Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 4 1886.djvu/85

 Rh of Human Faculty—(1) Imagination, (2) Affection, and (3) Memory—the first more especially unifying and shaping the phenomena of the External World, the second more especially determining relations to other Beings, and the third more especially creating and environing with an Ancestral World.

I have no space here to defend this analysis, nor to show its relations to recent psychological researches. Nor is this necessary. The most important point in the statement of this Principle is the affirmation that a natural Classification of Folk-lore must be founded on a psychological Analysis of Folk-life. This must, I think, be evident, if the definition of Folk-lore as knowledge of Folk-life is accepted. And if this essential point as to Classification is admitted, whether our Analysis is as well stated as it might be is a minor question.

III. Corresponding with these most general facts of Consciousness and of Faculty, the three Psychological Elements of Folk-life are (1) Folk-beliefs, (2) Folk-passions, and (3) Folk-traditions; and as Folklore is knowledge of Folk-life, these, therefore, are the Natural Divisions also of the Subjects of Folk-lore.

On this it may be noted that, if the distinction is kept clearly in view between Folk-life and Culture-life, no question can arise as to whether Mythology generally, or whether, more particularly Astrology, Magic, and Witchcraft, belong, or not, to Folk-lore. They belong to it just so far as, and no further than, our knowledge is drawn directly from the records of Folk-life. To Hesiod, for instance. Classical Greek Mythology was Folk-lore; to us who study it, as systematised in Hesiod, it is Culture-lore. So, the Astrology, Magic, and Witchcraft which we find in the records of Adepts, beginning with Accadian Cylinders and Egyptian Papyri, and ending with Mediæval Manuscripts, belong to the history of Culture, and are indeed the natural Sciences of the First Stages of Culture; while the Astrology, Magic, and Witchcraft, the facts of which we ourselves may ascertain from our experiences of Folk-life, belong to Folk-lore, and will be recorded under the General Headings for the registration of the Facts of Folk-life.

IV. The expressions of each of the three Elements of Folk-life—Folk-beliefs, Folk-passions, and Folk-traditions—are to be found in