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Title: The Basis of Social Relations - A Study in Ethnic Psychology
Author: Brinton, Daniel G. (Daniel Garrison)
Language: English
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THE SCIENCE SERIES
1. =The Study of Man.= By A. C. HADDON. Illustrated. 8º
2. =The Groundwork of Science.= By ST. GEORGE MIVART.
3. =Rivers of North America.= By ISRAEL C. RUSSELL. Illustrated.
4. =Earth Sculpture; or, The Origin of Land Forms.= By JAMES GEIKIE.
Illustrated.
5. =Volcanoes; Their Structure and Significance.= By T. G. BONNEY.
Illustrated.
6. =Bacteria.= By GEORGE NEWMAN. Illustrated.
7. =A Book of Whales.= By F. E. BEDDARD. Illustrated.
8. =Comparative Physiology of the Brain=, etc. By JACQUES LOEB.
Illustrated.
9. =The Stars.= By SIMON NEWCOMB. Illustrated.
10. =The Basis of Social Relations.= By DANIEL G. BRINTON.
* * * * *
_For list of works in preparation see end of this volume._
The Science Series
EDITED BY
Professor J. McKeen Cattell, M.A., Ph.D.
AND
F. E. Beddard, M.A., F.R.S.
THE BASIS OF SOCIAL RELATIONS
[Illustration]
The Basis of Social Relations
A Study in Ethnic Psychology
By
Daniel G. Brinton, A.M., M.D., LL.D., Sc.D.
Late Professor of American Archæology and Linguistics in the University
of Pennsylvania; author of “History of Primitive Religions,” “Races and
Peoples,” “The American Race,” etc.
Edited by
Livingston Farrand
Columbia University
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1902
COPYRIGHT, 1902
BY
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
------------------------------------------------------------------------
EDITOR’S PREFACE
The manuscript of the following work was left by Dr. Brinton at his
death in 1899 in a state of approximate completion, lacking only final
revision at his hands. The editor has contented himself, therefore, with
making such verbal corrections as were necessary and, by slight
rearrangement of certain sections to conform to the obvious scheme of
the work, bringing the text into readiness for publication. The
verification and noting of references have not been attempted. The
author’s encyclopedic acquaintance with the literature of his subject as
well as his general method of quotation has made this impracticable.
Dr. Brinton’s contributions to anthropology are too well known to call
for especial comment, his writings, particularly in the fields of
American archæology and linguistics, being so numerous and valuable as
to give him a world-wide reputation. His interest, however, was general
as well as special, and the development of anthropology owes much to his
insight and ready pen. Among the doctrines for which he stood at all
times an active champion was the psychological unity of man, a principle
which is now widely accepted and forms the working basis for most of our
modern ethnology. Tacitly assumed, as it is and has been, for the most
part since the writings of Waitz, the need of a succinct statement of
the doctrine has long been felt, and this is now given, possibly in
somewhat extreme form, in the present work.
Apart from its intrinsic interest the book will be welcomed as the last
word of the distinguished author whose lamented death has deprived the
science of anthropology of one of its ablest representatives.
L. F.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION vii
PART I
THE CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE ETHNIC MIND
CHAPTER I
THE UNITY OF THE HUMAN MIND 3
CHAPTER II
THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE GROUP. THE ETHNIC MIND 23
CHAPTER III
PHYSIOLOGICAL VARIATION IN THE ETHNIC MIND. PROGRESSIVE AND
REGRESSIVE VARIATION. MODES AND RATES OF ETHNIC VARIATION 46
CHAPTER IV
PATHOLOGICAL VARIATION IN THE ETHNIC MIND 82
PART II
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE ETHNIC MIND
INTRODUCTION 123
CHAPTER I
THE INFLUENCE OF THE SOMATIC ENVIRONMENT 126
CHAPTER II
ETHNIC MENTAL DIVERSITY FROM COGNATIC CAUSES. HEREDITY; HYBRIDITY;
RACIAL PATHOLOGY 147
CHAPTER III
THE INFLUENCE OF THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 163
CHAPTER IV
THE INFLUENCE OF THE GEOGRAPHIC ENVIRONMENT 180
INDEX 201
INTRODUCTION
It is strange that not in any language has there been published a
systematic treatise on Ethnic Psychology; strange, because the theme is
in nowise a new one but has been the subject of many papers and
discussions for a generation; indeed, had a journal dedicated to its
service for a score of years; strange, also, because its students claim
that it is the key to ethnology, the sure interpreter of history, and
the only solid basis for constructive sociology.
Why this apparent failure to establish for itself a position in the
temple of the Science of Man? This inquiry must be answered on the
threshold of a treatise which undertakes to vindicate for this study an
independent position and a permanent value.
It has been cultivated chiefly by German writers. The periodical to
which I have referred was begun in 1860, under the editorship of Dr. M.
Lazarus and Dr. H. Steinthal, the former a psychologist, the latter a
logician and linguist. The contributors to it often occupied high places
in the learned world. Their articles, usually on special points in
ethnography or linguistics, were replete with thought and facts. But
they failed to convince their contemporaries that there was any room in
the hierarchy of the sciences for this newcomer. The failure was so
palpable that after twenty years’ struggle the editors abandoned their
task. But the seed they sowed had not perished in the soil. Under other
names it struck root and flourished, and is now asserting for itself a
right to live by virtue of its real worth to the right understanding of
human progress.
Why, then, this failure of its earlier cultivation?
To some extent, but not in full, the answer to this may be found in a
critique of the spirit and method of the writers mentioned, offered by
one of the most eminent psychologists of our generation, Professor W.
Wundt.
With partial justice, he pointed out that these teachers proceeded on a
false route in their effort to establish the principles of an ethnic
psychology. They approached it imbued with metaphysical ingenuities,
they indulged too much in talk of “soul,” and they searched for “laws”;
whereas, modern psychology recognises only “psychic processes,” and is
not willing to consider that any “soul-constitution” enters to modify of
its own force the progress of the race. Wundt also asserted that the
field of ethnic psychology is already mainly occupied by general
ethnology, or else by the philosophy of history. Yet he did not deny
that in a sphere strictly limited to the subjects of language, custom,
and myth such a “discipline” might do useful work.
In his later writings, however, Wundt seems to have modified these
strictures, and in the last edition of his excellent text-book
acknowledges that there is no antagonism between experimental and ethnic
psychology, as has been sometimes supposed; that they do not occupy
different, but parts of the same fields, and are distinguished mainly by
difference of method, the one resting on experiment, the other on
observation.
The recognition of ethnic psychology by professed psychologists is,
therefore, an accomplished fact; and this was long since anticipated by
the general literature of history and ethnography.
Who, for instance, has denied that there is such a thing as “racial” or
“national” character? Did anyone take it into his head to denounce as
meaningless Emerson’s title, _English Traits_? Does not every treatise
on ethnography assume that there are certain psychical characteristics
of races, tribes, and peoples, quite sharply dividing them from their
neighbours?
Take, for instance, Letourneau’s popular work, and we find him expressly
claiming that the races and subraces of mankind can be classified by the
relative development of their psychical powers; and such a
“psychological” classification is not a novelty in anthropology.
These mental traits, characteristics, differences, between human groups
are precisely the material which ethnic psychology takes as its material
for investigations. Its aim is to define them clearly, to explain their
origin and growth, and to set forth what influence they assert on a
people and on its neighbours.
Ethnic psychology does not hesitate to claim that the separation of
mankind into groups by psychical differences was and is the one
necessary condition of human progress everywhere and at all times; and,
therefore, that the study of the causes of these differences, and the
influence they exerted in the direction of evolution or regression, is
the most essential of all studies to the present and future welfare of
humanity.
In this sense, it is not only the guiding thread in historical research,
but it is immediately and intensely practical, full of application to
the social life and political measures of the day.
Some have jealously feared that it offers itself as a substitute for the
philosophy of history. True that it draws some of its material from
history; but as much from ethnography and geography. Moreover, it is
not, as history, a chronologic, but essentially a natural science,
depending for its results on objective, verifiable facts, not on records
and documents.
To allege that this field is already occupied is wide of the mark. It is
no more embraced in general ethnology or in history than experimental
psychology is included in general physiology. The advancement of science
depends on the specialisation of its fields of research, and it is high
time that ethnic psychology should take an independent position of its
own.
To assist towards this I shall aim in the present work to set forth its
method and its aims as I understand them. In both these directions I
offer schemes notably different from those of the authors I have
mentioned, believing that this science requires for its independent
development much more comprehensive outlines than will be found in their
writings.
The method, it need hardly be said, must be that of the so-called
“natural sciences”; but it must be based, as Wundt remarks, not on
experiment—that were impossible—but on observation. This is to extend,
not, as he argued, to a few products of culture, but to everything which
makes up national or ethnic life, be it an historic event, an object of
art, a law, custom, rite, myth, or mode of expression. The origins of
these, in the sense of their proximate or exciting causes, are to be
sought, and the conditions of their growth and decay deduced from their
histories.
We are dealing with facts of Life, with collective mental function in
action, and we can appeal, therefore, to the principles of general
biology to guide us. We can, for example, since every organism bears in
its structure not only the record of its own life-history but the
vestiges of its ancestry, confidently expect to find in the traits of
nations the survivals of their earlier and unrecorded conditions.
Understood in this sense, ethnic psychology does not deal with
mathematics and physics, but with collections of facts, feelings,
thoughts, and historic events, and seeks by comparison and analysis to
discover their causal relations. It is wholly objective, and for that
reason eminently a “natural” science. The objective truths with which it
deals are not primary but secondary mental products, as they are not
attached to the individual but to the group. For this reason it has an
advantage over other natural sciences in that it can with propriety
search not only into growth but into origins, for, in its purview, these
fall within the domain of known facts.
We must recognise that the psychical expressions of life are absolutely
and always correlated to the physical functions and structure; and that,
therefore, no purely psychical causes can explain ethnic development or
degeneration. As the past of an organism decides its future, so the
future of a people is already written in its past history.
As in ethnic psychology the material is different from that in
experimental psychology, so in the former we must abandon the methods
suitable in the latter. The ethnic _psyche_ is made up of a number of
experiences common to the mass, but not occurring in any one of its
individual members. These experiences of the aggregate develop their own
variations and modes of progress, and must be studied for themselves,
without reference to the individual, holding the processes of the single
mind as analogies only.
While fully acknowledging the inseparable correlation between all
psychical activities and the physical structures which condition them,
let us not fall into the common and gross error of supposing that
physical is in any way a measure of psychical function. All measurements
in experimental psychology, be they by chemistry or physics, are
quantitative only, and can be nothing else (Wundt); whereas psychical
comparisons are purely qualitative.
A single example will illustrate this infinitely important
fact:—precisely the same quantity of physico-chemical change may be
needed for the evolution into consciousness of two ideas; but if the one
is false and the other true, their psychic values are indefinitely
apart.
We perceive, therefore, that in psychology generally, and especially in
ethnic psychology, where we deal with aggregates, we must draw a
fundamental distinction between those agents which act quantitatively on
the psychical life, that is, modify it by measurable forces, and those
which act qualitatively, that is, by altering the contents and direction
of the _psyche_ itself.
The former belong properly to “natural history,” and can be measured and
estimated just to the extent that we have instruments of precision for
the purpose; the latter wholly elude any such attempts, and must be
appraised by the results they have historically achieved, that is, by
arts, events, or institutions.
The recognition of these two factors of human development, radically
distinct yet inseparably associated, has led me to adopt the division
into two parts of the present work. The first is the “natural,” the
second, the “cultural,” history of the ethnic mind.[1]
Footnote 1:
The author had apparently decided to reverse this order of treatment
after writing the above. The “natural history of the ethnic mind”
forms the second part of the work.—EDITOR.
Note that I say _ethnic_ mind. For let it be said here, as well as
repeated later, that there is no such thing as progress or culture in
the isolated individual, but only in the group, in society, in the
_ethnos_. Only by taking and giving, borrowing and lending, can life
either improve or continue.
The “natural” history will embrace the consideration of those general
doctrines of continuity and variation which hold true alike in matter
and in mind, in the soul as in the body, and a review of the known
forces which, acting through the physical structure and function upon
the organs which are the vehicles of mental phenomena, weaken or
strengthen the psychical activities.
