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even if his use of the name betrays a tendency t confound the species with the genus.

It remains to enquire whether Sir James Frazer actual treatment of the folk-lore of the Old Testamen accords with his general definition of the subject, c with the psychological method that this definition seem to imply. If it does, the fact is not obvious. The reade is frankly told that the aim of the treatise is to look fo folk-lore in the shape of sundry 'survivals' of savager that are 'preserved like fossils' in the Old Testamen As far as this goes, folk-lore might consist entirely i survivals; and, more than that, it might seem that th proposition can be converted simply, and all survival even such as occur in a literature, are to rank as foll lore. For the rest, the collective action of the multitud is nowhere in evidence as a principle of explanatio being applied neither to the Jewish people nor to tho savages from whom the survivals in question are suppos to have descended.

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What method, then, does the actual treatment i volve? At first sight the procedure might seem to simply this: to pick out certain stories, beliefs or custor of the Jews that have an old-fashioned air; to addu savage parallels in plenty; and to leave the student draw his own conclusions. But to say that no more attempted would be unfair. Sir James Frazer's intima acquaintance with the savage and his ways enables hi usually to suggest some plausible ground for a giv idea or institution as found among the savages that cites. If thereupon he could prove that the Jewi analogue had little or no present meaning for the Jev of Biblical times, this would at least afford a presum tion that we must seek for its origin in the past histo of the people; though not necessarily in a savage pas unless no intermediate state of culture could possib have brought it into being. But on this side the arg ment tends to be sketchy. After all, Jewish history a secondary interest with Sir James Frazer. Neve theless, his industry and his erudition are both so pr digious that he is not likely to have left anything undo that seemed to him worth doing. The chances are tha if any of his results are at all inconclusive, the causeapart, of course, from sheer lack of evidence-is tl

tendency, deeply rooted in folk-lore study, to pursue a naive method of survivals that confuses the historically ancient with the psychologically crude.

Genuine survivals are habits of society that have in part lost their meaning and use for those who retain them. But in practice it is very difficult to apply these tests of meaning and use to the habits-the customary ways of feeling, thinking, and acting-of any society or section of society with an outlook widely differing from our own. Their standards, not ours, provide the only objective criterion of the inadequacy imputed to the alleged survival; but it is only too easy to succumb to the fallacy of supposing that what is more or less meaningless and useless in our own eyes must be so for all sorts and conditions of men. And not only is it certainly untrue to imagine that human behaviour universally rests on the same reasons; it is even uncertain how far some of its varieties can be attributed o motives of the rational type at all. As in the psychoogy of the individual some experiences, for instance Ireams, are held to be governed from below the threshold of consciousness, so in social psychology it is the modern ashion to postulate a collective unconscious' whence rocesses originate that in their surface appearance seem o set the logic of the purposive life at defiance. Be this s it may, it is a well-established law that conduct ever uns ahead of the power of analysing its grounds; so hat, even where a trained faculty of reflexion is at vork, the real springs of action remain obscure, being ever identical and sometimes quite at variance with he reasons whereby we justify it after the event.

How much harder, then, is it to arrive at the true aotives in the case of the unsophisticated type of man vho lacks the power of ex-post-facto justification; who, ike the gentleman in the story, 'never apologises.' As urgenev says of the Russian peasant: Who can undertand him? He does not understand himself.' Thus the tudent of survivals must beware lest he embark on a ild-goose chase in search of an original meaning that ever was. The peasant does so-and-so, he knows not hy. Here are savages that seem to do the like, but, las! if they once knew why, they have forgotten. Whereupon infinite regress seems suggested. The

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method of survivals has great value when criticall employed; but due allowance must be made for th fact that lack of meaning may or may not impl loss of meaning. It may either be the effect of disuse and so be referable to antecedent historical conditions or, as the symptom of an imperfect mental integration it may be assignable to psychological conditions operatin; here and now.

