The struggle that is now devastating Europe has been described as
an unavoidable war of races, as an outcome of the innate hostility
between Teutonic, Slav, and Latin peoples, that can never be overcome
by argument and reason, because it is due to deep-seated “racial
instinct.” If this were so, we might despair of the future of mankind;
for beyond this conflict would arise others without end, as wider and
closer international intercourse develops and brings more emphatically
into consciousness racial differences like those between Latin-American
and Anglo-American, East Indian and European, Mongol or Malay and
European. If this view were correct, the so-called “racial instinct”
would perpetuate wars of extermination until one race alone survived.
It is true that in our own political and social life the feeling of
racial solidarity finds strong expression in our behavior towards
Mongol and Negro. It is equally true that in Europe the Slavic world is
moved to its depths by the Pan-Slavistic idea; that Germany has been
carried far on a wave of admiration for the excellence of the great
Teutonic race, and that England rests serene on the unshaken conviction
of the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon; and yet the emotional value of
these ideas does not make clear their rational values.
The term “racial instinct” expresses the ideas that there are definite,
insurmountable antipathies based on differences of appearance, and
that certain hereditary mental characteristics belong to each type of
man.
In Europe, the occurrence of local types has led to the concept of
distinct races, identified with certain national groups: the blond
representing the Teuton; the heavy, darker type, the Slav; and the
Mediterranean, the typical Spaniard or Italian.
On account of the peculiar position of the blond type, it has been
pre-eminently identified with the so-called Aryan race. As is well
known, most of the languages of Europe are derived from one ancient
form of speech,--the parental Aryan language. Slavic, Teutonic, and
Romance languages are the most important modern divisions of this
group in Europe, to which Greek, Celtic, Lithuanian, and Albanian also
belong. Among European languages, only Finnish and its relatives on the
Baltic, Magyar, Turkish, and Basque, do not belong to this extended
group. Aryan languages are spoken by people of the most diverse racial
types; nevertheless there are scientists who try to identify the blond
north-European with the ancient pure Aryan, and who claim for the race
pre-eminent hereditary gifts, because the people who at present and in
our concept are the leaders of the world speak Aryan languages.
Scientific proof of these contentions cannot be given. They are rather
fancies of north-European dreamers, based on the complaisant love of
the achievements of the blondes. No one has ever proved either that all
the Aryans of the earliest times were blondes, or that people speaking
other languages may not have been blond, too; and nobody would be
able to show that the great achievements of mankind were due to blond
thinkers. On the contrary, the men to whom we are indebted for the
basic advance of civilization belong to the dark-complexioned human
types of the Orient, Greece, and Italy, and not to our blond ancestors.
How deep and emotional a hold this idea has in the minds of some
scientists appears when some investigators try to show us that Christ
cannot have been a Jew by descent, but must have been an Aryan.