PART III
THE DEVELOPMENT OF NATIONAL MIND AND CHARACTER
Chapter Xiv
Introductory
In the first Part of this book we have reviewed the most general
principles of collective mental life, beginning with the unorganised
crowd as affording the simplest example, considering then an army
as the simplest example of the profound modifications of collective
mental life effected by organisation of the group. In the second
Part we passed on to apply these principles to the understanding of
the mind of the nation as the most important, complex, and interesting
of all types of the group mind.
In the third Part I take up the consideration in a general
way of the processes by which national mind and character are
gradually built up and shaped in the long course of ages. For, just
as we cannot understand individual minds, their peculiarities and
differences, without studying their development, so we cannot hope
to understand national mind and character and the peculiarities and
differences of nations, without studying the slow processes through
which they have been built up in the course of centuries.
In an earlier chapter, in connexion with the question of the
importance of homogeneity of mental qualities as a condition of the
existence of the national mind, I argued that race has really considerable
influence in moulding the type of national mind. I recognized
that differences of innate qualities between races, at any rate between
allied subraces, are not great, and that they can be, and
generally are, almost completely over-ridden and obscured in each
individual by the moulding power of the social environment in which
he grows up; but I urged that these racial qualities are very persistent,
and that they exert a slight but constant pressure or bias upon the
development of all that constitutes social environment, upon the
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forms of institutions, customs, traditions, and beliefs of every kind,
so that the effect of such slight but constant bias accumulates from
generation to generation, and in the long run exerts an immense
influence.
One way of treating the part played by the racial mental qualities
in the development of the national mind would be to attempt to
define the racial or innate peculiarities of the peoples existing at
the present time, and to assume that these peculiarities were produced
in the remote past, before the formation of nations began,
and that they have persisted unchanged throughout the period of
the development of nations. Something of this sort was proposed
by Walter Bagehot in his Physics and Politics. He distinguished in
the development of peoples two great periods—on the one hand the
race-making period, which roughly corresponds to the whole prehistoric
period, and on the other hand the nation-making period,
which roughly corresponds to the historic period. This distinction
has undoubtedly a certain validity.
It seems probable that man was evolved from his prehuman
ancestry as a single stock, probably a stock somewhat widely distributed
in the heart of the Eurasian continent, or possibly in Africa
according to the recent view of some authors, or in the area which
is now the Indian Ocean. If this be true, it follows that the
differentiation of the mental and physical qualities of the principal
human races, the differentiation of the white and black and yellow
and brown races, as well as of the chief subraces, such as the
Semitic, the races of Europe—the Homo Europaeus, Alpinus and
Mediterraneus—was the work of the immensely prolonged prehistoric
period. For these races and subraces, as we now know them, seem
to have been in existence and to have had recognisably and substantially
the same leading qualities, both mental and physical, that
they now have, before the beginning of the historic period.
The racial differentiation during the prehistoric period must
have been much greater than during the historic period; and this
was not only because the former period was immensely longer, but
also because, in all probability, the rate of racial change has been
on the whole slower in the historic period.
The differentiation of racial types in the prehistoric period must
have been in the main the work of differences of physical environment,
operating directly by way of selection, by way of the adaptation
of each race to its environment through the extermination of the
strains least suited to exist under those physical conditions. But
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this process, this direct moulding of racial types by physical environment,
must have been well nigh arrested as soon as nations began
to form. For the formation of nations implies the beginning of
civilisation; and civilisation very largely consists in the capacity
of a people to subdue their physical environment, or at least to
adapt the physical environment to men’s needs to a degree
that renders them far less the sport of it than was primitive man;
it consists, in short, in replacing man’s natural environment by an
artificial environment largely of his own choice and creation.
In a second and perhaps even more important way, the formation
of nations with the development of civilisation modified and weakened
the moulding influence of the physical environment; namely,
it introduced social co-operation in an ever increasing degree, so that
the perpetual struggle of individuals and of small family groups
with one another and with nature was replaced by a co-operative
struggle of large communities against the physical environment
and with one another. And in this process those members
of each community who, by reason of weakness, general incapacity,
or other peculiarity, would have been liable to be eliminated under
primitive conditions became shielded in an ever increasing degree
by the powers of the stronger and more capable against the selective
power of nature and against individual human forces. And, although
within the community the rivalry of individuals and families still
went on, it was no longer so much a direct struggle for existence, but
rather became more and more a struggle for position in the social
scale; and failure in the struggle no longer necessarily meant death,
or even incapacity to leave an average number of descendants. That
is to say, primitive man’s struggle for existence against the forces
of nature and against his fellow men, which made for racial evolution
and differentiation through survival of those fittest to cope with
various environments, tended to be replaced by a struggle which no
longer made for racial evolution towards a higher type, and which
may even have made for race-deterioration, at the same time that
civilisation and national organisation continued to progress.
We may, then, recognise a certain truth in Bagehot’s distinction
of two great periods, the race-making and the nation-making periods.
Nevertheless, it would not be satisfactory to follow the course suggested
above and simply assume certain racial characters as given
fixed data without further consideration. For, firstly, it is interesting
and perhaps not altogether unprofitable to indulge in speculations
on the race-making processes of the prehistoric period. Secondly,
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although it seems likely that racial changes have been in the main
slower and on the whole relatively slight in the historic period, yet
they have not been altogether lacking; and, in proportion to their
magnitude, such changes as have occurred have been of great
importance for national life; and changes of this kind are still
playing their part in shaping the destinies of nations. Possible racial
changes of mental qualities must therefore be considered, when we
seek to give a general account of the conditions of the development
of nations.
On the other hand, we must reject root and branch the crude
idea, which has a certain popular currency, that the development
of civilisation and of nations implies a parallel evolution of individual
minds. That idea we have already touched upon and rejected in a
previous chapter, where we arrived at the conclusion that there is
no reason to suppose the present civilised peoples to be on the
whole innately superior to their barbaric ancestors.
If we use the word ‘tradition’ in the widest possible sense to denote
all the intellectual and moral gains of past generations, in so far as
they are not innate but are handed on from one generation to another
by the personal intercourse of the younger with the older generation,
and if we allow the notion of tradition to include all the institutions
and customs that are passed on from generation to generation, then
we may class all the changes of a people that constitute the evolution
of a national character under the two heads: evolution of innate
qualities and evolution of traditions. Using the word ‘tradition’ in
the wide sense just now indicated, the traditions of a people may
be said to include the recognised social organisation of the whole
people into classes, castes, clans, phratries, or groups of any kind,
whose relations to one another and whose place in the national
system are determined by law, custom and conventions of various
kinds. This part of the total tradition is relatively independent of the
rest, and we may usefully distinguish the development of such
social organisation as social evolution—giving to the term this restricted
and definite meaning—and we may set it alongside the
other two conceptions as of co-ordinate value.
If we thus set apart for consideration under a distinct head the
evolution of social organisation, the rest of the body of national
traditions may be said to constitute the civilisation of a people.
For the civilisation of a people at any time is essentially the sum of
the moral and intellectual traditions that are living and operative
among them at that particular time. We are apt in a loose way
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to consider the civilisation of a people to consist in its material
evidences; but it is only in so far as these material evidences, the
buildings, industries, arts, products, machinery, and so forth, are
the expression and outcome of its mental state that they are in any
degree a measure of its civilisation. We may realize this most
clearly by considering the case of a people on which the material
products of civilisation have been impressed from without. Thus
the peasants of India live amongst, and make use of, and benefit
materially by, the railways and irrigation works created by their
British rulers, and are protected from invasion and from internal
anarchy by the British military organisation and equipment; and
they play a subordinate though essential part in the creation and
maintenance of all these material evidences of civilisation. But
these material evidences are not the expression of the mental state
of the peoples of India, and form no true part of their civilisation;
and, in fact, they affect their civilisation astonishingly little; although
if these products of a higher civilisation should be maintained for
a long period of time they would, no doubt, produce changes of their
civilisation, probably tending in some degree to assimilate their
mental state to that of Western Europe.
We may, then, with advantage distinguish between the social
organisation and the civilisation of a people. In doing so we are of
course making an effort of abstraction, which, though it results in
an artificial separation of things intimately related, is nevertheless
useful and therefore justifiable. In a similar way the progress of civilisation
may be distinguished from social evolution. Social evolution
is profoundly affected by the progress of civilisation, and in turn
reacts powerfully upon it; for any given social organisation may
greatly favour or obstruct the further progress of civilisation.
There could have been no considerable advance of civilisation without
the evolution of some social organisation; but that the two things
are distinct is clear, when we reflect that there may be a very complex
social organisation, implying a long course of social evolution, among
a people that has hardly the rudiments of civilisation. Extreme
instances of social organisation in the absence of civilisation are
afforded by some animal societies—for example, societies of ants,
bees, and wasps. Among peoples, the native tribes of Australia illustrate
the fact most forcibly. They are at the very bottom of the
scale of civilisation; yet it has been discovered that they have a
complex and well-defined social organisation, which can only
have been achieved by a long course of social evolution. These
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people are divided into totem clans, which clans are grouped in
phratries, each individual being born, according to well recognised
rules, into a clan of which he remains a life-long member; and his
membership in the clan and phratry involves certain well-defined
rights and obligations, and well-defined relations to other persons,
especially as regards marriage; and these rights, obligations and
relations are recognised and rigidly maintained throughout immense
areas.
On the other hand, although no people has attained any considerable
degree of civilisation without considerable social organisation,
nevertheless we can at least imagine a people continuing to
enjoy a high civilisation, practising and enjoying much of the arts,
sciences, philosophy, and literature, which we regard as the essentials
of civilisation, yet retaining a bare minimum of social organisation.
And this state of affairs is not only conceivable, but is held up as a
practicable ideal by philosophical anarchists such as Tolstoi and
Kropotkin; and it is, I think, true to say that the American nation
presents an approximation to this condition.
Again, a very high state of civilisation may co-exist with a
relatively primitive social organisation. Thus the civilisation of
Athens in the classical age was equal to, or even superior to, our own
in many respects; yet the social organisation was very much less
highly evolved. It had hardly emerged from the barbaric patriarchal
condition, and had at its foundation a cruel system of slavery[105];
and it had also another great point of inferiority—namely, the very
restricted number of persons included in the social system. These
deficiencies, this rudimentary character, of its social organisation
was the principal cause of the instability and brief endurance of that
brilliant civilisation.
We have so far distinguished three principal factors or groups
of factors in the evolution of national mind and character: (1) Evolution
of innate or racial qualities: (2) Development of civilisation:
(3) Social evolution, or the development of social organisation.
Now the first two of these we may with advantage divide under
two parallel heads, the heads of intellectual and moral development.
No doubt, the intellectual and the moral endowment of a people
continually react on each other; and many of the manifestations of
the national mind are jointly determined by the intelligence and the
morality of a people; especially perhaps is this true of their religion
and their art. Nevertheless, it is clear that we can distinguish pretty
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sharply between the intellectual and the moral traditions of a people;
and that these may vary independently of one another to a great
extent. A rich and full intellectual tradition may go with a moral
tradition of very low level, as in the Italian civilisation of the
renascence; and a very high moral tradition with a relative poverty
of the intellectual, as in the early days of the puritan settlements
of New England.
The same distinction between the intellectual and the moral level
is harder to draw in the case of the racial qualities of a people, but
it undoubtedly exists and is valid in principle, no matter how difficult
in practice to deal with.
We have, then, to distinguish five classes of factors, five heads
under which all the factors which determine the evolution of national
character may be distributed. They are
| (1) Innate moral disposition | } racial qualities. | |
| (2) Innate intellectual capacities | ||
| (3) Moral tradition | } national civilisation. | |
| (4) Intellectual tradition | ||
| (5) Social organisation. | ||
Every nation that has advanced from a low level to a higher
level of national life has done so in virtue of development or progress
in one or more of these respects. And a principal part of our task,
in considering the evolution of national mind and character, is to
assign to each of these its due importance and its proper place in
the whole complex development.
The distinction between the racial and the traditional level of
a people is too often ignored; chiefly, perhaps, for the reason that
it has usually been assumed that whatever is traditional becomes
innate and racial through use. Since in recent years it has been
shown that this assumption is very questionable, a number of
authors have recognised the importance of the distinction as regards
the intellectual qualities of a people; but, as regards the moral
qualities, the distinction is still very generally overlooked.
The neglect of these distinctions between the innate and the
traditional has in great measure vitiated much of the keen dispute
that has been waged over the question whether the progress of
civilisation depends primarily on intellectual or on moral advance.
For example, T. H. Buckle and Benjamin Kidd agreed in recognising
clearly the distinction between the innate and the traditional intellectual
status of a people; and they agreed in maintaining that we
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have no reason to believe that in the historic period any people has
made any considerable advance in innate intellectual capacity;
and that any such advance, if there has been any, has not been a
principal factor in the progress of civilisation. But they differed
extremely in that Buckle maintained that the primary cause of
all progress of national life is the improvement of its intellectual
tradition, that is, increase in the quantity and the worth of its stock
of knowledge and accepted beliefs, and improvements in methods of
intellectual operation; and he held that improvements of morals and
of social organisation have been secondary results of these intellectual
gains. Kidd, on the other hand[106], maintained that the progress of
European civilisation has been primarily due to an improvement of
the morality of peoples; that this has led to improvement of social
organisation; and that this in turn has been the essential condition
of the progress of the intellectual tradition, because it has secured
a stable social environment, a security of life, a free field for the
exercise of intellectual powers; in the absence of which conditions
the intellectual powers of a nation cannot effectively organise
themselves and apply themselves to the understanding of man and
nature, or to securing the traditional perpetuation of the gains which
they may sporadically achieve. We have to examine these views
and try to determine what truth they contain, and to show that they
are not wholly opposed but can in some measure be combined.
I propose to make first a very brief critical survey of some of
the most notable attempts that have been made to account for racial
qualities, and I shall try to supplement and harmonise these as far as
possible. We may with advantage consider at the outset the race-making
period, and afterwards go on to consider changes of racial
qualities in the historic period. This Part of the book is necessarily
somewhat speculative, but its interest and importance for our main
topic may justify its inclusion.
Chapter Xv
THE RACE-MAKING PERIOD
Let us now see what can be said about the process of racial differentiation
which, as we saw in the foregoing chapter, was in its main
features accomplished in the prehistoric or race-making period. We
cannot hope to reach many positive conclusions, but rather merely
to discuss certain possibilities and probabilities in regard to the
main factors of the differentiation of racial mental types.
