The truth Mr. MacRitchie does not reckon with is, that no theory will explain the nature and origin of the fairy superstitions which does not also explain the nature and origin of every other supernatural being worshipped or dreaded by uncivilized mankind throughout the world. And until he shall address himself to this task, however ingenious his guesses, however amusing his philology, however delightfully wild his literary and historical arguments, he will not succeed in convincing any serious student.
Here then we must pause. Obvious are the differences between the nations of mankind: differences of physical conformation,--that is to say, of race; divergences of mental and moral development,--that is to say, of civilization. Hitherto the task attempted by folklore has been to show that underlying all these differences there is a broad foundation of common agreement; that distinctions of race do not extend to mental and moral constitution; that the highest nation on the ladder of culture has climbed from the same rung on which the lowest are yet standing; and that the absurd and incongruous customs and institutions and the equally absurd and impossible stories and beliefs found imbedded in the civilization of the more advanced nations are explicable, and explicable only, as relics of the phases wherethrough those nations have passed from the depths of savagery.
If it be admitted in general terms that the evidence collected and marshalled up to the present time has established among sure scientific facts so much of the past of humanity, this achievement is but the beginning of toil. A wide field has been opened to the student for the collection and arrangement of details, before the true meaning of many a strange custom and stranger tale will be thoroughly understood. I have tried to do something of the kind in the foregoing pages. But beyond this there is the more delicate investigation of the ethnic element in folklore. Can we assign to the various races their special shares in the development of a common tradition? Can we show what direction each race took, and how and why it modified the general inheritance?
On the other hand, it is not asserted that the status of savagery was the primitive condition of men. Of course it may have been. But if not, there is work to be done in endeavouring to ascertain what lies behind it. The questions started from this point wander across the border of folklore into pure psychology; but it is a psychology based not upon introspection and analysis of the mind of the civilized man, developed under the complex influences that have been acting and reacting during untold years of upward struggling, always arduous and often cruel, but a psychology which must be painfully reconstructed from the simplest and most archaic phenomena disclosed by anthropological research. Who can say what light may not thus be thrown as well on the destiny as on the origin of mankind?