The “cultural” history will present something of a new departure in
anthropology—a classification of all ethnologic data as the products of
a few general concepts, universal to the human mind, but conditioned in
their expressions by the natural history of each group. The
justification of this procedure, which is _not_ a return to the ideology
of an older generation, will be presented in the introduction to the
second part.
The illustrative examples I shall frequently draw from savage conditions
of life. This is in accordance with the custom of ethnologists, and is
based on the fact that in such conditions the motives of action are
simpler and less concealed, and we are nearer the origins of arts and
institutions.
Only by such direct examples can a true psychology be established. The
time has passed when one can seek the laws of mental development from
the “inner consciousness”; and we smile at even so recent a philosopher
as Cousin, when he tells us that, to discover such laws, “_il nous
suffit de rentrer dans nous-mêmes_.”
PART I
THE CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE ETHNIC MIND
CHAPTER I
_THE UNITY OF THE HUMAN MIND_
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 been 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 using 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 one 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 shows 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 reflective 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.”
In 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 inspiration, 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.
Attempting 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 it 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 of 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 formulated 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 development 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 capacity 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 death. 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 to 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 itself
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 several
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, emerging 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 may 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.
CHAPTER II
_THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE GROUP. THE ETHNIC MIND_
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 the 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.
This 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
cell 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 are 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 in 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 can 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 forward 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 been 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 individual 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.
I 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 complex 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, nor 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 this. 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 projected 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 will 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.” Some 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 the 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, lifts 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 in 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 means 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.
Being 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 weighed 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.
CHAPTER III
_PHYSIOLOGICAL VARIATION IN THE ETHNIC MIND_
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 minds. 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 members, 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 groups. 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 this 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 which 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
independent 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:
1—Remembrance.
2—Industry.
3—Inventiveness.
4—Adaptability.
5—Receptiveness.
6—Forethought.
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_ club,—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 of 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.
The 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 of 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 stone, 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 miles
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 home 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
seek 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. They 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
fancied 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
descendants, 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. Blind 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 with 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.
What 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:
“I have lost, ah, many a pleasure,
Many a hope and many a power.”
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 of 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.
Where 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 to 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 concentration 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 highly 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 act 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).
2. 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 inspection 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 to 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 chief
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 a 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 species 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 improvement 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, following 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, steam, 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.”
CHAPTER IV
_PATHOLOGICAL VARIATION IN THE ETHNIC MIND_
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
they 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.”
Ethnic 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 true, 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 of 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.
1. _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 and 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 who 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 digestible, 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_) 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 India, 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]
Footnote 2:
[An obvious gap in the manuscript occurs at this point, but one which
in no way affects the general argument of the author.—EDITOR.]
_(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 is 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 exalted 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 to 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 to 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 41 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 these 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 belong 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 means 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. The 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 is 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 profound 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.
II.—_In the Emotional Life._
1. Conditions of Hypersthenia (active motor │(_a_) Hysteria.
states) │
│(_b_) Exaltation.
│(_c_) Destructive
│ Impulses.
2. Conditions of Asthenia (passive sensory │(_a_) Melancholia
states) │ (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 “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 classes 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 show 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 recurrence 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.
Another 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. These “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 control 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 of
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 a 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 devotion 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 the 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.
We 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
fruitless. 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 dwellers 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
mental 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.
PART II
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE ETHNIC MIND
_INTRODUCTION_
Although, as we have seen, there is no common measure of Mind and
Matter, the connections between the two are so intimate that, in
organised beings, any change in the one entails a corresponding change
in the other.
This is a principle which has long been accepted in the Science of Man.
A quarter of a century ago Professor Schaffhausen expressed it in these
words: “One of the weightiest doctrines in Anthropology is the constant
correlation between intellectual capacity and physical organisation.”
That branch of Anthropology called Somatology is devoted to the
investigation of the human body, its measurements, structure, and
functions, as they differ in individuals, groups, and races, for the
purpose of defining and explaining this correlation.
The expressions of the individual mind are largely the reflex of its
environment, of the external impulses, stimuli, and conditions which
surround it. These are physical, measurable, quantitative, and therefore
within the province of the “natural” sciences.
In their relation to the individual, they mostly belong to the domain of
“experimental” psychology; but as they influence the group and decide
its constitution they form an important branch of ethnic psychology
also.
The natural history of the Mind is chiefly the study of its
environments, its _milieu_. But that term is to be taken in its widest
sense.
The nearest environment of my mind is my body. Indeed, it is the only
environment of which I have positive knowledge. As John Stuart Mill well
said, “I know my own feelings with a higher certainty than I know aught
else.”
Hence the physical constitution of the individual is that which has
primary importance.
That may be considered first as an individual question, without going
beyond the circumstances of the personal life and health, a purely
_somatic_ investigation. We may next inquire how many of his
peculiarities the individual owes to his ancestors, which will bring up
the questions of heredity, hybridity, and others, including mental as
well as physical traits. His debt is large to these, but still larger,
say some writers, to his contemporaries, the associates with whom he has
been thrown from birth. These are his “people,” the “group” of which he
is a member. He is modified in a thousand ways by this “demographic”
environment.
All these—his ancestors, fellows, and his own body—are “human”
influences. Beyond them lies the great world of other beings and of
unconscious forces, the animals and plants, the land and water, the
clime and spot, which make up his “geographic” environment. How
dependent is he upon these! How utterly they often control his thoughts
and actions!
Each of these I shall endeavour to estimate in their influence on the
individual, not as an individual, but as a member of a group; and on the
group itself, as an independent, psychic entity, nowise identical in
character with any individual.
CHAPTER I
_THE INFLUENCE OF THE SOMATIC ENVIRONMENT_
The human body is an “organism” each part of which is in vital relation
to the whole, and is influenced by the condition of every other part.
This is true of function as well as structure, for function, after all,
is merely the term we give to structure in action. Mentality, psychical
activity, is a function, and, like all others, is organically
conditioned by the whole organism and its several parts. To understand
the influence of the body on the mind, therefore, we should consider in
such relation each of the physiological “systems” which make up the
organic life. For my present purpose, however, it will be sufficient to
select those most closely related to mental activity.
_The Brain._—The learned of all times have sought to find “the seat of
the soul.” Primitive men generally placed it in the liver or in the
heart; but anatomists have been long agreed that it must be somewhere in
the head. The latest word from them is that it resides in the nerve
cells of the grey matter of the brain, in the number and activity of the
“pyramid-neurons” there situate, and probably in their capacity to send
out shoots or branches.
This intimate, ultimate, structure and potency establishes the
difference between the intellectual faculties of species and
individuals. In the lower animals these cells are few and scattered, and
their proliferations short and simple. In man the cells increase in
number and their extensions become long and complex. They are more
abundant when the grey matter is ample, as is the case where the
convolutions are intricate.
Up to a recent period it was supposed that the weight or size of the
brain was the chief physical element in mental superiority. It is now
known, that has little to do with it. Not a few men of distinguished
parts, such as Liebig, Gambetta, Tiedemann, etc., have had brains
decidedly below the average in weight, while, on the other hand, many
with large brains have led unimportant lives. This is also the case with
races, for although the African negro is below the European in his
cranial capacity, the Fuegian, decidedly below the African in mental
development, has a brain larger than either of the other races.
Obviously, both the cubical content and weight of the brain depend much
on the general size, stature, and weight of the body; and no one has
been found who pretends that the biggest man is also the ablest.
We are almost compelled, therefore, to accept as correct the conclusion
reached by Lapouge and others, that not the size but the molecular
constitution of the brain is finally decisive of intellectual power; and
this is a trait which up to the present time has eluded analysis.
This is not inconsistent with holding that where other proportions are
the same, a larger, more complex brain is generally significant of
higher mental powers; and that a well-balanced skull, with orthognathic
features and moderate facial development, are indications favourable for
the psychical possessions of the individual or the group.
The _shape_ would seem to be more significant than the weight of the
brain. Of all the elements of gross cerebral anatomy it appears to be
that most indicative of mental power.
This is a recent discovery of craniologists, the entire meaning of which
has not yet been worked out. It is due to the researches of Ammon and
Lapouge within the last decade, and to the anthropologist promises
solutions of various obscure problems in the cultural growth of the
species.
These observers have ascertained, by many thousand measurements on the
living and the dead, that those persons who, as a class, are best
adapted to the high and continued strain of modern city and competitive
life, have skulls in that shape termed “subdolichocephalic,” which means
that their brains have a prevailing and fixed spatial relation of their
parts, a relation, no doubt, which is the most favourable to the general
and prolonged activity of those nerve cells which we know are the seat
of psychical function.
Such persons in youth stand at the head in the school, they take the
prizes in examinations, they carry off the honours in intellectual
contests, they are leaders in the learned professions, they are the
self-created “upper class,” and, what is equally noteworthy, in the
unhealthy atmosphere of great cities they outlive their associates with
other shapes of brain.
But these observers also note that while these somewhat long-skulled
persons have such intellectual and even physical advantages in the
struggle for existence, they are deficient in others, which, under some
circumstances, are even more necessary to success.
The same extended series of measurements and comparisons show that those
whose brains are rounder in form—more brachycephalic—prove generally
superior in technical skill, in industry, and in perseverance. They are
less adventurous, they lack imagination and the stimulus of the ideal,
they are narrow and formalists; but they shine in the bourgeois virtues
of capacity for steady work, of devotion to hearth and home, in respect
for settled government, stable laws, and ancestral institutions.
This favourable brain shape is, in Europe, often correlated with the
blonde type, light hair, and grey or blue eyes; but whether this is
anything more than a local peculiarity remains in doubt.
Ammon has pointed out, however, that these traits, where they have been
united in history, have marked a daring, energetic, progressive stock,
one fertile in bold explorers, conquerors, and thinkers. Such was the
type of the ancient Aryans, who became the ruling race wherever they
carried their victorious standard, “not through numbers, longevity, or
fertility, but through the consequences of ‘natural selection.’”
Professor Lapouge has further shown that in southern France, where the
local aristocracy rose from the same stock as the peasantry by superior
personal ability, a notable difference is observable between the
skull-shapes of the two classes, the crania of the “gentlemen” being
considerably longer in proportion to width than those of the peasantry.
They are well suited for village life and agricultural occupations; but,
subjected to the stress and strain of great cities, they die out in the
third generation.[3]
Footnote 3:
These deductions were based on many thousand observations in France,
Switzerland, and Germany, and are undoubtedly true for the places and
periods in which they were conducted; but it has not been shown that
they are generally applicable in other areas. Some observers (Livi,
Lombroso) have not accepted them for Italy. The opposition they have
met in France from Fouillée and others is merely sentimental.
When it is remembered that whole nations, stocks, races, are
characterised by the prevalence of one or other of these skull-forms, it
is at once seen that a physical basis is here presented for ethnic
psychology worthy of attentive study. These authors have, in fact,
applied their conclusions in this direction; but, concerning themselves
chiefly with the mixed populations of European states, have been
principally occupied with the “social selections” which may be attained
in such communities from this cause.
While the skull-form thus becomes distinctive of brains possessing or
lacking certain faculties, it must not be supposed that this relation is
an essential one. The brain will perform its work without reference to
the shape of the skull. This is proved by the many tribes who have
artificially deformed the head in obedience to fashion or superstition.
In America it is noteworthy that the crania thus malformed to the utmost
degree are precisely those of the nations of the highest
civilisation—the Mayas of Central America and the Quechuas of Peru.
_The Nervous System._—Professor Haeckel, in his lectures on
“anthropogeny,” lays down the maxim, “All soul-functions or psychical
activities depend directly on the structure and composition of the
nervous system.” This is illustrated by the biological development of
the nerves of special sense,—of sight, hearing, taste, and smell.
Originally they were all indifferent touch-nerves, and by slow degrees
in indefinite time developed their specific reactions.
They are yet by no means the same in all persons, as everyone knows.
They also differ widely in groups, nations, and races. The study of the
“reaction-times” of the principal races has occupied Cattell, Bache, and
other psychologists. The sense of taste is notably different. An Eskimo
finds pleasure in castor oil and a Kamchatkan in eating rotten fish. The
Annamite is almost insensible to pain from wounds, but suffers intensely
from moderate cold and is acutely affected by odours. The Fuegian can
sleep naked on the snow with comfort, but is easily disturbed by noises.