It is high time to pass on to consider Sir Jame Frazer's particular results; and all the more so becaus much of what has hitherto been said is not meant t apply especially to him. Rather the opportunity cause by the appearance of an important work constructed or what may be called the classical model has been utilise in order to glance at recent tendencies, such as augu the adoption of new methods, or at any rate an exacte use of the old. Thus, on the one hand, the principl of historical affiliation, as proved by cultural diffusio from a centre, has of late received great emphasis; an in its service a method has been developed whereby th evidential value of survivals is clearly demonstrated, a any rate within the two departments of technology an social organisation. On the other hand, psychologist of the Freudian school have essayed a new interpreta tion of primitive culture, more especially as regard certain aspects of mythology and religion; and thei findings, however tentative at present, at least sugges that we must reckon not only with the formative influ ence of a quasi-mechanical transmission from one grou] of men to another, but likewise with that of a spontane ous generation, constantly renewed, such as issues from the depths of our common human nature. In the mean time, Sir James Frazer, preferring fact to theory, i more concerned to adduce similarities in culture than to decide whether these similarities are to be explained in one way or in the other. In so far as he wears the mantle of Robertson Smith, he seeks to do justice to historical causes. Inasmuch, however, as he likewise loyally maintains the tradition of Tylor, he is not oblivious of psychological conditions; which Tylor long ago distinguished as the causes lying nearer at hand, and hence forming an especially profitable object of research

If there is a flaw in his method, it is simply that he does not realise how near at hand these latter causes often are, but tends to relegate them one and all to the past. Yet at all events it is a cheering view that any low-grade habits we may still possess are due to historical accident, not to ourselves.

Sir James Frazer's sub-title implies a logical division of his subject under the three heads of religion, legend, and law. Some such classification of the material is convenient, and may be followed here; though it must not be forgotten that every topic alike falls in the first instance under the category of religion, since it relates to the content of a hierarchical tradition and a sacred text. First, then, we may deal with legend, if, as he presumably does, Sir James Frazer intends to include under this heading, not only stories about remarkable persons and events, but also stories about origins, such s are usually classed as aetiological, or explanatory, nyths. A typical example is the myth of the creation of man. Having analysed the earlier and more naive of the two narratives preserved in Genesis, Sir James Frazer proceeds to muster by its side a large number of ore or less similar tales. Some belong to what Dr Farnell would term 'the adjacent anthropology,' here epresented by a fairly civilised environment; and the est hail from the remotest corners of the uncivilised world. He cannot doubt that such rude conceptions of he origin of mankind, common to Greeks, Hebrews, Babylonians and Egyptians, were handed down to the vilised peoples of antiquity by their savage or barbarous prefathers.' But can he, and does he, prove it? This ertainly is an occasion when we must allow for the Dssibility of independent invention. What could be ore natural and universal than to want to know how rst there came to be men? To which question there an be but one of two answers: either that they were ade, or that they grew. The latter view is wide-spread mong savages, who are notoriously proud to claim an nimal ancestry; and it may well be that some folk-lorist the future will maintain that the Darwinian theory self is a survival of totemism. But here we are conrned with the other notion that men were made. The Biblical account simply says that God formed

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man of the dust of the ground.' Hereupon Sir Jame Frazer comments: To the Hebrews this derivation o our species from the dust of the ground suggested itsel all the more naturally because, in their language, th word for "ground" (adamah) is in form the feminin of the word for "man" (adam).' He elsewhere adds 'The Hebrew word for man in general is adam, the wor for ground is adamah, and the word for red is adom; s that by a natural and almost necessary concatenation causes we arrive at the conclusion that our first paren was modelled out of red earth.' The tone of the las passage perhaps verges on irony; but, if the suggestio of an etymological basis for the myth is seriously mean then surely our search for its origin must be confined t one linguistic area. But in this case what is the precis relevance of a parallel from outside this area—say, example cited from Egypt of the god Khnoumou wh moulded men out of clay on his potter's wheel? Beside in the comparison of stories it is highly unsafe to deduc a historical connexion from the recurrence of a singl incident. Further, an incident is hardly recognisabl as one and the same when it varies from an exhibitio of the potter's art, as in the Egyptian instance, to th making of a clay figure in relief upon a piece of bark as in an Australian case adduced as a parallel; wher perhaps a piece of imitative magic is implied, sinc neither god nor man in aboriginal Australia ever trie to make a pot. The only satisfactory way of demor strating diffusion by culture-contact in the case of story is to discover variants of the same plot or com bination of incidents, as is done for instance in Mis Cox's Cinderella, a model investigation of folk-tale dis tribution. Nothing of the sort being attempted here we are left to make what we can out of the scattere episodes. Of these, perhaps, the most striking is th creation of Eve out of a rib. Certain Asiatic parallel Sir James Frazer believes to be echoes of the Biblica account, due to missionary influence. But what is to b made of a story, reported from three different parts o Polynesia, that the first woman was named Ivi, having been created out of a rib or bone, for which ivi is th regular Polynesian word? It appears too that ivi, bone is widely used in various secondary senses that includ

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