The Basis of Social Relations

In a treatise on psychology we have to do with the Mind; and what is Mind? So far as we can define it, it is the sum of those activities which distinguish living from dead matter, the organism from the inorganic mass.

So broad a definition would include both the vegetable and the animal worlds; and this is not an error; but for the present purpose, which is the consideration of the mind of man, it is enough if we recognise that this mind of his is a development of that of the brute; the same in most of its traits, contrasted to it in a few. It is profitable, in truth indispensable, to scrutinise both closely.

Identities and Differences of the Human and the Brute Mind.—There is a branch of science called “comparative psychology.” Its province is to trace the evolution of human mental powers to their earlier phases in the inferior animals. So successfully has it 4been pursued that not a few of its teachers claim that there is nothing left as the private property of man in this connection; that he has no powers or faculties which are peculiarly his own; that all his endowments differ in degree only from those evinced by some one or other of the lower species.

The brute has his fine senses, as acute as, often acuter than, ours; no one can deny him emotions of love and fear, hate and affection, sorrow and joy, as poignant as ours, and often expressed in strangely similar modes; his memory is retentive, his will strong, his self-control remarkable; he has a lively curiosity, a love of imitation, a sense of the beautiful, and it is acknowledged that we cannot deny him either imagination or reason. Mental progress is not unknown in the brute, and it is well to remember that it is not universal among men.

What, then, is man’s proud prerogative? What the gift which has given him the world and all that therein is? The answer is in one word,—ideation. The last efforts of modern science can but paraphrase the words which the philosopher Locke penned nigh two centuries ago: “The having of general ideas is that which puts a perfect distinction between man and brute.” The latest American writer on the subject merely repeats this when he phrases it “the ability to think in general terms by 5using symbols (words) which summarise systems of association.”

Let us avoid the metaphysical snares which have been spread around this simple statement. No matter about such words as “concepts,” “notions,” “apperceptions,” “abstractions,” and the like. Let us fix in mind the formula of Romanes: “Distinctively human faculty belongs with distinctively human ideation.” This, the power to form general ideas,—which are necessarily abstract,—is the one prerogative which lifts man above brute. By it he can compare what he learns and thus develop an intellectual life for comparison; to borrow the metaphor of a famous student of his kind, it is the magic wand, the diamond-hilted sword, by which man will conquer his salvation through learning the truth. We exclaim, with Pascal, “It is Thought which makes Man.”

Outside of this and its developments, all that man has of soul-life is in common with the brute. Why should he be ashamed of it? What folly to pretend, as the common phrase goes, to “get rid of the brute in man”! Parental love, social instincts, fidelity, friendship, courage,—these are parts of his heritage from his four-footed ancestor. What would he become, dispossessed of them?

Already, in that long alienation from his brethren which made man the one species of his genus and the 6one genus of his class, has he lost certain strange powers of mind which excite our special wonder when we see their manifestations in his remote relations. The chief of these is Instinct. We are all familiar with its extraordinary exhibitions in bees, ants, and higher animals, and its seeming total absence in ourselves. What can we make of it?

Instinct and Intelligence.—Throughout all nature there is an unceasing eternal conflict between the old and the new, between motion and rest, between the fixed and the variable, between the individual and the universe. This cosmic contest is reflected within the realm of animal life in the contrast between Instinct and Intelligence.

Instinct is hereditary; it belongs to the species; its performance is unconscious, resulting from internal impulse; its tendency is endless repetition, not improvement; it is petrified, inherited habit. Intelligence belongs to the individual; it is neither inherited nor transmissible by blood; its tendency is toward advancement, progress. It is the source of all knowledge not purely empirical, and of all development not of chance.

Habits which are forced upon organisms by the environment under penalty of extinction become hereditary modes of procedure. They are persisted in because vitally beneficial. Comparative anatomy 7shows us that those organs and structures which are most persistent have their functions most instinctive; and conversely, as individual freedom of action increases, instinct retires and intelligence takes its place, accompanied by higher plasticity in the structures involved in the action.

Intelligent action is personal initiative from compared experiences. It is not merely repetition, as in the tricks of animals, but deduction; therefore it introduces new tendencies into life, which instinct never does; and these tendencies are not the direct sequences of external stimuli, as are instincts, but are psychic in origin, proceeding from the mental conclusion reached.

No more interesting comparison between instinct and intelligence can be found than that offered by the social communities of the lower animals,—the bees, ants, beavers, and the like. Their well-regulated activities excite our surprise and admiration. Each member of the little state has his duty and performs it, with the result that all are thereby benefited and the species successfully perpetuated.

But much of the admiration expended on these societies in the lower life has been misplaced. Their perfect organisation is due to narrower development of mental powers. The one object at which they aim is species-continuation, and to this all else is subordinated. They are in no sense comparable to the 8reflective purpose which is at the base of human society, whose real, though oft unacknowledged, and ever unsuccessful, aim is to insure to each individual the full development of his various powers. Hence it is that human society is and must be ever changing with individual aspirations, and can never be iron-bound in one form.

Imagination.—There is another faculty of mind, which, if not exclusively human, is so in all its higher manifestations, and indeed is, in its development, perhaps the best mental criterion we could select to measure the evolution of races, nations, and individuals. I refer to Imagination, Fancy, the source of our noblest enthusiasms, of our loftiest sentiments, of poetic rapture, and artistic inspiration. These spiritual sentiments are wholly absent in the brute, and are rare in inferior personalities. They arise from the vivid presentation to the mind of real or fancied experiences directed to some end in view. But this is just the definition of active imagination. It is a rehearsal of our perceptions, real, or those analogous to reality. Though not a collation of ideas, its processes are closely akin to those of logical thought; and, as an eminent analyst says, “The principle of an organic division according to an end in view governs all processes of active imagination.”

9In this phrase we see why imagination ranks as a criterion of mental development. Ruled chiefly by unconscious instinct the brute has no other aims than to feed and sleep and reproduce his kind; men of low degree add to these, perhaps, the lust of power or of gold or of amusement, or other such vain and paltry ambitions; but the soul that seeks the highest has aims beyond all fulfilment, but which by their glory stimulate its activities to the utmost and lift it into a life above all mundane satisfactions.

The Ideal.—By the plastic power of the active imagination is formed the Ideal, the most potent of all the stimulants of the higher culture. Based on reality and experience, it transcends the possibilities of both, and lifts the soul into realms whose light is not on sea or land, and whose activities aim at results beyond any present power of human nature to achieve. But it is only by striving for that which is beyond reach that the utmost effort possible can be called forth.

The ideal, some ideal, is present in every human heart. It is the goal toward which each strives in seeking pleasure and in avoiding pain. Through the unity of the human mind, the same ideals, few in number, have directed the energies of men in all times and climes. Around them have concentrated the labours of nations, and as one or the other became more prominent, national character partook of its 10inspiration, and national history fell under its sway. Constantly in the history of culture do we see such general devotion to an ideal lead groups toward or away from the avenue to progress and vitality.

Consciousness and Self-Consciousness.—Through ideation arises man’s consciousness of himself as an independent personality. In its broadest sense, that of reaction to an external stimulus, consciousness is a property of all animals, perhaps of all organic tissues. Contractility and motility depend upon it. What it is, “in itself,” we have no means of knowing; therefore it is safe to agree with Professor Cope in his negative opinion that it “is qualitatively comparable to nothing else.”

In simpler forms of organic life it must be merely rudimentary; but in most animals it reaches what has been called the “projective” stage; that is, the animal is conscious of the existence of others, like or unlike himself, though he is not yet conscious of himself as a separate entity. This has been held to explain, psychologically, the “gregarious instincts” of many lower species.

As a result of the absence of general concepts, the brute does not contemplate himself as a single individual in contrast to the others of his species. He is unable to class these under a general term or thought. Hence self-consciousness belongs to man alone.

11Attempting to define this trait, we may say that it is the perception of the unity and continuity of the individual’s psychological activities. Just in proportion as this perception becomes clear, positive, sharply defined, does the individual become aware of his own life, his real existence, its laws, and its purposes.

Hence the study of this mental characteristic becomes of the highest importance in ethnology; for it has been well said (Post) that the growth or decay of individual self-consciousness is an unfailing measure of the growth or decay of States.

Physiologically, the sense of self, the Ego, is produced by outgoing discharges from the central nervous system which are felt. They may arise from external forces or from the internal source which we call Volition, or Will. In both cases the repetition of feeling them yields the notion of Personality.

It is instructive to note how differently races and nations have understood and still do understand this notion; instructive, because it has much to do with their characters and actions.

Naturally enough many have identified the I with the body, or with that portion of the body least destructible, the bones. For this reason, in Egypt, Peru, Teneriffe, and many other localities there was the practice of preserving the entire body by exsiccation or mummification, the belief being that, were 12it destroyed, the personal existence of the decedent would also perish. In other lands the bones were carefully guarded in ossuaries or shrines, for in them the soul was held to abide.

Not less widely received was another opinion, that the self dwells in the name. The personal name was therefore conferred with ceremony, and frequently was not disclosed beyond the family. The individual could be injured through his name, his personality impaired by its misuse.

In higher conditions the Person is usually defined by attributes and environment, as sex, age, calling, property, and the like. Ask a man who he is, he will define himself “by name and standing.”

Few reach the conception of abstract Individuality, apart from the above incidents of time and place; so that it is easy to see that self-consciousness is still in little more than an embryonic stage of development in humanity. It differs notably in races and stages of culture. Dr. Van Brero comments on the slight sense of personality among the Malayan islanders, and attributes to that their exemption from certain nervous diseases. Its morbid development in self-attention and Ego-mania is frequently noticed in the asylums of highly civilised centres.

I shall have frequent occasion to insist that the utmost healthful, that is, symmetrical, development 13of the individuality is the true aim of human society. This is directly due to the fact that self-consciousness, the “I” in its final analysis, depends on the unity and independence of the individual Will, which in a given moment of action can be One only. The cultivation of individuality is therefore the cultivation of the will, to direct and strengthen which must be the purpose of all education.

The Intellectual Process.—The chasm between the human and the brute mind widens when we come to look more closely at the various steps of the intellectual process, that is, at the method of reasoning. To be either clear or conscious, this must be carried on by general ideas, in themselves abstractions. For example, the so-called “syllogisms” of logic depend upon the relation of a general to a particular idea; and thinking can no more be conducted without this relation than talking without grammatical rules; though neither the formula of the syllogism nor the rules of grammar are consciously present to the mind.

The logical process is everywhere and at all times the same, in the sage or the savage, the sane or the insane. To reach any conclusion, the mind must work in accordance with its method. This is purely mechanical. An English philosopher (Jevons) invented a “logical machine,” which worked as well as the human brain. The logical process has been 14formulated by a mathematician (Boole) in a simple equation of the second degree. It must consist of subject and predicate, of general and particular. But the process has nothing to do with the proceeds. A mill grinds equally well wheat, tares, and poisonberries. Not upon the fact that the pepsin digests, but that it digests proper aliments, depends the health of the body. So the content of the intellectual operation, not its form, is of good or harm, and merits the attention of ethnographer or historian.

The Mechanical Action of Mind.—The Germans have a saying, framed first by their writer, Lichtenstein, known as “the Magician of the North,” that “we do not think. Thinking merely goes on within us”; just as our stomachs digest and our glands excrete. Another one of their authors originated the once-celebrated apothegm, “Without phosphorus there is no thought.”

The aim of both expressions is to put pointedly the principle that the intellectual process is of a mechanico-chemical character, a mere bodily function, to be classed with digestion or circulation. This opinion has of late years been warmly espoused in the United States.

That intellectual actions are governed by fixed laws was long ago said and demonstrated by Quetelet in his remarkable studies of vital statistics. That the 15development of thought proceeds “under the rule of an iron necessity” is the ripened conviction of that profound student of man, Bastian. We must accept it as the verdict of science.

What, then, becomes of individuality, personality, free-will? Must we, as the great dramatist said, “confess ourselves the slaves of chance, the flies of every wind that blows?”

Not yet. That we are subject to our surroundings and our history; that our forefathers, though dead, have not relaxed their parental grasp; that time, clime, and spot master thought and deed, is all true. But above all is Volition, Will, a final, insoluble, personal power, the one irrefragable proof of separate existence, not itself translatable into Force, but the director, initiator, of all vital forces.

The “Psychic Cells.”—Mind brings man into kinship with all organic life. Long ago Aristotle said if one would explain the human soul, he must accomplish it through learning the souls of all other beings.

The physiologist explains mental phenomena as the function of specialised cell-life. He points out the cells, strange triangular masses in the cortex of the brain, with long processes and spiny branches, touching but never uniting. In the lower animals the network is simple, the branches short; as mental 16capacity advances, they become more complex and longer.

These are the “psychic cells” in whose microscopic laboratory is worked the magic of mind, transforming waves of impact, some into sweet music, others into colour and light and all the glory of the landscape; changing sights and sounds into emotions of joy or dread; transmitting them into passions or lusts; assorting the gathered stores of comparison, and from them building ideas base or noble, and awakening the Will to direct the use of all.

The Question of Soul.—But, it will be exclaimed, in this discussion of Mind, is nothing to be said of a Soul? Has man not an immortal element which removes him infinitely from the brute which perishes, and which guarantees his personal existence after death?

The answer of modern science is that between “mind” and “soul” no distinction can be drawn; and that this very quality of “ideation” is not a sudden acquisition, some free gift of the gods, bestowed full-blown and perfected, but the development of a very slow process, traceable in its beginnings in some beasts, faint in the lowest men, strictly conditioned on the growth of articulate expression, far from complete in the ripest intellects. It neither excludes nor assumes persistence after corporeal 17death. We may use the word “soul,” therefore, because it is rich in associations; but use it as a synonym of “mind.”

The soul is not some transcendental substance outside of the individual, but exists by virtue of the connection of his psychic processes with each other. This does not lessen the reality of his personal existence, but explains it.

