Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/433

 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FOLK-LORE.

HON. LADY WELBY.

is, of course, a commonplace that as observation of facts becomes more careful and more wary of controversial bias, it is likely to reveal more and more of the unexpected, and to overturn some inferences which had been previously taken for granted. And this must be especially the case where attempts are made to unravel the meaning of folk-lore, which represents a mental condition so far from the modern civilised standpoint.

This must be my excuse for venturing, as an outsider, to bring forward some queries suggested by recent writing on the subject, the first of which could hardly, till now, have been asked with hope of profitable result.

In accounts of savage superstition a traditional bias has for long reigned supreme. Has it not been generally succeeded by an opposite one? Are we not inevitably more or less under the sway of reaction from discredited assumptions? If so, it may well be that the work, of which Dr. Tylor's Primitive Culture was such an epoch-making example, may, itself, prove the introduction to a third way of approaching the subject, in great measure owing to such labours as his, and daily becoming not only more possible but, more frequently adopted. This, of course, would neither be a reversion nor a revulsion, but simply a development.

Of the first method of interpretation (if it merits that name at all) any and every missionary record up to fifteen, or even ten, years ago will furnish endless examples; and, indeed, so would any ordinary traveller's report. Of the second, representing the reaction from this (as its misleading glosses become glaringly evident), there are also on all sides abundant instances. But the point is to ask whether some recent writing on the subject does not give ground for the hope that we may be entering on a virtually fresh phase of inquiry on the earlier stages of the growth of human intelligence, and one likely to yield important results. If so, it is