to recount what a race has done and left undone in the work of the
world. We must also turn a gloomier page and take into account the
pathological mental symptoms it betrays; for these may be indicative of
a disease so deep seated and so fatal that the doom of the race is
inevitable. When we see whole peoples dying out, not through external
violence, but through some internal lack of vital force or adaptability,
as in the instances of the Tasmanians, Australians, Polynesians, and
American Indians, we may be sure that either in mind or body they are
the victims of some deep-seated, fatal disease.
Most writers, treating the subject superficially, have sought for the
cause of the decline and destruction of peoples in the decay of their
institutions, in the immorality of their lives, in their apathy to
danger, or in the loss of their ambitions. These are but symptoms of the
mental or physical malady which, “mining all within, infects unseen.”
They are the results of the incurable ailment which is hurrying them to
destruction. Dr. Orgeas is right in his contention that “the
pathological characteristics of peoples have played leading parts in the
grand dramas of history, though they have too often escaped the
observation of historians.”
It finds its expressions in such phenomena as Ratzel enumerates as the
cause of the deaths of peoples—restlessness, indifference to life,
debauchery, infanticide, murder, cannibalism, constant war, slavery,
laziness. When these are carried to the extent of reducing the personal
and numerical vigour of a tribe or race, it indicates that its intellect
is awry, its mind is diseased.
Thus the ineradicable restlessness of the red race, which more than any
other one trait has stood in the way of their self-culture, belongs in
the pathology of their nervous system. As Dr. Buschan points out, and as
I have elsewhere emphasised, they are especially subject to “diseases of
excitement,” contagious nervous disorders, leading to scenes of the
wildest riot and tribal loss.
They share this pathological condition with the Malayo-Polynesian
peoples of the Pacific island-world. Among them both we find numerous
examples of that outbreak of homicidal mania called “running amuck”
(properly _amok_), where the maniac rushes into a crowd, killing whom he
can; a crowd, not of enemies, as in the “Berserkerwuth” of the Northmen,
but of friends and relatives. The abandonment of both races to
alcoholism and narcotics is an evidence of the same morbid nervous
excitability. This is an inherited racial pathological tendency and is
not to be measured by the mere prevalence of nervous diseases. These may
arise from the increased strain on the neurons when the struggle for
existence is intensified. The enfranchised blacks since they have been
obliged to support themselves present a much larger percentage of brain
and nerve disease; such maladies among the Jews of Europe are six times
more frequent than among the Aryans; and certain forms, such as
progressive paralysis, are unknown in any but the most civilised
communities.
The immunity of races to disease, or its reverse, reacts powerfully on
their mental life, leading in the latter case to discouragement and
apathy, in the former to confidence and conquest.
Two of the most striking examples are measles and smallpox. In the white
race, the former has become merely one of the “diseases of children,”
exciting little alarm, and, against the latter, vaccination provides an
efficient protection. Among native Polynesians and Americans the ravages
of both have been so dreadful as not merely to decimate a population but
to leave the survivors mentally prostrate and indifferent to life. To
such an extent has this mental depression sometimes progressed that some
tribes, as the Lenguas of La Plata, have decided on the self-destruction
of their race, and destroyed all their children at birth.
The immunity of the white race to malignant measles is not due to any
special power of resistance, but to well-known laws of natural selection
in disease, and does not extend to many diseases. The Japanese are
practically immune to scarlet fever, the black race to yellow fever,
etc., and that all such exemptions react favourably on the ethnic mind
cannot be doubted. Such immunity is strictly _cognatic_, a legacy of
blood in the true physiological sense, the human cells having undergone
changes by the repeated attacks of the disease-germs resulting in
practical indifference to their assaults.
Indirectly, the march of epidemics has often not only decided the fate
of nations but worked remarkable changes in national character. A
familiar and striking example is the result of the Black Death (bubonic
typhus) in England in the reign of Edward III.
CHAPTER III
_THE INFLUENCE OF THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT_
At the risk of needless repetition I again emphasise the fact that
Ethnic Psychology, the group-mind, is a product of social relations, a
result of aggregation, and cannot be fully explained by the processes of
the individual mind. The resemblances between them are analogies, not
homologies. They act and react, one on the other, with the force of
independent psychic entities.
The general proposition to this effect I have laid down in the second
chapter of Part I. Now I shall go more into detail and examine just what
influences the ethnic mind brings to bear upon that of the individual to
bring it into _rapport_ with itself, to make it conform to the mass, to
expunge, in fact, all that is individual within it.
I have also briefly but sufficiently referred to the psychologic
measures by which this is accomplished, such as imitation, opposition,
and continuity, by which the anti-social instincts are curbed, but at
the same time originality and independence are also often crushed.
It remains to point out the exact instruments which the group-mind
employs in this process and to estimate their relative force.
These may be classified under five headings: Language, Law, Religion,
Occupation, and Social Relations. This is in the order of the influence
which they generally exert on the individual mind, which influence is to
be understood as reciprocal, the individual working most potently on the
ethnic mind in the same order of instruments. It is true, however, that
the relative potency of each of them varies considerably with the
condition of culture. Let us briefly examine their several
characteristics.
_Language._—Of all bonds which unite men, none other is so strong as
language. This, indeed, it is which first developed the human in man. I
have shown that the one distinguishing trait which divides man from
brute is his power of general conceptions under symbols. The word
“language” provides the symbol. To form words is the necessary first
step in reasoning; to attach to words precise meanings, perfect
connotations, is the main effort of all subsequent reasonings. Words are
the storehouse of all knowledge; they are the tools of the mind, by
which all its constructions are framed.
Language is the involuntary product of the human intellect. The man
speaks with like spontaneity as the dog barks or the bird sings; but the
brute’s inarticulate cry expresses mere emotion, while the man’s
articulate sounds convey thought.
Language is a proof of man’s original social nature. It is impossible to
explain it as other than the action of a group. It is due directly to
the need of others felt by each. The individual alone could never form a
speech, and hence he could never clearly think; for thought, for
clearness, needs not only creation but expression. We never fully
understand or fully believe, until another understands us and believes
with us.
Hence, language is the most perfect example of ethnic psychical action.
It is the product of the group, to which each individual of the group
contributes his share, and which is the common property of all,
reflecting at once the traits of the group and the relations of the
individual to it.
Nor is language a merely temporary criterion of group-character.