As for the relation which mind or soul in general bears to the material external world, most thinkers are of opinion now that the contrast formerly supposed to exist is one merely of view-point; that natural science considers all our experiences as external, while mental science studies them as wholly internal.

Are the Mental Faculties the Same in Man Everywhere?—The lines thus clearly drawn between the human and the brute mind, we ask, do they hold good for the whole human species, of all races and degrees of culture? And has man in the past always possessed these faculties which have been thus attributed to him alone of all organised beings?

To these inquiries I shall address myself.

It is true, as I shall have many occasions to show hereafter, that in mental endowment tribes and races widely differ; but so do individuals of the same race, even of the same family; and in regard 18to many of these differences we can so accurately put our finger on what brings it about that we have but to alter conditions in order to alter endowments.

The Fuegian savage is one of the worst specimens of the genus; but put him when young in an English school, and he will grow up an intelligent member of civilised society. However low man is, he can be instructed, improved, redeemed; and it is this most cheering fact which should encourage us in incessant labour for the degraded and the despised of humanity.

There is another proof, strong, convincing, of the substantial sameness of the human mind throughout the species. This is Language, articulate speech. No tribe has ever been known in history or ethnography but had a language ample for its needs. The speechless man, Homo alalus, is a fiction of a philosopher. He never lived.

Language, however, is the guarantor of thought in general terms. The words are the “associative symbols” of abstract ideas. Wherever men talk, they think in a solely human fashion.

Philologists talk of “higher” or “lower” languages. The assertion has been made that some more than others favor abstract expressions. Such statements may be granted; but the fact remains that every word 19itself is the symbol of an abstraction, and only as such can it be rationally uttered.

We can trace language back to its pristine rudiments, to the form that it must have had among the hordes of the “old stone age,” cave-dwellers, naked savages. I have made such an attempt. But the essentials of speech as a vehicle of thought still remain; and though doubtless there was a period when articulate separated from inarticulate speech, that was during the morning twilight of man’s day on earth, when he as yet scarcely merited the name of man.

From all analogy we may be confident that the early palæolithic men who shaped the symmetrical axes of Acheul, scrapers, punches, and hammers; who carefully selected and tested the flint-flakes; who had enough of an eye for beauty to preserve fine quartz pebbles; and who lived in social groups, in stationary homes along watercourses,—these men unquestionably had a spoken language, and minds competent to deal in simple abstractions. Yet these are the most ancient men of whom we know anything, dwellers in central Europe before the Great Ice Age.

When we have such evidence as this for the psychical unity of the human species, is it worth while going into that antiquated discussion of the “monogenists” and “polygenists” as to whether man owns one or 20several birthplaces? Surely not. We declare all nations of the earth to be of one blood by the judgment of a higher court than anatomy can furnish; though it also hands down no dissenting opinion.

The Elementary Ideas and their Development.—These two principles, or rather demonstrated truths,—the unity of the mind of man, and the substantial uniformity of its action under like conditions,—form the broad and secure foundation for Ethnic Psychology. They confirm the validity of its results and guarantee its methods.

As there are conditions which are universal, such as the structure and functions of the body, its general relations to its surroundings, its needs and powers, these developed everywhere at first the like psychical activities, or mental expressions. They constitute what Bastian has happily called the “elementary ideas” of our species. In all races, over all continents, they present themselves with a wonderful sameness, which led the older students of man to the fallacious supposition that they must have been borrowed from some common centre.

Nor are they easily obliterated under the stress of new experiences and changed conditions. With that tenacity of life which characterises simple and primitive forms, they persist through periods of divergent and higher culture, hiding under venerable beliefs, 21emerging with fresh disguises, but easily detected as but repetitions of the dear primordial faiths of the race.

The Ethnic Ideas and their Origin.—From the monotonous unity of the elementary ideas, the common property of mankind in its earliest stages of development, branched off the mental life of each group and tribe, not discarding the old, but adding the new under the external compulsion of environment and experience.

Where such externals were alike or nearly so, the progress was parallel; where unlike, it was divergent; analogous in this to well-known doctrines of the biologist.

Such branches were constantly blending in peace or colliding in war, leading to a perpetual interaction of the one growth with the other, engendering a complexity of relation to each other and to the primitive substratum. But the ethnic character, once crystallised, remained as ingrained as the national life or the bodily stigmata. It compelled the members as a mass to look at life and its aims through certain lights, to comprehend the world under certain forms, to move to a measure, and dance to a tune.

Such is the power of the Ethnic Mind, fraught with weal or woe for the nation over whom it rules, tyrannical, portentous, a blind natural force, which 22may lift its helpless followers to skyey heights or drag them into the abyss.

How it is formed and what decides its fateful beneficent or maleficent decrees, I shall consider in detail in the next chapters.

The ethnic character becomes more fixed with advancing culture, and its component parts—that is, the individuals who compose it—more uniform. This has not been understood by one of the latest writers on the subject, Professor Vierkandt, who maintains that in savage groups there is a much greater sameness between the individuals who compose them. Superficially, this is true on account of the limited range of their activity; but in proportion to that range the individuals differ more widely, because they are so much more subjected to external influences and emotional attacks. Dr. Krejči is more correct in his opinion that the sum of the differences between cultured individuals and peoples is less than that between the uncultured. This obviously flows from the fact that cultivated minds are governed by reason and knowledge, whose prescriptions are everywhere 24the same; while illiterate minds are victims of ignorance and passion. All who learn that twice two are four act on the knowledge of it; but the Brazilian Indian, who has no word in his language for numerals above two, may disregard it.

Some have maintained that the promptings of the group-mind as felt by the individual belong in the unconscious or involuntary part of his nature, and partake of the character of mechanical necessity.

There is indeed this tendency, but it is not by any means a necessary character of the collective mind, as an example easily shows. I may adopt a prevailing custom or belief merely through imitation, which is a mechanical procedure; or I may adopt it, being led to examine it from its prevalence and to approve it from my examination,—and this is a voluntary action.

In this we see the contrast of cultured and uncultured group-minds. The latter demand assent merely from their unanimity, the former wish it only from enlightenment; the latter ask faith, the former knowledge; the latter command obedience, the former urge investigation.

Plato has a dialogue on the problem of “The One and the Many”; and the abstract subtleties he brings forward are almost paralleled by the concrete facts which we encounter in an endeavour to state the mutual relations of the Individual and the Group.

25This science of ours, ethnic psychology, has, in one sense, nothing to do with the individual. It does not start from his mind or thoughts but from the mind of the group; its laws are those of the group only, and in nowise true of the individual; it omits wide tracts of activities which belong to the individual and embraces others in which he has no share; to the extent that it does study him, it is solely in his relation to others, and not in the least for himself.

On the other hand, as the group is a generic concept only, it has no objective existence. It lives only in the individuals which compose it; and only by studying them singly can we reach any fact or principle which is true of them in the aggregate.

Yet it is almost as correct to maintain that the group is that which alone of the two is real. The closer we study the individual, the more do his alleged individualities cease, as such, and disappear in the general laws by virtue of which society exists; the less baggage does he prove to have which is really his own; the more do all his thoughts, traits, and features turn out to be those of others; so that, at last, he melts into the mass, and there is nothing left which he has a right to claim as his personal property. His pretended personal mind is the reflex of the group-minds around him, as his body is in every fibre and 26cell the repetition of his species and race. As an American writer strongly puts it: “Morally I am as much a part of society as physically I am a part of the world’s fauna.”

But let no one deduce from this that the group is merely the sum total of the individuals which compose it, the net balance of their thoughts and lives. Nothing would be more erroneous. I have already said that laws and processes belong to the group which are foreign to the individual. We may go further, and prove that these processes, the spirit of the group, are quite different from those of any single member of it. To use the expression of Wundt: “The resultant arising from united psychological processes includes contents which are not present in the components.”

In numerous respects, indeed, the individual and the group stand in opposition to each other. The qualities of the former are incoherent, disorderly, irregular; while those of the latter are fixed, stable, computable.

Let us contemplate further this relation of the individual to the group, for upon its correct apprehension must the whole fabric of ethnic psychology, as a science, rest.

In every healthy individual there is a feeling that his thoughts and actions are vain unless they 27are somehow directed towards his fellow human beings; yet there is a further feeling that these fellow creatures are but a means for the developing and perfecting of himself. He desires to be intimately associated with the group, but not to be absorbed and lost in it. His unconscious goal is individuality, but not isolation; and he feels that the most complete and sane individuality can be obtained only by association with others of his kind. For that reason, he submits his will to the collective will, his consciousness to the collective consciousness. He accepts from the group the ideas, conclusions, and opinions common to it, and the motives of volition, such as customs and rules of conduct, which it collectively sanctions.

These ideas and motives are strictly the property of the group, not of its separate members. Such a prevailing unity of thought and sentiment does not rest on unanimity of opinion; it does not necessarily exclude any amount of individuality, and is consistent with the utmost freedom of the personal mind. Its basis is a similarity of form and direction of the psychical activities, guiding and modifying them in such a way that a general colour and tendency can be recognised.

If it is asked, on what ultimate psychical concept the differences of collective or group-minds are based 28in a last analysis, I am inclined to answer with Wilhelm von Humboldt, that it is on the currently accepted relation of the material to the immaterial world. The solution adopted for this insoluble problem is the hidden spring of motive in the minds of all.

The actual existence of the group-mind can no more be denied than the constant inter-relation between it and the individual mind. It takes nothing from its reality that it exists only in individual wills. To deny it on that account, as Wundt admirably says, is as illogical as to deny the existence of a building because the single stones of which it is composed may be removed. Indeed, it might claim higher reality than the individual mind in that its will is more potent and can attain greater results by collective action.

Of course, there is no metaphysical “substance” or mythological “being” behind the collective mind. That were a nonsensical notion. Nor is it in any sense a voluntary invention, created by contract for utilitarian ends. That were a gross misconception. It is the actual agreement and interaction of individuals resulting in mental modes, tendencies, and powers not belonging to any one member, and moving under laws developed by the requirements of this independent existence. It is like an orchestra which 29can produce harmonies by the blending of the strains of numerous instruments impossible to any one of them.

The sense or self-recognition of individual life as apart from group life varies widely. In the totemic bonds of savage life, in the guilds of higher grades, in the “society centres” of modern life, the individual consciously and willingly renounces nearly the whole of himself in favour of the circle which he enters.

When he attempts the opposite extreme, and prides himself on his insulation, his egotism, and antagonism to others, he usually deceives himself. No matter how selfishly he pursues his aims, it is ever in obedience to the influence of the group. From it he takes his thoughts and the language in which to express them, his economic values are those recognised by it, its ideals are his, he will strive in vain to escape the iron bands of the social order about him. Unknown to himself, he abides the slave of others.

The group has another advantage over him which he can in no wise diminish or avoid. He will die, but it will live. He, with his petty strivings and personal ambitions, will soon sink into the dateless night, but the social order of which he was a part will survive in other and younger generations, moving 30forward to its destiny under compulsive forces of which he has not even an inkling, crushing his blind opposition under resistless wheels.

Not by antagonism to the group does the individual gain his highest personal aims, his fullest reality as an individual, but by devoting himself to the best interests of the group, learning what they really are, and furthering them by a study of the means adapted to their growth and fruition. This is “altruism,” the living for others, in its highest sense, the aim not primarily the individual, but the group and its welfare.

This is the more needful because the group, as a psychical unit, is never creative. It is receptive, active, executive, but for its creative inspirations it depends upon the individual. What is called “originality,” the stimuli and momenta of development, arise primarily from the single mind.

But it is equally true that the work of the group must precede the work of the individual, and prepare for it, if it is to be successful. Otherwise, the seed will be sown on barren ground.

In every historic event the group is the only active agent; through it the individual can bring to bear his limited powers over an indefinitely vast area, and with indefinitely multiplied force. History is a record of the sentiments and actions of groups; yet so little has this been understood, so obscured has this 31been by the potency of personality, that until recently it has been little more than an account of individuals. Without the aid of the group, what would have become of the most famous heroes of the past?

I would sum up these reflections on the relations of the individual and the group by the practical deduction that to understand the individual we must study him in relation to the group, and to understand the group we must study it, primarily in the individuals of which it is composed, in both their physical and mental life; and secondly, in those principles and processes which it, as an entirely psychical product, presents peculiar to itself.

The group is not a “natural” product in the objective sense in which that word is employed in the term “natural sciences.” It is a purely mental creation, though none the less real. It must be examined and investigated by other methods, therefore, than those customary in the biologic sciences.

Instead of studying external phenomena for their own sake, we must regard all such as valuable only as they indicate psychic changes, and as they can be translated into mental correlates. The study is, therefore, from within, and qualitative rather than quantitative, in this respect contrasting with experimental psychology and also with history.

When we examine in detail the interaction of the 32individual and the group we may classify the processes which take place somewhat as follows:

The individual receives from the group the symbols for complex and general ideas—that is, the words of language; he is also taught many complex purposeful motions, such as are needed in social and cultured life; he is supplied with artificial objects for his use, as tools, clothing, shelter, etc.; and he is constantly subjected to a certain amount of physical force from those around him—in other words, is “made to do” a variety of acts. The group may consciously strive to modify him, as in public education, religious instruction, and the like; or it may act merely negatively in opposing any developments antagonistic to its own character. The individual may work for or against the group, or for himself only; but in either case has to reckon with the group for what he obtains from it.

While the unity of the ethnic mind is fostered by a conscious effort to promote common interests, modes of expression, ambitions, and aims, its energy is in direct proportion to the cultivation of the sense of individuality among its members, for from the latter alone are born the impulses to progress. The fatal error of many communities has been to bend every effort to secure the former, while they neglected or actually endeavoured to suppress the latter.