The intellectual differences between both individuals and races arise
not so much from relative mental capacity as from varying reaction to
mental stimuli. They all have pretty much the same power to pursue
knowledge, if they choose to exert it. The difference is one involving
the general nerve-tracts. Perception and attention were the forces which
in the history of organisms developed all the special senses from nerves
of touch; and the growth of the intellect is consequently closely
conditioned by the qualities of nerve-sensations.
_The Osseous System._—To be asked to define the ethnic life of a group
from the bones exhumed in its cemeteries would seem a hopeless task. Yet
it is possible, for on the osseous system the whole bodily structure is
built up, and the activity of the brain is conditioned.
Races differ in their skeletons. That of the African black is heavy, the
flat bones thick, the pelvis narrow, and presents many peculiarities
which are termed “pithecoid” or ape-like. Contrasting with these are
small-boned, delicately formed skeletons of the Indonesians and
Japanese, resembling those of the female in other stocks. It would not
be difficult to bring the ethnic into relation to these skeletal traits.
Professor Hervé, of the School of Anthropology of Paris, has argued that
the presence of the “Wormian bones” and the complexity of the cranial
sutures are a measure of the rapidity of brain-development, and
consequently a criterion of mental activity in a stock. This can
scarcely be accepted, for we are not sure that the rapidity of
bone-formation bears any ratio to the growth of the brain-cells; but it
is not rash to argue that a people whose bones are largely diseased must
have lived in unhygienic conditions, and had become degenerate in mind
as well as body.
Such is the case with the skeletons of that wholly unknown tribe who
once densely peopled the Salt River valley in Arizona, and of those who
dwelt near the great cemetery of Ancon in Peru. About one-third of the
skeletons present pathological features indicating long-continued
defective nutrition or widespread disease. No wonder that both stocks
perished off the earth. Though at one time singularly advanced, they had
sunk into complete degeneracy.
_Muscular System; Height and Weight._—There is a relation between
height, weight, and mental power, true for the individual and the group.
This is not mysterious, as all three depend upon nutrition.
Physiologists lay down ratios of height, weight, and age which are
requisite to the highest health, mental and physical.
We may go further, and say that any marked aberration from the average
of the species in these respects is accompanied by some equally
noticeable psychical peculiarity. Dwarfs have often acute minds, but
rarely deep affections.
Inferior stature is often an ethnic trait. The central African pygmies,
the Lapps, and the Bushmen are familiar examples. Mr. Haliburton has
recorded others in the Atlas and Pyrenean mountains; and Dr. Collignon
reports the diminution in height in some districts of central France.
The explanation of all is the same—lack of proper, regular, and
sufficient alimentation. They are, as the Germans say, _Kümmerformen_,
products of wretchedness. The shortest of the Bushmen are also the most
miserable—those living amid the barren sands of the Kalihari desert.
The reaction of such prolonged semi-starvation on the functions of the
brain-cells leads to psychical dwarfishness. None of these undersized
stocks have gained a position in history or contributed to the culture
of humanity. They have been unequal in physical strife, and have been
forced to the wall.
_Reproduction._—The reproductive function in its various manifestations
exerts an enormous influence on the individual mind, and exhibits broad
racial and ethnic distinctions. Its power is scarcely less operative in
the fate of nations than of persons, and its reflection in the mind of
groups deserves closest attention.
The period of puberty changes widely the direction of the thoughts, and
the character frequently undergoes a complete transformation. Children
previously studious lose interest in their lessons, while others pursue
them with greatly increased devotion. The sexual emotions, which mark
the epoch, may absorb the whole being or merely stimulate it to higher
efforts.
The age at which puberty begins varies, following the general law that
the higher the annual temperature the earlier in life does the change
set in. This becomes of psychical interest when it is added that the
earlier the change the more intense and permeating are the erotic
passions; the more do they compel to their sway the other emotions and
the intellect.
Only two motives, observes Professor Friedrich Müller, can induce the
Australian or the typical African to prolonged labour,—hunger and the
sex passion. Civilised communities are measurably lifted above the
immediate struggle for food, but not in the least above the other
impulse. If you could learn the prime motive, says Dr. Van Buren, of the
presence of the crowds of men on Broadway, you would find ninety per
cent. of them are there through sex feeling.
The sentiments of love, of marital and parental affection, of family
life, control mankind more completely than any other motives. These are
physical, personal feelings, and to that extent narrow and in conflict
with many which are broader and more altruistic. Few persons can advance
beyond them, and the collective mind is obliged by the laws of its own
existence to register them as of the very first importance.
The power of a group is, other things being equal, in proportion to the
size of the group, and its increase in numbers is in geometrical
proportion to its fecundity, provided the food-supply remains
sufficient.
These are two closely related and essential factors to advance, and have
been so felt from man’s earliest infancy. The complicated systems of
marriage and relationship in vogue among the Australian and other rude
tribes arose from the effort to adjust the birth-rate to the available
amount of food. Many of the forms of marriage arose from the same
consideration. In polygamous countries most men are monogamous because
they cannot keep large families. Legal infanticide, exposure of the
new-born, as in China, is another effort in the same direction. Where
such measures are not legalised they reappear in other guises.
Artificial abortion and intentional limitation of families are frequent
in France and the United States. They are outcrops of a sentiment of
self-protection which has been familiar to the species from its
beginning.
Sex feeling belongs distinctly to the animal and emotional side of human
nature. Where it is the dominating motive, neither individual nor group
can attain the highest development. This is noticeably the case in the
African. Coloured children in our public schools are equal to their
white associates up to the age of puberty. But that change is more
profound in the African than in the European constitution. After it has
occurred, the difference in favour of the white children becomes very
apparent. Their mental world is not so invaded by thoughts of sex, and
they are more inclined to study.
In a less degree, as I have before remarked, the same contrast exists
between the Teutonic and Latin peoples of Europe, and has been
acknowledged to have resulted in decided advantages for the former.
Virility—that is, the reproductive potency in the male—bears no relation
to the strength of the erotic passion.
In some the passion of sexual love is little more than an appetite.
Satisfied, it is indefinitely quiescent, not entering into the general
life; or, if it at times fires the emotions, they are easily restrained
or banished by the exercise of other mental powers. This has been the
case with many eminent men of notoriously ardent temperaments but never
subdued by them (Byron, Goethe).
It is also an ethnic trait, a characteristic of the Teutonic blood, in
sharp contrast to the so-called Latin peoples. With the latter, as is
obvious from the literature, the erotic feeling is an enduring and
overmastering passion, colouring the intelligence and often absorbing
into itself the activities of the life.
As virility in man, so fecundity in woman has no relation to sex
feeling; or, if any, in a reverse degree.
The famous calculations of Malthus, which cannot be disproved, and which
have been confirmed by the latest statistics, show that this fear of
population transcending the food-supply is real and ever present. Where
it is not immediate, as in modern life, it is nevertheless near and
visible in the division of the parental property among a large family of
children; in the increased difficulties of properly educating such a
family and giving each a proper position and start in life; and in
providing for such as are feeble or incompetent. This effort, extended
throughout a community, means more intense competition, a more bitter
struggle for property, a more constant occupation with sordid details,
to the neglect of reflection, study, and abstract thought.
Reproduction, therefore, to its utmost limits, would be of no advantage
to a community, but decidedly deleterious. Its effect on the collective
mind would be lowering, as it would centre the general attention on
material aims and personal interests.
Nor is the individual who would direct his activities by the highest
motives at all compelled to increase his kind. The accessory demands
upon his time and powers which such an action usually entails, would
probably hinder him in his efforts. Darwin forcibly stated this in his
_Descent of Man_. He imagines a man who, not compelled by any deep
feeling, yet sacrifices his life for the good of others through the love
of glory. “His example would excite the same wish for glory in other men
and would strengthen by exercise the noble feeling of admiration. He
might thus do far more good to his tribe than by begetting offspring
with a tendency to inherit his own high character.”
If this is true of one governed by a motive confessedly not the highest,
how much more true of him or her whose soul is fired with a devotion to
the truth of science or to the welfare of the race!
_Feminism._—The physical contrast of the sexes belongs to all mammals,
to birds, and to most of the animal kingdom. The female is generally
smaller, lighter, with lines more graceful and delicate. This is true,
as a rule, in all races of men and held good for the earliest tribes
whose skeletons have been preserved. Yet the contrast in man is so far
from positive that the anatomist knows no criteria to establish the sex
from the bones except the more obtuse angle of the rami of the pubes in
the female; and even this is obliterated in some branches of the human
race, the Indo-Chinese, for example, where the rami meet in both sexes
at about the same angle (Hervé).
The tendency to “feminism” is not unusual in the white race as an
individual peculiarity; and is especially prominent as a racial trait in
the Asiatic or Mongolian branch of our species. They have sparse beards,
little hair on the body but much and strong on the head, and the
features of the sexes are similar. In many respects they display
feminine traits of character, being industrious, sedentary, and
peace-loving, receptive but not originative, ruled by emotion, and
easily brought under the influence of nervous impressions.
Women have much less variability than men; they are precocious, and
their growth more rapid, but the arrest of development arrives with them
sooner. They remain near the child type throughout their lives.
Mr. Havelock Ellis has argued that for this reason they are nearer the
future type of the species, and that the results of modern civilisation
are to render men more feminine in occupations, character, appearance,
and anatomy.
It would be more correct to say that as civilisation advances the
distinctions between the sexes erected by conditions of lower culture
tend to disappear, each sex gaining much from the other without
forfeiting that which is peculiarly its own.
The masculine woman and the feminine man are erratic, often degenerate
types. The tendency to “homosexuality” (or to “non-sexuality”) has
appeared from time to time as an ethnic trait. It was notorious in
ancient Greece and mediæval Italy, and in both cases presaged
deterioration.
_The Vital Powers._—Health is one trait; tenacity of life another.
Feeble and sickly people sometimes reveal a surprising vitality; others,
who are hale and athletic, succumb to slight attacks. The American
Indian, when he falls ill, gives up and dies; while Europeans, though
increasingly requiring medical attention, are growing in longevity.
This physical fact has a noticeable bearing on ethnic psychology. Where
the old survive, the property and the management of society usually rest
in their hands. The traits of age are reflected on the collective mind.
It is cautious, perhaps to timidity, slow in action, avoiding strife.
These are the traits of Chinese diplomacy, in which country not only is
longevity considerable, but the respect for the old passes into
veneration.
As a rule, the lower forms of culture are associated with the shortest
lives. The Australian is a Nestor who reaches fifty years. Early
maturity and early decay mark inferior and degenerate stages of society.
Hence they are guided by inexperienced minds and by the emotional
characters of youth.
_Temperament._—The ancient physicians had much to say about
“temperaments,” classifying them usually as four, the sanguine, bilious,
nervous, and phlegmatic. Both modern medicine and psychology have
rejected these as a basis of classification, but acknowledge that there
lies an important truth in the ancient doctrine.
Professor Wundt, for example, defines temperament from the psychological
standpoint as “an individual tendency to the rise of a certain mental
state,” and Manouvrier, recognising the intimate relationship of mind
and body, explains it as “an ensemble of physical and mental traits
arising from fundamental constitutional differences” in individuals.
Confining myself to the psychological aspect of temperament, I should
call it the personal mode of reaction to different classes of stimuli.
It is the general disposition of the mind, the individual way of looking
at things, _l’humeur habituelle_, and is independent of sentiments,
ideas, or knowledge. It is the psychic resultant of the whole organic
life of the individuals. In this sense, the distinctions of temperaments
are justified, as they depend on the dominance of one or the other of
the physiological systems—circulatory, alimentary, nervous, genital,
etc.—in the economy.
Various writers (Manouvrier, Ribot, Kant) have adopted as the measure of
temperaments and the principle of their classification, the one standard
of _energy_; in other words, molecular change. They speak of sthenic and
hypersthenic temperaments, active and passive, etc.
I doubt if this is correct in physiology, and it is certainly not so in
psychology. Men of all temperaments may be equally energetic, equally
active in life-work. That is an old observation. The measure or standard
should be, not energy, but that general mental condition called
_happiness_. That is the popular distinction, and it is the true one.
When we speak of a sanguine, bilious, cheerful, gloomy, temperament, we
refer to a general and characteristic mental attitude, with reference to
individual happiness.
Rabelais could joke on his death-bed, but Byron, young, rich, and
courted, could find no theme for song but sorrow.
