Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/43

 Rh brings to perfection certain elements in the universal treasure. Here it is that the influence of race and of genius comes in.

The great races, as of the Aryan speaking and Semitic peoples, are races in which genius is common, and the general level is high. Such a race has its codes, its creeds, its epics, its drama, which the less fortunate races lack. But the fond, the basis, is common to humanity. Meanwhile, till quite recently, even in the higher races, the folk, the people, the untaught, have gone on living on the old stock, using the old treasure, secretly revering the dispossessed ghosts and fairies, amusing the leisure of the winter evenings with the old stories handed down from grandmother to mother, to child, through all the generations. These very stories exist, though the folk know it not, in another form, refined by the genius of poets. In time, and occasionally, they will filter back among the people. But, on the whole, till now, the folk have prolonged the ancient life, as it was in customs and belief long before Homer sang, long before the Hebrew legislation was codified and promulgated.

This is a broad general view of the theory of Folk-lore, a rule to the working of which there are doubtless many exceptions. For example, philosophers have tried to show that in religion all begins, as usual, with the folk, all starts from the ghosts which they saw, or thought they saw, while early theological genius and mature speculation select from these ghosts till, by the survival of the fittest, the fittest ghost becomes a god. I shall not throw the apple of theological discord among the Congress, and shall merely confess that this theory does not, as far as I have gone, seem to me to be justified by facts. Among the very rudest peoples whom I have tried to study, the God is already in existence, as well as the ghosts, already makes for righteousness, and promises future punishment and reward. How the idea came there, among these very backward, but far from really primitive people, I cannot