33I have been using the word “group” in a loose way. The time has now come to distinguish it from various other terms familiar to ethnology, such as tribe, folk, nation, people, stock, and race.

“Group” is the best English equivalent for the Greek ethnos, which word, by its derivation, means a number of people united together by habits and usages in common.

This at once places the group above the mere temporary aggregations, such as the crowd or the mob. The ethnic group is formed by the thoughts and aims of the lives of its members, not by their ephemeral emotions and actions.

Compared with nation, stock, or race, it is a generic term; for by “nation” we understand all united in the acceptance of one form of government; by “stock,” those speaking dialects or tongues derived from one primitive language (linguistic stocks); and by “race,” those connected by identity of physical traits. The “tribe” is merely the primitive form of the nation, while in English “folk” has a current application to certain classes in society and not to the whole of it.

The correlative of the ethnic group, or, in these pages, “the group,” in German is Volk and in French, le peuple.

How these ethnic groups are formed, under what 34complex conditions their differences arise, what influences are the most potent in their creation and preservation, will be considered in detail hereafter. At present it is sufficient to mention certain general principles, applicable to the formation of all ethnic groups.

First, it must be borne in mind that mere similarity and geographical contiguity are not enough to constitute an ethnos. The Fuegian hordes live under the same sky, speak closely related dialects and are physically alike; but no one would pretend that there is any unity among them. Their roving bands never meet but to fight and their only social occupation is mutual destruction. Nor would there be any true unity in a society however peaceful where each family isolates itself to the utmost from its neighbours and seeks to limit all its efforts and sympathies to its own members. Such a society might become high in numbers and extended in area; but it would have no true unity. It might even develop considerable results in thoughts, study, and invention; but they would remain sterile to the general weal, and contribute little or nothing to the progress of the race. Such was the condition of parts of Europe in the feudal ages.

The ethnic life is a mental life, and this consists not in the sameness brought about by the environment, 35nor even in ideas and acquirements, but in movement, comparison, and association of ideas.

The unity not merely of present traits but of future aims, not merely of ideas but of ideals, is the true unity which constitutes the ethnic mind. This is the foundation fact which must be constantly present to the student, if his researches in ethnic psychology are to be profitable.

In this it differs from racial psychology, for while doubtless each race has mental advantages and deficiencies which are its own and which largely decide the destiny of its members, these are not united in pursuit of one end. There is no unity of will and purpose.

Each individual partakes of this racial psychology as he does of many other mental unions, such as his church and his political party; but that which has pre-eminence in history and psychology is not these, but that closer and paramount union to which he is bound by a common speech, ideas, motives, and hopes.

We must not forget, however, that under whatever connotation we understand the group, it is still composed of individuals; and the relations which these bear to it require careful consideration.

The unity of a group can never be complete. The infinite variations of its individual members prevent 36this. And here comes in an interesting law which has lately been defined by an American scientist. He has shown that precisely that trait or those traits which are the most distinguishing characteristics of a group vary the widest in the individuals of that group.

Let us take, for instance, a given community remarkable for the average height of its members. We shall find wider variations in this dimension among them than among a community less conspicuous in this measurement.

This appears to hold equally good for the statistics of longevity, of health and disease, and other physical traits. There is little doubt it is also of general application to mental qualities. The contradictory estimates of national character largely depend upon it. Not the bias of the observers but their ignorance of the operation of this law will often explain such discrepancies.

What method should we follow to avoid such an error? In other words, what formula can we devise to correct individual variation and arrive at a true average for the group?

This work has already been done for us. Diligent students of vital statistics have as good as demonstrated that when a given characteristic of a group can be expressed in numbers and these 37projected by the graphic method, the resultant curve obtained will be one of those called by mathematicians binomial. Subtracting from the whole number one-tenth for aberrant forms or abnormal cases (the distribution of error), of the remainder, one-half will represent the mean, and one-fourth each will represent the plus and minus extremes. For example, suppose in a given community numbering one thousand adults the average height is 5 feet 6 inches; in it, one hundred persons (one-tenth) will be either abnormally tall or short; of the remainder, 450 will attain just about the total average height; while 225 will be above and 225 below it.

We can fearlessly adopt this method of reasoning in ethnic psychology. When we speak of mental traits or ideas common to the group, we mean that they may be held as expressed by scarcely half of that group; that in the remainder of the group they may be much more positively adopted or more or less rejected; but inasmuch as such numerous exceptions largely annul each other’s force, the general tendency and action of the group will be guided by the average rather than by either extreme.

The justice of this method is further supported by another general psychical law of groups. This is, that they attract in the direct ratio of their mass; the more numerous a party is, the more adherents 38will it obtain. Hence, although in the above example the mean, 450, is less than half of the whole number, yet it is much greater than either of the other three sub-groups, 100, 225, 225, and exerts therefore double the attractive power of the latter. That is, in a question of opinion, it will receive twice as many adherents as either of the latter. Hence the value of majorities as expressing the will of a community.

The principle of psychical action on which the above is based is one very familiar to students of psychology. It is that termed “collective suggestion.” This is the overmastering tendency to imitate the examples of others, to act in accordance with the ideas and feelings which we witness in those around us. When such ideas and sentiments are constant, and conspicuously displayed, they overcome resistance and the individual mind is attracted to that of the group with like irresistible magnetism as in fairy lore drew the ship of the mariners to the loadstone rocks of Avalon.

From these considerations it will be understood that the group may be regarded mathematically as a “constant,” the resultant of a number of “variables,” the individuals of whom it is constituted.

Many writers of late years have spoken of the social unit, the group or the nation, as an “organism.” 39Some have further defined it as a “super-organism” or a “physio-psychic organism.”

Such expressions are well enough as figures of speech. They serve to accentuate the interdependence of parts and the potentiality of change and development in the ethnic mind. But the simile becomes illusory and deceptive when it is set up as a principle from which to deduce conclusions. The group is no more an organism than is any other psychical concept, that of the “genus Homo” for example.

A vital characteristic of the ethnic group is the degree of its centralisation. This is, in truth, a coefficient of its powers. Numbers may be said to increase thus by addition, but centralisation by multiplication. The centralisation, however, must be real; not simply a single point of action, but also a convergence of forces to that point. The French nation is popularly supposed to be centralised in Paris; but in fact the provinces are usually ignorant of national action there until after it has occurred. It is through modern methods of rapid transmission of intelligence that national groups can act with so much greater force than in earlier days.

The permanence of the ethnic group has been a matter much discussed by philosophers. Led on by a supposed analogy to the individual, governed by 40the notion that the social unit is an “organism” and subject to the same laws as physical organisms, supported, as they imagined, by the teachings of history, writers of merit have claimed that the ethnos has a birth, an adolescence, a period of maturity, and old age and death, as has the individual.

Even such an acute thinker as Quetelet was so enamoured of this theory that he worked out the “natural longevity” of a nation, discovering it to be about ten times the greatest longevity of its individual members!

The doctrines of ethnic psychology, as I understand them, do not sanction such an opinion. The analogy of the group to an organism is purely fictitious; the historic causes of the decay of nations are not the same and are not allied to those which bring about mortality in the individual.

There is no such thing as a natural death of a Society. It may be crushed by external force, but if it perishes from within, it has deliberately poisoned itself, has fallen a victim to preventable disease.

There is one catholicon, one elixir of life, which will preserve any society from decay, and confer upon it the blessing of eternal youth, if it is constantly remembered and administered.

That catholicon is to cherish and cultivate assiduously the one distinction which, I have pointed out, 41lifts the human group above the communities of the ants, the bees, and the beavers; that is, that the chief aim of the community shall ever be to give each individual in it the best opportunity for the full development of his faculties.

If the history of the gradual decline and fall of any nation be investigated, it will be seen that the end has come through the violation of this, the one peculiar principle of human association. Hemmed in by castes, classes, or institutions, the human souls have atrophied, degenerated, grown decrepit and impotent, incapable of resisting the natural forces around them.

Though the ethnic mind does not run the same life-course as the individual body, yet it resembles this in its ceaseless change. It is forever altering both its contents, its purposes, and the intensity with which it pursues them.

Psychologists have classified these activities under three general expressions which we may call laws. They are, first, the law of Continuity; second, the law of Diversity of Purpose; and third, the law of Contrast.

The law of Continuity means that in the ethnic mental life there is a regulated course of growth or development; that each phase or condition is the logical result of previous phases or conditions.

The second law emphasises that the rate of growth depends chiefly on the diversity of aims which exists 42in the community. As they are multiplied, growth is the more rapid. This is analogous to that law of organic forms by which evolution is in proportion to variation.

The third law, that of Contrast, applies to the ethnic mind the curious fact in mental life that a prolonged devotion to one idea leads to a reaction in which the opposite of that idea becomes dominant. This is even more conspicuous in the history of progressive nations than in that of individuals. Upon this depends that periodicity in the lives of peoples which has so often been remarked by historians.

The above mentioned facts and laws demonstrate that there is a true unity of existence in the ethnic mind; that it has its own traits, forms, and processes of growth and decay, quite apart from those of the individual mind; that it is not to be studied by the methods of experimental psychology, but by methods drawn from the observation of its own modes of being; and that it is this abstraction, if you please, which is the prime factor in the fate of the group over which it rules.

But I must return again to the definition of the Group. It must not be said that I leave any obscurity in the connotation of that prominent word.

There may be—there always are—many forms of groups in the same community, and these by no 43means cover each other coterminously. Take many an American village, for example. There are the religious groups, Protestant and Catholic; the political parties, Republicans and Democrats, not at all of the same individuals as the former; and there may be the linguistic groups, German and American, different again from both the former; and the racial groups, whites and negroes.

Something similar to this is found on a large scale in every people, every nation; and the serious problem presents itself,—how are we, from these heterogeneous elements, to reach anything which we can properly call the common sentiment, the general mind of the mass?

The example I have chosen of the American village is an extreme one. In a primitive, isolated tribe of Indians, in a remote mountain village, or a rarely visited island, the task would be vastly easier. But the principle in all cases is the same.

By eliminating particular after particular, as the logicians say, we finally reach a general, a consensus of opinion and aspiration on a variety of topics, with which the full number required by the mathematical method already stated will agree. These common sentiments will represent the active influence of that community, and very accurately measure its value in development.

44Being an American village, we can without doubt predict that it will be of one mind that making money should be the chief aim of active exertion; that respect for the law of the land should be cultivated; and that performing recognised duties to one’s family should be taught as indispensable.

One must not take it for granted, however, that such like salient features are necessarily the ones which govern and measure the powers and actions of the group. Such an error is very common. The chief trait of the Scot is popularly supposed to be his stinginess; but the solid and lasting character of that people prove that they have souls above lucre. The English are pre-eminently mercantile, and Napoleon called them a nation of shopkeepers, but he discovered his mistake at Waterloo; the apostle called the Cretans “liars and slow bellies,” but Crete was the source of Greek law, and when the apostle elsewhere quoted a Gentile poet’s concept of God as his own, that poet was a Cretan.

How, then, it will be asked, are we to distinguish the most vital from the most prominent traits of the ethnic mind, since they are not always, even not often, the same?

The answer to that question is the main object of the second part of the present volume. Suffice it, therefore, here to say that all ethnic traits must be 45weighed and measured by the contributions they make to the cultural history of mankind, to the realisation in daily life of those ideas which are the formative elements in civilisation.

Reverting once more to the definition of the group as portrayed in the ethnic mind, its traits are further brought into relief by the comparison of group with group.

The individuals are here dropped from sight, and the elements and processes of two or more ethnic minds are placed in contrast. They are compared in the manner in which they have conceived and carried out notions common to the species—let us say religion, or law, or social relations, or practical inventions. When the comparison is extended to all the cultural elements and the results tabulated, we reach fixed and accurate data for appraising ethnic mental ability, whether racial, tribal, or national.

There is nothing delusive or fanciful in such comparisons. The results are obtained by recognised scientific methods, and are controlled by well-known mathematical laws. They establish the claims of ethnic psychology to a place among the exact sciences, and show that it has a field of its own not yet included in the domain of any of its neighbours.

Thus furnished, as we have seen in the last chapter, with a common stock of faculties and desires, the primitive men set out from their unknown birthplace, to conquer the world. They journeyed east, north, south, and west, into foreign fields and under alien skies. Seized in the iron grasp of novel environment, each band must adapt itself to the new conditions or perish; for in their ignorance they knew not to wrest the power from Nature and make her their slave. They must bow and yield to her commands under penalty of death.

Compelled by external forces, they changed the hue of their skin and the shade of their hair; they grew tall of stature or sunk to pygmies; their skulls altered in shape, and their long bones rounded, or else flattened like those of apes.

Not less surprising were the alterations in their 47minds. Some felt no desire for fixed abodes, and ever wandered, while others sowed fields and built cities; some remained in small, ungoverned bands, while others founded great empires and enacted iron codes; some were satisfied to compel the Unknown by magical rites, while others sought the wisdom of God and the secrets of Nature.

These variations, however, meant Progress; for repetition is not progress, and it is only by ceaseless change and endless experiment that one can find out the best. The separation of man into families and tribes and peoples was, in fact, a necessary condition to his improvement as a species. From the seeming chaos of changing forms the highest type emerged, as, in Greek myth, from the surging seas rose the perfect form of Aphrodite Anadyomene.

The chaos is indeed but seeming. The differences among men are the results of physiological processes, proceeding in definite directions under fixed laws, and adjusted so that they bring about calculable results. Let us turn to the examination of these processes, in their universal expressions operative everywhere, as well in the psychical as the physical world.

Psychical as well as physical; for the new conditions which transformed the bodies of the primitive horde left their impress also on the minds of its 48members, not erasing any trait which made them Man, but bringing them into closer likeness between themselves, and by that act into sharper contrast to their neighbours. The varied practical needs of life fostered their peculiarities, and created a similarity of feelings and purposes, and a community of knowledge in each band. This acted as a sort of intellectual mother-water in which each individual mind of the band crystallised into the same shape, readily accepted the beliefs, imbibed the same prejudices, looked at the world through the same spectacles.