I would point out at once that the answer to be given to the
question—Are acquired qualities transmitted? Are the effects of
use inherited? is all important for our topic. I do not propose to
discuss that difficult question now. I will merely say that the present
state of biological science makes it seem doubtful whether such
inheritance takes place, and that, although the question remains
open, we are not justified in assuming an affirmative answer; that,
therefore, we must not be satisfied with any explanation of racial
and national characteristics based upon this assumption; and in the
following discussion I shall provisionally assume the truth of the
Neo-Darwinian principle that acquired modifications are not transmitted.
Assuming, as we must, that all peoples are descended from some
one original stock, the problem is—Can anything be said of the
conditions which have determined the differentiation of races of
different mental constitutions, of the development of racial qualities
which, having become relatively fixed, have led to the evolution of
different types of national organisation and culture? And especially
we have to consider the conditions which have produced, and may
still produce in the future, the qualities that make for the progress
of nations.
We must suppose a certain social organisation to have obtained
among that primitive human stock from which all races have been
evolved, probably an organisation in small groups based on the
family under the rule and leadership of a patriarch.
It is possible that considerable divergences of social organisation
may have taken place, without any advance towards civilisation;
such divergences of social organisation must have tended to
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divert the course of mental evolution along various lines; but they
must themselves have had their causes; they cannot in themselves
be the ultimate causes of divergence of racial mental types.
Such ultimate causes of the differentiation of mental qualities
must have been of two orders only, so far as I can see: (1) differences
of physical environment; (2) spontaneous variations in different
directions of the innate mental qualities of individuals, especially of
the more gifted and energetic individuals of each people.
In the mental evolution of animals these two factors are not
distinguishable. We may say that the main and perhaps the sole
condition of their evolution is the selection by the physical environment
of spontaneous favourable variations and mutations of innate
mental qualities; if we include under the term physical environment
of the species all the other animal and vegetable species of
its habitat. For it is only by its selective influence upon individual
variations that physical environment can determine differentiation
of races.
But with man the case is different; spontaneous variation not
only provides the new qualities which, by determining the survival
of the individual in his struggle for existence with the physical
environment, secure their own perpetuation by transmission to the
after coming generations. The new qualities determine mental evolution
in another manner, by a mode of operation which is almost
completely absent in animal evolution; namely, the spontaneous
variations create a social environment which profoundly modifies
the influence of the physical environment, and itself becomes a
principal factor in the determination of the trend of racial evolution.
Man is distinguished from the animals above all things by his
power of learning. Whereas the behaviour of animals, even of the
higher ones, consists almost entirely of purely instinctive actions,
innate modes of response to a limited number of situations; man
has an indefinitely great capacity for acquiring new modes of
response, and so of adapting himself in new and more complex ways
to an almost indefinite variety of situations. And his new mental
acquisitions are not made only by the slow process of adaptation
in the light of his own individual experience of the consequences of
behaviour of this and that kind; as are most of the few acquisitions
of the animals. By far the greater part of the mental stock-in-trade
by which his behaviour is guided is acquired from his fellow men;
it represents the accumulated experience of all the foregoing
generations of his race and nation. Man’s life in society, together
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with the great plasticity of his mind, its great capacity for new
adaptations, secures him this enormous advantage; the two things
are necessarily correlated. Without the plasticity of mind, his life
in society would benefit him relatively little. Many animals that
lead a social life in large herds or flocks are not superior, but rather
inferior, in mental power to animals that lead a more solitary life;
and indeed this seems to be generally true, as we see on comparing
generally the herbivorous gregarious animals with the solitary
carnivores that prey upon them. The social life of such animals,
rendering individual intelligence less necessary for protection and
escape from danger, tends actually against mental development.
On the other hand, man’s great plastic brain would be of comparatively
little use to him if he lived a solitary unsocial life. His great
brain is there to enable him to assimilate and make use of the
accumulated experience, the sum of knowledge and morality, which
is traditional in the society into which he is born a member; that is
to say, the development of social life, which depended so much upon
language and for the forwarding of which language came into
existence, must have gone hand in hand with the development of
the great brain, which enables full advantage to be secured from
social co-operation and which, especially, renders possible the
accumulation of knowledge, belief, and traditional sentiment.
Now this traditional stock of knowledge and morality has been
very slowly accumulated, bit by bit; and every bit, every least new
addition to it, has been a difficult acquisition, due in the first
instance to some spontaneous variation of some individual’s mental
structure from the ancestral type of mental structure. That is to
say, throughout the evolution of civilisation, progress of every
kind, increase of knowledge or improvement of morality, has been
due to the birth of more or less exceptional individuals, individuals
varying ever so slightly from the ancestral type and capable, owing
to this variation, of making some new and original adaptation of
action, or of perceiving some previously undiscovered relation
between things.
These new acquisitions, first made by individuals, are, if true or
useful, sooner or later imitated or accepted by the society of which
the original-minded individual is a member, and then, becoming
incorporated in the traditional stock of knowledge and morality,
are thereby placed at the service of all members of that society.
Thus favourable spontaneous variations do not, as with the
animals, render possible mental evolution merely by conducing to
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the survival of, and the perpetuation of the qualities of, those
individuals in whom the variations occur. They may do this, or
they may not; but, in addition and more importantly, they contribute
to the stock of traditional knowledge and morality, and so
raise the social group as a whole in the scale of civilisation; they
render it more capable of successfully contending against other
groups and against the adverse influence of the physical environment;
and they promote the solidarity of the group by adding to
its stock of common tradition; thus the acquisitions of each member
benefit the group as a whole and all its members, quite apart from
any philanthropic purpose or intention of producing such a result.
The achievement of this unconscious undesigned solidarity of
human societies is one of two great steps in the evolution of the human
race by which the process is rendered very different from, and is
raised to a higher plane than, the mental evolution of the animal
world. The second and still more important step is one which is only
just beginning to be achieved in the present age; I shall have to touch
on it in a later chapter.
The original or primary divergence of mental type between any
two peoples must, then, have been due to these fundamental causes—namely,
differences of physical environment and spontaneous variations
of mental structure, the latter adding to the traditional stock
of knowledge and belief, of moral precepts and sentiments.
Intellectual or moral divergence produced by these two primary
causes would tend to determine the course of social evolution along
different lines and so to produce different types of social organisation.
And different social organisations thus produced would then react
upon the moral and intellectual life of the people to produce further
divergence; for example, one type of social organisation determined
by physical environment, say a well developed patriarchal system,
may have made for progress of intellect and morals; another, say
a matriarchal organisation, or one based on communal marriage,
may have tended to produce stagnation.
As social evolution proceeded and brought about more extensive
and more complex forms of social organisation, which included, within
any one society or group, larger numbers of individuals in more
effective forms of association, social organisation must have assumed
a constantly increasing importance as a condition of mental evolution
relatively to all other factors, especially as compared with the
influence of physical environment; until, in the complex societies
of the present time, it has an altogether predominant importance.
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This truth is concisely stated in the old dictum that “in the infancy
of nations men shape the State; in their maturity the State shapes the
men.” Accordingly, in considering the mental evolution of peoples
we must never lose sight of the influence of social organisation.
It follows that the conditions of the mental evolution of man are immensely
more complex than those of the mental evolution of animals.
We must recognise not only the selection, through survival in
the struggle for existence, of new mental qualities arising as spontaneous
variations of individual mental structure. This, which is
the only, or almost the only, process at work in the mental evolution
of animals, is immensely complicated and overshadowed in importance
by two processes. The first is the accumulation of knowledge
and morality in traditional forms. The traditional accumulation,
which so far outweighs the mental equipment possible to any individual
isolated from an old society, not only constitutes in itself a
most important evolutionary product, but it modifies profoundly
the conditions of evolution of the individual innate qualities of mind;
for example, the greater and more valuable the stock of traditional
knowledge and morality becomes, the more does fitness to survive
consist in the capacity to assimilate this knowledge and to conform
to these higher moral precepts, the less does it consist in the purely
individualistic qualities, such as quickness of eye and ear, fleetness
of foot, or strength and skill of hand. Secondly, the processes of
natural selection are complicated by the social evolution, which
tends progressively to abolish the struggle for existence between
individuals, and to replace it by a struggle between groups; in which
struggle success is determined not only by the qualities of individuals,
but also very largely by the social organisation and by the traditional
knowledge and morality of the groups.
Each variety of the human species, each race considered as a
succession of individuals having certain innate mental qualities, has
been evolved, then, not merely under the influence of the physical
environment, like the animal species, but also and to an ever increasing
extent under the influence of the social environment. The
social environment we regard as consisting of two parts; namely,
the social organisation and the body of social tradition; for these,
though interdependent and constantly interacting, may yet with
advantage be kept apart in thought. We must, then, bear constantly
in mind the fact that man creates for himself an environment
which becomes ever more complex and influential, overshadowing
more and more in importance the physical environment.
Here I would revert to some points of the analogy, drawn in
Chapter X, between the mind of a nation and that of an individual.
The mind of an individual human being develops by accumulating
the results of his experience; and so does that of a people. In
this respect the analogy holds good. But the development possible
to an individual is strictly limited in two ways. First, by the short
duration of the material basis of his mental life; secondly by the
extent of his innate capacities. Neither of these limitations applies
to the national mind. Its material basis is in principle immortal,
because its individual components may be incessantly renewed; and
its development has no limit set to it by its innate capacities, because
these may be indefinitely extended and improved. In these respects
the national mind resembles the species rather than the individual.
The development of the national mind, and of the minds of those
who share in the mental life of the nation, thus combines the
methods and advantages of the development of individuals and of
species, methods which are essentially different. The result is that
the mental development of man, since his social life began, has been
radically different from that of the animals; it has been a social process;
it has been the evolution of peoples rather than of individuals.
The evolution of man as an individual has been wholly subordinated
to that of peoples; and it is incapable of being understood or profitably
considered apart from the development of the group mind.
Assuming, as we must, that all the races of men are derived from
a common stock, it is obvious, I think, that the first differentiation of
racial types was determined almost exclusively by differences of
physical environment, and that the other conditions only very slowly
developed and did not assume their predominant importance until
the time which may be roughly defined as the beginning of the
historic or nation-making period.
Physical environment affects the mental qualities of a people
in three ways: firstly, it directly influences the minds of each
generation; secondly, it moulds the mental constitution by natural
selection, adapting the race to itself; thirdly, it exerts indirect
influence by determining the occupations and modes of life and,
through these, the social organisation of a people. We may consider
these three modes of influence in turn.
There has been much speculation on the direct influence of the
physical environment in moulding the mental type of a people, but
little or nothing can be said to be established.
There is a fair concensus of opinion to the effect that what we
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may call climate exerts an important influence. In climate the two
factors recognised as of chief importance are temperature and
moisture. High temperature combined with moisture certainly tends
to depress the vital activity of Europeans and to render them
indolent, indisposed to exertion of any kind. On the other hand,
high temperature combined with dryness of the atmosphere seems
to have the effect of rendering men but little disposed to continuous
activity, and yet capable of great efforts; it tends to produce a
violent spasmodic activity. A cold climate seems to dispose towards
sustained activity and, when combined with much moisture, to a
certain slowness.
These effects, which we ourselves experience and which we see
produced upon other individuals on passing from one climate to
another, we seem to see impressed upon many of the races which
have long been subjected to these climates; for example, the slow
and lazy Malays have long occupied the hottest moistest region of
the earth. The Arabs and the fiery Sikhs may be held to illustrate
the effect of dry heat. The Englishman and the Dutchman seem
to show the effects of a moist cool climate, a certain sluggishness
embodied with great energy and perseverance.
In these and other cases, in which the innate temperament of
a people corresponds to the effects directly induced by their climate,
it seems natural to suppose that the innate temperament has been
produced by the transmission and accumulation from generation
to generation of the direct effects of the climate. The assumption
is so natural that it has been made by almost every writer who has
dealt with the question. And these instances of conformity of the
temperament of peoples to the direct effects of climate are sometimes
offered as being among the most striking evidences of the reality
of hereditary transmission of acquired qualities; and the argument
is reinforced by instances of what seem to be similar results produced
by climate on physical types. Thus, it is said that in North
America a race characterised by a new specific combination of
mental and physical qualities is being rapidly formed; and it
seems to be well established that long slender hands are among
these features; for in Paris a specially long slender glove is made
every year in large quantities for the American market. Again, we
see apparently a change of physical type in the white inhabitants
of Australia. They seem to be becoming taller and more slender
‘cornstalks’; and this is commonly regarded as the direct effect of
climate.
Now, that a new race or subrace with a specific combination of
qualities should be forming in America is certainly to be expected
from the fact that the intimate blending of a number of European
stocks has been going on for some generations. But what gives
special support to the assumption that these new qualities are the
direct effects of climate is that these qualities, the physical at least,
seem to be approximations to the type of the Red Indians, the
aboriginal inhabitants. And, it is said, this approximation of type
can only be due to hereditary accumulation of the direct effects of
the climate on individuals.
Another way in which climate has been held to modify racial
mental qualities by direct action is through the senses, especially
the eye. M. Boutmy, in his book on the English people makes
great play with this principle[107]. He points out that the thick hazy
state of the air, so common in our islands, renders vague and dull
all outlines and colours, so that the eye does not receive that wealth
of well-defined hues and forms which give so great a charm to some
more sunny lands, such as the Mediterranean coast lands. Hence,
he says, the senses become or remain relatively dull, and the sense-perceptions
slow and relatively indiscriminating. Such relative deficiency
of aesthetic variety and richness in the appearance of the
outer world produces secondarily a further and deeper modification
of mental type. In the lands where nature surrounds man with an
endless variety of rich and pleasing scenes, he can find sufficient
satisfaction in mere contemplation of the outer world; and, when he
takes to art production, he tends merely to reproduce in more or
less idealised forms the objects and scenes he finds around him; his
art tends to be essentially objective. On the other hand, in the dull
northern climes, man has not ever at hand these sources of satisfaction
in the mere contemplation of the outer world; consequently
he is driven back upon his own nature, to find his satisfactions in a
ceaseless activity of mind and body, but chiefly of the latter. Hence,
races so situated are characterised by great bodily activity and their
art and literature are essentially subjective. The thick air, the
monotony of vague form and colour, drive the mind to reflection
upon itself; and in art the objects of nature serve merely as symbols
by aid of which the mind seeks to express its own broodings. “The
painter paints with the intentions of the poet, the poet describes or
sings with the motives of the psychologist or moralist. All the
literature of imagination of the English shows us the internal reacting
[Pg 216]
incessantly upon the external with a singular power of transfiguration
and interpretation[108].” Hence also poetry is the privilege of a few
rare spirits and is for them the product of deep reflection, not a
simple lyrical expression in which all can equally share.