The phlegmatic temperament is supposed not to enjoy keenly, but also not
to suffer keenly. The sanguine temperament is not easily cast down by
adversity, while the bilious or melancholic person is little capable of
appreciating the joyous side of life.
These ancient terms may not be acceptable to modern science; but the
truths on which they are based are acknowledged by all authorities.
They interest us here, because a group has its temperament as much as an
individual, drawn, no doubt, from that prevailing among its members, but
noticeably strengthened by the inherent forces of ethnic psychics.
The recognition of this is seen in common parlance when we speak of the
phlegmatic Dutchman, the gay Frenchman, etc.
Such popular characterisations may not be accurate, but they serve to
show that the fact of a national temperament has unconsciously made
itself felt.
It does not seem dependent either on nutrition, geographic position, or
history; and it is hereditary and constant. Thus the Eskimos, living
amid eternal snows, with a limited diet and a desperately hard struggle
for existence, have a singularly cheerful disposition, loving to talk,
laugh, and indulge in pleasant social intercourse. On the other hand,
the Cakchiquels of Guatemala, living amid the most beautiful and fertile
tracts in the world, are chronically morose and gloomy. Their
temperament is reflected in their language, which, as the late Dr.
Berendt remarked, is as singularly rich in terms for sad emotions as it
is poor for those of a joyous character.
There is no doubt that a cheerful mental disposition is in itself a
defence against the attacks of disease. Seeland, in his anthropologic
studies of the question, found that persons of a cheerful temperament
are, in an extended series, physically stronger than those who are
melancholic, in the proportion of 148:135; though whether this should be
regarded as cause or consequence is open to construction; and, while
fully recognising the actuality of national temperaments, he adds that
an analysis of them, with a view to defining their causes, is still far
from practicable. The important conclusion which he reaches, however, is
that the happier temperament corresponds to the higher degree of health,
and that, in comparison, that which tends to the melancholic is morbid,
a pathologic product, an indication of degeneration.
Regarded as a national question, we derive from this that the calm and
the cheerful temperaments are those which promise most success and
permanence.
CHAPTER II
_ETHNIC MENTAL DIVERSITY FROM COGNATIC CAUSES_
In the last chapter I have considered the individual in his relation to
the group simply as an isolated unit, with his own powers and
weaknesses.
Both of these, however, he derives largely from his ancestors, through
the fact that he is born a member of a particular species, race, and
family. Such traits react powerfully on his mental life, and, indeed, in
themselves force him into relation with a human group, his cognatic or
kindred associates.
The ethnic psychologist must therefore devote to them insistent
attention. For convenience of study the facts may be grouped under three
headings, Heredity, Hybridity, and Racial Pathology.
_Heredity._—In body and mind, the child resembles his parents, the
individual his ancestors. This is the principle of fixity of type, the
permanence of species.
Neither in body or mind is the child ever exactly like his parents or
either one of them. Differences are always visible. This is the
principle of constant variation, at the basis of the unending
transformations of organic forms.
On these two principles rests the law of Evolution, which may be
progressive or regressive, that is, toward greater complexity and
specialisation or toward simplicity and homogeneity. Of these two
principles, one is real, the other merely apparent,—the negative or
minus quantity of the other, as cold is to heat or darkness to light.
Which is the real?
The question is not idle, for upon its correct decision depends the
accuracy of our views of organic life.
So long as the doctrine of the immutability of species was accepted,
everyone believed in the fixity of type as the prime law. When Lamarck
and Darwin had undermined that position, and up to a very recent date,
the two principles were considered somehow equal, dual conflicting
forces, the fixity of type being a passive result of the action of the
“environment.”
The unphilosophical character of such a conception of facts has now
become apparent, at least to a few. The true positive of the two forces
is change, variation. This is the one, fundamental, essential
characteristic of living matter. Every element of an organism that is
not ceaselessly changing ceases to be living, vital.
“Hereditary,” therefore, is a merely negative expression. It means a
diminution, not a cessation of change. Inherited traits are those in
which the rate of variability has been so reduced that they reappear by
repetition in several or many generations. Every one of them began in
some single individual, was due to a definite exciting cause, and was
transmitted by the route of reproduction. Hence inherited traits have
been properly termed “secondary variations.”
The long discussion whether acquired characters can be inherited has
virtually been decided in favour of the opinion that every character,
whether racial or specific, was originally acquired by a single person
or persons and transmitted by them. The data of pathology admit of no
doubt on this point, and pathology is but one of the aspects of general
organic development.
That not every acquired character can be transmitted goes without
saying; and it is equally true that hereditary traits vary widely in
their capacity for survival. So evident is this that they have been
classified by observers into “strong” and “weak” traits, the latter
betraying a feebleness of self-perpetuation compared to the former.
I have been discoursing of physical heredity and some of its observed
laws. This has not been beside the mark; for I repeat that the
correlation between body and mind is absolute. Psychical traits are
passed down from generation to generation hand in hand with physical
peculiarities. Men are what they are in good measure because they are
born so. About this the students of heredity are unanimous and positive.
Hence the necessity in ethnic psychology of learning the laws of
physical heredity and applying them to the history of the mind.
An example will illustrate this.
There is a curious manifestation of transmission called “homochronous”
heredity. The adjective signifies that a trait which appears first at a
certain age in the parent will also appear first at about the same age
in the offspring. A familiar physiological example is the date of the
beginning and the end of the reproductive period in women. Inherited
tendencies to disease will recur in the offspring at the age they
revealed themselves in the parent. This is strikingly true of mental
traits, especially those which are degenerative.
Even in the mixed populations of modern states, the connection of mental
with physical heredity is manifest. Commenting on the population of
France, Dr. Collignon observes: “To the difference of races, a purely
anatomical fact attested by the form of the skull, the colour of the
eyes and hair, and similar bodily traits, there corresponds a cerebral
difference, which shows itself in the prevailing direction of the
thoughts, and in special aptitudes.” These contrasts are shown by the
statistics of Jacoby, who examined the birth and lineage of the most
eminent men of France in all departments of activity. He found that the
Normans were decidedly ahead in the exact sciences and practical
affairs, while in poetry, romance, and works of imagination in general
the people of the Midi were far superior to them.
Heredity is believed to present itself in another aspect, which has
excited much attention. I refer to that form of it called “atavism” or
“ancestral reversion,” or “retrogression,” in which a child “takes
after,” not his immediate parents, but some remote ancestor; even, as
has been often claimed, so remote as beyond the limits of our own
species. Such traits have been called “pithecoid” (ape-like) reversions,
as they are alleged to be derived from some four-footed precursor of
man, an ape, or even a lemur.
Evolutionists whose enthusiasm transcended their discretion have pointed
out many such features in the human skeleton. A few years ago (1894) I
gathered these together, and in a paper read before the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, I undertook to prove that
these features can be satisfactorily explained by mechanical and
functional processes acting in the individual life or in that of his
immediate ancestors, and that we have no occasion to appeal to
hypotheses of descent, which have, at least, never been proved. Other
American anatomists (Bowditch, Baker) endorsed and supported by further
evidence this position, so that physical anthropologists, in our country
at least, have said less about atavism than formerly; and the final blow
to it has been dealt quite lately by a Dutch writer, Dr. Kohlbrügge. He
has established the thesis that “all so-called atavistic anomalies are
meaningless for the race-type. They are brought about by arrests of
development or general variability. They depend on disturbances of
nutrition, leading to excess or deficiency of productive energy,
presenting a deceptive appearance of progressive or retrogressive
evolution.”
The consideration of these questions in physical heredity is necessary
in psychology, whether individual or ethnic, not merely because the laws
of physical run parallel to those of psychical life, but as well for the
valuation of those expressions about “men recurring to their brute
ancestors” in habits or feelings, so frequent in popular literature.
_Hybridity._—The intermixture of human races or stocks, human hybridity
as it is sometimes called, has been recognised by all anthropologists to
be a prime factor in ethnic psychology, in the psychical history of Man.
But, strange to say, the opinions about its results could not have been
more divergent. On the one hand we have a corps of authors, Gobineau,
Nott, Broca, Hovelacque, Hervé, etc., who condemn the admixture of human
races as leading inevitably to mental and physical degeneration,
infertility, and extinction.
In direct contradiction to them we find the not less distinguished names
of Quatrefages and Bastian, who maintain not only that such
“miscegenation” is harmless, but that it has been the main factor of
human intellectual progress! That owing chiefly to it certain tribes and
nations have by unconscious selection drawn to themselves the strong
qualities of many lines of blood, and thus won the foremost place in the
struggle for existence. This was notably the opinion of Quatrefages, who
defended the thesis, “In race-mingling the crossing is unilateral and is
directed under unconscious selection toward the superior race.”
This is supported by many well-known examples. In our own country, the
superiority of the mulatto to the full-blood negro is proved by history
and is familiar to all observers; and Dr. Boas has shown by statistical
researches that the half-blood Indian is mentally superior to his
companion of pure lineage, while the half-blood Indian women, instead of
revealing diminished fertility, average two more children to a marriage
than their red sisters of unmixed lineage.
But it will not do to ignore the array of facts of contrary tenor which
has been marshalled to show that in divers instances the result of
race-mixture has been disastrous.
Many of these may easily be explained by the unfortunate social
condition of children in such unions, mostly illegitimate, or at odds
with extreme poverty and its ill surroundings. If they do inherit an
increased ability, it is, under modern conditions, more apt to be
directed against than in favour of the social order.
After all such allowances, there remains a residue unexplained by them,
and inconsistent with the general theory of advantage in
race-intermixture.
The solution of this problem is to be found in the operation of an
obscure but certain law of heredity which has been demonstrated by the
best modern observers.
This reads that in the struggle for transmission between contrary
characteristics in the parents, any trait, mental or physical, may be
passed down separately, _independently of others_.
Thus, on the physical side, the father may have red, the mother black,
hair. The children will inherit, not a blended colour, but some the red,
some the black hair. Or, let us say, one parent has marked musical
ability, the other none. Some of the children will have as much as the
gifted parent, the others be devoid of the faculty.
It is essential, also, to remember that it is the inferior race only
which reaps the psychical advantage. Compared to the parent of the
higher race, the children are a deteriorated product. Only when
contrasted with the average of the lower race can they be expected to
take some precedence. The mixture, if general and continued through
generations, will infallibly entail a lower grade of power in the
descendant. The net balance of the two accounts will show a loss when
compared with the result of unions among the higher race alone.
This consideration has led a recent writer, Dr. Reibmayr, to a theory of
ethnic mental development which merits close attention.
A family, tribe, caste, or race, to preserve and increase its faculties
must sedulously avoid intermarriage with one of inferior gifts. The
value of “breeding in-and-in” is familiar to all interested in the
improvement of the lower animals. This was attained in primitive life by
the tribal law of endogamous marriages, by which a man must take his
wife within the tribe, but not of his immediate blood.
The superiority which this developed led to the subjection of other
tribes, and this, through capture and enslavement of the women, to
intermixture of blood, with its above mentioned first consequences:
deterioration of power in the captors, and, next, elevation of the
lower, conquered tribe.
The former was sometimes counteracted by the maintenance of purity of
blood in a portion of the community, which thus became the ruling class;
and if this did not take place, the tribe itself soon fell beneath the
sway of some neighbour which had maintained its lineage more purely.
Thus, says Dr. Reibmayr, the history of human mental development is, in
fact, the history of human hybridity and its necessary consequences.
Thus it appears that the reciprocal action of these two genetic
processes, the one of close and closer interbreeding, the other of wide
and wider intermixture of blood, is the prime element in modifying the
psychical faculties,—in other words, in creating and moulding the ethnic
mind.
How weighty this consideration becomes when we reflect that throughout
historic times, that is, from the earliest dawn of civilisation, the
subspecies of man have ever been as clearly contrasted in every feature
as they are to-day! The oldest monuments of Egypt and Assyria show their
portraits as typical as if carved or painted yesterday. No boreal
fountain can wash the Ethiopian white; no kisses of tropical Phœbus
could turn Cleopatra black.
We are constrained to adopt, therefore, the principle formulated by
Orgeas, that, so far as history knows, “the races of men have never
altered their traits except through intermarriage.”
The physical criteria of race, such as the colour of the skin, the hair,
the shape of the skull, the odour of the glands, are well marked in the
gross. I have examined their relative values for purposes of
classification in another work, and need not repeat the details here.