We may well believe that it was not long before contests arose between the primitive hordes. We are told, indeed, by a venerable authority that they began between the first two brothers. Then these diversities of body and mind decided the conflict. The stronger slew the weaker or drove them from the field; unless, indeed, by craft or superior skill the weaker foiled the stronger, as, so endowed, in the long run they surely would. Thus the great law of Natural Selection, of the destruction of the less fit, exercised its sway to preserve that horde which, on the whole, was better adapted for preservation and gave it power over the land.

In the species Man the exemplification of this great law is, as I have intimated, essentially psychical, and its application is upon masses, upon ethnic 49groups. History, the story of man’s progress, deals only with these, not with individuals.

Progressive ethnic mental variation is therefore the theme for our immediate consideration, and especially as it is displayed in the processes of natural selection and adaptation. This is the physiology of ethnic psychology, the history of its normal progress to more specialised powers and higher types.

I cannot go amiss if I present it with a rather close adherence to the recognised method of natural science; for the impression is constantly gaining ground that the psychical life of Man follows the same laws as does his physical; or, to express the thought more accurately, that the one is the reflex of the other, for we can read both with equal correctness in terms of thought or terms of extension.

Such changes may take place in several directions: as in abolishing organs no longer useful; in reducing others which are diminishing in value; in strengthening those which are of immediate utility; and, by correlation, maintaining those relations of parts on which the “type” depends.

These changes are not “purposive”; they do not aim toward a future type, though they may result in one. Such a type may be more decadent than its antecedent, and be the prelude to extinction, under 50this adamantine law of destruction; but if its variations have been physiological and adaptive, they will confer upon it the blessing of life, the gift of length of days.

Those changes which strengthen an organ or structure, or tend to develop and preserve new and useful variations are called “progressive”; those which tend to draw individual variation back to the current type or to reduce certain structures or functions are called “regressive” variations.

It would seem at first sight that such processes must tend in opposite directions—the one beneficial, the other injurious. In fact, both are preservative; but by contrasted physiological processes.

Progressive changes begin in the individual and pass by inheritance into the stock, when they have proved beneficial to it. They continue in action so long as they are useful. When their utility ceases, the energy of the economy is expended elsewhere, on other structures or faculties. The degeneration thus produced is “compensatory.” It does not detract from but adds to the general viability of the organism.

What is most marvellous in this process is that the part or power rarely wholly disappears, no matter how long it has been useless. The pineal gland in the human brain is the remains of a third eye with 51which our ancestors looked out from the top of their heads when they were Silurian fishes; and the appendix vermiformis was an annex to their stomachs when they were herbaceous ruminants!

So it is in psychical anthropology. A department of it, Folklore, is taken up with such survivals, and strange are its revelations! Our Christmas dinner is a reminiscence of a cannibal feast at the winter solstice. The dyed Easter egg is a relic of a myth of the dawn older than the Pyramids.

In strictly scientific language evolution is not always synonymous with progress. It means simply change or transformation within the limits of physiological laws—that is, that such changes tend, on the whole, to the preservation of the individual or do not conflict with it.

Life is the criterion of evolution. But the application of this standard is not always easy. The most salient variation is not necessarily the most important. Again, a variation admirably suited to a given mode of existence may be unfriendly to development by unfitting the stock for later and inevitable changes of environment.

In the psychical ethnic life there are, however, a limited number of characteristics, the symmetrical development of which cannot fail to bring out all the latent powers of the group in the struggle for its 52independent existence; and, conversely, their neglect or faulty cultivation will surely pave the way to debility and disappearance. They are the primary factors of progressive variation in ethnic psychology.

The list of them is as follows:

They are all essential to ethnic progress; though the special cultivation of one or the other must be dictated by the circumstances. The development must be in relation to the inner (mental) and outer (physical) demands upon the group, if it is to make the best of its life. They are the physiological elements of collective mental growth, standing in relation to it as do proper food, exercise, cleanliness, and the other hygienic methods to bodily health and strength.

1. Remembrance.—Knowledge is of no avail unless it is remembered. Experience may become prophetic, but if its words are forgotten, of what use is its wisdom? Hence the rudest savages seek means to strengthen their recollection of events and ideas. The Australian has his message stick, the Peruvian his knotted string (quipu), the Chippeway his meday 53club,—all to help preserve tradition, ritual, knowledge, in some form.

Whatever technical process was devised to shape a war club, or to minister to the sense of beauty by adornment, whatever laws were framed to regulate the clan, whatever secrets were learned from nature, became of value to the group only in so far as the faculty of memory and the means of remembrance were cultivated.

I need not refer to the supreme treasure of written records, the national literatures of the world; but it is worth noting that just to the extent that a nation cherishes its own history, lives in its past deeds, drinks from its own fonts of thought, does it develop its vitality and independence.

Tradition and instruction in what the group has already gained is the first condition of further advance. If the future is to rest on a secure foundation, it must be built on the experience of the past. Plato estimated the alphabet none too highly when he called it a gift of the gods. The dream of immortality in name is a mighty stimulus to effort. What were that fame worth that perished with our flesh?

Under this head also comes what we broadly call Education, that which distributes to the new generation the garnered grain and treasured pearls of hundreds 54of older generations; which places in the hands of the young the tools of thought, the training in vocations, the pride in the noble achievements of the past, the acquaintance with their own powers and the means of increasing them, the precepts of justice, of love, and of truth, and the inspiration of grand ideals of life and work.

No past is too remote to be destitute of practical value to the present. No truth is too trivial to be regarded. Knowledge has long and wisely been esteemed the synonym of power. Art, science, the whole fabric of culture, are accumulations, memories, of millenniums of labour, of whose results all has been lost except that which has been recollected.

2. Industry.—The secret of all improvement in human life is the conscious effort to improve. Idleness is the chief obstacle to advancement. Disuse of brain-function degenerates the tissues faster than misuse. Labour, work, activity, exercise,—these are the only means to strengthen the powers we have and insure their survival.

Not all effort is equally beneficial. It may be honestly intended, but misdirected, and lead to perdition; it may be the tread-mill labour which reduces the man to a machine, and blunts and dulls his soul; it may be, as with those who “work hard at play,” consumed in frivolous pastimes and trivial objects.

55The true aim of all effort, that aim which most contributes to progress, is the conquest of the environment, the subjection of it to the enlightened reason and the individual will. “The one process of human evolution,” says a thoughtful writer, “is the passage from a merely mechanical to a rational life.”

“Adaptation to environment” belongs to plant life and brute life. Man at his best aims at the nobler task of moulding the environment to his own will and wishes. He is not its slave, but its master. Does arctic cold threaten to freeze the blood in his veins? He builds a hut and lights a lamp; and the summer zephyr is not milder than the air he breathes. Does the equatorial sun dart its fatal rays from the zenith? He spreads an umbrella and dons a helmet, and is as cool as if under orchard shades of temperate zones.

Reason-directed, unflagging activity,—this is the one indispensable and all-sufficient security for the indefinite progress of individual or group. The definition of “genius,” said Goethe, “is the willingness to labour unremittingly.” The willingness presupposes the will, and he of the indomitable will soon becomes master of his purpose.

This trait has long been familiar as a criterion in ethnic psychology. Professor Klemm in his history 56of human culture, written half a century ago, divided the tribes and nations of humanity into those who have been “passive” and those who have been “active.” He maintained that the love of labour is the simple and sufficient measure for the capacities of any race.

Many later writers have followed him in this discrimination, although they phrase it in various forms. The latest, Professor Vierkandt, repeats it in a more psychological guise when he states that the real source and centre of all differences between the cultures of human groups is the one difference between their voluntary and involuntary activities. The latter are instinctive, the former reflective; the latter are mechanical, the former are rational; the latter are of bondage, the former of freedom.

The sum of average brain-industry in an ethnic mind is the measure of its comparative value. Not single brilliant examples of genius, cases here and there of exceptional ability, but a prevailing love of labour is what guarantees success. A true genius, a Camoens or a Cervantes, belongs more to the world than to the nation. Both these illustrious names have stimulated thought more in foreign lands than in their own homes.

3. Inventiveness.—When the neolithic man invented a sword of bronze to replace his dagger of 57stone, he invested his tribe with the kingship of the known world. The less-inventive hordes became their slaves.

The victory of man over nature has been won by his inventions; and the tribe, group, or nation which leads in the control of natural forces will also lead in the struggle for existence, and supremacy. Others may sing sweeter songs or dream diviner visions, but the potency of life will not be won thereby.

Inventiveness is another word for that knowledge which is really power, force, strength—brutal, if you will, but present, actual.

Man is distinctively a tool-using animal, and those with the most efficient tools will bring the others to terms; for when it is a tool of war, a weapon, victory is to him who has the best.

Inventiveness is the foe of habit, and habit is the foe to advancement. As the sickle gave way to the scythe, and the scythe to the mowing-machine, the food-supply was insured against failure, famines disappeared, and aggregations of millions in cities became possible.

An invention is something concrete, objective. It substitutes reality for a dream, and in the end surpasses, in the elements of the marvellous, all dreams. The Arabian Nights tell of no magic spell so potent as to enable persons to speak to each other a thousand 58miles apart. But invention has made that the most commonplace of incidents.

As there is no calculable limit to the natural forces, so there is none to our possible control of them. Reason has this in itself, that qualitatively it is of higher order than force and can control it to any extent. The nation which constantly encourages this application of reason must be the most forcible, the most powerful. Would you forecast the fate of the present “great powers” in the twentieth century? The books of prophecy are open. They are the records of the patent offices.

4. Adaptability.—The fundamental law of life in organic forms is their relative ability to adapt themselves to environments.

This is just as true of ethnic units, physically and mentally. When I come to speak of acclimatisation, I shall dwell on the former phase; now, I emphasise the necessity of mental adaptation, as shown in laws, religions, customs, and thoughts.

There must be nothing “hide-bound” in the tribe or nation which migrates or which expands into new conditions of life. Home-sickness must be unknown to it. It must cherish no ancient local prejudices, carry with it no baggage which it is not ready to exchange for something more suitable. More than that, it must be on the alert to discover what alterations in 59home habits should be made, and hasten to make them.

Adaptability is not the loss of national character. We may change our sky with profit, but keep our minds. To lose ourselves in travelling would be a loss irreparable. The human group which succumbs to new environment does not adapt itself to it, but is drowned in it. The changes required by adaptability are chiefly external and of will. They are such as the recognition of new experiences suggests as advisable for survival.

Adaptability is an active trait. To be most effective it must be conscious and purposive. The knowledge gained from others must be utilised intentionally to the special advantage of the group. In this form it is a product of the higher culture. Primitive peoples, when they migrated, submitted themselves without reflection to the new influences around them; enlightened groups are on their guard and sedulously retain what they bring with them if they see it is better than what they find, or accept the latter if it is superior. True adaptability, therefore, is the result of conscious reasoning.

5. Receptiveness.—Not only should the ethnic mind be ready to adapt itself to changed conditions, but it should be ever ready to give admittance to new knowledge; not only passively, but should actively 60seek it from others. Only thus can it progress surely and rapidly. Anything in the nature of “Chauvinism” is destructive to breadth of conception. The national egotism which scorns to learn of neighbours prepares the pathway to national ruin.

Primitive tribes borrowed extensively one from the other. The traditions, games, arts, and inventions were appropriated by the most mentally energetic, and by them such secured dominion and prosperity.

Civilisation alters not this process. That nation to-day which is most eager to learn from others, which is furthest from the fatal delusion that all wisdom flows from its own springs, will surely be in the van of progress.

Receptiveness in national life is gauged by the knowledge the nation has of others. This can be gained by intelligent travel or by study. Where the citizens of a country travel little or for amusement only, and are but slightly conversant with other languages than their own, we may be sure that the national mind is lacking in this quality. The number of foreign students in a great university is a test of this element of progress in the character of their respective nationalities.

Hence the practical deduction of the importance of a knowledge of modern languages. Without them, the minds of other nations are closed books to us. 61They may be surpassing us in wisdom and we be ignorant of it. In that case, some day we or our children will weep for our negligence.

6. Forethought.—In one of his works Professor Letourneau remarks that forethought is par excellence the ripe fruit of intellectual development. The ancient Greeks embodied this truth in the pregnant myth of Prometheus (Forethought), who stole fire from the gods and gave it unto men and his brother Epimetheus (Afterthought).

He who is willing to sacrifice the present for the future must possess self-control, fixity of purpose, faith in what governs the future, decision of character. His actions must be conscious, purposive, directed by intelligence. His will must be trained in the choice of motive, and his passions curbed into obedience to his reason. Self-restraint, self-sacrifice, even self-immolation, are the virtues he must be ready to practise.

The distant aim for which he is thus denying himself may be within the confines of his own expectation of life, and thus be after all centred in personal ambitions; or it may be directed toward some hoped-for life hereafter, in the next world, the spirit-land; or, noblest of all, it may be in the interest of unborn generations and humanity at large. Perhaps in his zeal he misses present joys for the illusions of a 62fancied future; but better this than to sacrifice the future to the present.

In such deliberate and conscious planning for remote aims he is not like the squirrel who lays up a store of nuts for the winter; for the man exercises his will and decides between motives, and his actions are not controlled by external events but by inner, psychical reflections. There is even something not despicable in that avarice which heaps up riches and knows not who shall enjoy them. In it is revealed that anxiety to labour for a remote future, at present sacrifice, which, in nobler expressions, is a fine, essentially human, trait.

