Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/445

 cravings of what we agree to call the highest types of mind. "Pantheism" may even represent that most fatal of obstacles, the dead wall of a geocentric levelling down, like the outgrown idea that the suns in the sky were subordinate to this little lightless earth. But that one idea which is here indicated beneath it—the idea of continuity of link between all things at all times and in all places, continuity both simultaneous and successive; the repudiation of all unfathomable gulfs except in the one sense of distinction, not division; the frank acceptance of ties with the most humble or despised of nature's forms and conditions of existence, that may surely prove, when we have learnt to assimilate it, the starting-point of an ascent so worthy and so fruitful of all good, that it is difficult to find a word with pure enough associations to define it with.

This line of thought, however, as no one can feel more strongly than myself, is dangerous if not futile, as at best essentially premature. We have to earn and not to snatch result and reward. And the tangle of dead and decaying growths of theory with fungi of fallacy growing rankly upon them which surrounds us on every side, warns us at least not to add to the number and thus to hinder a healthier future harvest. They must be allowed time to form a fertile soil, and light and air must first be freely admitted. But perhaps it may be wise sometimes to think of modern ethnological labours under the image of working a mine of exceeding and multifarious richness and immense depth and range. The machinery, the "plant" is magnificent and embodies all that science can suggest. But in one part of the mine the floor rings hollow to the footsteps of some less engrossed than others with the task of working it. May it be that this means an insecurity dangerous only if ignored and neglected? May it be that yet below the great depth hollowed out there is a layer of air, or of water or of fire which needs dealing with before the work can safely now be prosecuted? Or, on the other hand, may some yet richer treasure lie beneath? Whatever form in which we put these queries, it is at least a matter of rejoicing, because of hopeful augury for the future, that there should be a manifest increase among our ablest thinkers of the tendency to look deeper than has generally been the case till lately for answers to the most vital of all the appeals and problems of human life.