Conspicuously not. Nothing clings so tenaciously to us as our mother
tongue. Religions may fade and institutions decay, we may change our
clime and culture, but the tongue persists. It is passed from generation
to generation, exceeding count. No heirloom is so cherished, no
tradition so hoary.
By the Aryan tongues of modern Europe antiquaries have restored the mode
of life of that primitive horde who spoke the ancestral speech of all
the Indo-European peoples, now stretching in an unbroken line from
Farther India to San Francisco. Unnoticed but indelible, the ethnic life
of that horde left its impressions on its speech like the footsteps on
geologic strata from which the palæontologists reconstruct the strange
forms of extinct species.
As the individual can convey his thoughts, his personality to the group,
in the language of the group, he is confined and limited by that
language. Hence the sovereign necessity in this investigation to study
not merely the contents of a tongue, its verbal richness and resources,
but that subtler side of it, its form or morphology. Indeed, the highest
aim of linguistic science, of the _philosophy_ of language, is to
estimate the influences of the various forms of speech not merely on the
expression, but on the formation of ideas. We think in words and in
grammatical relations, and both should be logical and accurate if our
expressed results shall be so also.
Few but specialists are aware how widely the varieties of human speech
differ in the power they exert of this formative character. Suppose that
in English we could not speak of that “divine tool,” the hand, except as
a bodily member belonging to some particular person, “my hand” or
“John’s hand”; how it would crush all means of generalisation, shut in
our minds to present and local cases! Yet this is the case in hundreds
of American and some Asiatic dialects, not only with this but many
classes of concepts. How are we to convey the simplest arithmetical
relations to tribes who have no words for integers beyond 5? What is
more hopeless, how can a member of such a tribe ever become an
arithmetician of his own effort?
Thus an individual is a mental slave to the tongue he speaks. Virtually,
it fixes the limits of his intellectual life. His most violent efforts
cannot transcend them. Here the group, the ethnic mind exercises
tyrannical sway over him.
So also do the contents of his tongue. I mean by this that incalculable
potency broadly called literature, spoken or written,—the oratory,
romance, poetry, philosophy, history, and science,—which is his daily
mental food all the years of his conscious life. In this maelstrom of
the opinions of others, his own individuality is generally submerged; he
loses it in the struggle, and his own talk becomes but the echo of that
of others of the group.
_Law._—Writers who imagine that Law is a product of Culture are
singularly off the track. Nowhere are its prescriptions more definite,
its violation more abhorred, or its penalties more inflexibly enforced
than in the lowest depths of savagery. There the punishment is known and
leniency unknown. When the Australian black has broken the unwritten law
of his tribe, he has but two alternatives,—disappearance forever or
death. After accepting the latter, or when seized in his flight, he
quietly digs his own grave and, sitting in it, awaits the spears of his
tribesmen.
So the “totemic” bond, the earliest form of permanent grouping in many
families of mankind, whether based on religious or consanguine ties,
invariably presents a compact and minute system of restrictions on
individual liberty. They are, indeed, often carried to such an extent as
to destroy all sense of personal responsibility or conscience, and to
limit independence of action to the most trivial details of life. In
them, through the recognised power of law, the group is everything, the
individual nothing. Hence, they preserve but do not progress; for I
cannot too often repeat the fundamental distinction between the
group-mind and the individual mind: that the former is active and
preservative, while the latter alone is creative and progressive.
By the general term “Law” I mean that restraint exercised by the group
on the individual which in its last recourse is backed by physical
force. It makes no difference whether the sentiment of the group is laid
down by the High Chancellor in his ermine or by “Judge Lynch” in his
shirt-sleeves; nor whether the group is the House of Lords or a gang of
thieves, the underlying principle—that of the forcible constraint of the
individual by the community—remains the same. To borrow Blackstone’s
definition, it is the “rule of conduct” which the group chooses to
establish for its own ends. Law, therefore, is essentially a part of the
ethnic mind, not conceivable except as a group-product, and if at times,
apparently, the expression of one mouth (autocracy), yet voluntarily
accepted by the group.
The body of concrete laws developed in a community, whether under
conditions of freedom or restraint, constitute its government. Under
either condition, the government is rightly regarded as the most
significant product of the ethnic mind as revealing, educating, and
moulding ethnic or national character. For any permanently accepted
government, though it may have been instituted by force, must be mainly
in unison with the ethnic traits.
The law stretches its hand over all the activities of the individual,
mental or physical, fostering some and repressing others, marking the
limit to all. Personal actions, the acquisition of property, the
expression of opinions, all are by common consent of every community
absolutely subjected to the ethnic mind, the will of the group, and the
physical power of the group stands ready to compel obedience to this
will.
Distinctly the ethnic and not the individual will; for in laws we have
frequent examples of the contrast between the two, when no individual
approves a law which all approve. There is not an American writer who
would be willing to have the expression of his thoughts gagged by
government; and not one but approves of the law of libel.
In no relation of human life has the influence of law as a moulder of
ethnic mental unity been more observable from earliest times than in
that of Marriage.
It is my own opinion, based on a long study of the subject, that
physical fidelity, _la fidélité du corps_, as Manon Lescaut expressed
it, of either sex to the other never was, and is not now, what is termed
a “natural” trait of human character. The native desire for sexual
variety is equally strong in both sexes and has been so from the
beginning.
Marriage laws, it should be borne in mind, have been everywhere and in
all time framed by the males alone, and they all reveal the intention of
the framers to preserve a right of property in the female, to limit her
sexual freedom, while their own remains unrestricted.
Collateral interests, such as the extent of the food-supply, the rules
of transmission of property, the purity of castes or classes, and the
like, have frequently entered into the bearing of marriage laws; but the
first and continued aim remains the prevention of feminine infidelity
and the retention of masculine independence.
For this reason, the woman, even in the most advanced states to-day, is
deprived of civic rights and kept in economic dependence; she is allowed
no part in either the making or the execution of the laws, and her
position is ranked with that of minors or adults of undeveloped minds.
Government, therefore, with few exceptions, differs from language in
this, that it is the exclusive production of the male ethnic mind, and
must be considered to express the masculine traits only.
The form of marriage intimately affects two questions of prime
importance in ethnic psychology: that of purity or intermixture of
blood, and that of the permanence of the group.