This characteristic differs widely in mankind, and in individuals. So significant is it of the progress of the group that in various forms it has been chosen by several writers as the main distinction between savagery and civilisation. The efforts of the barbarian aim at the satisfaction of his immediate wants only. His means of livelihood—hunting, fishing, and the collection of natural products—do not admit of saving for a far-off future. As the soul rises in culture, its horizon expands. Not merely against winter’s want, but against the inevitable periods of sickness and decrepitude which lie in wait for all, must we be prepared. Then there are the feeble and the helpless, and farther still the unborn, our 63descendants, for whom we feel responsible. Finally, the horizon falls co-equal with the limits of the world, and the future of all humanity appeals to the loftiest souls as demanding their strenuous labours.

The best-directed efforts of humanitarians to-day are aimed at the cultivation of forethought in the minds and habits of the lower, so called, improvident classes of society. Wise governments are engaged in providing secure depositories for small savings, in devising methods of insurance against want in old age and poverty, and in urging upon all the wisdom of guarding property against attacks, thus aiding in the survival of the nations.

These are the primary factors of progress in the ethnic mind. Everywhere and at all times their assiduous cultivation makes for national strength and life. Where they are all active, success is assured. Where even one is neglected danger is incurred.

But, it will be objected, are there not other mental traits just as necessary,—for instance, courage, enthusiasm, loyalty, patriotism? Yes, they are sometimes advantageous, sometimes necessary; but these and similar emotions are secondary; in themselves, they do not insure progress; in frequent instances, they oppose it, and lead their possessors to ruin. 64Blind courage, for example, like misdirected energy, is mischievous and destructive.

Emotions and sentiments are necessary stimulants to action. They are indefinitely valuable in national character, but only to the extent that they are governed and directed by intelligence. In themselves they are blind and unreasoning impulses, and dangerous guides. In culture history, they belong to primitive or half-civilised people, incapable of holding rational conduct. By means of them, astute and unscrupulous rulers sway the masses, exciting them to actions detrimental to themselves.

The real factors in ethnic evolution must ever be those which are rational, conscious, voluntary. As voluntary, they require freedom, liberty of choice and of action. Freedom is an external condition, and unless it is enjoyed without other restraint than the limitation of the same privilege in others, the group can never reach its complete development. In the theory of progress, therefore, it should be always given as the primary condition of growth.

The physiological processes by which regressive variation affects the ethnic mind are chiefly three:

1. Absorption through concentration elsewhere.

2. Disuse or neglect of faculties.

3. Reaction from natural limitations.

Such changes as these are not merely consistent 65with ethnic advancement but essential to it. They indicate simply a re-distribution of the vital forces in accordance with the demands of new conditions. This is a phenomenon constantly seen in the individual life of organic beings of every grade, and that it extends to the species and to the mental powers proves that it is an universal law.

Many have maintained that regressive variation proceeds in an inverse direction from progressive evolution, eliminating the most recently acquired characteristics first. Not a few have sought to apply this supposed law to ethnic conditions and sociological factors. But recent authorities of weight, who have examined this question with care, regard the instances supposed to confirm such a theory as coincidences only, or explicable on other grounds.

The term “regressive,” therefore, is to be understood as applying to a physiological and healthy process, by which the sum of nutrition in an organism is expended more upon one or several elements of that organism at the expense of other elements. The latter, therefore, reduced in sustenance, undergo “regressive” changes, atrophy, or diminish.

In mental life this is paralleled by the cultivation of some faculties to the neglect of others. Those to which we “pay attention,” as the phrase is, improve, while those which we neglect are weakened.

66What is here noted of the individual is true of the group. Indeed, it is a leading fact in the psychical history of the species. Man has paid heavily for all his winnings in the intellectual field by losses of many a power which would serve him well had he retained it. He has forfeited the instincts which once were his guides, the acuteness of his senses has gone, the happy carelessness of his youth has deserted him. We may all join in the lament of Mrs. Browning:

In applying these general facts to the variations of the ethnic mind, the principal distinction to observe is between relative regressive and actual regressive changes.

The former are not only consistent with general progress, but in some sense a condition of it. In following the steep ascent of advancement, we must cast aside some of our baggage. We must husband our resources and spend them where the return will be most bountiful. Where we strike the balance of our mental losses and gains and find it in favour of general improvement, we may rest content.

1. Absorption through Concentration Elsewhere.—The concentration of the ethnic mind on the cultivation of one group-trait infallibly leads to a diminution 67of other faculties. The group has a fixed amount of time, activity, and mental force, and if this is concentrated chiefly on one purpose, others must suffer.

History offers numberless examples of this. A few will suffice. The Vikings of Norseland had but one vocation—war; and though they repeatedly founded kingdoms in the south, not one survived. The capacities for peaceful life were lost in them, but for generations they were the terror of the more numerous and highly cultured nations of the south.

Exclusive devotion to the religious sentiment has reduced many peoples to practical imbecility, especially where the State has used its powers to force a particular church upon the community. Nothing, indeed, has brought about more complete intellectual atrophy.

These are examples where the process under consideration has been misdirected or carried too far. When it is properly guided, the compensation for the loss or diminution of one faculty is vastly greater than the value of that faculty. Thus, it was through the cultivation of his intelligence that early man lost his instincts. Through an earnest desire for peace which sprang up in the cities of the Middle Ages, the constant strife between the feudal nobles was measurably checked, to the signal advantage of the nation.

68Where the stress of mental attention is directed to the cultivation of secondary traits or of those which make against the general welfare, the process is still physiological; it may, indeed, for the time be advantageous, concentrating the group-feeling and fitting the nation for its immediate conditions. Thus, in the present age, industrialism attracts to its sphere most of the ability of several leading nations. It offers not in itself a high ideal of life, but appears to be one peculiarly suited to the prevailing conditions of humanity. It stores reserve national force which will, doubtless, in time be expended on nobler aims.

2. Disuse or Neglect of Faculties.—The impairment of mental powers through disuse is one of the most common phenomena of psychology. Men are much more colour-blind than women, because they exert less the faculty of distinguishing hues. Persons who do not practise memorising soon lose the power.

In the history of nations this has been most conspicuous in the neglect of the military spirit; Carthage yielded to Rome, and Rome to the barbarian, chiefly because a distaste for personal exposure in combat led each nation in time to depend on mercenaries for defence. For centuries in China the vocation of the soldier has been looked upon as inferior 69to that of the scholar or the statesman; and, however just this might be in the abstract, it so weakened the national integrity that the vast Sinitic empire is now tottering to ruin.

Disuse may arise from two conditions: the one, from neglect and overattention to other faculties; the other, from absence of opportunity.

Both are abundantly represented in ethnic psychology. Of the former, I have just given instances; while of the latter the deliberate avoidance by large groups of certain areas of mental life are examples in point. Thus, the Society of Friends (Quakers) have for two hundred and fifty years expelled the cultivation of the fine arts from their education. The result is a loss of the æsthetic faculties, but a remarkable gain in other directions—such as sobriety, longevity, business success. Whether the compensation is sufficient seems, however, to be decided in the negative by the Friends themselves.

Other examples present themselves. The aristocracy of Siam regard all forms of work as so degrading that they allow their finger-nails to grow five or six inches in length to prove that their hands have never been soiled with labour. Needless to say that this disuse of their muscles is followed by atrophy of their brain-cells, so that they are an emasculate and enfeebled group. The theory of 70concentration and disuse of faculties in the group led to the system of castes, the most striking example of which is in India, where they are divided upon race lines. The white Brahmans are the priests, legislators, scholars, and diplomats; the red Rajpoots are the warriors and chieftains; the yellow Mongols are the commercial and agricultural class; while the black Dravidians are the mechanics and herdsmen. Each caste adopts its special branch of activity and avoids that traditionally belonging to another caste.

Although a similar theory has been widely popular in many states, such a division of labour and responsibility has in it elements of debility which in the long run must bring about social disintegration. It conflicts with the unity of the ethnic mind.

3. Reaction from Natural Limitations.—As there is a difference in the mental aptitudes of individuals which no training can equalise, so there is in those of human groups. Its causes do not concern us here. The fact remains and must be faced.

There are natural limitations to each mind and to each group of minds. Compared with the most highly gifted, the less so stand in the physiological relation of “rudimentary organs.” When brought into contact, the latter will either succumb or accept a subordinate position.

The American Indians, as a race, were comparatively 71highly gifted. They created an order of architecture and even devised a system of phonetic writing; but none of their states was of long duration, and none of their so-called “empires” rose above the level of a temporary confederacy.

The limitations of the racial mind were such that a complex social organisation was impossible for them. In the forms of their highest governments, those of the Aztecs, Mayas, and Peruvians, we see repeated on a large scale the simple and insufficient models of the rude hunting tribes of the plains.

This is also true of the black race of Africa. The powerful monarchies which at times have been erected in that continent over the dead bodies of myriads of victims have lasted but a generation or two. The natural limitations of the racial mind prevented it.

Many other examples could be cited. Indeed, the law of “thus far shalt thou go and no farther” tells the story of most of the failures of races and peoples. They fell through mental inability to succeed. They had reached the natural limit of their activities.

But there is in this no occasion to deduce a conclusion of fatalism. These limitations have been operative in great measure because they have been unrecognised, and no effort has been made to escape them. Though they may not be remedied, their evil effects may be avoided by enlightened prevision. They 72act like other natural laws, and all such laws can be turned to man’s advantage, if he sets about it wisely.

Modes and Rates of Ethnic Variation.—Both progressive and regressive mental variations are formed of constructive, synthetic evolution; both are necessary to general advancement; both have their place in the scheme of national health and growth. They belong among what the physiologist calls “anabolic” processes—those whose tendency is to preserve and develop the species.

There has, however, been frequent misunderstanding of the modes of action of these processes and the rate of their movement. This misconception exists widely to-day. Many writers have mistaken actual advance for degeneration, or claimed that some nation or stage of culture was superior to another from some single real or imagined feature. Thus Rousseau and his school, enamoured of the supposed personal freedom of the savage, lauded the existence of man “in a state of nature”; and their followers still assail modern civilisation as a failure.

It becomes important, therefore, to examine the modes of healthy progress so that we may understand its sometimes strange aspects.

These modes are three in number:

1. In lines, either parallel (homoplastic) or divergent (heteroplastic).

732. In circles, or curved forms (spirals).

3. In waves, rhythmic undulatory forms.

1. Parallel and Divergent Variation.—Evolutionists are familiar with these two forms of progressive variation in the organic world. They are equally evident in human progress.

No fact in ethnology is more striking than the parallelisms of primitive culture. Go where we will among the savage tribes of the globe, we find them developing the same arts along the same lines, framing their tribal organisations on the same models, calling in similar words on the same gods. Not only in this but in what seem matters of caprice, fancy, and local colour, the same similarity, almost identity, prevails. They tell stories of like plots, decorate their weapons in like patterns, dance and sing in like forms.

Yet, though so much alike, so “tarred with the same stick,” each tribe and group is different. Each has its own imprint and character. Each has its points of individuality.

This is “divergent” variation, just as universal, just as inevitable as the parallelism we have been considering. This extends into minute and seemingly unimportant details. We may, for example, compare the stone axes of neighbouring American tribes. In a casual survey, they look alike; a close 74inspection reveals slight but constant differences. The trained eye can distinguish their place of origin without difficulty.

This inherent divergence is so profound that two well-marked groups become incapable of mental unity. They may be separated by an imaginary line, and have been for generations under like climatic and cultural conditions, but the imprint of the divergence is ineradicable. If they have the same religion, they will understand it differently; the same events will impress them differently; their feeling and their hopes will be asunder.

While this is true, it is also true that a new stimulus to progress is created by the union of divergent lines of thought. The resultant is a fresh element in mental life, a new birth independent of either parent.

Such unions are brought about either by similarity or contrast. There is a species of elective affinity between certain lines of psychical development which at once unites them as they approach each other.

There is also a similar union induced by contrasted psychical states. We say familiarly that “opposites attract each other,” and it is a maxim drawn from frequent experience. The rapid changes from social freedom to military tyranny in the mercurial population of some states seem more gratifying 75to the ethnic spirit than a continued stable government.

Parallel variations lead to similarity in products. They are “homoplastic,” to use the term of the evolutionist. Primitive tribes, developing under the same general conditions of environment, are strikingly alike in culture.

Divergent variations are “heteroplastic,” that is, they lead to new products, and hence are the higher activities in all that makes for advancement. Whatever multiplies them stimulates the growth of culture.

2. Variation in Circles or Curves.—Both parallel and divergent evolution are expressions of continuity of progress in lines, extending from point to point, intersecting to produce other lines of new directions.

Such a rectilinear scheme is the simplest that we can sketch of human advancement; and for many purposes it is sufficiently correct. It does not, however, fully express the geometrical representation of such agencies as we are considering. Professor Baldwin has justly remarked that there is a “circular activity” in all progress. Its influence is not aimed solely at a point ahead, but extends itself in all directions. The reception of a new and true idea in the human mind may be likened to the introduction of a ray of sunlight into a darkened room. Its 76chief force is seen in the linear shaft of light, but the illumination extends in some degree to the whole space.

Johannes Schmidt has shown that the distribution of the early Aryan dialects and religions was not from the point of common origin by right lines of migration in different directions, but should be represented diagrammatically by a series of irregular circles and ellipses, overlapping each other. The tendency to variation arises in some centre and spreads from it in a series of curves. These meeting others lead to an “interlinking” of cultural areas.

This is true of the other elements of ethnic culture. The localities where many such overlappings occurred became secondary centres from which in turn the circular activity of culture was propagated.

A mart where many visitors from different nations congregated would receive some new learning from all and through its concentration would impart this higher potency in some measure to all. For example, the city of Nippur, on the Babylonian plain, attracted twenty-five hundred years ago to its markets not only Assyrians and Edomites, but Medes and Persians from the East, Syrians and Hittites from the West, and probably Greeks and Egyptians and Arabians from remoter lands.