But the question is pertinent: Are there psychological distinctions
separating the subspecies of man as clearly as those of his physical
economy?
Conflicting answers have been and still are offered to this inquiry. By
some the mental powers of the races are asserted to be as sharply
contrasted as their personal appearance, and the gulf between them to be
practically impassable.
I have already said that nothing in the minute or gross anatomy of the
brain can be offered to support this view. The contributions to the
general culture of the species have been markedly unequal; but may not
this be explained by other reasons than inherent physical inequalities?
I have already expressed the opinion that human groups have differed
less in inherent psychical capacity than in stimuli and opportunities.
Such, also, is the belief of that profound student of human development,
Professor Bastian. He claims that convincing evidence in favour of such
a view can be drawn from the uniformity in the development of thoughts,
inventions, customs, religions, and the other elements of culture the
world over, up to a certain point at which other intercurrent influences
entered, not dependent on race distinctions.
After a prolonged study of primitive peoples the anthropologist Waitz
reached the conclusion that there is not and never was any positive
difference in the intellectual power of races; and the historian Buckle,
reviewing the record of the species in time, announced his conviction
that “the natural faculties of man have made no progress.”
In abundant instances the children of savage parents have been brought
up in civilised surroundings and have shown themselves equal and
occasionally superior to their comrades of the so-called higher race in
all the tastes of cultured society. It were useless, therefore, to talk
of an average natural inferiority.
The attainment of a possible average, therefore, must be conceded. But
this must not be construed as closing the question historically or
psychically.
It is constantly observed in education that children of equal ability
are by no means equally good scholars. They respond differently to the
stimulus of the desire of knowledge.
Such contrasts are witnessed in races also, and, apart from whatever
other influences we may name, are hereditary characteristics, recurring
indefinitely and controlling the racial mind, its activities and its
ambitions.
So visible are the mental differences of races that some writers have
advocated a psychological classification in anthropology. Professor
Letourneau has attempted it in one of his many treatises.
_Pathology._—But it is not sufficient in this study of racial psychology
to recount what a race has done and left undone in the work of the
world. We must also turn a gloomier page and take into account the
pathological mental symptoms it betrays; for these may be indicative of
a disease so deep seated and so fatal that the doom of the race is
inevitable. When we see whole peoples dying out, not through external
violence, but through some internal lack of vital force or adaptability,
as in the instances of the Tasmanians, Australians, Polynesians, and
American Indians, we may be sure that either in mind or body they are
the victims of some deep-seated, fatal disease.
Most writers, treating the subject superficially, have sought for the
cause of the decline and destruction of peoples in the decay of their
institutions, in the immorality of their lives, in their apathy to
danger, or in the loss of their ambitions. These are but symptoms of the
mental or physical malady which, “mining all within, infects unseen.”
They are the results of the incurable ailment which is hurrying them to
destruction. Dr. Orgeas is right in his contention that “the
pathological characteristics of peoples have played leading parts in the
grand dramas of history, though they have too often escaped the
observation of historians.”
It finds its expressions in such phenomena as Ratzel enumerates as the
cause of the deaths of peoples—restlessness, indifference to life,
debauchery, infanticide, murder, cannibalism, constant war, slavery,
laziness. When these are carried to the extent of reducing the personal
and numerical vigour of a tribe or race, it indicates that its intellect
is awry, its mind is diseased.
Thus the ineradicable restlessness of the red race, which more than any
other one trait has stood in the way of their self-culture, belongs in
the pathology of their nervous system. As Dr. Buschan points out, and as
I have elsewhere emphasised, they are especially subject to “diseases of
excitement,” contagious nervous disorders, leading to scenes of the
wildest riot and tribal loss.
They share this pathological condition with the Malayo-Polynesian
peoples of the Pacific island-world. Among them both we find numerous
examples of that outbreak of homicidal mania called “running amuck”
(properly _amok_), where the maniac rushes into a crowd, killing whom he
can; a crowd, not of enemies, as in the “Berserkerwuth” of the Northmen,
but of friends and relatives. The abandonment of both races to
alcoholism and narcotics is an evidence of the same morbid nervous
excitability. This is an inherited racial pathological tendency and is
not to be measured by the mere prevalence of nervous diseases. These may
arise from the increased strain on the neurons when the struggle for
existence is intensified. The enfranchised blacks since they have been
obliged to support themselves present a much larger percentage of brain
and nerve disease; such maladies among the Jews of Europe are six times
more frequent than among the Aryans; and certain forms, such as
progressive paralysis, are unknown in any but the most civilised
communities.
The immunity of races to disease, or its reverse, reacts powerfully on
their mental life, leading in the latter case to discouragement and
apathy, in the former to confidence and conquest.
Two of the most striking examples are measles and smallpox. In the white
race, the former has become merely one of the “diseases of children,”
exciting little alarm, and, against the latter, vaccination provides an
efficient protection. Among native Polynesians and Americans the ravages
of both have been so dreadful as not merely to decimate a population but
to leave the survivors mentally prostrate and indifferent to life. To
such an extent has this mental depression sometimes progressed that some
tribes, as the Lenguas of La Plata, have decided on the self-destruction
of their race, and destroyed all their children at birth.
The immunity of the white race to malignant measles is not due to any
special power of resistance, but to well-known laws of natural selection
in disease, and does not extend to many diseases. The Japanese are
practically immune to scarlet fever, the black race to yellow fever,
etc., and that all such exemptions react favourably on the ethnic mind
cannot be doubted. Such immunity is strictly _cognatic_, a legacy of
blood in the true physiological sense, the human cells having undergone
changes by the repeated attacks of the disease-germs resulting in
practical indifference to their assaults.
Indirectly, the march of epidemics has often not only decided the fate
of nations but worked remarkable changes in national character. A
familiar and striking example is the result of the Black Death (bubonic
typhus) in England in the reign of Edward III.
CHAPTER III
_THE INFLUENCE OF THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT_
At the risk of needless repetition I again emphasise the fact that
Ethnic Psychology, the group-mind, is a product of social relations, a
result of aggregation, and cannot be fully explained by the processes of
the individual mind. The resemblances between them are analogies, not
homologies. They act and react, one on the other, with the force of
independent psychic entities.
The general proposition to this effect I have laid down in the second
chapter of Part I. Now I shall go more into detail and examine just what
influences the ethnic mind brings to bear upon that of the individual to
bring it into _rapport_ with itself, to make it conform to the mass, to
expunge, in fact, all that is individual within it.
I have also briefly but sufficiently referred to the psychologic
measures by which this is accomplished, such as imitation, opposition,
and continuity, by which the anti-social instincts are curbed, but at
the same time originality and independence are also often crushed.
It remains to point out the exact instruments which the group-mind
employs in this process and to estimate their relative force.
These may be classified under five headings: Language, Law, Religion,
Occupation, and Social Relations. This is in the order of the influence
which they generally exert on the individual mind, which influence is to
be understood as reciprocal, the individual working most potently on the
ethnic mind in the same order of instruments. It is true, however, that
the relative potency of each of them varies considerably with the
condition of culture. Let us briefly examine their several
characteristics.
_Language._—Of all bonds which unite men, none other is so strong as
language. This, indeed, it is which first developed the human in man. I
have shown that the one distinguishing trait which divides man from
brute is his power of general conceptions under symbols. The word
“language” provides the symbol. To form words is the necessary first
step in reasoning; to attach to words precise meanings, perfect
connotations, is the main effort of all subsequent reasonings. Words are
the storehouse of all knowledge; they are the tools of the mind, by
which all its constructions are framed.
Language is the involuntary product of the human intellect. The man
speaks with like spontaneity as the dog barks or the bird sings; but the
brute’s inarticulate cry expresses mere emotion, while the man’s
articulate sounds convey thought.
Language is a proof of man’s original social nature. It is impossible to
explain it as other than the action of a group. It is due directly to
the need of others felt by each. The individual alone could never form a
speech, and hence he could never clearly think; for thought, for
clearness, needs not only creation but expression. We never fully
understand or fully believe, until another understands us and believes
with us.
Hence, language is the most perfect example of ethnic psychical action.
It is the product of the group, to which each individual of the group
contributes his share, and which is the common property of all,
reflecting at once the traits of the group and the relations of the
individual to it.
Nor is language a merely temporary criterion of group-character.
Conspicuously not. Nothing clings so tenaciously to us as our mother
tongue. Religions may fade and institutions decay, we may change our
clime and culture, but the tongue persists. It is passed from generation
to generation, exceeding count. No heirloom is so cherished, no
tradition so hoary.
By the Aryan tongues of modern Europe antiquaries have restored the mode
of life of that primitive horde who spoke the ancestral speech of all
the Indo-European peoples, now stretching in an unbroken line from
Farther India to San Francisco. Unnoticed but indelible, the ethnic life
of that horde left its impressions on its speech like the footsteps on
geologic strata from which the palæontologists reconstruct the strange
forms of extinct species.
As the individual can convey his thoughts, his personality to the group,
in the language of the group, he is confined and limited by that
language. Hence the sovereign necessity in this investigation to study
not merely the contents of a tongue, its verbal richness and resources,
but that subtler side of it, its form or morphology. Indeed, the highest
aim of linguistic science, of the _philosophy_ of language, is to
estimate the influences of the various forms of speech not merely on the
expression, but on the formation of ideas. We think in words and in
grammatical relations, and both should be logical and accurate if our
expressed results shall be so also.
Few but specialists are aware how widely the varieties of human speech
differ in the power they exert of this formative character. Suppose that
in English we could not speak of that “divine tool,” the hand, except as
a bodily member belonging to some particular person, “my hand” or
“John’s hand”; how it would crush all means of generalisation, shut in
our minds to present and local cases! Yet this is the case in hundreds
of American and some Asiatic dialects, not only with this but many
classes of concepts. How are we to convey the simplest arithmetical
relations to tribes who have no words for integers beyond 5? What is
more hopeless, how can a member of such a tribe ever become an
arithmetician of his own effort?
Thus an individual is a mental slave to the tongue he speaks. Virtually,
it fixes the limits of his intellectual life. His most violent efforts
cannot transcend them. Here the group, the ethnic mind exercises
tyrannical sway over him.
So also do the contents of his tongue. I mean by this that incalculable
potency broadly called literature, spoken or written,—the oratory,
romance, poetry, philosophy, history, and science,—which is his daily
mental food all the years of his conscious life. In this maelstrom of
the opinions of others, his own individuality is generally submerged; he
loses it in the struggle, and his own talk becomes but the echo of that
of others of the group.
_Law._—Writers who imagine that Law is a product of Culture are
singularly off the track. Nowhere are its prescriptions more definite,
its violation more abhorred, or its penalties more inflexibly enforced
than in the lowest depths of savagery. There the punishment is known and
leniency unknown. When the Australian black has broken the unwritten law
of his tribe, he has but two alternatives,—disappearance forever or
death. After accepting the latter, or when seized in his flight, he
quietly digs his own grave and, sitting in it, awaits the spears of his
tribesmen.
So the “totemic” bond, the earliest form of permanent grouping in many
families of mankind, whether based on religious or consanguine ties,
invariably presents a compact and minute system of restrictions on
individual liberty. They are, indeed, often carried to such an extent as
to destroy all sense of personal responsibility or conscience, and to
limit independence of action to the most trivial details of life. In
them, through the recognised power of law, the group is everything, the
individual nothing. Hence, they preserve but do not progress; for I
cannot too often repeat the fundamental distinction between the
group-mind and the individual mind: that the former is active and
preservative, while the latter alone is creative and progressive.
By the general term “Law” I mean that restraint exercised by the group
on the individual which in its last recourse is backed by physical
force. It makes no difference whether the sentiment of the group is laid
down by the High Chancellor in his ermine or by “Judge Lynch” in his
shirt-sleeves; nor whether the group is the House of Lords or a gang of
thieves, the underlying principle—that of the forcible constraint of the
individual by the community—remains the same. To borrow Blackstone’s
definition, it is the “rule of conduct” which the group chooses to
establish for its own ends. Law, therefore, is essentially a part of the
ethnic mind, not conceivable except as a group-product, and if at times,
apparently, the expression of one mouth (autocracy), yet voluntarily
accepted by the group.
