Traditional knowledge

“ Tradition, oral and written, is accumulated and condensed observation; and by means of this each new generation can avail itself of the experience of preceding generations, can thus find time to explore fresh departments of knowledge, and so transmit its own traditions to the generations that shall follow. ”

“ Their influence upon mental culture is most beneficial; and the views acquired by knowledge of them enable the mind to trace, in the phenomena of Nature, proofs of an infinite wisdom—for the unfathomable depths of which language has no expression. ”

“ There are, also, interior senses, apprehensive powers of the mind, which equally crave culture, and which depend for their precision and force on careful education and diligent use. Mere observation, experience, or study, cannot give knowledge that will be of any avail. ”

“ Trench's poem of Deirdre Wed, while in the other group we may place a large number of original Celtic romances, which in their present Irish form are nearly nine hundred years old, and have recently been translated into French, German, and English. From the modern poems some knowledge of the subjects of the Irish stories has been widely diffused, but the poems are really adaptations, coloured by modern ideas and by the poetic fancy of the writers, so that they seldom give a correct representation of the literature from which the subjects are drawn. ”

“ These, by whatever name we like to call them, are facts and not fancies, and facts which enter largely into all questions, whether of science, philosophy, religion, or practical policy. Every one who wishes to keep at all abreast with modern culture, ought to have some general knowledge of the ideas and principles which underlie them and which are embraced in the comprehensive word “polarity.” ”

“ It assists the student of tradition in many ways. People who will still explain for themselves in primitive fashion phenomena which they do not understand, [Pg 207] and who remain content with such primitive explanations instead of relying upon the discoveries of science, are just the people to retain with strong persistence the traditional beliefs and ideas which they obtained from their fathers, and to acquire other traditional beliefs and ideas which they obtain from neighbours. ”

“ The "simplifiers,"—whose aims were wholly moral and whose methods were purely pacific—felt that their ideas could be realized on any plane of civilization. Hence, what profiteth knowledge and science? ”

“ Once more, oral tradition, even when it has come to treat former institutions and beliefs mainly as material for wonder-tales, is capable of keeping alive for ages those germinal ideas and sentiments out of which a whole culture may be reproduced. ”

“ It follows that all the natural arts serve divine science, and the lower knowledge rightly ordered leads to the higher. History, i.e. the historical meaning, is that in which words signify things, and its servants, as already said, are the three sciences, grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. ”

“ And culture is, at bottom, only an enlarged and clarified experience,—an experience so comprehensive that it puts its possessor in touch with all times and men, and gives him the opportunity of comparing his own knowledge of things, his faith and his practice, with the knowledge, faith, and practice of all the generations. This opportunity brings, to one who knows how to use it, deliverance from the ignorance or half-knowledge of provincialism, from the crudity of its half-trained tastes, and from the blind passion of its rash and groundless faith in its own infallibility. ”

“ By Tradition I mean the entire circle of thought and practice, custom as well as belief, ceremonies, tales, music, songs, dances and other amusements, the philosophy and the superstitions and the institutions, delivered by word of mouth and by example from generation to generation through unremembered ages: in a word, the sum total of the psychological phenomena of uncivilized man. Every people has its own body of Tradition, its own Folk-lore, which comprises a slowly diminishing part, or the whole, of its mental furniture, according as the art of writing is, or is not, known. ”

“ And as the word is the root out of which the whole stem of man’s transmitted knowledge, or tradition, has grown up, with all its branches and offshoots, so, too, in the eloquent speech, in the elegant composition, and even in all lofty internal meditation—which form, as it were, the leaves, flowers, and fruits of this goodly tree of living tradition—it is again the word by which the whole is carried on and ultimately perfected. ”

“ Verbal tradition was developed to its highest possibility by the bards. They did much to make language what it is to the world to-day.
4. With the invention of writing, which developed out of pictorial record, human tradition was able to become fuller and much more exact. Verbal tradition, which had hitherto changed from age to age, began to be fixed. Men separated by hundreds of miles could now communicate their thoughts. An increasing number of human beings began to share a common written knowledge{v1-231} and a common sense of a past and a future. ”

“ If we examine ourselves closely, we find that next to nothing of our store of knowledge has been acquired either empirically or traditionally; on the contrary, the whole tendency of our education has been to replace in our minds the impressions derived from our senses and the facts gathered from folk-tradition, by conceptions due to the deliberate and trained exercise of reason. ”

“ The custom here to be dealt with, therefore, holds its place in the history of humanity, and is as deserving of study as any other custom whose rise and decline constitute a phase in the world's development. ”

“ I would not urge the correctness of the views I have put forward as applicable to every part of the world, or to every phase in the history of tradition; but I would urge that in the great centres of traditional life they are practically the only means of arriving at the position occupied by tradition, and that in all cases they form a working hypothesis upon which future inquirers may well base their researches. ”

“ In any known civilization there will be found something in the way of esoteric knowledge. This body of knowledge will vary characteristically from one culture to another, differing both in content and in respect of the canons of truth and reality relied on by its adepts. ”

“ From what has now been said, it clearly follows that the whole of the training and education which an age calls Learned Culture, is only the means towards a knowledge of the attainable portion of the Divine Idea, and is only valuable in so far as it actually is such a means, and truly fulfils its purpose. ”

“ All this much—and with a full awareness of just how much it is—I am going to claim as literature and our province. Religion, I hold, every religion so far as it establishes and carries ideas, is literature, philosophy is literature, science is literature ”