Human progress has been likened by some to 77a spiral figure where each advance is a repetition of a former stage but with improvements to it. This is a combination of the right line and the curve; but the notion that repetition or recapitulation exists in evolution in any other form than that of renewed effort finds little support in natural science.

3. Variation in Waves, or Rhythmic Undulations.—Some of the most recent speculations on the ultimate forces of the universe lead to the belief that they are maintained in activity by an eternal rhythmic pulsation or undulation, generating its energy from its periods of repose.

This doctrine has been applied by Professor Gerland to the progress of the human race. His teaching is that after a period of rapid advance there follows one of depression, which in turn is succeeded by another of advance, reaching a higher development than any which preceded it.

Other writers have expressed this notion in the form that after a period of activity and invention follows one of repose and reflection, giving way in turn to another of activity.

The Rate of Progress.—Professor de Mortillet calculates from a wide range of data, geologic and archæologic, that man has lived on the earth about 240,000 years. The most conservative student of prehistoric records would not estimate the life of our 78species at less than fifty thousand years, and it is much more likely to be double that duration.

The date of anything like civilisation is much more recent. Even in its oldest centres, as Egypt or Babylonia, to place its beginning ten thousand years ago is to exceed the demands of the boldest antiquary; while over most of the now civilised areas of the globe a condition of barbarism prevailed until less than two thousand years ago.

These facts prove wide variations in the rate of progress, very slow movements in earlier times and lower conditions, singularly rapid advances in later high conditions.

We are led to the conclusion, therefore, that the rate is not by one mode of progression but by several.

1. By arithmetical progression (addition).

2. By geometrical progression (multiplication).

3. By saltatory progression (permutation).

These are not to be applied too strictly, but it is safe to make the general statement about them that they correspond to the three stages of culture,—savagery, half-culture, and full-culture.

The simplest rate is by adding one invention or art to another, as does the savage in his lowest stage to-day and as did primitive man for myriads of years. Each such addition is so much gained, but reflects little 79improvement on the general life. Thus the Australian began with a stone fastened to a wooden handle, and with which he could strike a blow, scratch the earth, or tear flesh. To this he added in time a spear or javelin, a club, and finally that curious weapon, the boomerang. Each of these inventions helped him just to the extent he used it and not more. His general condition was not bettered beyond that amount. It was as if he had added a hundred dollars to his capital and enjoyed the interest of the investment. His was arithmetical progression.

This merely arithmetical progression by simple addition, 2 + 2 + 2 + 2=8, explains why the introduction or invention of very important technical procedures have frequently been of no influence on the general culture of a people. Thus, the smelting and forging of iron has been known from time immemorial among the African blacks, and many of them are skilful blacksmiths; but beyond its immediate convenience for weapons, the art did them no benefit. The Chinese knew the compass and gunpowder many centuries before the Europeans, but their methods of war and navigation received no impulse from these potent allies.

French physiologists have defined the human brain as “an organ of repetition and multiplication.” So long as its activities are confined to mere imitation, 80following a set example, it employs the former function only, and the progress of the group must be very slow.

This was not Mr. Lewis H. Morgan’s opinion. That thoughtful ethnologist maintained that “from first to last human progress has been in a ratio not rigorously but essentially geometrical.” But the arguments on which he chiefly based this maxim, so far as it applies to primitive conditions were the development of articulate speech and the social, “gentile” organisation; and neither of these resulted from a conscious effort of mind.

Progress does proceed in a geometrical ratio—that is, by multiplication, when an invention reacts on the sum of the ethnic possessions to increase their general value—when, as we say, it has an indefinite number of “applications.” This is seen in the recognition of the mechanical powers,—the lever, the pulley, the screw, the weighing-beam, and so on. In ship-building, the oar, the rudder, and the sail improved the whole system of water transportation.

Geometrical ratio increases rapidly. It is represented by a series 2 × 2 × 2 × 2=16. But the augment by permutation is still greater. This is shown in the series 2 × 3 × 4 × 5=120. Mr. George Iles claims that this is the true rate of modern progress as represented by the effect on the world of printing, 81steam, electricity, and photography. This is progress “saltatory,” or by leaps. It explains, he believes, the sudden and rapid advance of some periods, and also the losses of continuity sometimes observed. His maxim is: “The newest of the factors of culture multiplies all the factors which went before it.”

We have seen in the preceding chapter that atrophy and regression are an essential process of progressive evolution, necessary in order that the preponderance of nutrition may be cast in favour of the most useful organs and structures.

This is “physiological” degeneration, “degeneration with compensation,” the result of which is finally favourable to the general economy.

But there is another form of degeneration, the tendency of which is distinctly injurious to the organism as a whole, and which, if unchecked, would compass its destruction. This is “pathological degeneration,” “degeneration without compensation.”

Although such processes are also biologic,—that is, carried on by life products (cellular neoplasms),—they are incapable of independent existence and are always warring against that of the organism in which 83they are engendered. It is an axiom that the laws of progressive evolution do not apply to pathological processes (Virchow).

In the history of the mental life of individuals and nations we find a striking parallelism to these physical processes, certain degenerations bringing with them compensations in the growth of higher faculties, others tending inevitably to the destruction of the individual or the group. The latter belongs to the domain of “ethnic psycho-pathology.”

Psychologists have shunned this field. “Psychology,” says a recent American writer, “must concern itself with the normal mind”; and a German author of merit has insisted that mental pathology has no place in ethnology, because this science occupies itself only with the progress of mankind.

Much more correct is the opinion of Dr. Ireland that “it is quite erroneous to treat the history of the human race as that of the sane alone”; and, indeed, we may almost go so far as Professor Capitan, of the School of Anthropology of Paris, and say: “Everybody is diseased. Nobody is healthy. We are obliged to study mankind in a constantly morbid condition of body and mind.” Or we may go as far as Pascal, when he says, “Men are naturally so insane that he is deemed insane who is not insane with the rest.”

84Ethnic psychology is obliged to take into account the constant presence and powerful action of pathological mental elements. Tribes and nations have been destroyed by war or by catastrophes; but much more frequently some disease of the ethnic mind itself has prepared its own extinction.

Here an important distinction is necessary. Ethnic mental disease has no relation to the frequency of individual cases of insanity. These do not affect the ethnic mind because that is the outcome of the intelligence of the community, not of its irresponsible members.

For this reason ethnic psycho-pathology cannot be discussed wholly from the standpoint of insanity, although the analogies are such that we can profitably compare them in outline, and this I shall attempt.

A definition is sometimes useful, so I present the following:

A pathological condition of the ethnic mind is present when it is chronically incapable of directing the activities of the group correctly toward self-preservation and development.

Like all definitions in natural science, this one is not to be applied literally in all cases. The incapacity may be present and yet not to such a degree as to be positively destructive. All nations have some insane tendencies, as have all individuals; and it is 85true, as a specialist has said: “The more one knows of insanity, the less does it seem to differ from the normal condition.”

These pathological traits of the ethnic mind can be analysed and classified. They will be found to arise

1. From some intellectual deficiency or perversion; or

2. From some persistent disturbance of the emotional life.

No one will demand that every member of a group should suffer from such conditions in order that its collective mind should betray morbid consequences. It is enough if a majority, or even a decided minority, providing it exerts the requisite influence on the mass, is in such a pathological state. A degenerate nobility or a dissolute priesthood has often worked the ruin of a state through the contagion of example and its control of lower classes.

Before considering in detail the varied forms under which these diseased mental traits present themselves, it will be well to examine the general causes to which they are due.

Etiology.—Each of such pathological conditions of the ethnic mind has a basis in some prevailing physical neurosis, the origin of which can be traced in the ethnic history, and which becomes hereditary in the stock. For of these two principles no student 86of the subject can doubt, (1) that every pathological mental manifestation corresponds to a neuropathic change, and (2) that whatever may be said about the transmission of acquired characters in physiology, no physician can for a moment doubt that morbid infection may be passed down from generation to generation.

For these reasons the study of causes in ethnic pathology becomes of enormous practical moment. Only by an acquaintance with them can preventive and curative remedies be applied.

These causes are, at first, always external and individual. They proceed from some form of “environment,” mental or physical. But the morbid impression, once fully received, is often indelible, becomes fixed in the type, and is but little influenced by external agencies.

These primary causes of true ethnic degeneration I shall consider under four headings.

1. Imperfect Nutrition.

2. Sexual Subversions.

3. Toxic Agents.

4. Mental Shocks.

No one of these can act in the long run in other than a deleterious manner on the ethnic mind. There is nothing “compensatory” in any one of them or so little that it need not be reckoned.

871. Imperfect Nutrition.—It has been said broadly that all psychopathic and regressive conditions arise from malnutrition (Féré). This is true, in a sense, but does not carry us far in the direction of treatment. We ask a closer definition of origins.

There is no doubt of the intimate relationship of ample nutrition and intellectual progress; but while it is well to avoid the ancient notion of the independence of soul and body and that the former is superior to the latter, we must guard against the modern extreme of Buckle and his followers, that the history of nations can be traced to the food they eat. Man is omnivorous, and his well-being is nourished by food of any kind, providing it is nutritious and easily assimilable. The effort which has often been made to trace the character of tribes and nations to some prevalent diet—be it of fish or flesh, or vegetable products—is fanciful, and yields no positive facts. What does harm is not some particular kind but a general insufficiency of aliment.

Imperfect nutrition may be traced to three principal sources. 1. Insufficient or unsuitable food. 2. Lack of variety. 3. Improper preparation of food.

The careful researches of Collignon, Ranke, Ammon, and others have traced the stunted forms, defective bodies, and low intellectual development of the Lapps, the mountaineers of central Europe 88and the Bushmen of the Kalihari desert to one cause, la misére, lack of sufficient and appropriate food. This is certain to bring about degeneration of organs, incomplete development, and loss of brain power. Continued through generations, a hereditary taint is engendered which saps the vigour of the stock, and cannot be eradicated by improved conditions.

Unsuitable food is usually consumed on account of the scarcity of better material, but at times from a morbid craving. Examples are the unctuous clay which was swallowed by various tribes in America and Australia, and also by some of the “poor white trash” of Georgia. The ergoted rye and maize to which some of the peasantry of France and Italy are forced to have recourse exerts a disastrous influence on both body and mind.

But food may be ever so excellent in itself, yet unsuitable to the geographic and other conditions. The Eskimo thrives on blubber and raw fish; but such a diet in Ceylon would be as inappropriate as the Hindoo’s boiled rice for an exclusive diet in Greenland.

Lack of variety interferes with nutrition even when the food material itself is ample. By structure and habit man is omnivorous, and suffers when confined to a single article of diet. The blood becomes depraved and scorbutic symptoms often appear. Nations 89who mainly live on some one substance—rice, cassava, potatoes, etc.—suffer, lose their power of adaptation to their surroundings, as was remarked by Alexander von Humboldt, and are more liable to disease. Owing also to the partial sustenance thus furnished, the brain-cells are less progressive and energetic. There are nearly a score of chemical elements in the body, all of which must be supplied by the aliment if maximum physical health is to be attained and the highest energy and moral vigour are desired; for, although it is not correct to assert, as some have claimed, that the physical insures psychical perfection, it is undoubtedly true that the mind is never at its best in a feeble and sickly body. Dr. Johnson was more than half right when he argued that a sick man is a scoundrel!

A volume might be written on the influence of the preparation of food on national character. Cookery is one of the fine arts, and its development has been parallel with general culture. No tribe takes its food habitually raw. The Eskimo will freeze it first, the Tartar readies his steak by placing it beneath his saddle, and the African cannibal will soak his human morsel in water. Before pots or kettles were invented, the flesh was roasted over the fire or in trenches covered with hot coals.

Cookery renders food more assimilable, more 90digestible, and thus allows the brain a better chance to do its work. Frying hardens and soddens food, and the frying-pan is, therefore, an enemy to civilisation. Chewing coarse, hard, and uncooked food develops the muscles of the jaws and makes the face “prognathic,” an almost sure sign of intellectual inferiority, and directly connected with an unfavourable shape of the skull. The man who invented the mill was one of the greatest benefactors to his race. Condiments add to the digestibility of food and hold an important place in its preparation. Salt and pepper thus sharpen the intellect.

2. Subversion of Sex-relations.—There is nothing more vital to the growth, even to the very existence, of a nation than the sex-relations which it favours by its laws, customs, and preferences. Upon these depend the processes of natural selection by which the number and the power of future generations are decided through inflexible rules. If these relations, as established by the fixed natural laws of species-perpetuation, are traversed by ignorance or wilful disobedience, nothing can prevent the injury to the physical strength and mental ability of the offspring.

Such subversions of the sex-relations may be presented under five headings:

(a)91

Premature and delayed marriage.

(b)

Abnormal forms of marriage.

(c)

Abstention from marriage through various causes.

(d)

Licentiousness. Divorce.

(e)

Diminution of natality. Infertility.

(a) Premature and Delayed Marriage.—Mr. Galton, in one of his thoughtful works, remarks: “An enormous effect upon the average natural ability of a race may be produced by influences which retard the average age of marriage or hasten it.” He has illustrated this by abundant examples now through his many writings familiar to the public, his general thesis being that the wisest policy for a nation is to retard the age of marriage among the weak and to hasten it among the vigorous classes.

This is, of course, to be construed within physiological lines; premature relations of the sexes, too early marriages, are disastrous in every respect. Statistics of European armies show that there is a far higher mortality and much more sickness among the soldiers who have married young than among single men of the same age. Certain Australian and South American tribes force their female children of immature age into marital relations, and to this is due the rapid decrease of their numbers.