In an earlier chapter I have emphasised the results of close and of
mixed breeding in man as one of the controlling factors of his
advancement. It is obvious that the forms of marriage called endogamous,
where the only recognised marriages are within the clan; monogamous,
where there is but one wife; and “preferential” polygamous, where there
are several wives, but the children of one only are recognised as
legitimate, greatly favour close breeding.
General polygamous marriages, on the other hand, lead infallibly to
intermixture of stocks and the enfeeblement of the higher in its mental
capacity.
Not less do these laws affect the permanence of the group. This depends
directly on the amount of property it has, and its ability to keep it.
In any form of communal marriage the property descends in common and
belongs to the clan or consanguine group. There is no stimulus to the
individual to augment it, as he gains nothing for himself. Hence, such
marriages early fell into disuse.
General polygamous marriages are scarcely less fatal. Equal rights of
inheritance between the offspring of several mothers lead to dissipation
of the inheritance and to family feuds in the division. This is
conspicuously true of inherited dignities and power. In history no
polygamous nation has long survived the internecine feuds between the
many heirs to the throne. The Sultan is safe only when all his brothers
are murdered.
The marriage laws powerfully influence the ethnic mind in another
direction, heavily fraught with weal or woe for its destiny; that is, in
the respect for woman as a sex, in the honour shown her, in the
sentiment of chivalry.
This is a true ethnic sentiment, quite apart from personal affection or
romantic love. It reflects the position of woman in the group, not in
the family, and reflects the feelings of the individual mind toward
woman as a sex, as a part of the general group.
If we regard culture as the full development of the sentiment and
emotions, as well as the intellectual faculties of a community, then I
know no one criterion which will measure its degrees more accurately
than the prevailing opinion about woman, her place and her dues.
Where the laws make her distinctly dependent and inferior, where, in
marriage, she becomes more or less the property of her husband or the
mere instrument of his passion, it is impossible that the general sense
of the community can regard her with high esteem. This is the case in
all polygamous nations.
The chivalry of the Middle Ages was the direct consequence of the
inflexible monogamy commanded by the Church.
Closely related to these influences are those of celibacy and divorce as
sanctioned by law.
By “Occupation” in ethnology is meant that aim to which the individual
devotes most of his time, thoughts, and energies.
It does not necessarily mean to “work” or to gain a livelihood. In many
cases it is mere amusement or a routine of social customs, or, like the
beggar, sitting still and asking alms.
Whatever aim it acknowledges, the occupation is one of the most direct
and potent agencies in the formation of character, individual and
national; in Shakespeare’s phrase, “almost the nature is subdued to what
it works in, like the dyer’s hand.”
Some ethnographers have selected the prevailing occupations as the best
of all tests to distinguish the grades of man’s cultural advance. They
have divided his progress into a hunting, a pastoral, an agricultural,
and a commercial stage. Much may be said in favour of such a division.
At any rate, it indicates the close connection between human life in the
aggregate and individual avocation.
It is certain that the man or the group who have to devote their whole
energies to obtain the necessities of existence must advance very slowly
or not at all in the intellectual life. This partly explains the
stationary culture of the Australian black and the native of our arid
western plains.
But it does not follow, as some theorists would have us believe, that
leisure, the non-necessity of work, in itself favours progress. The
reverse is the case. The Polynesians, for whom nature’s harvests were
ample, were as low as, often lower than, the Australian. Nothing favours
progress but ordered industry directed toward a distant purpose.
The manner in which occupations, therefore, modify the ethnic mind
varies with the character and aims of the occupations. The first
distinction may be drawn in the degree in which they favour social
intercourse, and thus promote the unity of the group. In this respect
agriculture holds a low place. The unprogressive character of farming
communities is notorious. The contrast of the adjectives rustic and
urbane shows it to be an observation of ancient date. The cause lies
chiefly in the isolation of the farmer, and the suspicion and jealousy
with which he usually regards his nearest neighbours.
Another cause lies deeper and is of general value. Where there is but
one prevailing occupation, where all men’s thoughts and energies are
directed along the same lines to the same ends, there can be little
social advance. For the best results to the group the movements of
individual activities should be in intersecting, not in parallel lines.
This is the main secret of the superiority of city life, in spite of its
many drawbacks.
The respect, or lack of it, with which a community regards occupations
is a marked trait of ethnic psychology, and reacts powerfully on the
position and destiny of the nation.
In England, commerce, “trade,” is widely regarded as somewhat degrading.
Yet were she to lose her trade she would promptly sink to a fourth-class
power—an illustration of what I have before remarked, that a sentiment
of the group-mind may not be that of the individuals of the group.
The vocation of arms is regarded in modern Europe with admiration, but
in China with disrespect; the results of which have proved that the
Chinese, if correct, are far ahead of their time.
The veneration of the priestly office has coloured the thoughts and
written the fate of many a nation; and there is no lack of examples
to-day where their oracles close the ethnic mind to the admission of
verifiable knowledge and the results of science.
The disrespect for occupations beneficial to the group is an invariable
proof of low intelligence in the ethnic mind. The result of such a
sentiment is anti-social and weakens the power of the group as a unit,
by promoting divisions and opposition among its members.
The extreme of this is seen in the system of castes, rigidly carried
out, as in India, and resulting everywhere in national impotence and
ethnic dissociation. The former system of feudal aristocracy in Europe
was little better, and led to civil wars, the fruits of national
disunity.
National unity, to be of the highest type, must be based on equal
respect for every man’s employment, if that employment is of advantage
to the community.
By confining the exercise of certain highly honoured occupations to
so-called “privileged” classes, a heavy blow is dealt at the unity of
the ethnic mind. Class jealousy and party antagonism are developed,
followed by a corresponding weakening of the national force. Modern
democracy fully recognises this danger, but has been unable to remove it
under the guise of nepotism and succession in office.
It need hardly be added that where there exists a recognised distinction
between owners and slaves, or between a “ruling” and a “subject” class,
unity of group sentiment or thought is out of the question.
Yet, in modern life strenuous exertions are frequent to insist on a
distinction of the occupations of men and women, based, not on capacity
or opportunity, but on the fact of sex alone, the general effort being
to confine women to “menial” or mechanical occupations only.
The philosophical ethnologist can see in this nothing but the
near-sighted effort of the strong to oppress the weak, unaware of its
sure recoil on themselves. In reducing the influence of woman, exerted
through beneficial activities, the _ethnos_ directly diminishes the
elements of its own advancement. Goethe never wrote a deeper truth than
in his famous lines:
Das ewig weibliche,
Zieht uns hinan.
