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PAGE INTRODUCTION vii

PART I

THE CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE ETHNIC MIND

THE UNITY OF THE HUMAN MIND 3

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE GROUP. THE ETHNIC MIND 23

PHYSIOLOGICAL VARIATION IN THE ETHNIC MIND. PROGRESSIVE AND REGRESSIVE VARIATION. MODES AND RATES OF ETHNIC VARIATION 46

PATHOLOGICAL VARIATION IN THE ETHNIC MIND 82

PART II

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE ETHNIC MIND

INTRODUCTION 123

THE INFLUENCE OF THE SOMATIC ENVIRONMENT 126

ETHNIC MENTAL DIVERSITY FROM COGNATIC CAUSES. HEREDITY; HYBRIDITY; RACIAL PATHOLOGY 147

THE INFLUENCE OF THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT 163

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.

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.

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 ; 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

PART I THE CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE ETHNIC 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.

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.

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 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.

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