(b) Abnormal Forms of Marriage.—Among early Semitic tribes, and to-day in parts of Tibet and 92India, the custom prevails of “polyandry,” in which one woman is the wife of several husbands. This sometimes arose from female infanticide, sometimes, as in Tibet, where all the brothers of a family have one wife in common, in order to preserve undivided the family property.^[2]

(c) Abstention from Marriage.—Mr. Galton has pointed out with great force the injury worked by sacerdotal celibacy in the history of European civilisation. The commendation of the single life in man or woman as “the better part” has been by no means confined to certain sects of Christianity. Long before that religion started, this sacrifice was enjoined on the priests of Cybele, the virgins of Vesta, the Egyptian ministrants, and many other officials in Old World rites; while in the New World not only were there houses of “nuns” among the Quechuas of Peru and the Mayas of Yucatan, but the priests in those cults and even the “medicine men” of rude Northern tribes were frequently vowed to perpetual and absolute chastity.

In the struggle of modern life, and also in the greater facility for the pursuit of pleasure, of self-culture or devotion to some cherished pursuit, the unmarried person has an advantage, and hence it 93is noted that marriage is either long delayed or wholly avoided. The division of a community along narrow social, financial, or religious lines greatly aids this isolation by narrowing the selection of partners for life. War, emigration, and the love of adventure prompt the males to desert remote and quiet localities, leaving the females in the majority and imbuing the males with a distaste for domestic pursuits. During the Crusades there were considerable areas in Europe where there was only one man left to seven women.

Students of psychopathic conditions have pointed out another and apparently growing cause of indifference to marriage,—that sentiment called “homosexuality,” an inversion of the sexual instinct toward one’s own sex. This may be innocent in action and emotion, when it means merely the preference for friendship in the same gender and a congenital indifference to sexual feelings; or it may progress to any degree of monosexual devotion, such as classic tradition attributed to the characters of Sappho and Heliogabalus.

Whatever the cause which leads to the presence of many old bachelors and spinsters in a community, it must be condemned by the anthropologist, because it is certain to bring about mental deterioration of the stock; and the higher the motive, the more 94exalted the reason offered for such abstention, the surer is the deterioration, because it means that the class capable of such superior motives will be extinguished in the community.

(d) Licentiousness; Divorce.—No one will need to be persuaded that open licentiousness, the disregard of those sentiments and principles which attach in lasting unions persons of opposite sex, can have other than a detrimental effect on individual and national character. Wherever this has prevailed, the community has been weakened and its powers misdirected. Any stimulus to the sex feeling beyond that for its physiological purpose detracts from the general energy, physical and mental; and any indulgence of it in other than physiological methods develops degenerative tendencies.

Sexual psychopathy has been abundantly investigated of late years by Krafft-Ebing, Ellis, and other students, and its prevalence is too extended for it not to have profound effect on the ethnic mind. What is one of the worst features is the attraction that such psychopathic subjects have for each other, whether of the same or opposite sexes. It thus becomes an inherited trait, and in a majority of the cases this is easily recognised.

The question here arises, to what extent in a community the marriage tie may be relaxed without injury 95to or to the advantage of the general psychical welfare. This practical inquiry should be decided not by religious or social prejudice, but by a study of the peculiar conditions of the community and of the application of general principles to them.

It is impossible for me here to enter into this vast and vital question; but some of these general principles may be briefly stated.

Students of primitive conditions have reached the conclusion that neither sex in the human species is inclined to permanent sexual unions. They point out that among savage tribes, and indeed in various advanced religions, ceremonies and customs are in vogue to expiate such attachments as contrary to the divine ordinances. They further show that the forms of marriage were instituted either for selfish sensual purposes on the part of the male or for property reasons; and that in a condition of freedom and advanced culture neither sex is inclined to regard them as durably binding.

With progressive enlightenment, bringing with it, as it must, the freedom of woman from civil disabilities, divorces increase, and only those marriages are stable in which both parties are satisfied. The result of this is constantly beneficial. Facility of separation is a potent stimulus to connubial harmony; for the one most satisfied with the relation will always strive 96to render it agreeable to the other, in order to avoid a dissolution of the tie.

Licentiousness, therefore, is not synonymous with loose marriage relations, but the reverse.

(e) Diminution of Natality.—There is no more certain sign of the degeneration of a race, nation, or class than a decreasing birth-rate. When it reaches the point that the deaths in its ranks exceed the births, extinction has already begun. Providing that fecundity continues normal, the onslaughts of war, famine, and pestilence may be remedied; but when, through agencies of any description, the birth-rate sensibly falls off, there is no escape from destruction. This disaster may arise from physical, but is generally due to psychical causes, and therefore points distinctly to mental pathology in the group where it occurs.

Striking examples of this have been presented by studies of the noble families of Europe. Placed in positions where their chief aims were amusement, self-indulgence, and ostentation, their best faculties were allowed to rust and finally to decay, bringing with this the extinction of their lines.

Researches in European history show that the ennobled families of France, Germany, and England have rarely survived the fifth generation, and not more than six per cent. are in existence after three hundred years. Of 427 English noble families, but 9741 were represented at the beginning of the 17th century. The patrician families who controlled the free cities of the Middle Ages are now known in history only. Scarcely a score have outlived the degenerative agencies of wealth, idleness, and indulgence.

The other extreme of the social scale is equally unfriendly to productiveness. It is popularly thought that the poor man has children if he has nothing else. But he must not be too poor. Surgeons of the Indian civil service have proved by ample statistics that the famines which periodically ravage the East bring in their train widespread and lasting infertility. Arrest of puberty and organic deterioration of the reproductive system are common results of the prolonged starvation, and prevent child-bearing.

The psychic contrast between this result and that of malignant epidemics is marked and singular. During and after famines the feelings dependent on sex are almost extinguished; while in epidemics of acute diseases, such as plague, cholera, and yellow fever, they are notably exalted, as they are also in leprosy.

There is also a class of maladies known in medicine as “dystrophic” on account of their tendency to diminish virility, and thus both lessen the birth rate and lead to morbid psychic states. Prominent among 98these are malarial fevers, tuberculosis, and the later stages of alcoholism and the opium habit. By many writers the inordinate use of tobacco is believed to exert a similar effect.

In modern life, notably in France and the eastern United States, there is a very observable infecundity in certain classes, and they the wealthiest and best educated, due unquestionably to intention on the part of the married—to purely psychic causes, therefore. In the “best society” of those localities two or three children to a marriage are as many as are wanted and as many as arrive.

That this limitation is deliberate, and not the result of reproductive debility, has been shown by an application of the law of sex at birth as formulated by Dumont. This is, that when the proportion of the sexes at birth are as 105 males to 100 females, the diminished natality is voluntary; and when it is involuntary, due to disease or malformations, this ratio is always disturbed.

As statistics prove that in modern life two-thirds of the children born alive never perpetuate their kind, through death, the single life, sterility, or other reason, it is plain that intentional limitation of offspring to a number less than four means certain extinction of the family.

3. Toxic Agents.—The toxic agents of ethnic degeneration 99belong to two classes, stimulant-narcotics and disease-germs. The former are voluntarily consumed by the individual, the latter he absorbs through exposure to insalubrious conditions. Both belong to preventable causes of deterioration.

Of the stimulant-narcotics, alcohol, opium, and tobacco are the most familiar. But they by no means exhaust the list. Everywhere and at all times man has had an intense craving for these nervines. Where the Koran forbids alcoholic drinks, the Arabs take refuge in kief and other species of hemp. The native Mexicans cull the peyotl, the Siberians a toadstool, the Peruvians coca.

The precise degree to which these agents have altered the intellectual and moral powers of communities has long been the theme of controversies.

This is especially true of alcohol. Professor Lapouge, certainly an unbiassed observer, citizen of a land where temperance societies are unknown, does not hesitate to call it “the most formidable agent of degeneration in modern society.” Its worst effects are not the violence to which it occasionally leads or the frightful nervous diseases which its excessive use entails, but the slow hardening of the “axis cylinders” in the nerve sheaths, the immediate consequence of which is permanent deterioration of mental activity. Extended throughout a community, this 100means a lessening of its energy and of its finest mental qualities. Chronic alcoholism of this kind does not materially shorten life, but it is eminently transmissible, and this soddens the stock. The white race is most exposed to these mental and nervous effects of alcohol, while the red and black races escape them in large measure.

The second class of toxic agents affecting the community at large includes the various forms of disease-germs. No one can doubt the debilitating influence of malaria on the mental faculties of the population exposed to its poisonous action. Vast tracts of the earth’s surface are by it rendered incapable of sustaining the highest types of humanity. Their energy is sapped, their vitality lowered, by the insidious miasm. No race or nationality is immune. Though the white race is most liable to its attacks, the African blacks are so far from being exempt that in the more intense malarial districts of their continent nearly one-third of the natives suffer from the disease.

Marsh poison is usually confined to the lowlands. But the mountain valleys also generate a noxious agent, most unfriendly to mental growth. It displays itself in a threefold form, embracing goitre, cretinism, and deaf-mutism, the three closely related and bringing with them a positive debility of psychical powers. 101The mountains have not only been the refuge of the feeble, escaping from the plains, but they have worked to render these outcasts feebler still by reducing them in stature and viability. Goitre is not confined to Alpine regions, though more prevalent there. It is distinctly hereditary, and the offspring of goitrous parents are predisposed to cretinism and allied forms of imbecility. The southern and western slopes of the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Himalayas, and the Cordilleras are especially the homes of this class of diseases.

Another series of toxic agents which calls for consideration in this connection are the so-called “constitutional diseases.” These are contagious and transmissible, the poison of the blood being handed down from generation to generation.

The most noteworthy of these is syphilis. Its extreme prevalence among lower classes of the community and in some of the darker races is a present and potent cause of their mental inferiority. It is well known to specialists that children born of syphilitic parents are deficient in mental energy and physical stamina. They are liable to scrofulous symptoms and tubercular degenerations, and are deficient in ambition and love of labour.

Less widely distributed, but yet affecting whole communities, are ergotism and pellagra, due to the consumption of diseased grain, and leprosy which 102is undoubtedly hereditary and vitiates the blood of whole families. Certain stocks are especially liable to it, notably the African blacks and next to them the Semites, both Jews and Arabs.

4. Mental Shock.—History presents many instructive examples of the destructive power of mental shock on the ethnic mind. It is brought about by some great, sudden, unexpected catastrophe, which breaks asunder the associations or institutions in which the community has lived its mental life.

Such a disruption may arise from an intensely malignant epidemic, from war, or from a natural catastrophe.

An example of the first was the frightful “black death” which swept over Europe in 1348–50, destroying nearly a fourth of the whole population. All accounts agree that the despair and desperation which accompanied such an unexampled affliction showed themselves in an abandonment of all restraint, a reckless indulgence in the wildest debaucheries, an entire disregard of social restrictions. The same is true of the “plague and famine” years, 1491–95, when, in the words of a medical historian, “the corruption of morals reached a height without parallel in ancient times.”

The depressing power of sudden defeat and subjugation has been repeatedly exemplified. The “spirit is broken” of the conquered people. Only by such a 103profound mental depravation can we explain why such a warlike and numerous nation as the Aztecs sank instantly to be the serfs of a handful of white conquerors.

A writer on the history of the Christian church has remarked that “every nation has its peculiar heresy.” A student of mental pathology might justly add that every nation has its peculiar form of insanity. An irrational tendency is present and active in every community, ever striving to gain the ascendancy, and when it succeeds, as has often been the case in history, it makes steadily for the destruction and extinction of the national existence.

The forms of mental alienation are as various in the collective as in the individual mind, and as they are extensions of the symptoms seen in the latter, they may be classified on similar lines. I shall examine them, therefore, first as they are connected with intellectual and next with emotional disturbances, in accordance with the following scheme:

Ethnic Psychopathic Conditions.
I.—In the Intellectual Life.
1. Conditions of Deficiency	(a) Imbecility.
	(b) Criminality.
2. Conditions of Perversion	(a) Delusions.
	(b) Dominant Ideas.
104II.—In the Emotional Life.
1. Conditions of Hypersthenia (active motor states)	(a) Hysteria.
	(b) Exaltation.
	(c) Destructive Impulses.
2. Conditions of Asthenia (passive sensory states)	(a) Melancholia (Depression).
	(b) Neurasthenia (Exhaustion).

I. Psychopathic Conditions in the Intellectual Life—1. Conditions of Deficiency.—The intellect of a group, like that of the individual, has its limits, beyond which it is not possible to educate it. This is conspicuously seen in intellects below the normal, such as in feeble-minded persons. No amount of training can cure their radical defects and make them the equals of their average associates. These are instances of intellectual deficiency. It may express itself either in some degree of imbecility or in the active form of criminal habits.

Another class do not seem below the average in general powers, may, perhaps, appear in various directions above it; but they have some twist or obliquity in their mental make-up which separates them from their fellows, usually to their detriment. In common life such persons are known as “cranks” or 105“eccentrics,” men of one idea and paranoiacs. They are examples of intellectual perversion. Ethnic psychology can also supply abundant instances of this character.

(a) Imbecility.—To say that there are tribes or whole peoples actually imbecile would perhaps be going too far. Yet this has been asserted of some by competent observers. Mr. Horatio Hale, who was among the native blacks of Australia, related that the impression they produced on his mind was one of “great natural obtuseness, downright childishness, and imbecility.” The only arguments which availed with them were “such as we should use towards a child or a partial idiot.” Mr. Hale attributed this to generations of semi-starvation and malnutrition, and was so convinced of this that he believed the most favoured race would, by similar conditions, be reduced to the same low intellectual stage.

A prevailing inability to judge of evidence is common among many peoples and classes, and this is a marked sign of mental deficiency. They mistake associations of time and place for relations of cause and effect, and their reasoning is vitiated in consequence. Superstition is fostered by this mental obliquity. The casual objective relation is mistakenly assumed as the subjective necessity. This is especially common among savages, and the illiterate 106classes of higher culture. It is a mark of mental inferiority tending to irrational action and confusion of thought.