And the ethnic psychologist has no sounder maxim than that uttered by
Steinthal: “The position of woman is the cardinal point of all social
relations.”
The ethnic psychologist has a wide field in the study of the influence
of particular occupations on the minds of those engaged in them, and
thereafter on the mind of the group. He will have to examine the
assertion that some, though necessary, are in themselves deteriorating
to the better elements of humanity. Can the slaughter of men in war be
carried on without brutalising the sentiments? Can commerce be
successfully conducted without deception? Can the advocate do his best
for the guilty client without impairing his sentiment of truthfulness?
Further subjects of study must be the influence of occupations on home
and family life. Many involve travel, enforced absences, or a migratory
career, weakening such ties.
A marked tendency of modern occupations is toward increased
specialisation. A man will spend his life, it has been said, in making
the ninth part of a pin; and it has been asked, with accents of despair,
what hope for the mental growth of such a case? Yet, in fact, the lawyer
confined to his local code, or the medical specialist to the diseases of
one organ, has the horizon of his daily labour as narrowly
circumscribed.
The truth is that the individual is in the position of the primitive
tribe. If he is forced to give all his waking hours to “getting a
living,” it matters little what his employment is. One is as bad as
another. And if by his work he wins leisure, all depends on the use of
that leisure. Spinoza gained his bread by grinding optical
glasses,—surely an uninspiring mechanical drudgery! But in odd times he
wrote his _Ethics_, than which no nobler contribution to the highest
realms of thought has ever been composed.
CHAPTER IV
_THE INFLUENCE OF THE GEOGRAPHIC ENVIRONMENT_
The extent to which the geographic environment decides the character and
history of a people has been and still is a question on which competent
writers differ widely.
On the one side we have such writers as Draper, Menschikoff, von
Ihering, Ratzel, and generally the Russian and English schools, who seek
in climate, soil, and waterways the explanation of the whole of history.
Their views may be summed up in the maxim of von Ihering, “The soil is
the Nation.”
In contrast to them stand the pure psychologists, notably the French
school, who refuse to admit any great or lasting power of the material
surroundings on the psychical traits. These, they claim, are to be
looked for in race and in permanent anatomical differences, persisting
in all climes and spots. They would say with the philosopher Hegel:
“Tell me not of the inspiration of Ionian skies! Have they not for a
thousand years spread their beauties in vain before degenerate eyes?”
The latter party, however, by no means insist that the environment is
indifferent. They would entirely agree with Professor Wundt, that purely
psychological laws are inadequate to explain the events of history, and
that we must constantly take into account the associated physical
conditions in order correctly to tell the story of human development.
They would not deny that in some remote and invisible past the racial
mind, like the racial anatomy, must have absorbed its permanent
characteristics from local impressions; but this once accomplished, they
would argue, both orders of characteristics became ineffaceable.
Even the most determined of the “anthropo-geographers” will not deny
that the power over the mind which they attribute to geographical
features diminishes in proportion as culture increases, to the extent
that it is no longer coercive in civilised life. Nor can anyone who
reflects be blind to the fact that the sameness brought about by
subjection to given geographical conditions is something very different
from the unity produced by mental association.
The decision of this debated question presents itself to me in a light
which I have not seen stated by previous writers.
Both parties are right. We must agree with Hegel that the most lovely
and advantageous spots on earth fail to develop their inhabitants; and
yet, where such development takes place, we can always point to the
geographic conditions which have alone rendered it possible.
In reality, the question is one only indirectly of geography. It
belongs, directly, in quite another department of research, that of
Economics, the science of the production and distribution of material
wealth.
No matter how fertile the soil, how inviting the waterways, how smiling
the skies, man will remain amid it all the savage of the prime unless he
have within him the psychical stimulus to make use of these for the
increase of his wealth; and that stimulus comes not from without.
Material wealth is as much a condition of mental growth as is bodily
nutrition, but is just as far as is the latter from being either a
synonym or a measure of such growth. It is a prerequisite, not a
correlate.
The application of this principle explains the discrepant facts which
have led to the conflict of opinions in anthropo-geography. Without
geographic facilities, a nation cannot become wealthy; and without
wealth it is even more at a disadvantage than the individual.
Poverty and riches are what most influence the fate of men and nations.
Armuth ist die grösste Plage,
Reichthum ist das höchste Gut.
GOETHE.
Life itself is a question not merely of means, but of ample means. In
central England the rich have an average longevity of forty-nine years,
the poor but twenty-five years; in Berlin the rich live fifty years, and
the poor thirty-two years (Farr, Kolb).
The higher culture, anything above the mere fight for life, can find a
place only when it is possible, through accumulated wealth, to call a
truce in that fight. The leisure so obtained may not be, generally is
not, employed to that higher end; but without it the effort remains
impossible.
Anthropo-geography, therefore, is primarily a branch of economics, not
of ethnology. It affects the ethnic mind only indirectly, and not at all
through the action of any laws of its own. It is a vital factor in the
production of tribal or national wealth, but in no way influences the
use which the tribe or nation may make of that wealth; while this is the
only question with which the ethnologist or the historian of human
culture is primarily concerned.
With this perfectly clear understanding on the real bearings of the
much-talked-of “geographic environment,” I shall proceed to review its
leading divisions.
Such a conclusion will not be favoured by those writers who teach that
the surroundings exert in some manner an inspiring or a depressing
effect on the mind, and that this reflects itself in the ethnic
character. What! they will exclaim; are we to count for nothing the
sweet meads, the sparkling waters, the glory of the landscape, and the
hues of the flowers? The grandeur of the forest, the sublimity of
beetling crags, the solemn expanse of the ocean,—are these of no avail
in impressing the souls that see them with exalted aspirations and
fervently stimulating the imagination?—
Alas! “The hand of little use has the daintier touch,” and lifelong
familiarity with the most beautiful scenes of nature reduces to zero the
stimulus which they are capable of yielding to others.
Wordsworth held the other view and could sing:
The thought of death sits easy on the man
Who has been born and dies among the mountains.
But it is obvious, on reading the note in which he explains the source
of his observation, that it was their social culture, not their local
habitation, which imparted this seeming indifference to the peasantry.
