term which, as international, I have been the first to respect—is to form a universal science, it is necessary that men of all nations should contribute to its progress, in order that the meaning which this science receives in Italy, France, Russia, Germany, or Portugal, may not be divergent, but only aspects and tendencies—phases of one and the same order of studies.
To me the people, as I have said, includes, without doubt, an element which we might call static, or passive, and another which we might name dynamic, or active. The former refers to the vestiges which it contains of anterior ideas and civilisations; vestiges transmitted orally from one generation to another, or by means of manners and customs; in a word, by tradition. In this sense, I think that the eminent Pitré has perfectly rightly called the Italian Society of Folk-Lore Society of Popular Traditions. The importance of his labours in folk-lore greatly strengthens his most reasonable opinion. But if the people is the genuine representative of this element, which we have called static or dead, in the people there exists another element, dynamic or living, and not the less important one, nor the one least worthy of study and consideration. In a happy hour the English folk-lorists are reconstructing, by means of the study of superstitions, ceremonies, rites, manners, customs, tales, and games, that proto-history of mankind, that most ancient ideal world, that grand mosaic, whose separate pieces are each one of these productions: but let them study also those facts which teach that there exists an evolution of ideas similar to that of organisms; let them study the manner in which the links of the great psychological chain are intertwined, and the march followed by the human mind until it arrived at the degree of relative development to which we find the feelings, the knowledge, the customs of the men of our day have attained. In the most insignificant songs, in the most neglected phrases—in the most trivial, apparently, of proverbs—there co-exists, by the side of the superstition, of the survival, of the relic of an ideal world completely disappeared, there co-exists a living element, an actual evidence of the psychological functions of the man of the people. In his stores of knowledge, by the side of the error, of the pre-occupation, and of the hasty induction which has mistaken the mere repetition of a phenomenon in
