The Basis of Social Relations: A Study in Ethnic Psychology

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.

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.