The body of concrete laws developed in a community, whether under
conditions of freedom or restraint, constitute its government. Under
either condition, the government is rightly regarded as the most
significant product of the ethnic mind as revealing, educating, and
moulding ethnic or national character. For any permanently accepted
government, though it may have been instituted by force, must be mainly
in unison with the ethnic traits.
The law stretches its hand over all the activities of the individual,
mental or physical, fostering some and repressing others, marking the
limit to all. Personal actions, the acquisition of property, the
expression of opinions, all are by common consent of every community
absolutely subjected to the ethnic mind, the will of the group, and the
physical power of the group stands ready to compel obedience to this
will.
Distinctly the ethnic and not the individual will; for in laws we have
frequent examples of the contrast between the two, when no individual
approves a law which all approve. There is not an American writer who
would be willing to have the expression of his thoughts gagged by
government; and not one but approves of the law of libel.
In no relation of human life has the influence of law as a moulder of
ethnic mental unity been more observable from earliest times than in
that of Marriage.
It is my own opinion, based on a long study of the subject, that
physical fidelity, _la fidélité du corps_, as Manon Lescaut expressed
it, of either sex to the other never was, and is not now, what is termed
a “natural” trait of human character. The native desire for sexual
variety is equally strong in both sexes and has been so from the
beginning.
Marriage laws, it should be borne in mind, have been everywhere and in
all time framed by the males alone, and they all reveal the intention of
the framers to preserve a right of property in the female, to limit her
sexual freedom, while their own remains unrestricted.
Collateral interests, such as the extent of the food-supply, the rules
of transmission of property, the purity of castes or classes, and the
like, have frequently entered into the bearing of marriage laws; but the
first and continued aim remains the prevention of feminine infidelity
and the retention of masculine independence.
For this reason, the woman, even in the most advanced states to-day, is
deprived of civic rights and kept in economic dependence; she is allowed
no part in either the making or the execution of the laws, and her
position is ranked with that of minors or adults of undeveloped minds.
Government, therefore, with few exceptions, differs from language in
this, that it is the exclusive production of the male ethnic mind, and
must be considered to express the masculine traits only.
The form of marriage intimately affects two questions of prime
importance in ethnic psychology: that of purity or intermixture of
blood, and that of the permanence of the group.
In an earlier chapter I have emphasised the results of close and of
mixed breeding in man as one of the controlling factors of his
advancement. It is obvious that the forms of marriage called endogamous,
where the only recognised marriages are within the clan; monogamous,
where there is but one wife; and “preferential” polygamous, where there
are several wives, but the children of one only are recognised as
legitimate, greatly favour close breeding.
General polygamous marriages, on the other hand, lead infallibly to
intermixture of stocks and the enfeeblement of the higher in its mental
capacity.
Not less do these laws affect the permanence of the group. This depends
directly on the amount of property it has, and its ability to keep it.
In any form of communal marriage the property descends in common and
belongs to the clan or consanguine group. There is no stimulus to the
individual to augment it, as he gains nothing for himself. Hence, such
marriages early fell into disuse.
General polygamous marriages are scarcely less fatal. Equal rights of
inheritance between the offspring of several mothers lead to dissipation
of the inheritance and to family feuds in the division. This is
conspicuously true of inherited dignities and power. In history no
polygamous nation has long survived the internecine feuds between the
many heirs to the throne. The Sultan is safe only when all his brothers
are murdered.
The marriage laws powerfully influence the ethnic mind in another
direction, heavily fraught with weal or woe for its destiny; that is, in
the respect for woman as a sex, in the honour shown her, in the
sentiment of chivalry.
This is a true ethnic sentiment, quite apart from personal affection or
romantic love. It reflects the position of woman in the group, not in
the family, and reflects the feelings of the individual mind toward
woman as a sex, as a part of the general group.
If we regard culture as the full development of the sentiment and
emotions, as well as the intellectual faculties of a community, then I
know no one criterion which will measure its degrees more accurately
than the prevailing opinion about woman, her place and her dues.
Where the laws make her distinctly dependent and inferior, where, in
marriage, she becomes more or less the property of her husband or the
mere instrument of his passion, it is impossible that the general sense
of the community can regard her with high esteem. This is the case in
all polygamous nations.
The chivalry of the Middle Ages was the direct consequence of the
inflexible monogamy commanded by the Church.
Closely related to these influences are those of celibacy and divorce as
sanctioned by law.
By “Occupation” in ethnology is meant that aim to which the individual
devotes most of his time, thoughts, and energies.
It does not necessarily mean to “work” or to gain a livelihood. In many
cases it is mere amusement or a routine of social customs, or, like the
beggar, sitting still and asking alms.
Whatever aim it acknowledges, the occupation is one of the most direct
and potent agencies in the formation of character, individual and
national; in Shakespeare’s phrase, “almost the nature is subdued to what
it works in, like the dyer’s hand.”
Some ethnographers have selected the prevailing occupations as the best
of all tests to distinguish the grades of man’s cultural advance. They
have divided his progress into a hunting, a pastoral, an agricultural,
and a commercial stage. Much may be said in favour of such a division.
At any rate, it indicates the close connection between human life in the
aggregate and individual avocation.
It is certain that the man or the group who have to devote their whole
energies to obtain the necessities of existence must advance very slowly
or not at all in the intellectual life. This partly explains the
stationary culture of the Australian black and the native of our arid
western plains.
But it does not follow, as some theorists would have us believe, that
leisure, the non-necessity of work, in itself favours progress. The
reverse is the case. The Polynesians, for whom nature’s harvests were
ample, were as low as, often lower than, the Australian. Nothing favours
progress but ordered industry directed toward a distant purpose.
The manner in which occupations, therefore, modify the ethnic mind
varies with the character and aims of the occupations. The first
distinction may be drawn in the degree in which they favour social
intercourse, and thus promote the unity of the group. In this respect
agriculture holds a low place. The unprogressive character of farming
communities is notorious. The contrast of the adjectives rustic and
urbane shows it to be an observation of ancient date. The cause lies
chiefly in the isolation of the farmer, and the suspicion and jealousy
with which he usually regards his nearest neighbours.
Another cause lies deeper and is of general value. Where there is but
one prevailing occupation, where all men’s thoughts and energies are
directed along the same lines to the same ends, there can be little
social advance. For the best results to the group the movements of
individual activities should be in intersecting, not in parallel lines.
This is the main secret of the superiority of city life, in spite of its
many drawbacks.
The respect, or lack of it, with which a community regards occupations
is a marked trait of ethnic psychology, and reacts powerfully on the
position and destiny of the nation.
In England, commerce, “trade,” is widely regarded as somewhat degrading.
Yet were she to lose her trade she would promptly sink to a fourth-class
power—an illustration of what I have before remarked, that a sentiment
of the group-mind may not be that of the individuals of the group.
The vocation of arms is regarded in modern Europe with admiration, but
in China with disrespect; the results of which have proved that the
Chinese, if correct, are far ahead of their time.
The veneration of the priestly office has coloured the thoughts and
written the fate of many a nation; and there is no lack of examples
to-day where their oracles close the ethnic mind to the admission of
verifiable knowledge and the results of science.
The disrespect for occupations beneficial to the group is an invariable
proof of low intelligence in the ethnic mind. The result of such a
sentiment is anti-social and weakens the power of the group as a unit,
by promoting divisions and opposition among its members.
The extreme of this is seen in the system of castes, rigidly carried
out, as in India, and resulting everywhere in national impotence and
ethnic dissociation. The former system of feudal aristocracy in Europe
was little better, and led to civil wars, the fruits of national
disunity.
National unity, to be of the highest type, must be based on equal
respect for every man’s employment, if that employment is of advantage
to the community.
By confining the exercise of certain highly honoured occupations to
so-called “privileged” classes, a heavy blow is dealt at the unity of
the ethnic mind. Class jealousy and party antagonism are developed,
followed by a corresponding weakening of the national force. Modern
democracy fully recognises this danger, but has been unable to remove it
under the guise of nepotism and succession in office.
It need hardly be added that where there exists a recognised distinction
between owners and slaves, or between a “ruling” and a “subject” class,
unity of group sentiment or thought is out of the question.
Yet, in modern life strenuous exertions are frequent to insist on a
distinction of the occupations of men and women, based, not on capacity
or opportunity, but on the fact of sex alone, the general effort being
to confine women to “menial” or mechanical occupations only.
The philosophical ethnologist can see in this nothing but the
near-sighted effort of the strong to oppress the weak, unaware of its
sure recoil on themselves. In reducing the influence of woman, exerted
through beneficial activities, the _ethnos_ directly diminishes the
elements of its own advancement. Goethe never wrote a deeper truth than
in his famous lines:
Das ewig weibliche,
Zieht uns hinan.
And the ethnic psychologist has no sounder maxim than that uttered by
Steinthal: “The position of woman is the cardinal point of all social
relations.”
The ethnic psychologist has a wide field in the study of the influence
of particular occupations on the minds of those engaged in them, and
thereafter on the mind of the group. He will have to examine the
assertion that some, though necessary, are in themselves deteriorating
to the better elements of humanity. Can the slaughter of men in war be
carried on without brutalising the sentiments? Can commerce be
successfully conducted without deception? Can the advocate do his best
for the guilty client without impairing his sentiment of truthfulness?
Further subjects of study must be the influence of occupations on home
and family life. Many involve travel, enforced absences, or a migratory
career, weakening such ties.
A marked tendency of modern occupations is toward increased
specialisation. A man will spend his life, it has been said, in making
the ninth part of a pin; and it has been asked, with accents of despair,
what hope for the mental growth of such a case? Yet, in fact, the lawyer
confined to his local code, or the medical specialist to the diseases of
one organ, has the horizon of his daily labour as narrowly
circumscribed.
The truth is that the individual is in the position of the primitive
tribe. If he is forced to give all his waking hours to “getting a
living,” it matters little what his employment is. One is as bad as
another. And if by his work he wins leisure, all depends on the use of
that leisure. Spinoza gained his bread by grinding optical
glasses,—surely an uninspiring mechanical drudgery! But in odd times he
wrote his _Ethics_, than which no nobler contribution to the highest
realms of thought has ever been composed.
CHAPTER IV
_THE INFLUENCE OF THE GEOGRAPHIC ENVIRONMENT_
The extent to which the geographic environment decides the character and
history of a people has been and still is a question on which competent
writers differ widely.
On the one side we have such writers as Draper, Menschikoff, von
Ihering, Ratzel, and generally the Russian and English schools, who seek
in climate, soil, and waterways the explanation of the whole of history.
Their views may be summed up in the maxim of von Ihering, “The soil is
the Nation.”
In contrast to them stand the pure psychologists, notably the French
school, who refuse to admit any great or lasting power of the material
surroundings on the psychical traits. These, they claim, are to be
looked for in race and in permanent anatomical differences, persisting
in all climes and spots. They would say with the philosopher Hegel:
“Tell me not of the inspiration of Ionian skies! Have they not for a
thousand years spread their beauties in vain before degenerate eyes?”
The latter party, however, by no means insist that the environment is
indifferent. They would entirely agree with Professor Wundt, that purely
psychological laws are inadequate to explain the events of history, and
that we must constantly take into account the associated physical
conditions in order correctly to tell the story of human development.
They would not deny that in some remote and invisible past the racial
mind, like the racial anatomy, must have absorbed its permanent
characteristics from local impressions; but this once accomplished, they
would argue, both orders of characteristics became ineffaceable.
Even the most determined of the “anthropo-geographers” will not deny
that the power over the mind which they attribute to geographical
features diminishes in proportion as culture increases, to the extent
that it is no longer coercive in civilised life. Nor can anyone who
reflects be blind to the fact that the sameness brought about by
subjection to given geographical conditions is something very different
from the unity produced by mental association.
The decision of this debated question presents itself to me in a light
which I have not seen stated by previous writers.
Both parties are right. We must agree with Hegel that the most lovely
and advantageous spots on earth fail to develop their inhabitants; and
yet, where such development takes place, we can always point to the
geographic conditions which have alone rendered it possible.
In reality, the question is one only indirectly of geography. It
belongs, directly, in quite another department of research, that of
Economics, the science of the production and distribution of material
wealth.
No matter how fertile the soil, how inviting the waterways, how smiling
the skies, man will remain amid it all the savage of the prime unless he
have within him the psychical stimulus to make use of these for the
increase of his wealth; and that stimulus comes not from without.