“ On the contrary, whatever value attaches to them, is to be found in their easy and unconscious adherence to ordinary traditional practice, and in the consequent absence of any exceptionally striking effects. ”

“ Others, though founded on crudest theories of the lower culture, have been so modified under the influence of advancing knowledge, as to afford a satisfactory framework for recognized facts; and positive science, mindful of the origin of its own philosophic schemes, must admit the validity of such a title. ”

“ It will be a very tedious and irksome task to copy the various traditions bearing on the above subjects and to discuss their authenticity, and criticise their genuineness, on the principles of the technicalities peculiar to the Science of Traditions, as well as on the basis of scientific and rational criticism. ”

“ Amidst these improvements in real science, the languages shall be learnt for use, and not pedantry: Your Lordship’s admired ancients shall be respected, and not idolized: the forms of classic composition be emulated: and a set of men arise, even beneath the shade of our academic cloysters, that shall polish the taste, as well as advance the knowledge, of their country. ”

“ So with man. I believe in the strength and truth of tradition. A learned man said to me a few weeks ago: "When I have to choose between the evidence of tradition and the evidence of a document, I always believe the evidence of tradition. ”

“ Culture seeks “the determination of this question through all the voices of human experience which have been heard upon it,—of art, science, poetry, philosophy, history, as well as of religion,—in order to give a greater fulness and certainty to its solution.... Religion says: The Kingdom of God is within you; and culture, in like manner, places human perfection in an internal condition, in the growth and predominance of our humanity proper, as distinguished from our animality. ”

“ That the traditions have been rescued and maintained in their purity and truth; coloured, no doubt, in the telling, and that unavoidably, under the pencil of their educated renderer—we have every reason to believe from internal evidences. ”

“ The latter, it leads to the gates of all valuable knowledge—philanthropic, ethical, and religious; for it brings them to the study of man, wonderfully and fearfully made—the proper study of man through all time—the open book, in which are the records of time and eternity. ”

“ I should rejoin—But they had, pre-eminently above all ancient races which we know, the scientific instinct; the teachableness and modesty; the clear eye and quick ear; the hearty reverence for fact and nature, and for the human body, and mind, and spirit; for human nature in a word, in its completeness, as the highest fact upon this earth. ”

“ Of the form and spirit of their generation, they are the representatives to later ages—throwing light on its history, on the state of its language and cultivation, and in return receiving light from those sources. ”

“ And, finally, cultural work is more reasonable. Through cultural work the intelligentsia explains the most important questions concerning itself and the people, and the most important questions are those concerning the knowledge of the people. ”

“ To find the real ground for the very differing estimate which serious people will set upon culture, we must find some motive for culture in the terms of which may lie a real ambiguity; and such a motive the word curiosity gives us. ”

“ In the higher civilized nations pure reason gains more and more influence on practical life, and thrusts back the authority of tradition; on the basis of biological knowledge a rational or monistic ethic is developed. ”

“ The origin of language is next explained, then that of civil society, of religion, and of the arts,—the general conclusion being that all progress is the result of natural experience, not of divine guidance. ”

“ It is only as the result of a prolonged and conscientious training, aided by an extensive experience and by a knowledge of the historical experience of the race, that the inherent rational tendencies develop into established logical habits and principles of belief. ”

“ Ideas, then, bear three types of relations to organic life, relations socially incarnated in traditional art, religion, and philosophy. First of all they may be an expression of innate capacities, the very essence of the freedom of life. ”

“ And this aim we cannot seek without coming in sight of another aim too, which we have often and often pointed out, and tried to recommend: culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit. ”

“ Let me say a word in behalf of the largest culture of the intellect, of all faculties thereof,—understanding, imagination, reason. I admit there have been men of able mind and large intellectual development who have turned off from religion, their science driving them away from the doctrines taught in this name. But such men have been few. ”

“ Under these two different forms, therefore doth Tradition reveal to us the primitive world, or in other words, these are the two grand conditions of humanity which fill the records of primitive history. ”

“ To what end the Greeks? to what end the Romans?—All the prerequisites to a learned culture, all the methods of science, were already there; man had already perfected the great and incomparable art of read ing profitably—that first necessity to the tradition of culture, the unity of the sciences; the natural sciences, in alliance with mathematics and mechanics, were on the right road,—the sense of fact, the last and more valuable of all the senses, had its schools, and its traditions were already centuries old! ”

“ We must include the study of the habitations, the handicrafts, the dialects of the folk: we take in archæology and philology—subjects which we know are in themselves enough to occupy the whole attention of a man of science, and I may add, of many Societies. But if by folk-lore we mean "the folk's learning," the learning of the folk themselves, then we may define the science which deals with it as that which treats of all that the folk believe or practise on the authority of inherited tradition, and not on the authority of written records. ”

“ The distinction between traditional data therefore and pure philosophy is far from being so real or so extensive as it is commonly thought to be. But for lack of time, I might undertake to prove to you more at length that the labor of individual thought upon the common [Pg 38] tradition is the absolute and permanent law of development for the human mind. ”

“ When the cultural dominates, the sign or language experience becomes an interpretation, i.e., a continuation of the semiotic experience. Interpretation of any kind corresponds to the never-ending differentiation from the biological and is representative of the constitution of culture. Under the name culture as used above, we understand human nature and its objectification in products, organizations, ideas, attitudes, values, artifacts. ”