Precisely the same indifference to death among their congeners in France
was noted long before by Montaigne.
There are three chief economic factors, derived from geographic
surroundings, which decide the material welfare of a human group on any
part of the earth’s surface. They are:
1.—The distribution of the surface land and water.
2.—The character of the soil with reference to productiveness, in the
mineral, floral, and faunal realms.
3.—Its salubrity for man.
These favour or oppose the three essential desiderata for human
progress, to wit:
1.—Intercommunication.
2.—Abundant nutrition and materials for the arts.
3.—Bodily health.
_The Distribution of Land and Water._—The Iroquois Indians call the
peace-belt of wampum which is exchanged between friendly tribes a
“river,” because it unites, as does some smooth watercourse, those
living apart. This is a sweet native tribute to the influence of
navigable streams in bringing man into relation to man. Bays, fiords,
and harbours permitted man with frail early craft to keep along the
seashore for thousands of miles. Thus the Tupis migrated from the river
La Plata to beyond the mouth of the Amazon and far up that stream;
while, antedating history, the Mediterranean peoples dared the stormy
Iberian coast to visit the remote Cassiterides and the boreal isles of
Thule.
The Delaware Indians expressed their relationship among themselves by
saying, “We drink the same water,” meaning that they all dwelt on the
Delaware River and its tributaries. Thus watersheds, through the
facility of intercourse they offered, became natural national areas, and
developed unity of thought and feeling.
Lake-districts exerted a like influence and became not only strongholds
by their pile dwellings, but centres of tribal unity. When Cortes
reached the valley of Mexico he found the shores of the lake occupied by
three nations, independent but closely federated for offence and
defence.
These are examples of the unifying powers of the watery elements; but in
its might as a torrential stream or as “the unplumbed, salt, estranging
sea,” it severs the families of men with a no less stringent potency. No
more striking example can be offered than that of the American race, the
so-called “Indians” of our continent. They extended over the whole area
from the austral to the boreal oceans, a race-unit, identical in
anatomical traits, but absolutely isolated from the rest of mankind, not
a trace of European, Asiatic, or Polynesian influence in their languages
or cultures.
The land areas offer obstacles more frequently than facilities to tribal
intercommunication. Mountain chains, deserts, steppes, vast swamps,
dense forests, and tangled jungles isolated by formidable barriers the
early hordes, leaving them to battle singly with the difficulties of
existence. The Roman writers say that interpreters for seventy different
languages were needed in the Caucasus, and de Leon pretends that in the
mountains of Ecuador there were as many tongues as there were villages.
That Egyptian and Babylonian civilisation flourished contemporaneously
for five thousand years without either colouring the other is explained
by the trackless and arid desert which lay between them.
Differences in mere _area_, a matter of square miles, materially modify
the ethnic mind. Great men are not born in small islands. The less the
area of a state, the less the variety of its life, the fewer the stimuli
to thought and emotion, the narrower the range of observation. The
ethnographer Gerland attributes the mental degeneracy of the
Polynesians, compared to their cognates, the Malays, directly to the
much smaller islands which they were obliged to inhabit.
Mere _number_ acts in a similar manner on the _psyche_. A nation of many
millions has greater self-confidence; each citizen feels its power
strengthening his own courage, his faith is firmer in what so many
believe, and he is the readier to labour for aims which so many admire.
The relation of the area to the number yields the _density_ of the
population, which, with its collateral condition of _distribution_, is a
ruling factor in ethnic life.
I have placed the geographic features which favour or impede
intercommunication first on the list of those which modify the ethnic
mind; and designedly so.
In the philosophic study of human development the social and anti-social
factors demand our first attention. A man becomes man only as one of
many. Nothing so lames progress as isolation; nothing so hastens it as
good company; and I am fain to endorse the proverb that bad company is
better than none. Rapid transportation is the key to the phenomenal
growth of the nineteenth century: transportation of weight by steam, of
thought by electricity. The Romans knew the value of good roads and made
the best which have ever been constructed; the Phœnicians and Greeks won
their pre-eminence, not by the resources of their home provinces, but by
their skill as sailors.
_The Soil._—Next and second in deciding the history and character of a
people comes the nature of the soil, the earth, on which they live.
Its value is to them in what it yields, either spontaneously or by
labour. The primitive man contented himself with the former; but culture
came along when toil entered. For culture ever demands an effort greater
than that immediately necessary for existence, because its aim, from
first to last, is directed to the future; and the higher the culture,
the more distant is that future.
Even the earliest men levied tribute on all the realms of nature. The
cave-dwellers of the Gironde caught fishes and trapped beasts; they
gathered nuts and edible roots; and they sought diligently for the
stones best adapted to lance-points and scrapers. All this we know from
the remains left in their rock-shelters. They utilised the soil to the
full extent of their knowledge and wants.
The wealth they thus amassed was scanty and transitory; but when their
successors, the neolithic peoples, appeared with domesticated animals,
an agriculture, a beginning of sedentary life and city building, and,
ere long, devised the excavation of ores wherewith to fashion weapons of
bronze, the land areas suitable for these occupations soon became the
centres of ethnic life and property.
I need not pursue the story of the growth of these prime industries: the
cultivation of the soil, the domestication of animals, the exploitation
of mines, the transformation from a wandering to a sedentary life, from
vagabondage to the hallowed associations of a home, and the effects
which these changes wrought on the sentiments and intellects of tribes.
What I wish particularly to point out is that what man asks from the
soil is primarily nutrition,—only nutrition, a living. It is the
“food-quest” which has been so vividly portrayed in American primitive
life by Mindeleff and so fully set forth by Mason: the tribe enslaved by
the soil; its laws, religion, customs, hopes, and fears wrapped up and
submerged in the desperate strife for food. Only where there is a
surplus, where wealth rises above want, is it possible for the group to
free itself from this bondage to the clod,—to become more than an
“adscript of the glebe.”
The relations between man and the fauna and flora of the region he
inhabits are constant and intimate. The progress of civilisation has
been traced by Pickering and others in the distribution of plants
cultivated by man for his food, use, or pleasure. They have been rightly
named by Gerland “the levers of his elevation.” Especially the cereals
supplied him a regular, appropriate, and sufficient nutrition. Their
product was not perishable, like fruit, but could be stored against the
season of cold and want. Their cultivation led to a sedentary life, to
the clearing and tillage of the soil, to its irrigation, and to the
study of the seasons and their changes.