It is certainly true that climate tends to produce these effects
by its direct action on individuals. Anyone who has lived for a time
in the southern climes must have noted these effects upon himself.
But we have no proof that the effects of climate are directly
inherited. It suffices to suppose that the direct effects are imposed
afresh by the climate on the minds of each generation. This view is
borne out by the fact that two races may live for many generations
in the same climate and yet remain very different in temperament
in these respects; for example the Irish climate is very similar to
the English, perhaps even more misty and damp; yet the Irish have
much more wit and liveliness than the English. And in every case
in which adaptation to physical environment has clearly become
innate or racial, an explanation can be suggested in terms of selection
of spontaneous variations, or of crossing of races. Thus, the approximation
of the American people to the type of the aboriginals, if it
is actual, and some observers deny it, may well be due to the small
infusion of the native blood which has admittedly taken place. It
may well be that certain qualities of the Red Indian, for example, the
straight dark hair and prominent cheek bones, are what the biologists
call ‘dominant characters’ when the Indian is crossed with the
European; that is, qualities which always assert themselves in the
offspring, to the exclusion of the corresponding quality of the other
race involved in the cross. If that is so, a very small proportion
of Indian blood would suffice to make these features very common
throughout the population of America. As an exception to the supposed
law of direct hereditary adaptation to climate take the colour
of the skin. The black negroes live in the hot moist regions of Africa,
and it has been said that pigmentation is the hereditary effect of
a hot moist climate. But there are men of a different race who have
long lived in an equally hot and moist climate, but who do not show
this effect—namely, tribes in the heart of Borneo, right under the
equator, whose skins are hardly darker than the average English
skins and less dark than the Southern Europeans’. Take again the
indolence of the peoples of warm hot climates and the energy of
peoples of colder climates. These certainly seem to be racial qualities;
but their distribution is adequately explained by the indirect
[Pg 217]
effect of physical environment exerted by way of natural selection; and
these differences of energy afford the best illustration of such indirect
action of physical environment in determining racial mental qualities.
Before considering the question further, let us note yet another
way in which the physical environment affects men’s minds and has
been supposed directly to induce certain racial qualities. Buckle
pointed out with great force the influence on the mind of what he
called the external aspects of nature. He showed that where, as in
India and the greater part of Asia, the physical features of a country
are planned upon a very large scale; where the mountains are huge,
where rivers are of immense length and volume, where plains are of
boundless extent, and the sun very hot, there the forces of nature
are exerted with an intensity that renders futile the best efforts of
man, at any rate of man in a state of low civilisation, to cope with
them. In such countries men are exposed to calamities on an
enormous scale, great floods, violent storms and deluges of rain,
earthquakes, excessive droughts resulting in famine and plague; and
they are exposed to the attacks of many dangerous animal species,
which are bred by the great heat in the dense and unconquerable
forests. These disasters have repeatedly occurred on a scale such
that in comparison with them the recent earthquake in California
appears a mere trifle. Millions have been destroyed in a few hours
in some of the floods of the Yellow River of China.
The magnitude of these objects and the appalling and irresistible
character of such devastating forces produce, said Buckle, two
principal and closely allied effects upon the mind; they stimulate
the imagination to run riot in extravagant and grotesque fancies;
at the same time, they discourage any attempt to cope with these
great forces and to understand their laws, and thus keep men perpetually
in fearful uncertainty as to their fate; for they cannot hope
to control it by their own unaided efforts.
Hence, the encouragement of superstition; hence, the dominance
of a degrading religion of fear throughout the greater part of such
regions; hence, the supremacy of priests and religious orders and the
discouragement of scientific reasoning. Hence, in the arts, the
literature, and the religion of India, we see a dominant tendency to
the grotesque, the enormous, the fearful; we see gods portrayed
with many arms, with three eyes and terrible visages. The legends
of their heroes contain monstrous details, as that they lived for
many thousands or millions of years. “All this,” says Buckle, “is
but a part of that love of the remote, that straining after the infinite,
[Pg 218]
and that indifference to the present, which characterises every branch
of Indian intellect. Not only in literature, but also in religion and
in art, this tendency is supreme. To subdue the understanding, and
indulge the imagination, is the universal principle. In the principles
of their theology, in the character of their gods, and even in the
form of their temples, we see how the sublime and threatening
aspects of the external world have filled the mind of the people with
those images of the grand and the terrible, which they strive to
reproduce in a visible form, and to which they owe the leading
peculiarities of their national culture.”[109]
That these peculiarities of the mental life of such peoples are
causally related with those terrible aspects of nature is, I think,
sufficiently established by Buckle. But if we admit this, there
remain two questions: (1) Have these tendencies become innate
racial qualities? (2) If so, how have they been rendered innate?
Buckle did not raise these questions and offered no opinion in regard
to them. But he seems to have assumed that these tendencies have
become innate; and there is much to be said for that view. Yet, if
that could be shown conclusively, it still would not prove inheritance
of these acquired qualities. It may have resulted in some such way
as this: the physical environment stimulates the imagination, and it
represses the tendency to control imagination and superstition by
reason and calm inquiry after causes; acting thus upon successive
generations of men, it determines the peculiarities of the religious
system and of the art and literature of the people. Individuals in
whom the same tendencies are innately strong will then flourish
under such a system; whereas those whose innate tendencies are in
the direction of reason and scepticism will find the system uncongenial,
unfavourable for the exercise of their best powers; they will
fail to make their mark; they may, as in many instances of European
inquirers, actually have lost their lives or their liberty through the
religious zeal of those who maintain the traditional system. Thus
the social environment, working through long ages, may have
constantly determined a certain degree of selection of the innate
tendencies congenial to it, and a weeding out of the opposed tendencies;
until the former have predominated in the race[110].
We have here a very important principle which we must constantly
bear in mind—namely, that not only the physical environment, but
[Pg 219]
also the social environment, may determine the survival of those
temperaments and qualities of mind best fitted to thrive in it, and,
by handicapping those least fitted to it, may gradually bring the
mental qualities of the race into conformity with itself. We shall
later see other examples by which this principle is more clearly
illustrated.
We conclude that, while physical environment may act powerfully
upon the minds of individuals, moulding their acquired qualities
in the three ways noticed—namely, influencing the mind through
bodily habit, through the senses, and through the imagination—there
is no sufficient evidence that the acquired qualities so induced ever
become innate or racial characters by direct transmission. In those
instances in which the racial qualities approximate to these direct
effects of physical environment, it may well be because the physical
environment has brought about adaptation of the race by long
continued selection of individuals, or because it has determined
peculiarities of social environment, which in turn have brought about
adaptation of the racial qualities by long continued selection.
Chapter Xvi
THE RACE-MAKING PERIOD (continued)
We considered in our last chapter the principal modes in which
physical environment affects the character of a people—namely,
(1) influence on temperament exerted chiefly through climate acting
upon the bodily functions: (2) influence through the senses, exerting
secondary effects upon the higher mental processes: (3) direct
influence on the imagination. We concluded that these effects
become innate in some degree; though whether they are impressed
on the race by direct inheritance, or by processes of direct or of
social selection, or in all three ways, remains an open question.
We distinguished, besides these direct modes of influence, two
indirect modes by which physical environment affects the mind and
character of a people: (1) by its selective action on individuals apart
from its influence upon their minds: (2) by determining occupations
and social organisation. We may consider them in turn.
It is recognised, as I pointed out above, that the races inhabiting
hot moist countries are commonly indolent, while those of the
moderately cold and moist climates tend to be extremely active
and energetic.
This difference is well brought out by Mr Meredith Townsend in
an essay on the charm of Asia for the Asiatics[111]; and he is speaking
not of Asia in general but of Southern Asia. He says Asiatics “will
not, under any provocation, burden themselves with a sustained
habit of taking trouble. You might as well ask lazzaroni to behave
like Prussian officials.” After quoting Thiers’ description of the
immense labours of detailed administration which he supported
while minister of State, he says “No Asiatic will do that…. One
half the weakness of every Oriental government arises from the
impossibility of finding men who will act as M. Thiers did.” These
races, bred in the tropics, are in fact incurable lotus-eaters, their
chief desire is for the afternoon life or, as is commonly said of the
Malays throughout the Eastern Archipelago, they are great leg-swingers,
they prefer to undertake no labour more arduous than
[Pg 221]
sitting still swinging their legs. All this, though more or less true
of the tropical races in general, is pre-eminently true of those
inhabiting regions which are moist as well as hot, the Malays, the
Burmese, the Siamese, the Papuans, the Negroes of the African
jungle regions.
Such peoples have failed to acquire the energy which leads men
to delight in activity for its own sake, not merely because a hot
moist climate inclines directly to indolence, but rather because the
prime necessities of life are to be had almost without labour; the
heat dispenses with the necessity for clothing and shelter, while the
hot sun and the moisture provide an abundance of vegetable food
in response to a minimum of labour. Hence, no man perishes through
lack of energy to secure the prime necessities of life; and there has
been no great weeding out of the indolent by severe conditions of
life, such as alone can produce an innately energetic race, one that
loves activity for its own sake. For the same reason these same
peoples also exercise but little foresight, they are naturally improvident;
the abundance of nature renders it possible to survive
and propagate without any prudent provision for the future.
Contrast with these races the northerly races—in Asia the Japanese,
whose energy and industry we all recognise, and the northern
Mongols or Tartars, who have so often overrun and conquered with
fire and sword the less energetic peoples of the south, or the Goorkhas
or Pathans of the highlands of northern India. But more especially
contrast with them the English people. M. Boutmy rightly asserts
that “the taste for and the habit of effort must be regarded as the
most essential attribute, the profound and spontaneous quality, of
the race[112].” It is displayed in the English love of sport and adventure
and travel, especially in such recreations as mountain climbing,
which is pre-eminently an English sport; also throughout our social
life, in the intensity of commercial and industrial activity, often
carried on ardently by men far removed from any necessity of making
money. In our political life, where a vast amount of effort is constantly
expended in achieving comparatively small results, we
always seem to prefer to achieve any reform by the methods which
give scope to and demand the greatest amount of public activity
and effort. It is shewn also in the immense amount of public
service rendered without remuneration, for the mere love of
activity and the exercise of power. It is very striking in English
colonies in tropical lands, and has been no doubt an important
[Pg 222]
factor in our success in tropical administration and in
colonisation.
Boutmy is inclined to attribute to this love of activity, as a
secondary effect, the dislike of the mass of Englishmen for generalisations
and for theoretical construction; for, he says, these are the
results naturally achieved by the reflective mind, whereas the English
mind gets no time for reflection, its attention is perpetually drawn
off from general principles by its tendency to pursue some immediate
practical end. Hence, he says, abstraction is subordinated to practical
ends and does not soar for its own sake. This truth is well illustrated
by the fact that all our English philosophers, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke,
Mill, Bentham, Spencer, etc., have been practical moralists, and
have conducted their investigations always with an eye to concrete
applications to the conduct of the State or of private life.
Boutmy regards this love of activity, together with foresight
and self-control, as racial qualities engendered by the severity of
the climate, working chiefly by way of natural selection. In the
prehistoric period more especially, when man had little knowledge
of means of protection from climate and hardship such as have
been developed by civilised societies, those individuals who were
deficient in these qualities must have succumbed to the rigours
of the climate, leaving their more energetic fellows to propagate
the race.
That there is truth in the view is shown by the fact that the
degree to which the love of activity is developed seems to vary
roughly with the severity of the climate even among the closely
allied races of Europe. As we pass northward from the coast of the
Mediterranean, we find the quality more and more strongly marked;
and it is in accordance with this principle that the dominant power,
the leadership in civilisation, has passed gradually northwards in
the historic period. Civilisation first developed in the sub-tropical
regions, in which the abundance of nature first gave men leisure to
devote themselves to things of the mind, to contemplation and
inquiry; while the northern races were still battling as savages
against the inclemency of the climate, were still being ruthlessly
weeded out by the rigorousness of the physical environment, and so
were being adapted to it, that is to say, were being rendered capable
of sustained and vigorous effort. But, as the means of subduing
nature and of protecting himself against nature have been developed
by man, the dominance has passed successively northwards to
peoples whose innate energy and love of activity were more
[Pg 223]
highly developed in proportion to the severity of the selection
exerted upon many preceding generations.
The severe climate has not been the only cause of this evolution
of an energetic active type. No doubt military selection played its
part also. The Northern races of Europe, more particularly the
Nordic, the fair-haired long-headed race, underwent a prolonged
and severe process of such military group selection, before branches
of it settled in our island; and, among the qualities which must have
tended to success and survival in this process, energy and capacity
for prolonged and frequent effort, especially bodily effort, must have
been one of the chief. Still, even such group selection was probably
a secondary result of the direct climatic selection; for it must have
been the love of activity and enterprise that led these peoples perpetually
to wander, and so to come into conflicts with one another,
conflicts in which the more energetic would in the main survive
and the less energetic succumb. In part also it must have been
determined in the third and the most indirect manner in which
physical environment shapes racial qualities—namely, by determining
occupations and modes of life, and through these the
forms of social organisation, both of which then react upon the
racial qualities.
In illustration of this third mode of action of physical conditions,
let us take a striking difference of mental quality between the French
and the English peoples, and inquire how the difference has arisen;
a difference which is recognised by every capable observer who has
compared the two peoples and which has been of immense importance
in shaping the history of the modern world. I mean the greater
sociability of the French and the greater independence of the English,
a greater self-reliance and capacity for individual initiative. The
difference finds expression in every aspect of the national life of the
two peoples. The sociability and sympathetic character of the French,
on which they justly pride themselves[113], is the inverse aspect of their
lack of the characteristic English qualities, independence and self-reliance.
In political life the difference appears in the centralised
organisation of the French nation, every detail of administration
being controlled by the central power through a rigidly organised
hierarchy of officials, in a way that leaves no scope for initiative
and independence in local administrations. Connected with this is
[Pg 224]
the almost universal desire of educated men to become state functionaries,
parts of the official machinery of administration, and the
consequent excessive growth of this class of persons.
The same quality of the French shows itself in the tendency to
prefer the monarchical rule of any man who shows himself capable
of ruling, a tendency which constantly besets the republican State
with a well-recognised danger. These are not local and temporary
manifestations, but have characterised the French nation throughout
the whole period of its existence. In the feudal period which preceded
its formation, there was considerable local independence; but the
feudal system was due to the dominant influence of Frankish chiefs,
of the same race as our Saxon forefathers, who overran most of
France as a ruling caste, but did not contribute any large element
to the population, and whose blood therefore has been largely
swamped. It appears in the greater violence among the French
people of collective mental processes, those of mobs, assemblies,
factions, and groups of all kinds. Each individual is easily carried
away by the mass; there are none to withstand the wave of contagion
and, by so doing, to break and check its force.
