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]

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.”