The grain, once harvested, still required preparation to become an
acceptable article of food. It must be soaked or crushed and in some way
cooked. These processes stimulated inventive ingenuity, encouraged
regular labour, and required specialisation of employment.
In the hunting and fishing stage of culture the fauna supplies the chief
articles of food. To obtain it was man’s earliest school of thought. He
had to surpass the deer in swiftness and the lion in strength, or devise
means to circumvent them. We find the early cave-men had accomplished as
much. They prepared pitfalls for the mammoth, traps for the
sabre-toothed tiger, foils for the fleet reindeer, and did not hesitate
to encounter even the formidable rhinoceros. Nets, hooks, and
fishing-gear were thought out with which to lure and ensnare the
denizens of the streams.
But a far more rapid advance in his culture condition came about when
man bent his energies to the preservation, not to the destruction, of
the lower animals. By the process of domestication he secured not only
an abundant supply of food in their milk and flesh, but beasts of burden
and draught, facilitating rapid intercourse and enabling him to conquer
more rapidly the nature around him.
The mental growth of many peoples has been inseparably linked to a
single animal. Thus the Tartars of the steppes have their horses, the
Todas their cows, the Tuaregs their camels, without which their social
organisations would be wholly lost.
The absence in America of any indigenous animal suited for burden or
draught which could be domesticated was one of the fatal flaws in the
ancient culture of the continent, drawing a line beyond which progress
in many directions became impossible.
_Salubrity._—By salubrity I mean the general tendency of a locality to
maintain the normal functions of the body.
This depends chiefly on what is included in the term “climate,” for
soils become unhealthy only through the action of climatic conditions.
These may be classed under three headings:
1. Temperature, which considers both the actual amount of heat and also
the rapidity or extent of its variations (the “range”).
2. Moisture, including rain- and snow-fall and the average humidity.
3. Variety, not merely in the two conditions above mentioned, but of
seasons, winds, clouds, electricity, etc.
The last-mentioned has been too frequently overlooked or underrated by
medical and ethnographic geographers. In reality, it is the most potent
of the three in its results on the human body and mind. It is easy to
show that it is not the extreme of heat or cold which acts injuriously
on the system, but the continuance of the temperature. A climate with a
marked seasonal contrast between summer and winter is confessedly more
invigorating than one, no matter how delightful, which is practically
the same from year-end to year-end.
To keep in health, to maintain the functions in their highest relative
activity, is the condition of the most effective work. Neither the
individual nor the ethnic mind can reach its best results unless the
body is in a healthful condition. Hence, those localities which are
prone to endemic diseases or to frequent epidemics can never maintain a
population intellectually equal to spots more favoured in this respect.
The most marked and widespread of the endemic poisons is _malaria_, the
result of a paludal germ which has not yet been isolated. Heat and
moisture are requisite to its development, and immunity from it is
unknown in any race.
Malaria is the curse of plains and lowlands, while mountainous regions
have almost the monopoly of goitre and cretinism. These endemic maladies
directly diminish the mental powers through disturbing the circulation
of the brain. They contribute largely to the inferior intellectual
status of mountaineers, already prepared by the isolation of their
lives.
The most important ethnic question in connection with climate is that of
the possibility of a race adapting itself to climatic conditions widely
different from those to which it has been accustomed. This is the
question of Acclimatisation.
Its bearings on ethnic psychology can be made at once evident by posing
a few practical inquiries: Can the English people flourish in India?
Will the French colonise successfully the Sudan? Have the Europeans lost
or gained in power by their migration to the United States? Can the
white or any other race ultimately become the sole residents of the
globe?
It will be seen that on the answers to such questions depends the
destiny of races and the consequences to the species of the facilities
of transportation offered by modern inventions. The subject has
therefore received the careful study of medical geographers and
statisticians.
I can give but a brief statement of their conclusions. They are to the
effect, first, that when the migration takes place along approximately
the same isothermal lines, the changes in the system are slight; but as
the mean annual temperature rises, the body becomes increasingly unable
to resist its deleterious action until a difference of 18° F. is
reached, at which continued existence of the more northern race becomes
impossible.
They suffer from a chemical change in the condition of the blood-cells,
leading to anæmia in the individual and to extinction of the lineage in
the third generation.
This is the general law of the relation to race and climate. Like most
laws, it has its exceptions, depending on special conditions. A stock
which has long been accustomed to change of climate adapts itself to any
with greater facility. This explains the singular readiness of the Jews
to settle and flourish in all zones. For a similar reason a people who
at home are accustomed to a climate of wide and sudden changes, like
that of the eastern United States, supports others with less loss of
power than the average.
A locality may be extremely hot, but unusually free from other malefic
influences, being dry, with regular and moderate winds, and well
drained, such as certain areas between the Red Sea and the Nile, which
are also quite salubrious.
Finally, certain individuals and certain families, owing to some
fortunate power of resistance which we cannot explain, acclimate
successfully where their companions perish. Most of the instances of
alleged successful acclimatisation of Europeans in the tropics are due
to such exceptions, the far greater number of the victims being left out
of the count.
If these alleged successful cases, or that of the Jews or Arabs, be
closely examined, it will almost surely be discovered that another
physiological element has been active in bringing about acclimatisation,
and that is the mingling of blood with the native race. In the American
tropics the Spaniards have survived for four centuries; but how many of
the _Ladinos_ can truthfully claim an unmixed descent? In Guatemala, for
example, says a close observer, _not any_. The Jews of the Malabar coast
have actually become black, and so has also in Africa many an Arab
claiming direct descent from the Prophet himself.
But along with this process of adaptation by amalgamation comes
unquestionably a lowering of the mental vitality of the higher race.
That is the price it has to pay for the privilege of survival under the
new conditions. But, in conformity to the principles already laid down
as accepted by all anthropologists, such a lowering must correspond to a
degeneration in the highest grades of structure, the brain-cells.
We are forced, therefore, to reach the decision that the human species
attains its highest development only under moderate conditions of heat,
such as prevail in the temperate zones (an annual mean of 8°–12° C.);
and the more startling conclusion that the races now native to the polar
and tropical areas are distinctly _pathological_, are types of
degeneracy, having forfeited their highest physiological elements in
order to purchase immunity from the unfavourable climatic conditions to
which they are subject. We must agree with a French writer, that “man is
not cosmopolitan,” and if he insists on becoming a “citizen of the
world” he is taxed heavily in his best estate for his presumption.