In England on the other hand political activity has always been
characterised by extreme jealousy of the central power, and by the
tendency to achieve everything possible by local action and voluntary
private effort. All reforms are initiated from the periphery, instead
of from the centre as in France. Great institutions, the universities,
schools, colleges, hospitals, railways, canals, docks, insurance companies,
even water supplies and telephones and many other things
which, it would seem, should naturally and properly be undertaken
by the State, or other official public body, have been generally set on
foot and worked by individuals or private associations of individuals.
Even vast colonial empires—India, Rhodesia, Canada, Sarawak,
Nigeria, North Borneo—have been in the main acquired through the
enterprise and efforts of individuals or associations of individuals;
the State only intervening when the main work has been accomplished.
In their religion, too, the English are markedly individualistic;
our numerous dissenting bodies have mostly dispensed with the
centralised official hierarchy which in Roman Catholic countries
mediates between God and man, and have insisted upon a direct
communion with God; and we have many little churches each of
which governs itself in absolute independence of every other. In
the family relations the same difference appears very strongly. The
[Pg 225]
French family regards itself, and is regarded by law, as a community
which holds its goods in common; each child has his legal claim
upon his share, relies upon his family for support in his struggle
with the world, and is encouraged by his parents to do so. In
the English family, on the other hand, the father is a supreme
despot, who disposes of his property as he wills. The children are
not encouraged to look for further support, when once they become
adult, but are taught that they must go out into the world to seek
their fortunes unaided. At an early age, the English boy is usually
thrust out of the family into the life of a school in which, by his
own efforts, he must find and keep his position among his fellows; and
he lives a life which, compared with that of the French boy, is one
of freedom and independence. In the distribution of the people on
the land we see the same difference of mental qualities revealed.
The French peasants are for the most part congregated sociably in
villages and small towns; the English farmer builds his homestead
apart upon his own domain. And this determines one of the most
striking differences in the aspect of the rural districts of both
countries. In the towns also the same tendencies are clearly shown;
in the separate little homes of the English and in the large houses
of the French shared by several families.
It is in the expansion in the world of the two peoples that the
effects of this difference are most clearly expressed and assume the
greatest importance. The English race has populated a vast proportion
of the surface of the world, and rules over one-fifth of
the total population. Whereas the French people, who have conquered
large areas, have never succeeded in permanently colonising
any considerable portion of their conquests and they have failed to
maintain their domination in many regions where they have for
a time established it. In every extra-European region where they
have come into conflict with the English race they have been worsted.
The secret of the difference in the expansion of the two peoples
is the difference of innate mental quality that we are considering,
enhanced by the differences of custom and of political and family
organisation engendered by it. For, like all other innate tendencies,
the two to which we are referring obtain accentuated expression
through moulding customs, institutions and social organisation in
ways which foster in successive generations just those tendencies of
which these institutions are themselves the traditional outcome and
expression. Thus, it is the individualistic nature of the political,
religious, and family organisation of the English people which, having
[Pg 226]
been engendered by innate independence of character and having in
turn accentuated it in each generation, has enabled the people to
achieve its marvels of colonisation and tropical administration. We
see these tendencies playing a predominant part in the history of
every British colony.
The difference was well brought out by Volney, a French observer
of the French and English colonists in the early days of the settlement
of North America. He wrote “The French colonist deliberates with
his wife upon everything that he proposes to do; often the plans fall
to the ground through lack of agreement.” “To visit one’s neighbours,
to chat with them, is for the French an habitual need so
imperious that on all the frontier of Louisiana and Canada you will
not find a single French colonist established beyond sight of his
neighbour’s home.” “On the other hand, the English colonist, slow
and taciturn, passes the whole day continuously at work; at breakfast
he coldly gives his orders to his wife; … and goes forth to labour….
If he finds an opportunity to sell his farm at a profit, he does so and
goes ten or twenty leagues further into the wilderness to make
himself a new home[114].”
It is the French authors themselves who have most insisted upon
this mental difference between the French and the English, which
seems to be determining a great difference in the destinies of the
two peoples; and most of them, while justly valuing the sympathetic
and sociable quality of the French mind, deeply regret its lack of
the English independence[115]. There has been no lack of speculation
and inquiry as to the origin and causes of this supremely important
difference. It is perhaps worth while to glance at some of these
attempts.
The most superficial attempt at explanation is to say that the
political and social institutions of the French people foster in each
individual the social tendencies in question, while the English institutions
develop their opposites. It is true, but it obviously
is not the explanation of the difference; for that we must go further
back, in order to find the origin of these differences of institution.
An explanation a little less superficial is that the domination of
the first Napoleon and the strong centralised system of administration
established by him accounts for the difference. But the permanence,
if not the very possibility, of that system, and the rise to
[Pg 227]
power of Napoleon himself, were but symptoms of this deep-lying
tendency of the French mind.
Buckle, recognising the profound difference which we are considering,
summed it up in the phrases ‘the dominance of the protective
spirit in France’ and of ‘the spirit of independence in England,’
He attributed the former partly to the influence of the Roman Catholic
Church in France with its centralised authoritative system, partly to
the long prevalence of the feudal system of social organisation, under
which every man was made to feel his personal dependence upon
the despotic power of an independent noble and was accustomed
to look to him for all initiative and guidance—was trained to
obey a despot, whose absolute jurisdiction and whose title to
his lands and rights was unchallenged. The system, he said,
culminated in the despotism of Louis XIV, by the subjection of the
previously independent nobles to the king, and was revived in a
different form, immediately after the great revolution, by Napoleon.
The dominance of the spirit of independence among the English
people he would explain also from the character of their political institutions
during recent centuries. After recounting the political history
of England from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, and after
showing how the people during that period repeatedly succeeded in
asserting its liberties against the encroachments of the kings, he wrote—“In
England the course of affairs, which I have endeavoured to trace
since the sixteenth century, had diffused among the people a knowledge
of their own resources and a skill and independence in the use
of them, imperfect indeed, but still far superior to that possessed by
any other of the great European countries,” But he was not wholly
satisfied with this explanation; he added—“Besides this, other
circumstances, which will be hereafter related, had, as early as the
eleventh century, begun to affect our national character and had
assisted in imparting to it that sturdy boldness, and at the same
time, those habits of foresight, and of cautious reserve, to which
the English mind owes its leading peculiarities.”
When we turn to his account of the primary cause of English
independence[116], we find that it was, in his view, that the feudal
system was established by William the Conqueror in a form different
from that obtaining on the continent. The nobles received their
lands directly from the king as grants, and all land owners were made
to acknowledge their direct obligation to him. The nobles were in
consequence too weak to set up their own power against that of
[Pg 228]
the king, and therefore they called the people to their aid in resisting
the power of the king; hence, the people early acquired rights and
privileges and the habit of organised resistance to the central
authority. “The English aristocracy, being thus forced by their own
weakness, to rely on the people, it naturally followed that the
people imbibed that tone of independence and that lofty bearing,
of which our civil and political institutions are the consequence,
rather than the cause. It is to this, and not to any fanciful peculiarity
of race, that we owe the sturdy and enterprising spirit for
which the inhabitants of this island have long been remarkable.”
“The practice of subinfeudation, became in France almost
universal.” The great lords subgranted parts of their lands to
lesser lords, and these again to others, and so on—“thus forming a
long chain of dependence, and, as it were, organising submission
into a system.” In this country, on the other hand, the practice was
actively checked. “The result was that by the fourteenth century
the liberties of Englishmen were secured,” and the spirit of independence
had become a part of the national character; that is to say,
Buckle maintained that three centuries of a different form of the
feudal system sufficed to produce this profound difference between
the French and English peoples.
Boutmy also fully recognises the important difference between
the innate qualities of the French and English; and he also would
explain it as the effect of political institutions since the middle ages,
but on lines somewhat different from Buckle’s—namely, that England
was early ruled by a king invested with great power, and inclined
to all the excesses of arbitrary rule. Hence the first need of the
people was to fortify themselves against his power. All the law of
England carries the imprint of this fear and this defiance. The
parliament has been set up against the crown, the judges against
parliament, and the jury against the power of the judges; and so,
ever since the conquest, individuals have been accustomed to think,
and to assert, that their persons, their purse, and their homes are
inviolable; and that the State is an enemy whose encroachments
must be resisted. This way of thinking has by long usage become
instinctive, increasing from generation to generation; until the horror
of servitude has become rooted in the Englishman’s temperament,
and the desire of independence has become a native and primary
passion.
Both Buckle and Boutmy agree, then, that the English love of
liberty is due to England having been conquered and ruled by a
[Pg 229]
powerful king, and that in France the opposite effect is to be attributed
to the same cause—namely, the influence of despotic rulers.
Surely this is to reverse cause and effect. If the English people had
not already possessed the sturdy spirit of independence when they
were conquered by the Norman, his strong centralised rule would
only have rendered them still less independent and would have
fostered the spirit of protection, as Buckle calls it. If the national
characters had been reversed in this respect, how easy it would have
been to show that the dependence of the English character was due
to the strong rule of a foreign despot, William of Normandy, while
the French independence was due to the existence in feudal times of
many centres of independent power, the nobles, each capable of
resisting the central authority! It was just because this spirit was
theirs already that the English people resisted their kings and were
able to secure their liberties by setting up institutions congenial to
their nature, institutions and customs which have fostered in each
individual and each generation the spirit of independence inherited
as a racial quality, and which possibly, though by no means certainly,
have further intensified the racial peculiarity.
Another cause for the difference of institutions is assigned by
Sir Henry Maine. He pointed to the great influence of Roman law upon
French institutions; he showed how the French lawyers, brought up
in the school of Roman law and holding the Roman Empire as the
ideal of a political organisation, threw all their weight upon the side
of the monarchy, and in favour of centralised administration. More,
perhaps, is due to this influence than to the causes assigned by Buckle
and Boutmy; but no one of these alleged causes, nor all of them
combined, can be accepted as adequate to explain the origin of the
difference of national characters. These authors fail also to make
clear how the political institutions can have modified character.
Boutmy frankly assumes use-inheritance, which, as I have said, is,
in the present state of science, an unwarrantable assumption.
That these qualities of the French and English peoples are innate
racial qualities, evolved during the race-making or prehistoric period,
is proved not only by the inadequacy of any assignable causes
operating during the historic period, but also by the fact that similar
qualities are described by the earliest historians as characterising
the ancestors, or the principal ancestral stocks, of the two peoples,
when they first appear in history. It is proved also by the fact that
other branches of the Nordic race have displayed similar qualities,
more especially the Dutch, and also the Normans, who, though they
[Pg 230]
have long formed part of the French State in the political sense, and
have suffered most of the political influences assigned as causes of
the spirit of protection, not only displayed the spirit of independence
in the highest degree ten centuries ago, but are admitted to be
still distinguished from the bulk of the French people by the greater
individualism of their character, just as they are still markedly
different in physical traits. They offer one of the best examples of
fixity of the physical characters of a race. No one can travel in
Normandy without being struck by the very marked and distinctive
physical type, which, according to all accounts, is that of the Norman
who came over to England with the Conqueror; and there is every
reason to believe that the mental qualities of the race have been
equally fixed and enduring.
Julius Caesar, Tacitus, and other early historians have described
for us the leading qualities of the Gauls on the one hand and of
the Teutons on the other. Fouillée in his Psychology of the French
People has brought together the evidence of these early historians
on the point; it shows that the Gauls and the Teutons were distinguished
very strongly by the same differences which obtain
between the French and English peoples at the present time,
especially the difference in respect of independence and initiative, the
origin of which we are seeking to explain. The Gauls were eminently
sociable people, sympathetic, emotional, demonstrative, vivacious,
very given to oratory and discussion, vain and moved by the desire
of glory, capable of great gallantry, but not of persevering effort in
face of difficulties, easily elated, easily cast down. And, what from
our point of view is especially important, they were readily led by
the chiefs, to whom they were attached by the bonds of personal
loyalty; and they were constantly banding themselves together in
large groups, under such leaders as attained popularity by their
superior qualities; and, again, they were dominated by the priestly
caste, the Druids. The Gauls even had those family institutions
which characterise the modern French and which have been
held to be the expression of their recently acquired qualities and
traditions; namely, the family had the character of a community
in which the wife had equal rights with the husband, and the children
were regarded also as members of the community having their equal
claims upon the family property. And society was bound together by
a system of patrons and clients, a system of personal dependence.
On the other hand, the Teutonic people, as described by the same
ancient authorities, displayed a decided individualism in virtue of
[Pg 231]
which their social organisation was more rudimentary. The father
was supreme in the family, and his power and property descended
to his eldest son. They were a more phlegmatic people, but of
great energy and persistence. Unlike the Gauls, they were dominated
by no priestly caste. The religious rites were conducted by the elder
men.
The Gauls were a mixed people of whom the minority, constituting
the nobility, were of the tall, fair, long-headed Nordic race, while the
majority, the mass of the common people, were of the short, dark,
round-headed race. And these, as the numerous observations of the
anthropologists show, constitute to-day the bulk of the population,
except in Normandy and the extreme north-east of France.
The Teutons or Germans of Caesar and Tacitus, on the other
hand, were of the fair Nordic race; and the Anglo-Saxons who
overran Britain, together with the Danes and Normans, who, with
the Saxons, formed the principal ancestral stock of the English, were
of this same Nordic race, or Northmen, as we may call them.
Now, it might seem useless to attempt to arrive at any conclusions
as to the influences that shaped these races in prehistoric times.
But an attempt has been made by one of the schools of French
sociologists, which, in spite of its speculative character, seems to be
worthy of attention. This is the school of ‘La Science Sociale,’
founded seventy years ago by Fredericq le Play and more recently
led by Ed. Demolins and H. de Tourville. Aided by a number
of ardent disciples, they have made a special study of the influence
of physical environment in determining occupations and social
organisation, and in moulding indirectly through these the mental
qualities of peoples. That is their great principle. They rightly, I
think, insist upon the relatively small importance of political institutions
in moulding a people, regarding them as secondary results of
the factors which, determining the private activities of men and
women at every moment of their lives from the cradle to the
grave, exert a far greater and more intimate influence upon their
minds. In two fascinating volumes[117] Demolins has summed up the
principal results of this school and attempted to trace the conditions
that have determined the differentiation of all the principal races
of the earth; and de Tourville has applied the same principles and
traced their effects in European history[118].
It is a curious fact that the work of the Le Play school is almost
[Pg 232]
entirely ignored by the other French sociologists and anthropologists.
