labour of a former generation. Thus it may be useful, as it is undoubtedly pious, to look backwards as well as forwards—not to forget, lest we lose time in having to relearn.
In the first place, then, Tylor stood for anthropology and Gomme for folklore. With smaller men this might have been a cause of dissociation and cross purposes. Instead, both realized clearly from the outset that they were exploring the same field from opposite ends. Tylor led the way by introducing the term "survivals."[1] He applied it to "that great class of facts" constituted by "processes, customs, opinions, and so forth, which have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which they had their original home." Here they "remain as proofs and examples of an older condition of culture out of which a newer has been evolved." "The serious business of ancient society may be seen to sink into the sport of later generations, and its serious belief to linger on in nursery folk-lore." Let us, too, note in passing that Tylor was no adherent of that false psychology which treats a survival as mere inert matter, a waste product passively impeding the exercise of organic function. On the contrary, he was fully aware that "sometimes old thoughts and practices will burst out afresh, to the amazement of a world that thought them long since dead or dying"; in brief, that the survival may be quickened into a revival, the savage impulses having meanwhile but lain dormant in the heart of the civilized man. So much then for Tylor's recognition of the study of survivals as a branch of what he calls the science of culture.
- ↑ See Primitive Culture (1st edit. 1871), 15 (pp. 16, 17 of 4th edit.) for his claim to this effect, as also for the passages subsequently cited; and see generally chaps. iii. and iv. He had already developed the notion of survivals as covering "the superstitious practices which belong to peasant folk-lore" in a lecture given at the Royal Institution, April 23, 1869, "On the Survival of Savage Thought in modern Civilisation"; see Proc. Roy. Inst. v. 522-35, esp. 530 (compare also ib. 534, on revivals).