The inferences in racial psychology which follow this opinion are too
evident to require detailed mention. Natural selection has fitted the
Eskimo and the Sudanese for their respective abodes, but it has been by
the process of regressive evolution; progressive evolution in man has
confined itself to less extreme climatic areas.
The facts of acclimatisation stand in close connection with another
doctrine in anthropology which is interesting for my theme, that of
“ethno-geographic provinces.” Alexander von Humboldt seems to have been
the first to give expression to this system of human grouping, and it
has been diligently cultivated by his disciple, Professor Bastian.
It rests upon the application to the human species of two general
principles recognised as true in zoölogy and botany. The one is, that
every organism is directly dependent on its environment (the _milieu_),
action and reaction going on constantly between them; the other is, that
no two faunal or floral regions are of equal rank in their capacity for
the development of a given type of organism.
The features which distinguish one ethno-geographic province from
another are chiefly, according to Bastian, meteorological, and they
permit, he claims, a much closer division of human groups than the
general continental areas which give us an African, a European, and an
American subspecies.
It is possible that more extended researches may enable ethnographers to
map out, in this sense, the distribution of our species; but the secular
alterations in meteorologic conditions, combined with the migratory
habits of most early communities, must greatly interfere with a rigid
application of these principles in ethnography.
The historic theory of “centres of civilisation” is allied to that of
ethno-geographic provinces. The stock examples of such are familiar. The
Babylonian plain, the valley of the Nile, in America the plateaux of
Mexico and of Tiahuanuco are constantly quoted as such. The geographic
advantages these situations offered,—a fertile soil, protection from
enemies, domesticable plants, and a moderate climate,—are offered as
reasons why an advanced culture rapidly developed in them, and from them
extended over adjacent regions.
Without denying the advantages of such surroundings, the most recent
researches in both hemispheres tend to reduce materially their
influence. The cultures in question did not begin at one point and
radiate from it, but arose simultaneously over wide areas, in different
linguistic stocks, with slight connections; and only later, and
secondarily, was it successfully concentrated by some one tribe,—by the
agency, it is now believed, of cognatic rather than geographic aids.
Assyriologists no longer believe that Sumerian culture originated in the
delta of the Euphrates, and Egyptologists look for the sources of the
civilisation of the Nile valley among the Libyans; while in the New
World not one, but seven stocks partook of the Aztec learning, and half
a dozen contributed to that of the Incas. The prehistoric culture of
Europe was not one of Carthaginians or Phœnicians, but was
self-developed.
INDEX
Acclimatisation, 194
Adaptability, 58
African, 27, 79, 89, 133, 134, 136, 138
Alcoholism, 99
American Indian, 70, 142, 153, 159, 162
Ammon, 87, 128
Annamite, 132
Arab, 99, 102, 196
Aristotle, 15
Arizona, 134
Aryan, 130, 161, 166
Asia Minor, 117
Assyria, 156
Asthenia, 117
Atavism, 151
Australian, 52, 105, 136, 137, 142, 159, 168, 174
Aztec, 71, 199
Bache, 132
Baker, 152
Baldwin, 75
Bastian, 15, 153, 158, 197, 198
Berendt, 145
Black Death, 102, 162
Blackstone, 169
Boas, 153
Boole, 14
Bowditch, 152
Brachycephaly, 129
Brain, 126
Brazilian, 24, 108
Broca, 153
Browning, Mrs., 66
Buckle, 87, 158
Buschan, 160
Bushmen, 88, 134, 135
Byron, 138, 144
Cakchiquel, 145
Capitan, 83
Castren, 113
Cattell, 132
Caucasus, 187
Centralisation, 39
Chauvinism, 115
China, 68, 79, 137, 176
Chippeway, 52
Climate, 192
Collignon, 87, 135, 150
Comparative psychology, 3 _ff._
Cope, 10
Cortes, 186
Cousin, xvi
Criminality, 106
Crusades, 93, 109
Cuba, 116
Darwin, 140, 148
Delusions, 108
Destructive impulse, 115
Divorce, 94
Dolichocephaly, 129
Dominant ideas, 110
Draper, 180
Dreams, 108
Dumont, 98
Economics, 182
Education, 53
Ellis, 94, 141
Emerson, ix
Erotomania, 114
Eskimo, 89, 118, 132, 145
Ethnic ideas, 21
—psychology, defined, vii _ff._
—— a natural science, xii
Exaltation, 113
Ezzelino da Romano, 115
Faculties, disuse of, 68
Farr, 183
Feminism, 140
Féré, 87
Ferrero, 114
Folk, 33
Folklore, 51
Forethought, 61
Fouillée, 131
Fuegian, 18, 34, 127, 132
Galton, 91, 92
Gambetta, 127
Gerland, 77, 187, 190
Gobineau, 153
Goethe, 55, 138, 178
Goitre, 101
Group, defined, 33, 42
Guaranis, 113
Haeckel, 132
Hale, 105
Haliburton, 134
Hegel, 180, 182
Height, 134
Heredity, 147
Hervé, 133, 140, 153
Home-sickness, 117
Hovelacque, 153
Humboldt, von, A., 89, 197
—— W., 28
Hurons, 112
Hybridity, 152
Hypersthenia, 112
Hysteria, 112
Iconoclasm, 116
Ideal, The, 9
Ideas, elementary, 20
—ethnic, 21
Ideation, 4
Ihering, von, 180
Iles, 80
Imagination, 8
Imbecility, 105
Incas, 199
India, 70, 109, 176
Individual and Group, contrasted, 23 _ff._
Indo-Chinese, 140
Indo-European, 166
Indonesian, 133
Industry, 54
Infanticide, 137
Instinct, 6 _ff._
Intellectual Deficiency, 104
—Process, 13
Intelligence 6
Inventiveness, 56
Ireland, 83
Iroquois, 185
Jacoby, 151
Japanese, 133
Jesuits, 112
Jevons, 13
Jews, 102, 161, 195, 196
Jingoism, 115
Johnson, 89
Kamchatkan, 108, 132
Kant, 143
Klemm, 55
Kohlbrügge, 152
Kolb, 183
Krafft-Ebing, 94
Krejči, 23
Lamarck, 148