It is seldom referred to by them, and outside France also it has not
received the attention it deserves. Much of it is of the nature of
brilliant speculation, and is regarded no doubt as unsound by many
more sober minds. Yet, when we attempt to understand the evolution
of man in the prehistoric period, brilliant speculation becomes
a necessary supplement to the work of measuring skulls and
digging up ruins, to which some less ingenious workers confine
themselves. And, of all the conclusions of the Le Play school, their
account of the origin of the distinctive characters of the Northmen
is one of the most striking and satisfactory; while their account of
the origins of the Gauls and of their peculiar social organisation and
well marked mental traits is also among their best work.
Chapter Xvii
THE RACE-MAKING PERIOD (continued)
The Influence of Occupations and of Race-crossing
In the foregoing chapter we noticed certain well-marked and generally
recognised differences of national character presented by the
French and the English peoples—namely, the greater independence
of the English, the greater sociability of the French people; and we
noted how these differences of national character show themselves
throughout the institutions of the two nations, and how they have
played a great part in determining the difference of their histories;
especially, we saw, how they are of prime importance, when we seek
to account for the greater expansion of the English people throughout
the world.
We then noticed several attempts that have been made, by
Buckle, Boutmy, Maine and others, to account for these differences
as results of differences of political institutions during the last
thousand years. We found that all these attempts fail, and that the
differences of political institutions, which these authors have regarded
as the causes of the differences of national character, are really the
expressions of a fundamental racial difference; that, in short, these
authors have inverted the true causal relation. I then drew attention
to the work of the school of Le Play and especially to its fundamental
principle—namely, that, while peoples are in a state of primitive
or lowly culture, their geographical or physical environment determines
their occupations and, through their occupations, their social
organisations, especially their domestic organisation; and that
particular modes of occupation and of social organisation of a
primitive people, persisting through many generations, mould the
innate qualities and form the racial character.
I said that two brilliant workers of the school—namely, Demolins
and de Tourville—had applied this principle to account for those
differences between the national characters of the French and
English peoples which we were considering. I have now to reproduce
their account in as condensed a form as possible.
Demolins claims to show that the short dark round-headed people,
who formed the bulk of the Gauls and also of the population
[Pg 234]
of modern France, came, in prehistoric times, from the Eurasian
steppe region, reaching France by way of the valley of the Danube,
a long narrow lowland region confined on the north by the Carpathians
and mountains of Bohemia, on the south by the Balkans and Swiss
Alps. He supposes that, for long ages, they had lived as pastoral
nomads on the steppes. By examining the nomads who still lead the
pastoral life on the steppes, he shows the kind of social organisation
to which this pastoral life inevitably gives rise and under which they
lived; and he traces the effects which such occupation and such social
organisation produce on the mental qualities of a people.
The system is the patriarchal system par excellence. It
is something very different from the Roman system characterised
by the patria potestas, which the writings of Sir H. Maine have
perhaps tended to confuse with the true patriarchal system. The
patriarchal system of the pastoral nomads is essentially a communal
system, under which all the brothers, sons, and grandsons of the
patriarch form, with their families, a community which holds all the
property, consisting of flocks and herds, in common; each member
having his claim to his share of the produce, each doing his share
of the common labour, and each having a voice in the regulation of
the affairs of the family. Such a system represses individualism;
there is no individual property, there are no individual rights, duties,
or responsibilities; no scope for individual initiative; the individual
is swallowed up in the community; superior energy or enterprise
bring no superior rewards, but rather tend to social disorganisation
and to the detriment of the individual who displays them.
Further, the work of looking after the herds of cattle is easy and
delightful, calling for no sustained exertion; and the herds provide
every necessary article of food, clothing, and shelter. Beyond the
family group there exists no political organisation; for the group
is self-supporting and independent, it has no need of relations with
other groups, and each group lives far apart from others, wandering
in some ill-defined region of the immense plain.
The peculiarities of this social organisation and of this mode of
life are clearly created by the physical environment, by the boundless
grassy plains, which enable each family group to maintain a
large troup of cattle, chiefly horses. At the same time, these conditions
render necessary the co-operation of all the members of the
family in the common work of tending the cattle; while the necessity
of continually moving on to fresh pasture prevents the growth of any
fixed forms of property and of any more elaborate social organisation.
It is an extremely stable and persistent mode of life and of
social organisation. So long as the geographical conditions remain
unchanged, it is difficult to see how any change would take place
in it, how any progress towards civilisation could begin. And, as a
matter of fact, the people who have remained in these regions continue
to lead just the same patriarchal, pastoral, nomadic life. Long
ages of this mode of life may well put upon a people the stamp
of sociability and communism and kill out individualism and
individual initiative! Demolins points out in a very interesting way
how these effects of the patriarchal system of the pastoral nomads
are displayed most clearly still by the population of southern Russia,
who, of all the settled European peoples descended from such
pastoral nomads, have suffered fewest disturbing influences; how
still the individual is subordinated to the community, to the mir,
by which all private life and industrial activity is directed and which
is the owner of the principal property, namely the land; and how, in
consequence, the people remain devoid of all individual initiative
and enterprise.
The Celts arriving in Gaul retained these qualities and something
of the patriarchal organisation, although they were no longer
simply pastoral nomads; for, in the course of their migrations, they
had been forced to take up agriculture and the rearing of other
domestic animals, especially the pig, through lack of sufficient open
steppe land. While in this disorganised condition in Gaul, they were
overrun by tribes of the Nordic race, who established themselves
as a conquering nobility, superimposing upon the rudimentary
political organisation of the Celts a loose military organisation of
clans; each clan was led by a popular warrior who attached to himself
by his personal qualities as large as possible a number of clients
or clansmen, acquiring rights over their land and property, in
return for the patronage and protection he offered them. These
nobles with their blood relatives were the tall fair-haired Gauls
described by Caesar. The Celts lent themselves readily to this
system based on personal loyalty and leadership, owing to their
lack of independence of character engendered by long ages of the
patriarchal communal régime. And the new social organisation
fostered and developed still more through many generations the
spirit of dependence, the tendency to look for authoritative guidance
and control to some recognised centre of power.
Under the two circumstances, the long régime of patriarchal communism
and the subsequent prevalence for many generations of the
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clan system, we may see, according to Demolins, the causes of
those deep-seated tendencies of the French nation (summed up by
Buckle in the phrase the spirit of protection) which throughout their
history have played so large a part in shaping the destinies of the
people, and which are still the source of grave anxiety to many
patriotic Frenchmen.
It is interesting to note that among the Celtic populations of the
British Isles the same features have been clearly displayed. We
see among them the clan-system with its dual ownership of the soil,
which has been perpetuated in Ireland to the present day and has
received more formal and legal recognition from the British government
in its recent legislation. We see the strong clannish spirit and
relative lack of independence. These qualities are clearly shown by the
Celtic Irish, even when they have been compelled by necessity to emigrate
to America. There they are not found to be pioneers on the
frontiers of civilisation, but rather remain herded together in clannish
communities in the cities of the eastern states, where they create
such powerful unofficial associations as ‘Tammany Hall.’
Demolins’ account of the genesis of the spirit of independence and
enterprise of the Anglo-Saxons is still more interesting and seductive.
He supposes that their ancestors also came originally in very
remote times from the Eurasian steppes; but that is a disputable
point and forms no essential part of his argument. They settled
in prehistoric times around the coasts of the Baltic and the North
Sea, especially in Scandinavia. And the physical peculiarities of this
region impressed upon their descendants the qualities which have
enabled them to play a leading part in the destruction of the Roman
power and in the development of the civilisation of modern Europe,
and which have established them in almost every part of the world
as a dominant race, increasing in power and numbers at the expense
of other peoples.
What, then, are these physical conditions?
Scandinavia is a mass of barren mountains coming down in
almost all parts abruptly to the sea. Its coast line is indented by
innumerable fiords and bordered by thousands of small islands; and
the sea which washes these coasts is warmed by the Gulf Stream.
This sea, owing to its warmth and to the existence of a great bank
which lies near the surface and runs parallel to the coast line, is
extremely rich in fish. Hence, the Nordic tribes who settled in
Scandinavia inevitably became a sea-faring folk, spreading slowly
along the coasts in small boats, supporting themselves in large part
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upon the fish which they caught in the sea; for the land is barren,
while the sea offers ideal conditions for fishing in small boats. But,
unlike the herds of pastoral peoples, sea-fishing does not provide
all the necessities of a simple life. It must be combined with agriculture.
Hence, the ancient Northmen became a race of hardy
seafarers who at the same time practised agriculture.
The character of the land which was available for the necessary
but supplementary agriculture was all important. It consisted, as
it does still, of small isolated strips of cultivatable soil at the feet
of the mountains where they plunge into the sea. On such land it
was impossible for the family to retain the form of a patriarchal
community. The fertile areas were too small to support such
communities, and the individualistic form of family was inevitably
evolved. On each small plot of cultivatable land a little farm was
formed, a homestead in which lived a family restricted to father,
mother, and children. As the children grew up, it was impossible to
support them on the one small farm or to divide it among them; one
son alone was chosen as the inheritor of the paternal farm; and each
of the others had to seek a new piece of land, build a new homestead,
and acquire his own boat.
Thus, the family was forced to become the individualistic family;
and the home of each such family was necessarily isolated, widely
separated from that of every other, owing to the scattered distribution
of the little areas of fertile soil. Thus were formed the first
homes in the English sense of the word; the home in which the father
rules supreme over his own little household, brooking no interference
from outside; the home in which the children are brought up to look
forward to establishing, each child for himself, similar independent
individualistic homes. Such homes have been established by the
Northmen in every part of the world in which they have settled;
and they are peculiar to them and their descendants.
It is obvious that all the very limited domains of the Scandinavian
coasts must have been fully occupied in the way described in a comparatively
few generations after the process of settlement began. This
seems to have occurred about the fourth or fifth century A.D. Then
the younger sons, for whom there was no place at home and for whom
there remained no spots suitable for homesteads in their native land,
were sent out into the world to seek their fortunes. They banded
themselves together to man single boats, or formed fleets of boats;
and, leaving their parents and women-folk behind, set out to conquer
for themselves new homesteads. Large numbers, sailing to the
[Pg 238]
southern shores of the Baltic and up the Weser and the Elbe, settled
on the plains of Saxony; and from this new centre they again spread,
as the Anglo-Saxons to England, and as the Franks to Gaul. Others
settled directly in northern France and became the Normans.
Others, the Varegs, penetrated the plains of Russia and established
themselves as princes over the Slav population.
This was a migration such as had never before been seen; bands
of armed men, all young or in the prime of life, coming not as mere
robbers, but seeking to conquer for themselves and to settle upon
whatever land seemed to them most desirable. Everywhere they
went they conquered and either exterminated or drove out the
indigenous population, as in the south and east of England, or established
themselves as an aristocracy, a ruling military caste, as the
Franks in the north-east of Gaul. And everywhere they established
firmly their individualistic social organisation, especially the isolated
homestead of the individualistic family, characterised by the despotic
power of the father and by great regard for individual property
and for the rights of the individual as against all State institutions
and public powers. In hostile countries the homestead became a
fortified place, or at least was furnished with a fortified keep or
castle; and in those regions, such as Gaul, in which the indigenous
population was not exterminated, the feudal system was thus
initiated. Everywhere they carried their spirit of independence,
enterprise, and initiation.
It was the swarming of the young broods of Northmen in search
of new homes that caused the Romans to describe these Northern
lands as the womb of peoples, and to regard them with wonder and
something of fear.
These qualities and habits continued to be displayed in the
highest degree by the Normans after their first settlement in the
north of France. The younger sons kept up the good old fashion
of going out into the world to seek a fortune or rather a territory,
which often was a dukedom or a kingdom. Their most characteristic
performance was the conquest of the greater part of Italy. A little
before William of Normandy and his companions secured for themselves
domains in this country, Norman knights, engaging in enterprises
that might well have seemed absolutely foolhardy, had
established themselves in Mediterranean lands. Some two thousand
Normans, arriving Viking fashion in their small ships, conquered
Sicily and the south of Italy and divided these lands among themselves;
and for a time they introduced order and a settled mode of
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life among the peoples of those parts. The leading spirits among
them were ten sons of one Norman gentleman, Tancrède de
Hauteville, the father of twelve sons of whom two only remained
at home, while each of the others carved out for himself a domain
in Italy. As Demolins remarks, these families, retaining undiminished
their individualistic tendencies and spirit of independence, were
veritable factories of men for exportation.
The modern Frenchman, says Demolins, would regard as the
height of folly the enterprises of the old Northmen, who, mounted
on their frail ships, quitted each spring the coast of Scandinavia,
launched out on the wild sea, landed, a mere handful of men, on the
coasts of Germany, Britain, or Gaul, and there with their swords
carved out domains and made new homesteads. It was thus that
the ancestors of Tancred had acquired the manor of Hauteville, and
it was thus that his sons conquered Italy and Sicily.
It was in a very similar way that, in a later age, men of the same
breed carried to the new world the same individualistic institutions
and the same spirit of independence, and in doing so, laid the sure
foundations of the immense vigour and prosperity of the American
people.
There is one almost more striking illustration of the great and
lasting effects upon character and institutions of the mode of life
of the Northmen determined by their physical environment. It
is furnished by the character and habits of the people who still
dwell in the plains between the mouths and lower parts of the Weser
and the Elbe, a region which was naturally one of the first to be
conquered and occupied by the Northmen. This territory is an
infertile sandy plain, and at the time of the coming of the Northmen
had but scanty population; hence, instead of becoming the military
and ruling caste of a subject people, the Northmen became themselves
peasants and farmers. In doing so, they retained all the
characteristic features of the individualistic family and have perpetuated
them, together with the spirit of enterprise and independence,
undiminished to the present day.
In this region each farm is a freehold which has remained in the
hands of the same family for long periods, in many cases for hundreds
of years. Each farm has its isolated homestead inhabited by the
head of the family, his wife and young children, and one or two
hired servants. Each homestead is well nigh completely self-supporting
and lives almost independent of the outside world.
In spite of the isolation, which might have been expected to
[Pg 240]
engender an extreme conservatism and backwardness of culture,
these farmers have continued to exhibit the old Northmen’s spirit
of enterprise and their power of voluntary combination in the
pursuit of individual ends. They were the first in Europe to
establish a society for the scientific study of agriculture, and they
have thus maintained themselves in the first rank as cultivators of
the land, quite without State assistance. In the same way and at an
early date they established schools for their children. They have
continued to produce large families and have retained the custom
of handing over the farm and homestead intact to one son, chosen
for his ability to manage it; while all the other sons keep up the
old custom of going out into the world to seek their fortunes, in
the shape of new homesteads.
