Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/468

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440
Reviews.
Elements of Folk Psychology. By W. Wunut. Translated by E. L. Schaub. London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd, 1916. 15s. net.

Professor Wundt is an eminent psychologist, and is therefore entitled to all respect when he seeks to elucidate the origins of human culture from a psychological point of view. He is ready to admit that ethnology, in the sense of the study of the movements of peoples involving culture-contact and the consequent origination of new forms of institution and belief, must pave the way for his own type of research, which tries to explain the general process towards the highest civilization in terms of the laws of the evolution of the human mind. But he maintains that the problems of the two disciplines are, if complementary, distinct; and herein I would venture to agree with him. His method as a method seems to me to be legitimate, even though the results of its application remain open to criticism.

A word may here be interpolated as to the use of the German expression Voelkerpsychologie, which Dr. Schaub renders by the new and not altogether happy phrase "Folk Psychology." Voelkerpsychologie, we are told by Professor Wundt, dates back as a word scarcely further than the middle of the nineteenth century, and may mean either of two very different things—the characterization of particular peoples (as when Mr. Fielding Hall entitles his book about the Burmese The Soul of a People), or the study of those mental products which are created by a community of human life (as we should commonly call it, "Social psychology"). Professor Wundt, of course, employs the term in this latter sense. I cannot but regret that Dr. Schaub should have seen fit to assign such a meaning to his neologism, "Folk Psychology." In English, surely, we shall do well to use "folk " in such a context with a definite reference to "the folk," namely, the relatively uncultured portion of an advanced society; or at most to extend its connotation so as to include those backward peoples whose mental outlook affords a key to so much of the "Lore" which the uncultivated portion of civilized society still continues to cherish. Indeed, in German Volkskunde (as distinguished from Voelkerkunde) serves very well to express our