Land and Water, distribution of, 185
Language, 18, 164
Lapouge, 99, 111, 128, 130
Lapps, 118, 134
Law, 167
Laycock, 119
Lazarus, vii
Lenguas, 162
Leon, de, 187
Letourneau, ix, 61, 159
Libyans, 199
Licentiousness, 94
Lichtenstein, 14
Liebig, 127
Livi, 131
Locke, 4
Lombroso, 131
Lykanthropy, 109
Malaria, 100, 193
Malay, 12, 112, 113, 187
Malthus, 139
Mania, epidemic, 109
Manouvrier, 143
Marriage, 170 _ff._
— abstention from, 92
— premature and delayed, 91
Mason, 190
Mayas, 71, 92, 131
Melancholia, 117
Menschikoff, 180
Mental Shock, 102
Mexicans, 99, 186
Mill, 124
Mind, human and brute, compared, 3 _ff._
—mechanical action of, 14
—unity of, 3 _ff._
—of the Group, 23 _ff._
—— not creative, 30
Mindeleff, 190
Modes of Progress, 72
Mohammedan, 111
Moisture, 192
Montaigne, 184
Morgan, 80
Mortillet, de, 77
Müller, 136
Muscular System, 134
Napoleon, 44
Natality, diminution of, 96
Nation, 33
Nervous System, 132
Neurasthenia, 118
Nippur, 76
Normans, 151
Northmen, 161
Nostalgia, 117
Nott, 153
Nutrition, 190
—imperfect, 87
Occupation, 173
Orgeas, 157, 160
Osseous System, 133
Pascal, 5, 83
Pathology, 159
Permanence, 39
Personality, 11
Peruvian, 52, 71, 99, 134
Perversion, conditions of, 107
Pickering, 190
Plato, 24, 53
Polynesian, 114, 159, 162, 174, 187
Post, 11
Progression, arithmetical, 78
—geometrical, 80
—saltatory, 80
Progress, rate of, 77
Psychic Cells, 16
Quakers, 69
Quatrefages, de, 153
Quechuas, 92, 131
Quen, de, 112
Quetelet, 14, 40, 107
Rabelais, 144
Race, 33
Ranke, 87
Ratzel, 160, 180
Receptiveness, 59
Reibmayr, 155, 156
Remembrance, 52
Reproduction, 135
Ribot, 143
Romanes, 5
Rousseau, 72
Salubrity, 192
Schaffhausen, 123
Schmidt, 76
Seeland, 145
Self-consciousness, 10
Semites, 102
Sexual subversions, 90
Siam, 69
Siberians, 99, 113
Skull measurements, 128 _ff._
Soil, 188
Soul, 16 _ff._
Spinoza, 179
Steinthal, vii, 178
Stock, 33
Symonds, 115
Syphilis, 101
Tartar, 89, 191
Tasmanian, 159
Temperament, 143
Temperature, 192
Tibet, 92
Tiedemann, 127
Todas, 192
Toxic agents, 98
Tribe, 33
Tuaregs, 192
Tupis, 185
Van Brero, 12
Van Buren, 136
Variation, physiological, 46
—progressive, 49
—regressive, 64
—modes and rates of, 72
—parallel and divergent, 73
—in circles and curves, 75
—in waves, 77
—pathological, 82
—— etiology of, 85
Vierkandt, 23, 56
Vikings, 67
Virchow, 83
Vital Powers, 142
Waitz, 158
Weight, 134
Wordsworth, 184
Wundt, viii, ix, xi, xiii, 26, 28, 143, 181
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* * * * *
_The following volumes are in preparation:_
=Meteors and Comets.= By Professor C. A. YOUNG, Princeton University.
=The Measurement of the Earth.= By Professor C. T. MENDENHALL, Worcester
Polytechnic Institute, formerly Superintendent of the U. S. Coast and
Geodetic Survey.
=Earthquakes.= By Major C. E. DUTTON, U.S.A.
=The History of Science.= By C. S. PEIRCE.
=Recent Theories of Evolution.= By J. MARK BALDWIN, Princeton
University.
=The Reproduction of Living Beings.= By Professor MARCUS HARTOG, Queen’s
College, Cork.
=Man and the Higher Apes.= By Dr. A. KEITH, F.R.C.S.
=Heredity.= By J. ARTHUR THOMPSON, School of Medicine, Edinburgh.
=Life Areas of North America: A Study in the Distribution of Animals and
Plants.= By Dr. C. HART MERRIAM, Chief of the Biological Survey, U. S.
Department of Agriculture.
=Age, Growth, Sex, and Death.= By Professor CHARLES S. MINOT, Harvard
Medical School.
=History of Botany.= By Professor A. H. GREEN.
=Planetary Motion.= By G. W. HILL.
=Infection and Immunity.= By GEORGE M. STERNBERG, Surgeon-General,
U.S.A.
The Mental Functions of the Brain
An Investigation into their Localisation and their Manifestation in
Health and Disease.
By BERNARD HOLLANDER, M.D. (Freiburg i.B.), M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P. (London.)
Illustrated with the clinical records of eight hundred cases of
localised brain derangements and with several plates. 8º.
(By mail, $3.75.) Net, $3.50.
“A book which should be read by every Surgeon and Physician in
America.”—_Boston Times._
“This is a work of more than ordinary importance. The author’s
researches and results oblige him not only to combat popular opinions,
but to criticise rather sharply some high medical authorities. The brain
is, indeed, the organ of the mind, but the various functions of the mind
have their separate centres of activity in the brain. In the
localisation of these centres good progress has been made and is still
to be made. The great pioneer in this line of discovery was Dr. Franz
Joseph Gall, a century ago. His results were long discredited but are
here presented for the first time as largely confirmed by other lines of
research. The phenomena of various kinds of mania are exhibited by Dr.
Hollander in their connection with local brain-lesions, and special
memories for words, numbers, music, etc., are traced to their local
centres in the brain. These and cognate discussions lead on to a
strenuous rehabilitation of phrenology, long discredited through
quackery, and, as Dr. Hollander contends, through medical philistinism.
The ability with which Dr. Hollander pleads the case is commensurate
with his courage in stemming the current of adverse prejudice. While
this work is of special interest to professional men, as lawyers and
physicians, it is valuable to all who are interested in the phenomena of
mind and the problems of education.”—_Outlook._
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK LONDON
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
2. Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Basis of Social Relations, by Daniel G. Brinton