Most striking of all, they still do this in the old Norse fashion as
nearly as possible. In one district these farmers combined their
efforts some sixty years ago and built a ship which, since that time,
has sailed every year to South Africa, carrying there the surplus
sons in search of new domains for themselves. In that far country
their spirit of independence finds satisfaction in establishing new
homesteads, new families of the individualistic type, and in perpetuating
their traditions of enterprise and self-reliance.
It is because the modern Scandinavians are of the same stock,
fashioned for long ages by the same physical environment, that they
have continued to emigrate in large numbers to North America,
where some of their ancestral race landed centuries before Columbus
was born, and where, in the newly opened territories of Canada and
the United States, they are generally recognised as being among the
best of the settlers.
Demolins does not enter into the question—How did the institutions
and mode of life of these or other peoples, determined
by physical environment, bring about adaptation of racial qualities
to the environment? He seems to assume in all cases use-inheritance.
But if, as seems possible or even probable, this is a false assumption,
we may still see clearly that, in the case of the Northmen at least,
adaptation may well have been effected by selection. The conditions
of life of these Northmen were such that in each generation the
majority of men could become fathers of families only after carrying
through successfully an enterprise in which a bold independence of
spirit was the prime condition of success.
Those who were deficient in the spirit of independence must
have shrunk from these wild expeditions in search of new homes to
[Pg 241]
be won only by the sword, or must in the main have failed to attain
the end; remaining at home, or returning there after failing in the
enterprise to which they proved unequal, to finish their days as
bachelor uncles at the paternal hearth. This process, carried on
for many generations, would lead to the evolution of just those
qualities which are characteristic of their descendants in all the
many parts of the earth where they now rule. Not only must such
social selection have been operative during the period of settlement
of Scandinavia; but each great migration to a new area must have
sifted out the most independent and enterprising spirits to be the
founders and fathers of the new branch of the race[119]. Thus the
descendants of the pilgrim fathers were the product of three such
processes of severe selection; the migration from Scandinavia to
Northern Germany; that from Germany to England; and that from
England to America. No wonder that they proved themselves well
able to cope with the hardships and dangers of a new continent
inhabited by savages only less fiercely tempered than their own stock
by many generations of warfare! When we thus find the same
institutions and the same mental traits characterising, from the
dawn of history to the present time, all the widely separated
branches of one racial stock and of this stock alone, we realize
how powerful over the destiny of nations is the influence of racial
character formed in the long prehistoric ages; we see how futile it
is to attempt to explain the mental traits of a people by the history
of their political institutions during a few recent centuries; we
understand that these institutions are the effects, not the causes,
of those mental qualities and that, even among the peoples who
have attained the highest degree of civilisation, racial qualities
remain of supreme importance.
The Crossing of Races
Before passing on to the consideration of evolutionary changes
during the historic period, a few words must be said about the
crossing and blending of races. Such blending has been, no doubt,
one of the principal causes of the great variety of human types at
present existing on the earth. It has been going on for long ages
[Pg 242]
in almost all regions; but especially in Europe and Africa. All
existing stocks (with few exceptions) are the products of race-blending.
No one of the existing European peoples is of unmixed
stock; every one is the product of successive mixtures and blendings
of allied stocks; and the mixing and blending still goes on; while
in America (both north and south) the greatest experiments in race-blending
that the world has yet seen are taking place before our eyes.
Authors differ widely as to the results of the crossing of human
races and subraces. Some assert that the effect of crossing of races
is always bad, that the cross-bred progeny is always inferior to the
parent stocks. They make no allowance for unfavourable conditions,
especially the lack of the strong moral traditions of old organised
societies. Others maintain the opposite opinion. Both opinions are
probably correct in a certain sense. I think the facts enable us
to make with some confidence the following generalisation. The
crossing of the most widely different stocks, stocks belonging to
any two of the four main races of man, produces an inferior race;
but the crossing of stocks belonging to the same principal race, and
especially the crossing of closely allied stocks, generally produces a
blended subrace superior to the mean of the two parental stocks, or
at least not inferior.
This generalisation cannot yet be based on exact and firmly
established data, unfortunately; but it is in harmony with old
established popular beliefs, and with what we know of the crossing
of animal breeds; and it is borne out by a general inspection of many
examples. For instance, the blending of the white, negro, and
American stocks, which has been going on in South America for
some centuries, seems to have resulted in a subrace which up to the
present time is inferior to the parent races; or at any rate to the
white race. So the mulattoes of North America and the West Indies,
although superior in some respects to the pure negroes, seem deficient
in vitality and fertility, and the race does not maintain itself. The
Eurasians of India are commonly said to be a comparatively feeble
people. The blend of the Caucasian with the yellow race is also
generally of a poor type. Examples abound in Java of people of
mixed Javanese and Dutch blood; and they are for the most part
feeble specimens of humanity. It is generally recognised that a
recently blended stock may produce a few individuals of exceptional
vigour and capacity and physical beauty. But setting these aside,
the blended stock seems to be inferior in two respects: (1) a general
lack of vigour, which expresses itself in lack of power of resistance
[Pg 243]
to many diseases and in relative infertility; so that the blended
stock can hardly maintain its numbers; (2) a lack of harmony of
qualities, both mental and physical. It may be that such lack of
harmony is the ground of the relative infertility of blended stocks.
It expresses itself in the inharmonious combination of physical
features, characteristic of the mongrel. The negro race has a beauty
of its own, which is spoilt by blending.
As regards mental constitution, although we cannot directly
observe and measure these disharmonies of composition, there
seems good reason to believe that they exist. The soul of the cross-bred
is, it would seem, apt to be the scene of perpetual conflict of
inharmonious tendencies. This has been the theme of many stories,
and, though no doubt many of them are overdrawn, there is no
reason to doubt that they in the main depict actual experience or
are founded on close observation.
It is on the moral, rather than the intellectual, side of the mind
that the disharmony seems to make itself felt most strongly; and
the moral detachment of the cross-bred from the moral traditions
of both the parent stocks is possibly due in part to a certain lack
of innate compatibility with those traditions, as well as to social
ostracism; the cross-bred can assimilate neither tradition so easily
and completely as the pure-bred stocks.
It is possible, though this is a still more speculative view, that
the same is true of the intellectual constitution of the mind.
The superiority of subraces formed by the blending of allied
stocks seems to fall principally under two heads: (1) a general vigour
of constitution; (2) a greater variety and variability of innate mental
qualities. The greater variability of qualities of a subrace renders
that race more adaptable to changing conditions; for racial adaptability
depends upon the occurrence of abundant spontaneous
variations. A large variety of innate qualities renders a race capable
of progressing rapidly in civilisation; it renders it more capable both
of producing novel ideas and of appreciating and assimilating the
ideas, discoveries, and institutions of other peoples; and such
imitative assimilation from one people to another has been a main
condition of the progress of culture.
It is, of course, well recognised that the great centres of development
of culture have been the places where different peoples have
come most freely into contact, notably the centre of the old world
where Asia, Africa, and Europe meet together. This was the area in
which the three great races of Europe came first into contact and
[Pg 244]
mingled freely. Some authors attribute the fertilising influence upon
culture wholly to the blending or contact of cultures; but there is
good reason to believe that it is largely due also to race-blending.
We might compare in this respect the three great culture
areas of the old world—Europe, India and China. The Chinese
afford an instance of one relatively pure race occupying a very
large area. In spite of its early start and great mental capacities,
its culture has stagnated. The stock was perhaps too pure.
India on the other hand seems to owe its peculiar history largely
to the fact that its population in almost all parts has been made up
from very widely different races—white, yellow and black; the
heterogeneity has been too great for stability and continued progress.
In Europe different branches and sub-branches of the white race,
that is of stocks not too widely different in constitution, have
undergone repeated crossing and recrossing.
It is worth while to point out that, if our generalisation is valid,
it follows that race-blending has been an important factor in the
progress of civilisation. And the generalisation has also an important
bearing upon one of the most urgent problems confronting
the statesmen of the world at the present time, and not only the
statesmen but all the citizens of the civilised states, especially the
citizens of the British Empire and of America. For it justifies
abundantly the refusal of the white inhabitants of various countries
to admit immigrants of the yellow or negro race to settle among
them; and it justifies, and more than justifies, the objection to intermarriage
with those other races which Englishmen have upheld
wherever they have settled, and which most other peoples have
not upheld[120].
In all the currents of heated discussion as to the rights and
wrongs of the treatment of other races, this question of the kind of
subrace which will result from intermarriage is generally left in the
background; whereas its importance is far greater than that of all
other considerations taken together. Some, like Sir S. Olivier[121], are
[Pg 245]
content to approve race-blending on the ground that it improves
the inferior race. But the racial qualities of the leading peoples of
the world are too precious to be squandered in the process of improving
in some uncertain degree the quality of the overwhelming
mass of humanity of inferior stocks; the process would probably
result in the total destruction of all that humanity has striven and
suffered for in its nobler efforts.
It is an interesting question—When two races or subraces are
crossed, do they ever produce a homogeneous and true subrace,
exhibiting a true and stable blend of the qualities of the parental
stocks? Or does the blend always remain imperfect, with many
individuals in whom the qualities of one or other of the parental
stocks predominate? The answer seems to be that a stable subrace
may be formed in this way, though usually not until free intermarriage
has gone on for many generations. According to the most
recent doctrine of heredity, the Mendelian, every human being is a
mosaic or patchwork of unit qualities, organs, or capacities, each of
which is inherited wholly from one of the parents and not at all
from the other. If this view is well founded, it follows that there
can be no true blending of these unit qualities. But still the mosaic
may be so finely grained and the unit qualities derived from the two
parents so closely interwoven, that each individual may present an
intimate mixture of the parental qualities, may represent for all
practical purposes a blending of the two stocks.
Chapter Xviii
RACIAL CHANGES DURING THE HISTORIC PERIOD
We have found reason to believe that national character, as expressed
in the collective mental life of any people, is only to be understood
and explained when we take into account the native or racial mental
qualities of the people; and we have seen reason to think that
these racial qualities were in the main formed in the prehistoric or
race-making period; we have noted some of the principal attempts
to throw light on the prehistoric moulding of races. But these
racial qualities, although very persistent, are not unalterable. We
must, therefore, consider whether, and in what ways, the racial mental
qualities of a people may have been changed during the nation-making
or historic period. What are the factors which determine
such changes? What is their influence on the destiny of nations?
The most diverse opinions are still held in regard to the question
of the extent and nature of changes of innate mental qualities of
peoples during the historic period, the period during which a people,
or a branch of a people, attains political unity and becomes a nation.
There is no doubt that the moulding power of physical environment
tends to become greatly diminished during this more
settled period of the life of a people, and that, in so far as changes
take place, they are determined principally by racial substitutions
and by social selections within a people, rather than by the mere
struggle for survival of individuals or of family groups against the
inclemency of nature or against other individuals and groups.
The former of these two modes of change, substitution, has
undoubtedly been effected on a large scale, producing in certain instances
radical changes in the racial quality of the populations of
some countries; that is to say, there has been more or less gradual
substitution of one race for another, while the nation as a geographical
and political entity, with its language and much of its
laws, institutions, and customs, lives on without complete breach
of continuity, and the people, although by blood radically changed,
continues to regard itself as the same people, accepting as its own
the traditions of those predecessors whom they mistakenly regard
as their ancestors.
Perhaps the most striking and complete change of this sort
in European history was the change of racial character of the
Greek people. It is now pretty well established that the Greek
population of the classical age was an incomplete blend of two of
the three great European stocks, namely Homo Europaeus, the
northern, fair, long-headed type of tall stature, and of H. Mediterraneus,
the short dark long-headed type of the Mediterranean coast
lands. The Pelasgians, who, as we now know, had achieved a
civilisation of a type that was widely spread through southern
Europe as long as three thousand years or more before our era,
seem to have been of this Mediterranean race.
Rather more than a thousand years before our era, the Pelasgian
population of Greece and the neighbouring regions began to be
overrun and conquered by tribes of the fair Northern race which
came in successive invasions, the Thracians, the Hellenes, the
Achaeans, the Ionians, and later the Dorians. Just as, at a later
period, men of the Northern race established themselves as a military
aristocracy over the Celtic peoples of western Europe, so these invading
tribes established themselves as a military aristocracy over
the populations of Mediterranean race; and, as in the former case, so
here, they intermarried largely with the people they conquered and
formed an imperfectly blended population, in the upper social strata
of which the fair type was predominant, in the lower strata the
dark type.
From this happy blending of two races was formed the people
which, under the favourable geographical and social conditions
of that time and place, evolved the civilisation that culminated
after six hundred years in the Athenian culture of the time of
Pericles. And then, after a very short time, the whole of that
splendid civilisation faded away, and the Greek people sank to a
position of slight importance from which it has never again risen.
After having displayed in several departments of the intellectual life
a power and originality such as have never been approached by any
other people, they became a people of very mediocre capacities,
devoid of power of origination and purely imitative.
That this profound change in the mental qualities of the population
of Greece was due to substitution of one racial stock by an
inferior one is beyond question. That a great change of racial type
was effected is sufficiently proved by the comparison of the physical
type of the modern with that of the ancient Greeks. The modern
are predominantly dark and round headed; the ancient were distinctly
[Pg 248]
long headed, as shown by a sufficient number of skull
measurements; and they were, as regards the dominant class at
least, predominantly fair in colour. It has been supposed that the
many references to the fair hair and complexion of heroes and gods
were due to fair persons being very rare and hence an object of
special admiration; but there is no ground for this. The way in which
this racial substitution took place is also pretty clear; and the rapid,
almost sudden, decline of the intellectual productivity of the Greek
people coincided in time with the racial change.
The first and most important factor in the extermination of
the best blood of ancient Greece was military selection. Military
group selection in the prehistoric period had, no doubt, played a
great part in bringing about the evolution of the superior mental
qualities of the European peoples, especially of the fair northern
race. So long as the peoples consisted of more or less wandering
tribes of pure race, which waged a war of extermination upon one
another, the peoples and tribes of superior mental and moral endowments
must in the main have survived, while those of inferior
endowments went under. But, so soon as the Nordic tribes became
settled as aristocracies ruling over the Pelasgian populations, the
effects of military selection tended to be reversed; instead of making
for racial improvement, they made for deterioration. That racial
deterioration occurs under these conditions seems to be an almost
general law; it has been exemplified among many different peoples.
The many small Greek states were almost perpetually at war with
one another; and the result of the warfare was not so much the
wholesale extermination of the people of any one state, as the killing
off in large numbers of the younger men of the ruling caste, the free
citizens of whom the armies were almost entirely composed.