In civilised communities those of the population who are thus constituted form the “dependent” class, incapable of making their own living, and supported either by their families or the state. They may thus survive and reproduce their kind, but ethnic groups afflicted with such intellectual retardation either perish or become subject to those with higher gifts.

(b) Criminality.—Criminality in its common forms must be classed as a condition of intellectual deficiency brought about by one or several of the causes I have already rehearsed. It is not necessary, here, to enter into the discussion as to whether a criminal is born or made, nor do I speak now of those violators of the law in favour of a higher law, the reformers, apostles, martyrs to a faith and a truth in advance of their time and place, nor of those who have yielded for a moment to some mastering temptation. I speak of the ordinary criminal who for selfish ends habitually violates the usages of the group in which he lives, and to this extent aims at its destruction.

This class cannot be disciplined into the rules necessary to the peace and welfare of the society in which they live. Researches on their psychology 107show them, as a rule, defective in physical sensibility, more frequently colour-blind, mental instability is always present, vanity is exaggerated, the emotions are violent, and the general intelligence is below the average. We must regard them as pathological, rapidly approaching a self-destructive degree of degeneration. When they are numerous in a group it is a sure sign of its general inferiority.

The most advanced criminologists of to-day have returned to the opinion advocated a generation ago by Quetelet in these words: “Society creates the germs of all crimes which are committed. She instigates them, and the criminal is merely the instrument of their execution.”

Translated into other words, this means that the psychic traits of any group are the direct parent of its anti-social, self-destructive, criminal instincts. To the extent that such traits are remediable the body politic is directly responsible for the violations of its own laws. If left unremedied, the ruin of the group must follow.

2. Conditions of Perversion.—Alienists have frequent occasion to observe cases of mental disease where all the faculties of the mind seem intact and equal to the average, except that there is a persistent irrational delusion on some single point or a few points; or else the mind is controlled by the insistent 108recurrence of a single idea, which obstinately aims to govern the whole man. The latter is known as an idée fixe, a fixed or dominant idea.

In ethnic psycho-pathology the same conditions may be constantly observed, and they react on the character and fate of peoples with visible power. That which passes under the name of “popular prejudice” is an example. A community will adopt an opinion, without reason, and will not permit a discussion of its merits. Any one not accepting it will be regarded as a public enemy.

(a) Delusions.—In primitive conditions the most common delusion is that of the identity of waking and dream-life. There is no distinction allowed in the equal reality of both, or, if any, it is in favour of the superiority of the dream-life, for in dreams the person seems possessed of powers which he loses on awakening. So highly are dreams esteemed, that many savage tribes and many nations of respectable culture have risked their gravest undertakings on the interpretation of these visions of the night.

Such a delusion is, of course, most contrary to reason and good order. On account of an inauspicious dream a Brazilian tribe will desert its village and its plantations; while if a Kamchatkan dreams that he has been given another man’s wife, it is held necessary for public welfare that his dream be realised.

109Another delusion, deeply rooted in the philosophy of India and which has worked untold misfortunes on its peoples, is that of the unreality of the distinction between subject and object—that is, between thought and the external world. Hence arose the doctrine that real life is mâyâ, an illusion or deception of the senses, and its aims and duties unworthy the contemplation of the true philosopher. The consequent neglect of the practical duties of life could not fail to weaken the peoples who juggled with sound reason in this manner.

A wonderful example of long-persistent delusion was the Crusades. For nearly two centuries (1095–1289) the Christian nations of Europe neglected state and domestic affairs in order to rescue the Holy Sepulchre from the hands of the infidels. All classes, from kings to peasants, fell a prey to the same obsession. It was accompanied by repeated and unmistakable signs of epidemic manias and neuropathias unequalled in history. Lykanthropy, in which the possessed howled and destroyed like wolves, was extremely common; the dancing mania spread through wide areas, forcing old and young into wild gestures and crazy motions; and, stranger than all, young children were attacked with a mad desire to leave their homes and to wander forth they knew not whither. Were they prevented, they pined and died. 110These “children’s crusades” began in Germany in 1212, extended through France, Switzerland, and Italy, and continued as late as 1418.

(b) Dominant Ideas.—The weightiest topic in universal history may possibly be the study of dominant or fixed ideas in ethnic psychology. A philosophic observer may regard each nation as the destined representative of some one idea, which, when its usefulness has ended, yields to others more germane to existing conditions; and by the successive action of all, the progress of the species is secured through the gradual elimination of those which are regressive.

Certain it is that in any group the constituent minds are controlled at a given time by some one idea common to all. This is, in one sense, a perversion of the intellect. The dominant idea assumes a magnitude out of proportion to its actual value; and by this disproportion—that is, by the undue attention it receives, others, often of equal or greater value to the group, are neglected.

These dominant ideas form the national ideals, after which the individual lines are consciously patterned, and by the practical application thus given, add to the cohesion of the group through the unification of its members. Acting under natural laws, common to organic forms as well as to societies, these ideas are the chief agents in social selection, and thus 111control almost absolutely the traits and destinies of nations, as has been traced in a masterly manner by Vacher de Lapouge.

Such ideas are easily recognised in a community. A slight acquaintance with history and literature teaches us that the early Romans were exclusively possessed by the military ideal, the lust of conquest; that the ideal of the Israelites has always been the thirst for commercial gain; and that art was the ruling aim in the palmy days of Greece.

But the finest example that occurs to me of many different peoples being dominated by a fixed idea is seen in the votaries of the Mohammedan religion. They are bound together by one sacred language, in which one book, the Koran, lays down all law, civil, criminal, and ecclesiastical, and the expressed dicta of which set them in sharpest opposition to all who do not accept it. The religious idea, thus stimulated out of all proportion to others, has developed in them a fanatical force which at one time almost enabled them to conquer the known world, and which has since resulted in the inevitable decay of their greatest states, their literature and arts.

II. Psychopathic Conditions in the Emotional Life.—Apart from the perversions of intelligence which cloud the reasoning faculties of nations, they are subject to widespread and persistent disturbances 112of their emotional lives, which frequently react disastrously on the common weal.

Following the division adopted by some competent alienists in individual cases, I may with propriety classify these into two divisions, as they represent, on the one hand, excessive, misdirected, and morbid activity, or, on the other, unhealthy depression and apathy.

1. Conditions of Hypersthenia.—It is a popular error in scientific circles that diseases of the nervous system increase with civilisation. The opposite is true. The lowest stages of culture are far more pathological than the higher, in this, as well as in most respects. True that certain neuroses belong to cultured peoples; but morbid emotional states are especially prevalent in lower conditions.

(a) Hysteria.—This is well illustrated in the history of epidemic hysteria. It may occasionally be seen among ourselves in a hospital ward or at a camp-meeting; but such outbreaks are sporadic. They belong in the ethnic temperament of many tribes of the Malayan and native American races.

The Jesuit fathers described in vivid colours such outbreaks among the Hurons of Canada, attacking whole villages and frequently leading to their destruction. Father de Quen was quite right when he wrote: “The old saying alleges that every man has 113a grain of madness in his composition; but this is a tribe where each has half an ounce.” He correctly regarded them as in a permanently pathological state.

Quite similar recitals are preserved of such outbreaks among the Guaranis of Paraguay, and other primitive stocks, notably the Malay peoples.

From the accounts of travellers it would seem, contrary to what we might suppose, that such excessive nervous sensibility is peculiarly present in extreme northern latitudes, while tropical tribes are much more liable to conditions of depression. Castren, who lived long among the northern Sibiric tribes, dwells with astonishment on their nervous sensitiveness. A sudden blow on the outside of the skin yurt will throw its occupants into spasms.

Among these “neuroses of excitement” which at times seize upon the souls of communities, none is more inexplicable, and none more fraught with consequences to world-history than the goading restlessness which has driven single tribes or groups of tribes into aimless roving. This Wanderlust arises as an emotional epidemic, not by a process of reasoning. It drives communities from fixed seats and comfortable homes, transforming them into migratory and warring hordes.

(b) Exaltation.—Under the heading of exaltation of nervous impulse the alienist includes a morbid 114devotion to sexual thoughts and acts (erotomania); to vanity, ambition, and self-magnification; and those states of megalomania where the patient is subject to delusions of greatness, idées de grandeur.

To all of these we may easily find parallels in ethnic life. They have all their analogies in tribal or national history, with consequences as disastrous as they disclose in the individual.

No more positive examples of erotic mania could be found in an asylum than those presented by the whole of some Polynesian tribes. The life of both sexes was devoted chiefly to the pleasures of the genital nerves. Societies were formed where such practices were developed into arts; children before maturity were initiated into them; and no mode of excitement, unnatural though it might be, was omitted or shunned.

The destructive results of such licentiousness in the history of these tribes, already extinct or nearly so, need not be insisted upon. But why seek to demonstrate it from remote times or savage lands? Within a year a philosophic student, from a wide range of investigation, has attributed chiefly to the same pathological cause the deterioration of the leading so-called Latin nations of Europe in the last two centuries. In them, says Signor G. Ferrero, the sex impulse develops earlier, and absorbs and wastes 115the life energies more than in the Teutonic nations, yielding to the latter the superior place in the struggle for existence.

Another and familiar exemplification of this neuropathic frame of the ethnic mind is that exaggerated national boastfulness known (from a soldier under Bonaparte) as Chauvinism. It is patriotism passed into mild dementia; so well known that it has a special name in English also, Jingoism. The profound conviction that our own country—whichever that may be—is the greatest in the world, leader of all in intelligence, power, culture, and vigour, is invariably and everywhere a mental delusion, a type of megalomania. Such a notion prepares the way for increase of ignorance and self-esteem so blind that it is sure ere long to fall in the pit ever open for fools.

(c) Destructive Impulse. The passion for wanton destruction may seize equally upon a person or group. It may be directed toward inanimate objects or against human life. John Addington Symonds gives a thrilling sketch of the monster, Ezzelino da Romano, Vicar of the Emperor Frederick II., in northern Italy (about 1250). His own passion was the mutilation, torture, and murder of men, women, and children. His inordinate cruelty and repeated massacres led to his becoming the hero of a fiendish cycle in Italian literature.

116We may call him, if we wish to palliate his monstrous deeds, a monomaniac; but, as Symonds says, if we thus excuse him “we shall have to place how many Visconti, Sforzeschi, Malatesti, Borgias, Farnesi, etc., in the list of maniacs?” No, it was an ethnic tendency of Italy at that period, and for long afterwards, and could be illustrated by scores of traits from popular as well as princely life.

The mania for murder which seized the Parisian populace in 1793 was a true pathological outburst. No sense of patriotism thrilled the crowds who ran by the tumbrils and surrounded the guillotines. It was hæmatomania, the blood-madness, that was upon them.

The suicidal impulse occasionally assumes an epidemic form which arises from conditions of the ethnic life. The aborigines of Cuba when enslaved by the Spanish conquerors practised self-destruction on a scale which contributed much to their prompt extinction. In the city of Frankfort-on-the-Main in the last century suicide became so frequent among women that the dead bodies were suspended by the feet in order to check the impulse in the survivors.

In a less degree the destructive passion directed against objects, or figuratively against institutions, known as iconoclasm, is often a mere outburst of unreasoning emotion. Its energy is misdirected and 117fruitless. What was the result of that which during the eighth and ninth centuries raged in Constantinople and Asia Minor? It altered image-worship into picture-worship, nothing more.

2. Conditions of Asthenia.—In contrast to the repeated explosions of nerve force which give rise to the active motor states of ethnic dementia I have been considering, are those characterised by a loss of reaction to stimuli, by passive, merely sensory, conditions.

These are of two varieties, well marked in their differences, each highly significant in its ethnological and historic relations. The one is allied to melancholia, being marked by depression or inaction of the psychic forces, the other by their exhaustion, by incapacity for reaction to ordinary stimuli.

(a) Melancholia.—The consequence of mental shock, I have already pointed out, is to bring about a sort of mental paralysis, a listless, apathetic state; and this I have illustrated by some examples.

A touching one is recorded of the Greek colony which erected the city of Pæstum on the Tyrrhenian Sea, whose stately ruins still attract thousands of visitors annually.

A clearly ethnic type of melancholia is nostalgia or homesickness. Of course it is found in some degree in all lands, but with some peoples, notably 118dwellers in high northern latitudes, the Lapps and Eskimo, it is severe and general. If removed from their surroundings they mope and die.

(b) Neurasthenia.—Diseases of nervous and mental exhaustion belong exclusively among nations of advanced culture. There are those which have not merely increased, most of them have originated in stages of high civilisation; not, as some have falsely argued, from conditions essential to culture, but to errors and misdirections in that culture. As, in all rapid motions, slight deviations entail more serious consequences than when motion is slow, so, in the rapid progress of modern times, slight neglects of hygiene bring about more serious results than in ruder countries.

This explains the relative increase of some forms of insanity, of suicide and criminality, and the appearance of new maladies, such as progressive paralysis, in civilised centres. They are due to exhaustion of the nerve centres in those who are not adapted to bear the strain of contemporary competitive life, or who, if able, fail to direct their activities in successful channels.

Another evidence of exhaustion, one which properly exercises the attention of the student of modern life, is the progressive distaste for the sex relation, especially among women. The consequences of this 119mental attitude are the prevalence of spinsterhood and the limitation of families in marriage, to which I have already referred. The attraction of the “higher culture” and of their new facilities for seeing and enjoying liberty have led to atrophy of the maternal instinct and of the desire of marriage. This can have but one result,—the diminution and final extinction of the group in which it prevails.

There is also such an ethnic malady as moral exhaustion. After a period of intense but ill-regulated ethical enthusiasm there often follows a reaction, when all ethical principles are thrown to the winds. This has been plausibly explained by Dr. Laycock as an overstimulation of the brain-cells most closely connected with this class of sentiments, with consequent exhaustion in transmission to the next generation. “The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”

The bigotry of Puritan England in the 17th century was followed by the laxity of the Restoration.

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