,
except as a fragment of the social institution to which it originally
belonged. No custom or belief has a life of its own separate from all
other. It is joined to other customs and beliefs in indissoluble
co-partnership, the whole group making up the institutions under which
the race or people to whom they belong live and flourish. This, as we
have already seen, is a most important principle in the study of
survivals. Not only is it strictly true of all primitive peoples, but
it is true of the early stages of more advanced communities.[428]
Indeed it has been put into a phrase used long ago by an English
writer on the manorial tenant, "His religion is a part of his
copyhold,"[429] and when the jurist talks to us in highly technical
language of lords, freeholders, villans, and serfs, we must bear in
mind that at any rate these villans and serfs belonged to a social
institution, one element of which was religion. So, too, must the
folklorist bear in mind that it is not the individual belief he is
concerned with, but with the belief that belongs to a community. It
must be assumed that the true test of the antiquity of every custom or
belief is its natural and easy assimilation with other customs and
beliefs, equally with itself in the position of a survival, and the
recognition of the whole group thus brought into relationship as
belonging to the institutions of the people from whom it is derived.

It is well to understand what this condition of things exactly means
as an element in the study of early beliefs. It will be dealing with
beliefs from their place in the social habitat; housing them, so to
speak, within the groups of human beings with which they are
connected. It will be considering them as part of the living organism
which the social units of man have created. All this indicates a
method of treating the subject entirely different from what has
hitherto obtained. Students of early English institutions are content
to construct elaborate arguments from the often conflicting testimony
of historical authorities; students of early beliefs construct
elaborate systems of religious thought far above the custom and rite
with which they are dealing. The two branches of the same subject are
never brought together to illustrate each other. Early institutions
cannot be separated from early beliefs. Early beliefs cannot properly
be separated from the society of which they form a component part. We
require to know not only