The wars between Sparta and Athens were the most destructive
and tragic of all in this respect. We know that the numbers of
Spartans of the aristocratic class, never very large, became fewer
and fewer, in spite of efforts made to keep up the number by admitting
to citizenship persons not of pure Spartan blood; and that
Sparta was eventually destroyed simply for lack of men, men of
the ruling class[122].
In Athens and other states the depleting agencies were more
numerous. Frequent wars played the same part as in Sparta; and
[Pg 249]
the number of free men was further diminished by the repeated
founding of colonies, in which a relatively small number of persons
of Greek blood became swallowed up in a large population of
mixed and inferior origin. In some states, in Athens especially, the
political conditions worked powerfully in the same direction.
Prominent citizens were perpetually exiled or condemned to death,
sometimes in considerable batches. It is said that at certain times
two-thirds of the citizens of certain states were living in exile; and
the exiles, going to the colonies or other foreign lands, were for
the most part lost to the Greek people.
Then, with the blooming period of Greek intellect, came the loss
of the ancient religious beliefs, beliefs which had strengthened the
family and made each man anxious to have many sons that the
rites might be duly performed for the repose of his shade. Coinciding
with this was the great increase of luxury which made large families
too expensive, save for the most wealthy; while at the same time
the abundance of slave labour kept down the rate of remuneration
of all handicrafts, and so condemned the class of free Greek artisans
to a state bordering on poverty. Hence, the free citizens of pure
blood, already largely reduced in numbers, ceased to multiply; and
the number of the citizens was only sustained by the admission to
citizenship of foreigners, freed slaves, and various elements of
different and inferior racial origins.
Hence, at the time that the battle of Chersonese was fought and
the Macedonians attained the supremacy, the Greek citizens were
no longer the same racial aristocracy which had produced the finest
flowers of Greek culture. But the work of substitution was still only
partially accomplished. In the time of the Roman domination of
Greece, the remnants of the true Greek aristocracy were removed
by the slave trade. Tens of thousands of Greeks of all classes were
brought together to the slave markets; while those men of talent
who escaped that fate emigrated to Rome to seek their fortunes by
teaching the Greek language and art and philosophy. Later still
came the Goths, who sacked the towns and destroyed or drove out
the inhabitants. Then followed successive invasions of Slavs from
the north; and lastly, the domination of the Turk well-nigh completed
the extinction of the old aristocracy.
The modern Greek people is descended largely from Slav invaders
and largely from the numerous and prolific slave population of the
great age of Greece, but hardly at all from the men who made the
greatness of that age.
Though the change and deterioration of the racial mental
qualities of the Greek people by racial substitution is the most
striking example in history, it is by no means the only one[123].
The substitution in that case was largely by elements drawn
from other regions and peoples. But a similar substitution and consequent
change of innate mental qualities may go on slowly within
any people which has been formed, as have almost all the present
European nations, by an incomplete blending of two or more racial
stocks; it may be effected by internal selection without any introduction
of new elements from any other region. Before considering
an example of the process, let us note certain facts which show that
there may well have taken place, throughout the historic period,
changes of the composition of peoples by internal substitution or
changes of the mental constitution by internal selections—that is
to say, by the more rapid multiplication of certain mental types and
the relative infertility of other types. Consider first the striking
fact that the populations of the various European countries seem
for the most part to have remained almost stationary as regards
numbers, or even in some cases to have diminished greatly in
numbers, throughout the period between the Roman domination
and the later part of the eighteenth century. The population of
Spain is said to have declined from forty millions under the Roman
rule to only six millions in the year 1700 A.D. The population of
Great Britain is said to have increased from five millions to six
millions only during the seventeenth century; and it is certain that
in the main it had increased at an even slower rate, or not at all, in
the preceding centuries since the Norman Conquest; whereas in the
nineteenth century it increased from thirteen millions to nearly
forty millions; that is to say, it trebled itself in the century; and
even that rate of increase is considerably less than the possible
maximal rate.
The same is roughly true for most of the European countries;
their populations, throughout great stretches of the historic period,
remained stationary or increased only very slowly. Now when,
during any period, a population does not multiply at the maximal
physiological rate, changes of its character may well be taking place;
for, in proportion as the rate of increase falls below the maximal,
there is a lack of fertility in the population or in some part of it;
[Pg 251]
if this relative infertility affects equally all parts and classes of the
population, it will produce no change of its composition; but if it
is selective, if for any reason it affects one class, or persons of some
one kind of temperament or mental type, more than others, then
this class or this temperament or this form of ability tends rapidly
to diminish and to disappear from among that people.
The causes of the relative infertility may be divided into two
classes: (1) those which operate by killing persons before they have
completed their middle life; (2) those which restrict fertility without
killing. Both may be selective in their action. The former kind is
alone operative in determining evolution in the animal world and
probably also among the less civilised peoples; but, as civilisation
advances, the causes of infertility of the other kind increase constantly
in effectiveness, while the former operate with less and less
intensity. It is through the causes which diminish fertility merely,
rather than exterminate individuals, that changes of racial quality
of nations are now being, and in the future will be, principally
determined. Selection of this kind is usually distinguished from the
various modes of natural selection which work by extermination,
by the name ‘reproductive selection.’ Briefly, natural selection
operates by means of selective death rate, reproductive selection
by means of selective birth rate.
No doubt, disease, especially in the form of plagues and epidemics,
was one of the principal causes of the slowness of increase
of population throughout the Middle Ages. And this was probably
non-selective as regards mental qualities, although it was strongly
selective as regards power of resistance to disease, and has left the
European peoples more resistant to most diseases than any other
peoples, save perhaps the Chinese[124].
But many other causes of selection were at work. Disease presumably
has not affected mental qualities by selection; although by
direct action and mental discouragement it may have tended to
the decay of civilisations; it has been argued, for example, that
malaria played a great part in the decay of classical antiquity, that
it was introduced some centuries B.C. and enfeebled the population
of Greece and Italy.
More interesting, from our point of view of the influences affecting
the mental constitution of populations, is the effect of alcohol.
[Pg 252]
Dr Archdall Reid has argued very forcibly that resistance to the
attraction of alcohol is a mental peculiarity which a race only
acquires through long exposure to the influence of abundant alcohol;
that populations are resistant just in proportion to their past
exposure to it—as is true in the main of epidemic and endemic
diseases—and that in both cases this is due to selection.[125]
Much careful painstaking work by continental anthropologists
seems to have proved that a change of racial composition through
internal selection has been and still is going on in both the German
and French people. The facts have been worked out by O. Ammon[126],
Hensen and De Lapouge[127]. They show, chiefly by means of the
comparison of the forms of large numbers of skulls, that throughout
the historic period the French and German peoples have been
becoming more and more round headed, that the type of Homo
Alpinus, the short dark round-headed race, has been gaining upon
the type of Homo Europaeus.
We have seen that the latter stock of the fair northern type
constituted the upper class among the Gauls of Caesar’s time; and
the invasions of Franks and Normans must have added considerably
to their numbers; yet, in spite of that, the mental and physical
characters of this race are said by these authors to be now very
much rarer than formerly, owing to the internal selections which
have favoured the Alpine type. These took the following forms.
In the first place, in the early Middle Ages, it is said, the Nordic
type, being a military aristocracy, suffered, as in ancient Greece,
proportionally far greater losses in warfare than the Alpine type.
Secondly, the severe persecutions of Protestants in France drove
into exile, besides killing many others, large numbers who were
for the most part of the fair race, because, as we have seen, this
race does not easily remain content within the Roman Church. It
is said, for example, that, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes,
so large a number of Protestants passed into Prussia that the rise
of Prussia as a powerful State was the immediate consequence,
with of course an equivalent loss to France. De Lapouge considers
this the greatest blow that France has suffered in the historic period.
[Pg 253]
Normandy alone, it is reported, sent 200,000 Protestants to Prussia.
But the most important and curious factor has been, according to
De Lapouge, what he calls the selection by towns. He shows, by
comparison of masses of anthropological observations, that the
Nordic type has been predominantly attracted to the towns (which
fact he attributes to their more restless enterprising character) while
the dark type has been more content to lead the quiet agricultural
life[128]. He points out that the town-life stimulates to a new struggle
for adaptation, from which differentiation of classes results; the longheads
maintain their numbers better and rise in the social scale.
Further, he shows that town-life makes against fertility, owing to a
number of psychological influences—the stimulation of ambition
and of the intellect, the luxurious habits, the weakening of family
life, the break with the past and its family traditions, the uncertainty
of the future, the weakening of religious sanctions; and he gives
reason to believe that in this way the towns have been, through
many generations, weeding out the elements of the fair race and
determining an ever increasing predominance of Homo Alpinus.
In order to understand the importance of these internal selections,
it is necessary to realise that their effects are cumulative
in a high degree, when the same influences continue to work
through many generations. Thus, if within any people there are
two equally numerous classes of persons of different mental constitution,
A and B, and if these constitutions determine that the one
group A has a net birth rate of three children per pair of adults,
while the other B has a birth rate of four per pair of parents; then,
in the third generation after one century, the numbers of the two
classes, other things being the same for both, will be as ten to
sixteen. After two centuries the one class will be more than twice
as numerous as the other; and after three centuries the numbers of
the class A will constitute about fifteen per cent, only of the whole
population. Late marriage is also very important. Suppose that
of two classes, A marries at 35, and B at 25 years, and that each
produces four children per marriage; then (other things being the
same) after three and a half centuries B becomes four times as
numerous as A. These two factors generally work together.
But, apart from the change of racial composition of a heterogeneous
nation by internal selection of this sort, changes of the
constitution of even a racially homogeneous people may be produced
through selection affecting persons of particular mental tendencies.
[Pg 254]
One of the most striking instances of this is the elimination of the
religious tendencies from the constitution of a people by negative
selection through the action of the Roman Church[129]. For many
centuries the Roman Church has attracted to her service very large
numbers of those who were by nature most religiously minded, and
it has imposed celibacy upon them, it has forbidden them to transmit
their natural piety to descendants. In Protestant countries this
process of negative selection of the religious tendencies was continued
for a much briefer period than in the Catholic countries. It is maintained
with much plausibility that we may see the result in the fact
that sincere and natural piety is far commoner in the Protestant
countries than in the Roman Catholic; that in the two countries
Italy and Spain, in which the influence of the Roman Church has
been greater than in any others, the people are now the least religiously
minded of any in Europe; that with them religion has
become purely formal and external, that the mass of the people,
though outwardly conforming, is absolutely irreligious; that in fact
this form of religion tends to exterminate itself in the long run by
insisting upon that form of reproductive selection[130].
Another striking instance of the incidence of negative selection
upon certain mental qualities of a people is afforded by the history
of Spain. In the sixteenth century Spain attained to a supreme
position of power and grandeur among the nations of the world,
such as has been rivalled by Rome alone in all history; and then
very rapidly her power decayed, and ever since she has remained
one of the most backward of European peoples, contributing little
to European culture, to science, art or philosophy, incapable of
developing without the aid of foreigners her rich industrial resources,
impotent in war, entirely devoid of enterprise and originality. To
what is this great change due?
It is not due to any adverse change of climate, to devastation
by war or plague or famine, nor is it due to any change in geographical
or economic relations. Spain remains more happily situated
as a centre of commerce than any other country of the world. The
mass of the people remains vigorous, proud, and virile. It is the
intellect of the nation alone which has decayed, or rather it
[Pg 255]
is the intellectual life of the nation that has become utterly
stagnant.
Buckle drew a vivid picture of the stagnation of the Spanish intellect
and sought the explanation of it in the great power wielded by
the Roman Catholic Church, which, he said, had successfully fostered
the spirit of protection and superstition, had discouraged every effort
of the intellect, and utterly repressed the spirit of inquiry, to the
free activity of which all progress of civilisation was, in his opinion,
due. Here, again, modern science shows that Buckle was led into
error by his ignorance of the importance of the biological factors,
the racial qualities and the changes produced in them by selection.
Galton and, still more fully, Fouillée have shown that the
stagnation of the intellect of the Spanish people and the consequent
decay of the power and glory of Spain have been chiefly due to the
fact that the people of Spain ceased to produce those men of exceptional
mental endowments, of intellectual energy and enterprise and
independence of character, on whom primarily depend the power
and prosperity of any nation and who are the most essential factors
in the progress of the civilisation of any people, who in short are
essential for the growth and endurance of national mind and character.
And this was because during some centuries intellectual
power, enterprise, and energy were steadily weeded out by a rigorous
process of negative selection. In the first place, the Church, having
attained enormous power, became in two ways a tremendous agency
of negative selection. First, she made celibate priests of a very
large proportion of all those whose natural bent was towards the
things of the mind, multiplying monastic orders excessively. Secondly,
by means of the Inquisition she destroyed with fire and sword or
drove into exile through many generations all those who would not
conform to her narrow creed, who combined intellectual power with
independence and originality of spirit and a firm will. In addition
she drove out all the Jews and all of Moorish origin.
The second mode of negative selection, namely persecution
exerted by the Church, was no doubt the more important, but
the former also must have had a great effect. We are helped to
realize the probable magnitude of the effect by reflection on facts
set out in an article by Bishop Welldon[131]. He shows the great part
played in English civilisation since the reformation by the sons
of the English Clergy; including as they did a number of men of
the highest achievements in all departments of our national life.
[Pg 256]
If all those sons of clergy who have shown exceptional abilities, and
all their descendants, had by the rule of celibacy been prevented
from coming into existence, how disastrous would that have been
for the English people, how much less successful and vigorous would
the nation have become!
A second powerful agency of negative selection was the immense
colonial empire which Spain so rapidly acquired, especially her
American conquests. The whole people was seized with the desire
to enrich themselves with the gold of the New World, and was
fascinated by the idea of imitating the romantic adventures of
Cortes and Pizarro. Great numbers of the bolder and most capable
spirits set out for the New World, and there either lost their lives
or remained to mix their blood with that of the native Indians or
the imported negroes. In either case their stock was lost to the
mother country.
The third and culminating cause was the career of military
aggression pursued by Charles V; this completed the extermination
of the aristocracy of ability and finally plunged Spain into an intellectual
torpor which has persisted ever since and from which she
can only be raised up by a succession of men of first-rate intellect
and character: men such as she seems incapable of producing,
because her people has thus been drained of all its most valuable
elements, because her eugenic stocks have been exterminated.