Material wealth is as much a condition of mental growth as is bodily
nutrition, but is just as far as is the latter from being either a
synonym or a measure of such growth. It is a prerequisite, not a
correlate.
The application of this principle explains the discrepant facts which
have led to the conflict of opinions in anthropo-geography. Without
geographic facilities, a nation cannot become wealthy; and without
wealth it is even more at a disadvantage than the individual.
Poverty and riches are what most influence the fate of men and nations.
Armuth ist die grösste Plage,
Reichthum ist das höchste Gut.
GOETHE.
Life itself is a question not merely of means, but of ample means. In
central England the rich have an average longevity of forty-nine years,
the poor but twenty-five years; in Berlin the rich live fifty years, and
the poor thirty-two years (Farr, Kolb).
The higher culture, anything above the mere fight for life, can find a
place only when it is possible, through accumulated wealth, to call a
truce in that fight. The leisure so obtained may not be, generally is
not, employed to that higher end; but without it the effort remains
impossible.
Anthropo-geography, therefore, is primarily a branch of economics, not
of ethnology. It affects the ethnic mind only indirectly, and not at all
through the action of any laws of its own. It is a vital factor in the
production of tribal or national wealth, but in no way influences the
use which the tribe or nation may make of that wealth; while this is the
only question with which the ethnologist or the historian of human
culture is primarily concerned.
With this perfectly clear understanding on the real bearings of the
much-talked-of “geographic environment,” I shall proceed to review its
leading divisions.
Such a conclusion will not be favoured by those writers who teach that
the surroundings exert in some manner an inspiring or a depressing
effect on the mind, and that this reflects itself in the ethnic
character. What! they will exclaim; are we to count for nothing the
sweet meads, the sparkling waters, the glory of the landscape, and the
hues of the flowers? The grandeur of the forest, the sublimity of
beetling crags, the solemn expanse of the ocean,—are these of no avail
in impressing the souls that see them with exalted aspirations and
fervently stimulating the imagination?—
Alas! “The hand of little use has the daintier touch,” and lifelong
familiarity with the most beautiful scenes of nature reduces to zero the
stimulus which they are capable of yielding to others.
Wordsworth held the other view and could sing:
The thought of death sits easy on the man
Who has been born and dies among the mountains.
But it is obvious, on reading the note in which he explains the source
of his observation, that it was their social culture, not their local
habitation, which imparted this seeming indifference to the peasantry.
Precisely the same indifference to death among their congeners in France
was noted long before by Montaigne.
There are three chief economic factors, derived from geographic
surroundings, which decide the material welfare of a human group on any
part of the earth’s surface. They are:
1.—The distribution of the surface land and water.
2.—The character of the soil with reference to productiveness, in the
mineral, floral, and faunal realms.
3.—Its salubrity for man.
These favour or oppose the three essential desiderata for human
progress, to wit:
1.—Intercommunication.
2.—Abundant nutrition and materials for the arts.
3.—Bodily health.
_The Distribution of Land and Water._—The Iroquois Indians call the
peace-belt of wampum which is exchanged between friendly tribes a
“river,” because it unites, as does some smooth watercourse, those
living apart. This is a sweet native tribute to the influence of
navigable streams in bringing man into relation to man. Bays, fiords,
and harbours permitted man with frail early craft to keep along the
seashore for thousands of miles. Thus the Tupis migrated from the river
La Plata to beyond the mouth of the Amazon and far up that stream;
while, antedating history, the Mediterranean peoples dared the stormy
Iberian coast to visit the remote Cassiterides and the boreal isles of
Thule.
The Delaware Indians expressed their relationship among themselves by
saying, “We drink the same water,” meaning that they all dwelt on the
Delaware River and its tributaries. Thus watersheds, through the
facility of intercourse they offered, became natural national areas, and
developed unity of thought and feeling.
Lake-districts exerted a like influence and became not only strongholds
by their pile dwellings, but centres of tribal unity. When Cortes
reached the valley of Mexico he found the shores of the lake occupied by
three nations, independent but closely federated for offence and
defence.
These are examples of the unifying powers of the watery elements; but in
its might as a torrential stream or as “the unplumbed, salt, estranging
sea,” it severs the families of men with a no less stringent potency. No
more striking example can be offered than that of the American race, the
so-called “Indians” of our continent. They extended over the whole area
from the austral to the boreal oceans, a race-unit, identical in
anatomical traits, but absolutely isolated from the rest of mankind, not
a trace of European, Asiatic, or Polynesian influence in their languages
or cultures.
The land areas offer obstacles more frequently than facilities to tribal
intercommunication. Mountain chains, deserts, steppes, vast swamps,
dense forests, and tangled jungles isolated by formidable barriers the
early hordes, leaving them to battle singly with the difficulties of
existence. The Roman writers say that interpreters for seventy different
languages were needed in the Caucasus, and de Leon pretends that in the
mountains of Ecuador there were as many tongues as there were villages.
That Egyptian and Babylonian civilisation flourished contemporaneously
for five thousand years without either colouring the other is explained
by the trackless and arid desert which lay between them.
Differences in mere _area_, a matter of square miles, materially modify
the ethnic mind. Great men are not born in small islands. The less the
area of a state, the less the variety of its life, the fewer the stimuli
to thought and emotion, the narrower the range of observation. The
ethnographer Gerland attributes the mental degeneracy of the
Polynesians, compared to their cognates, the Malays, directly to the
much smaller islands which they were obliged to inhabit.
Mere _number_ acts in a similar manner on the _psyche_. A nation of many
millions has greater self-confidence; each citizen feels its power
strengthening his own courage, his faith is firmer in what so many
believe, and he is the readier to labour for aims which so many admire.
The relation of the area to the number yields the _density_ of the
population, which, with its collateral condition of _distribution_, is a
ruling factor in ethnic life.
I have placed the geographic features which favour or impede
intercommunication first on the list of those which modify the ethnic
mind; and designedly so.
In the philosophic study of human development the social and anti-social
factors demand our first attention. A man becomes man only as one of
many. Nothing so lames progress as isolation; nothing so hastens it as
good company; and I am fain to endorse the proverb that bad company is
better than none. Rapid transportation is the key to the phenomenal
growth of the nineteenth century: transportation of weight by steam, of
thought by electricity. The Romans knew the value of good roads and made
the best which have ever been constructed; the Phœnicians and Greeks won
their pre-eminence, not by the resources of their home provinces, but by
their skill as sailors.
_The Soil._—Next and second in deciding the history and character of a
people comes the nature of the soil, the earth, on which they live.
Its value is to them in what it yields, either spontaneously or by
labour. The primitive man contented himself with the former; but culture
came along when toil entered. For culture ever demands an effort greater
than that immediately necessary for existence, because its aim, from
first to last, is directed to the future; and the higher the culture,
the more distant is that future.
Even the earliest men levied tribute on all the realms of nature. The
cave-dwellers of the Gironde caught fishes and trapped beasts; they
gathered nuts and edible roots; and they sought diligently for the
stones best adapted to lance-points and scrapers. All this we know from
the remains left in their rock-shelters. They utilised the soil to the
full extent of their knowledge and wants.
The wealth they thus amassed was scanty and transitory; but when their
successors, the neolithic peoples, appeared with domesticated animals,
an agriculture, a beginning of sedentary life and city building, and,
ere long, devised the excavation of ores wherewith to fashion weapons of
bronze, the land areas suitable for these occupations soon became the
centres of ethnic life and property.
I need not pursue the story of the growth of these prime industries: the
cultivation of the soil, the domestication of animals, the exploitation
of mines, the transformation from a wandering to a sedentary life, from
vagabondage to the hallowed associations of a home, and the effects
which these changes wrought on the sentiments and intellects of tribes.
What I wish particularly to point out is that what man asks from the
soil is primarily nutrition,—only nutrition, a living. It is the
“food-quest” which has been so vividly portrayed in American primitive
life by Mindeleff and so fully set forth by Mason: the tribe enslaved by
the soil; its laws, religion, customs, hopes, and fears wrapped up and
submerged in the desperate strife for food. Only where there is a
surplus, where wealth rises above want, is it possible for the group to
free itself from this bondage to the clod,—to become more than an
“adscript of the glebe.”
The relations between man and the fauna and flora of the region he
inhabits are constant and intimate. The progress of civilisation has
been traced by Pickering and others in the distribution of plants
cultivated by man for his food, use, or pleasure. They have been rightly
named by Gerland “the levers of his elevation.” Especially the cereals
supplied him a regular, appropriate, and sufficient nutrition. Their
product was not perishable, like fruit, but could be stored against the
season of cold and want. Their cultivation led to a sedentary life, to
the clearing and tillage of the soil, to its irrigation, and to the
study of the seasons and their changes.
The grain, once harvested, still required preparation to become an
acceptable article of food. It must be soaked or crushed and in some way
cooked. These processes stimulated inventive ingenuity, encouraged
regular labour, and required specialisation of employment.
In the hunting and fishing stage of culture the fauna supplies the chief
articles of food. To obtain it was man’s earliest school of thought. He
had to surpass the deer in swiftness and the lion in strength, or devise
means to circumvent them. We find the early cave-men had accomplished as
much. They prepared pitfalls for the mammoth, traps for the
sabre-toothed tiger, foils for the fleet reindeer, and did not hesitate
to encounter even the formidable rhinoceros. Nets, hooks, and
fishing-gear were thought out with which to lure and ensnare the
denizens of the streams.
But a far more rapid advance in his culture condition came about when
man bent his energies to the preservation, not to the destruction, of
the lower animals. By the process of domestication he secured not only
an abundant supply of food in their milk and flesh, but beasts of burden
and draught, facilitating rapid intercourse and enabling him to conquer
more rapidly the nature around him.
The mental growth of many peoples has been inseparably linked to a
single animal. Thus the Tartars of the steppes have their horses, the
Todas their cows, the Tuaregs their camels, without which their social
organisations would be wholly lost.
The absence in America of any indigenous animal suited for burden or
draught which could be domesticated was one of the fatal flaws in the
ancient culture of the continent, drawing a line beyond which progress
in many directions became impossible.
_Salubrity._—By salubrity I mean the general tendency of a locality to
maintain the normal functions of the body.
This depends chiefly on what is included in the term “climate,” for
soils become unhealthy only through the action of climatic conditions.
These may be classed under three headings:
1. Temperature, which considers both the actual amount of heat and also
the rapidity or extent of its variations (the “range”).
2. Moisture, including rain- and snow-fall and the average humidity.
3. Variety, not merely in the two conditions above mentioned, but of
seasons, winds, clouds, electricity, etc.
The last-mentioned has been too frequently overlooked or underrated by
medical and ethnographic geographers. In reality, it is the most potent
of the three in its results on the human body and mind. It is easy to
show that it is not the extreme of heat or cold which acts injuriously
on the system, but the continuance of the temperature. A climate with a
marked seasonal contrast between summer and winter is confessedly more
invigorating than one, no matter how delightful, which is practically
the same from year-end to year-end.
To keep in health, to maintain the functions in their highest relative
activity, is the condition of the most effective work. Neither the
individual nor the ethnic mind can reach its best results unless the
body is in a healthful condition. Hence, those localities which are
prone to endemic diseases or to frequent epidemics can never maintain a
population intellectually equal to spots more favoured in this respect.
The most marked and widespread of the endemic poisons is _malaria_, the
result of a paludal germ which has not yet been isolated. Heat and
moisture are requisite to its development, and immunity from it is
unknown in any race.
Malaria is the curse of plains and lowlands, while mountainous regions
have almost the monopoly of goitre and cretinism. These endemic maladies
directly diminish the mental powers through disturbing the circulation
of the brain. They contribute largely to the inferior intellectual
status of mountaineers, already prepared by the isolation of their
lives.
The most important ethnic question in connection with climate is that of
the possibility of a race adapting itself to climatic conditions widely
different from those to which it has been accustomed. This is the
question of Acclimatisation.
Its bearings on ethnic psychology can be made at once evident by posing
a few practical inquiries: Can the English people flourish in India?
Will the French colonise successfully the Sudan? Have the Europeans lost
or gained in power by their migration to the United States? Can the
white or any other race ultimately become the sole residents of the
globe?
