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 what beliefs a particular people possess, but in what manner these beliefs generate custom and rite and take their place among the influences which affect the social organism. Early man does not live individually. His life is part of a collective group. The group worships collectively as it lives collectively, and it is extremely important to work out the dual conditions. If the several items of custom and belief preserved by tradition are really ancient in their origin, they must be floating fragments, as it were, of an ancient _system_ of custom and belief--the cultus of the people among whom they originated. This cultus has been destroyed, struggling unsuccessfully against foreign and more vigorous systems of religion and society.