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]
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 Phoebus 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.
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.
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 Phoenicians 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 Phoenicians, but was self-developed.