It will be seen that on the answers to such questions depends the
destiny of races and the consequences to the species of the facilities
of transportation offered by modern inventions. The subject has
therefore received the careful study of medical geographers and
statisticians.
I can give but a brief statement of their conclusions. They are to the
effect, first, that when the migration takes place along approximately
the same isothermal lines, the changes in the system are slight; but as
the mean annual temperature rises, the body becomes increasingly unable
to resist its deleterious action until a difference of 18° F. is
reached, at which continued existence of the more northern race becomes
impossible.
They suffer from a chemical change in the condition of the blood-cells,
leading to anæmia in the individual and to extinction of the lineage in
the third generation.
This is the general law of the relation to race and climate. Like most
laws, it has its exceptions, depending on special conditions. A stock
which has long been accustomed to change of climate adapts itself to any
with greater facility. This explains the singular readiness of the Jews
to settle and flourish in all zones. For a similar reason a people who
at home are accustomed to a climate of wide and sudden changes, like
that of the eastern United States, supports others with less loss of
power than the average.
A locality may be extremely hot, but unusually free from other malefic
influences, being dry, with regular and moderate winds, and well
drained, such as certain areas between the Red Sea and the Nile, which
are also quite salubrious.
Finally, certain individuals and certain families, owing to some
fortunate power of resistance which we cannot explain, acclimate
successfully where their companions perish. Most of the instances of
alleged successful acclimatisation of Europeans in the tropics are due
to such exceptions, the far greater number of the victims being left out
of the count.
If these alleged successful cases, or that of the Jews or Arabs, be
closely examined, it will almost surely be discovered that another
physiological element has been active in bringing about acclimatisation,
and that is the mingling of blood with the native race. In the American
tropics the Spaniards have survived for four centuries; but how many of
the _Ladinos_ can truthfully claim an unmixed descent? In Guatemala, for
example, says a close observer, _not any_. The Jews of the Malabar coast
have actually become black, and so has also in Africa many an Arab
claiming direct descent from the Prophet himself.
But along with this process of adaptation by amalgamation comes
unquestionably a lowering of the mental vitality of the higher race.
That is the price it has to pay for the privilege of survival under the
new conditions. But, in conformity to the principles already laid down
as accepted by all anthropologists, such a lowering must correspond to a
degeneration in the highest grades of structure, the brain-cells.
We are forced, therefore, to reach the decision that the human species
attains its highest development only under moderate conditions of heat,
such as prevail in the temperate zones (an annual mean of 8°–12° C.);
and the more startling conclusion that the races now native to the polar
and tropical areas are distinctly _pathological_, are types of
degeneracy, having forfeited their highest physiological elements in
order to purchase immunity from the unfavourable climatic conditions to
which they are subject. We must agree with a French writer, that “man is
not cosmopolitan,” and if he insists on becoming a “citizen of the
world” he is taxed heavily in his best estate for his presumption.
The inferences in racial psychology which follow this opinion are too
evident to require detailed mention. Natural selection has fitted the
Eskimo and the Sudanese for their respective abodes, but it has been by
the process of regressive evolution; progressive evolution in man has
confined itself to less extreme climatic areas.
The facts of acclimatisation stand in close connection with another
doctrine in anthropology which is interesting for my theme, that of
“ethno-geographic provinces.” Alexander von Humboldt seems to have been
the first to give expression to this system of human grouping, and it
has been diligently cultivated by his disciple, Professor Bastian.
It rests upon the application to the human species of two general
principles recognised as true in zoölogy and botany. The one is, that
every organism is directly dependent on its environment (the _milieu_),
action and reaction going on constantly between them; the other is, that
no two faunal or floral regions are of equal rank in their capacity for
the development of a given type of organism.
The features which distinguish one ethno-geographic province from
another are chiefly, according to Bastian, meteorological, and they
permit, he claims, a much closer division of human groups than the
general continental areas which give us an African, a European, and an
American subspecies.
It is possible that more extended researches may enable ethnographers to
map out, in this sense, the distribution of our species; but the secular
alterations in meteorologic conditions, combined with the migratory
habits of most early communities, must greatly interfere with a rigid
application of these principles in ethnography.
The historic theory of “centres of civilisation” is allied to that of
ethno-geographic provinces. The stock examples of such are familiar. The
Babylonian plain, the valley of the Nile, in America the plateaux of
Mexico and of Tiahuanuco are constantly quoted as such. The geographic
advantages these situations offered,—a fertile soil, protection from
enemies, domesticable plants, and a moderate climate,—are offered as
reasons why an advanced culture rapidly developed in them, and from them
extended over adjacent regions.
Without denying the advantages of such surroundings, the most recent
researches in both hemispheres tend to reduce materially their
influence. The cultures in question did not begin at one point and
radiate from it, but arose simultaneously over wide areas, in different
linguistic stocks, with slight connections; and only later, and
secondarily, was it successfully concentrated by some one tribe,—by the
agency, it is now believed, of cognatic rather than geographic aids.
Assyriologists no longer believe that Sumerian culture originated in the
delta of the Euphrates, and Egyptologists look for the sources of the
civilisation of the Nile valley among the Libyans; while in the New
World not one, but seven stocks partook of the Aztec learning, and half
a dozen contributed to that of the Incas. The prehistoric culture of
Europe was not one of Carthaginians or Phœnicians, but was
self-developed.
INDEX
Acclimatisation, 194
Adaptability, 58
African, 27, 79, 89, 133, 134, 136, 138
Alcoholism, 99
American Indian, 70, 142, 153, 159, 162
Ammon, 87, 128
Annamite, 132
Arab, 99, 102, 196
Aristotle, 15
Arizona, 134
Aryan, 130, 161, 166
Asia Minor, 117
Assyria, 156
Asthenia, 117
Atavism, 151
Australian, 52, 105, 136, 137, 142, 159, 168, 174
Aztec, 71, 199
Bache, 132
Baker, 152
Baldwin, 75
Bastian, 15, 153, 158, 197, 198
Berendt, 145
Black Death, 102, 162
Blackstone, 169
Boas, 153
Boole, 14
Bowditch, 152
Brachycephaly, 129
Brain, 126
Brazilian, 24, 108
Broca, 153
Browning, Mrs., 66
Buckle, 87, 158
Buschan, 160
Bushmen, 88, 134, 135
Byron, 138, 144
Cakchiquel, 145
Capitan, 83
Castren, 113
Cattell, 132
Caucasus, 187
Centralisation, 39
Chauvinism, 115
China, 68, 79, 137, 176
Chippeway, 52
Climate, 192
Collignon, 87, 135, 150
Comparative psychology, 3 _ff._
Cope, 10
Cortes, 186
Cousin, xvi
Criminality, 106
Crusades, 93, 109
Cuba, 116
Darwin, 140, 148
Delusions, 108
Destructive impulse, 115
Divorce, 94
Dolichocephaly, 129
Dominant ideas, 110
Draper, 180
Dreams, 108
Dumont, 98
Economics, 182
Education, 53
Ellis, 94, 141
Emerson, ix
Erotomania, 114
Eskimo, 89, 118, 132, 145
Ethnic ideas, 21
—psychology, defined, vii _ff._
—— a natural science, xii
Exaltation, 113
Ezzelino da Romano, 115
Faculties, disuse of, 68
Farr, 183
Feminism, 140
Féré, 87
Ferrero, 114
Folk, 33
Folklore, 51
Forethought, 61
Fouillée, 131
Fuegian, 18, 34, 127, 132
Galton, 91, 92
Gambetta, 127
Gerland, 77, 187, 190
Gobineau, 153
Goethe, 55, 138, 178
Goitre, 101
Group, defined, 33, 42
Guaranis, 113
Haeckel, 132
Hale, 105
Haliburton, 134
Hegel, 180, 182
Height, 134
Heredity, 147
Hervé, 133, 140, 153
Home-sickness, 117
Hovelacque, 153
Humboldt, von, A., 89, 197
—— W., 28
Hurons, 112
Hybridity, 152
Hypersthenia, 112
Hysteria, 112
Iconoclasm, 116
Ideal, The, 9
Ideas, elementary, 20
—ethnic, 21
Ideation, 4
Ihering, von, 180
Iles, 80
Imagination, 8
Imbecility, 105
Incas, 199
India, 70, 109, 176
Individual and Group, contrasted, 23 _ff._
Indo-Chinese, 140
Indo-European, 166
Indonesian, 133
Industry, 54
Infanticide, 137
Instinct, 6 _ff._
Intellectual Deficiency, 104
—Process, 13
Intelligence 6
Inventiveness, 56
Ireland, 83
Iroquois, 185
Jacoby, 151
Japanese, 133
Jesuits, 112
Jevons, 13
Jews, 102, 161, 195, 196
Jingoism, 115
Johnson, 89
Kamchatkan, 108, 132
Kant, 143
Klemm, 55
Kohlbrügge, 152
Kolb, 183
Krafft-Ebing, 94
Krejči, 23
Lamarck, 148
Land and Water, distribution of, 185
Language, 18, 164
Lapouge, 99, 111, 128, 130
Lapps, 118, 134
Law, 167
Laycock, 119
Lazarus, vii
Lenguas, 162
Leon, de, 187
Letourneau, ix, 61, 159
Libyans, 199
Licentiousness, 94
Lichtenstein, 14
Liebig, 127
Livi, 131
Locke, 4
Lombroso, 131
Lykanthropy, 109
Malaria, 100, 193
Malay, 12, 112, 113, 187
Malthus, 139
Mania, epidemic, 109
Manouvrier, 143
Marriage, 170 _ff._
— abstention from, 92
— premature and delayed, 91
Mason, 190
Mayas, 71, 92, 131
Melancholia, 117
Menschikoff, 180
Mental Shock, 102
Mexicans, 99, 186
Mill, 124
Mind, human and brute, compared, 3 _ff._
—mechanical action of, 14
—unity of, 3 _ff._
—of the Group, 23 _ff._
—— not creative, 30
Mindeleff, 190
Modes of Progress, 72
Mohammedan, 111
Moisture, 192
Montaigne, 184
Morgan, 80
Mortillet, de, 77
Müller, 136
Muscular System, 134
Napoleon, 44
Natality, diminution of, 96
Nation, 33
Nervous System, 132
Neurasthenia, 118
Nippur, 76
Normans, 151
Northmen, 161
Nostalgia, 117
Nott, 153
Nutrition, 190
—imperfect, 87
Occupation, 173
Orgeas, 157, 160
Osseous System, 133
Pascal, 5, 83
Pathology, 159
Permanence, 39
Personality, 11
Peruvian, 52, 71, 99, 134
Perversion, conditions of, 107
Pickering, 190
Plato, 24, 53
Polynesian, 114, 159, 162, 174, 187
Post, 11
Progression, arithmetical, 78
—geometrical, 80
—saltatory, 80
Progress, rate of, 77
Psychic Cells, 16
Quakers, 69
Quatrefages, de, 153
Quechuas, 92, 131
Quen, de, 112
Quetelet, 14, 40, 107
Rabelais, 144
Race, 33
Ranke, 87
Ratzel, 160, 180
Receptiveness, 59
Reibmayr, 155, 156
Remembrance, 52
Reproduction, 135
Ribot, 143
Romanes, 5
Rousseau, 72
Salubrity, 192
Schaffhausen, 123
Schmidt, 76
Seeland, 145
Self-consciousness, 10
Semites, 102
Sexual subversions, 90
Siam, 69
Siberians, 99, 113
Skull measurements, 128 _ff._
Soil, 188
Soul, 16 _ff._
Spinoza, 179
Steinthal, vii, 178
Stock, 33
Symonds, 115
Syphilis, 101
Tartar, 89, 191
Tasmanian, 159
Temperament, 143
Temperature, 192
Tibet, 92
Tiedemann, 127
Todas, 192
Toxic agents, 98
Tribe, 33
Tuaregs, 192
Tupis, 185
Van Brero, 12
Van Buren, 136
Variation, physiological, 46
—progressive, 49
—regressive, 64
—modes and rates of, 72
—parallel and divergent, 73
—in circles and curves, 75
—in waves, 77
—pathological, 82
—— etiology of, 85
Vierkandt, 23, 56
Vikings, 67
Virchow, 83
Vital Powers, 142
Waitz, 158
Weight, 134
Wordsworth, 184
Wundt, viii, ix, xi, xiii, 26, 28, 143, 181
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
2. Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
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