The fall of Spain illustrates not only the operation of internal
social selection affecting certain mental qualities; it illustrates also
once more, even more clearly than the fall of Greece, the fact that
the civilisation of a people and its power and position in the world
depend altogether upon its intellectual aristocracy, and that the fall
of a people from a high place necessarily follows the failure to continue
to produce such an aristocracy.
In the civilised nations of the modern world, the most important
kind of selection at work at the present time is what is distinguished
as ‘economic selection’ working in conjunction with the formation
of the social classes. It has no doubt operated at various times
among other civilised peoples, but never so strongly and universally
as at present.
All the leading civilised nations have passed, in the eighteenth
and earlier part of the nineteenth centuries, through a period in
which the discoveries of science have enormously increased the
productive powers of man and man’s control over, and power of resistance
to, the forces of nature. The result has been that everywhere
[Pg 257]
civilised populations have multiplied at a great rate, in a way that
has never before occurred. But now this period seems to have
definitely come to an end, and to have been succeeded by a new
period characterised by three features which threaten to exert a
most deleterious effect upon the innate mental qualities of peoples.
(1) The world is becoming filled up; the untouched wealth of
enormous territories no longer lies open to the grasp of the bold
and enterprising. The coloured races are entering into the economic
competition in the way foreshadowed by the late C. H. Pearson[132].
The high organisation of every form of economic activity renders
the competition for wealth everywhere extremely severe. And at
the same time men have come to regard as necessities of life what,
but a few generations ago, were the luxuries of the wealthy or
unknown even to them; that is to say, the standard of comfort has
risen greatly. The combined result of these changes is the increased
difficulty of maintaining a family in the upper strata of society.
(2) There has been a great development of humanitarian sentiment,
one result of which has been the breaking down of class-barriers
and the perfecting of the social ladder; at the same time
it has produced such changes of our laws and institutions as tend
in an ever increasing degree to lighten the economic burdens of the
poor and to consummate by social organisation the abolition of
natural selection; that is to say, these changes are putting a stop
to the repression by natural laws of the multiplication of the less
fit, those least well endowed mentally and physically. The recent
great decline of infant mortality is one evidence of this.
(3) The influence of religion and custom has weakened, and men
are more disposed to adopt the naturalistic point of view, to believe
that this life is not a mere preparation for an infinitely longer life elsewhere,
but that it is all they can certainly reckon upon and, therefore,
is to be made the most of; while at the same time they are oppressed
by the severity of the economic competition and by a sense of the
lack of any ultimate purpose, end, or sanction of human effort.
The combined result of these three changes is a strong tendency
to reverse the operation by which nature has secured the evolution
of higher types of mind—namely, by breeding in the main from the
higher types in each generation. We see a tendency for the population
to be renewed in each generation preponderantly from the mentally
inferior elements, those whose outlook hardly extends beyond the
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immediate future and who have not learnt to demand for themselves
and their children favoured positions in the great game of life. The
effects of these three changes operate in the following manner. The
rate of reproduction, the birth rate, of nearly all civilised countries
is falling rapidly (although the death rate also falls). This diminution
of rate of reproduction is due to increase of celibacy, abstention from
marriage, to increase of late marriage, and to voluntary restriction
of the number of the family in marriage.
Now, it is shown statistically that this falling off of fertility
chiefly affects the classes above the average of ability, the upper
and middle classes and also the superior part of the artisan classes[133].
These classes have been formed and are maintained by the operation
of social and economic competition; they have long been, and are
still, perpetually recruited in each generation from the lower strata,
by the rise into them of the abler members of the lower strata.
Hence, economic selection, under our present social system, seems to
be working strongly for the mental deterioration of the most highly
civilised peoples; the social ladder, becoming more nearly perfect,
perpetually drains the mass of a people of its best members, enabling
them to rise to the upper strata where they tend to become infertile[134].
Galton and Prof. Karl Pearson have insisted most strongly upon
these tendencies. But they have not escaped the notice of continental
authors. M. Jacobi[135] has written a large volume packed with
historical illustrations to prove inductively the law that aristocracies
always die out, or are only maintained by constant recruiting from
below, or in other words that aristocracies tend to become infertile.
And the modern tendency which we have just now considered under
the head of economic selection may be regarded as falling under the
head of this law, a case of the extension of the law to democratic
communities and the natural aristocracies of ability which are
generated in them.
We may perhaps state the principal causes of this tendency
[Pg 259]
in general terms as follows: the acquirement by any class of
leisure, culture, and the habit of reflection (the malady of thought)
partially emancipates that class from the empire of instinct, custom,
and the religious sanctions of morality; and these are the great
conservative agencies under the influence of which men not so
emancipated continue to multiply according to the law of nature.
These instincts, customs, and religious sanctions of morality, which
lead men to multiply freely, have been acquired for the good of the
race or of the society considered as an organism whose life is of
indefinitely long duration; and in some respects they are opposed
to the pleasure and welfare of the individual life. The habit
of reason and reflection tends to lead men to act for their own
immediate welfare, rather than for the future welfare of the race
or of society, and to refuse to make those sacrifices of ease and
to undertake those responsibilities and efforts which the care of a
family imposes and which alone can secure the welfare of the future
generations. It is in respect to these duties that the great antagonism
between religion and reason appears in its most significant aspect.
The tendency for the upper classes to die out and to be replaced
constantly from the lower social strata by the aid of the social
ladder is no doubt stronger now than in foregoing ages. But
it has always been operative; and this is widely recognised; while
the comfortable inference has often been drawn that the process
is not only inevitable but actually beneficial and desirable. It is
said that the upper classes inevitably become effete, and that the
lower constitute an inexhaustible reservoir of mental and moral
excellences, from which they are and can be indefinitely renewed;
and thus the population is always rising in the social scale, a state
of affairs which makes for social happiness.
But, if we take a longer view, the prospect is not so comforting;
it seems only too probable that this constant dying away of society
at the top and the renewal of the upper strata from the lower, by
the agency of the social ladder, must sooner or later result in a
serious deterioration of the lower strata, at least in draining it of
its best stocks. There is also a return or downward current of less
strength, which returns to the lower strata the failures, the incompetents,
and the degenerates of the upper. And these two currents
must, it would seem, in the course of ages render it impossible for
the lower strata to continue to supply the superior elements required
to maintain the upper. If and when that stage is reached, national
decay must set in.
In England, where the operation of the social ladder has been
more effective and of longer duration than in any other country, there
are indications that this stage is at hand. Our social ladder has
provided and still provides a splendid array of talent, but already
it has produced, as its complement, a large mass of very inefficient
population. Foreign observers are constantly impressed with this;
Mr Collier Price[136], for example, tells us that the million best of our
population is the finest in the world; but that our lowest stratum
is the most degraded and hopelessly inefficient.
Looking at the course of history widely, we may see, then, in the
differentiation of social classes by the social ladder and in the
tendency of the upper strata to fail to reproduce themselves, an explanation
of the cyclic course of civilisation. This has been ascribed by
some authors[137] to race-crossing, followed by blending, and ultimately
by stagnation consequent upon complete blending and the flowering
period which coincides with it. But we now have a more adequate
explanation of the decay which follows upon the blooming period.
It is not mere stagnation, resulting from the achievement of social
harmony and the relaxation of efforts at social adaptation and
achievement of all kinds. The decline is probably due as much, and
perhaps in a much higher degree, to the exhaustion of the mass of
the population, the completion of the draining process by which,
throughout the whole period of the development of the cycle of
civilisation, the best elements and strains have been drained off
from the lower strata, brought to the top, and strained off.
It is interesting to speculate on the possible effect on this process
of the fact that we are becoming more clearly conscious of these
tendencies and subjecting them to scientific inquiry. Already the
legislature has taken one small step of a eugenic nature and is
soon to take another. The important thing is that we should recognise
that men are not the helpless sport of blind forces, that mankind
can control its own destiny in ever increasing degree as knowledge
grows.
A word may be said in regard to sexual selection, which probably
played a part in the evolution of the mental capacities of men.
It would seem that, in the peoples among whom monogamy is the
rule, it no longer operates to any appreciable degree. With the
general excess of females, we could suppose that it still tended to
race improvement only if the unmarried women were on the whole
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distinctly inferior to the married. But, if there is any difference, it
is probably the other way; because the most able women are more
and more attracted into independent careers. The further the so-called
emancipation of women goes, the more will this be the case.
Civilisation, then, tends from the first to put an end to that
elimination of the less fit individuals by the severities of Nature
which we call natural selection; and, as soon as it has passed beyond
its earliest stages, it brings to an end also the mortal conflicts of
social groups and the consequent group selection, which was in all
probability a main factor of racial progress in the prehistoric period.
It abolishes also at an early stage the improving influence of sexual
selection, which was probably the third principal condition of the
development of the higher powers of mankind.
Civilisation replaces these modes of selection, which make for
improvement of the racial qualities of peoples, by a number of modes
of social selection, nearly all of which must have been, so far as we
can see, negative or reversed selections—that is, selections making
for deterioration of the mental qualities of the civilised peoples.
In place of natural selection, group selection, and sexual selection, we
have had at work, within each people in increasing degrees, various
forms of social selection—military selection, selection by the towns,
selection by the church, political selection with its exiles and its
colonial system, and lastly economic selection, which has become
exceedingly influential in recent years among ourselves. And all
these, so far as can be seen, have operated mainly, among some
peoples and in some ages very powerfully, to diminish the fertility
of the best elements of the population and so to produce actual
retrogression of the average intellectual capacity of peoples, and
especially to deprive them of eugenic stocks, the stocks which
were most fertile in individuals of exceptional capacity on whom
the progress of civilisation and the relative power of nations chiefly
depend.
M. de Lapouge’s investigations of the matter have led him to
a very melancholy conclusion. He attaches especial importance to
urban selection, as he calls it, in weeding out the best stocks. He
writes—“There is no more agonising question than that of the
exhaustion of our intellectual reserves by the influence of city-life.
The public and our statesmen do not suspect it. But nevertheless
it is the great danger of modern societies and especially of France.
Of all the devastating influences which we have called social selections,
selection by the town makes most powerfully for deterioration
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of peoples. Our towns are destroying all of the intelligent and
energetic that have been spared us by the long centuries of disastrous
selections. France has lost in the past almost all her dolicho-blond
elements, and now are disappearing those of mixed stock and the
best of the short-headed type. In all the continent of Europe the
hour is at hand when there will remain only the inert and used up
débris of our dead nations, pitiable remnants who will be the prey
of unknown conquerors. Thus perished the Hellenic world, thus will
perish the whole of our civilisation, if man does not make application
of his knowledge of the principles of heredity, that tremendous
power which to-day is bringing death and stagnation, but by the
control of which science will enable us to secure safety and national
vigour[138].”
It is possible that this conclusion gives too dark a picture of the
tendencies of social selection in the civilised nations; but it does
seem probable that with the advance of civilisation the tendency
to reversed selection becomes strong[139]. We are at any rate compelled
to conclude that it is impossible to discover evidence of any influences
that can have made at all strongly for progressive evolution of
intellectual capacity during the historic period; whereas a number
of forms of selection seem to have worked against it and must at
least have counterbalanced any factors making for improvement,
and that therefore no advance has taken place in intellectual capacity
but more probably some deterioration has already occurred.
The conclusion thus reached deductively is well borne out by
the small amount of inductive evidence that is available. Such
comparison as we can make between the leading modern nations
and the civilised nations of antiquity tends rather to show that both
as regards the average man, and as regards the intellectual endowment
of exceptional men and the proportion of such men produced,
the advantage lies with the ancient peoples. And the comparison
of skull capacity or size of brain decidedly supports this conclusion.
It has been found by a number of anthropologists that the average
skull capacity of men of the late Stone Age in Europe was equal to,
[Pg 263]
or greater than, that of modern Europeans. And in the main, on
the large average, intellectual capacity varies with the size of the
brain.
Our seeming intellectual superiority is a superiority of the traditional
store of intellectual gains, a superiority of knowledge and of
the instruments of the intellect, of language, and of the methods
of mental operation by which knowledge is obtained, especially the
mathematical and scientific methods in general[140]. Consider a single
example frequently quoted to show the intellectual inferiority of
the modern savage. It is said—Here is a poor savage who cannot
count above ten without the help of his fingers and toes or other
tallies; and we generally forget that we also should be incapable of
counting above ten, had not our ancestors slowly devised the system
of enumeration or verbal counting, and that, given such a system,
the poor savage would be able to count as well as any of us.
The reader may be prepared to accept this conclusion as regards
the intellectual capacities of mankind, and yet may be inclined to
say—Surely the civilised peoples have progressed as regards their
moral qualities throughout the historic period! Let us, therefore,
consider this point separately for a moment.
Is there reason to believe that there has been progress of the
innate moral disposition during the historic period? Here we are on
still more difficult ground than when we considered the question of
the progress of innate intellectual capacity.
The essence of the higher morality is the predominance of the
altruistic motives over the egoistic, in the deliberately reasoned
control of conduct. But morality in this sense is relatively rare in
every age, and the great mass of moral conduct of men in general
is the issue of mental processes of a simpler kind; it consists in doing
what one believes to be right, in acting according to what one
believes to be one’s duty; no matter how that belief may have been
arrived at. The tendency to do what one believes to be right, which
for the vast majority of men has always been simply the tendency
to conform to the code of morals accepted by his society, has an
innate basis which may properly be called the social or moral
disposition. At present I am not concerned to define the elements
[Pg 264]
of our nature which make up the moral disposition[141]. The morality
of a people, objectively considered, is the outcome of the interaction
between their moral disposition, on the one hand, and the moral
environment of the individuals, on the other; and the latter consists
of two parts: (1) the traditional system of precepts, customs, laws,
in short the code: (2) the traditional system of sanctions by which
the code is upheld and enforced.
If we compare, in respect to this moral nature, the members of
primitive societies with those of highly civilised societies, applying
simply the criterion of conformity of conduct to the accepted code,
we shall be impelled to the conclusion that the former, the savages
and barbarians, have in general the moral nature much more highly
developed than the members of civilised societies; for they conform
on the whole very much more strictly to their moral codes. But
such a conclusion would be hardly fair to the civilised peoples; first,
because their social environment is more complex, so that the
bearing of their moral code is less simple and direct; it is less
easily obeyed, because its teachings are more generalised in form
and do not provide clear irresistible rulings for all or any large
proportion of the much greater variety of situations with which
individuals find themselves confronted. Secondly, because the code
is a higher one and makes greater demands upon the self-control of
individuals. Thirdly, because not only is the code less clear and
direct, but also the sanctions of conduct, civil and religious, are
generally less obvious and immediate; and the effectiveness of both
code and sanctions is weakened by the co-existence, within complex
civilised societies, of more or less rival codes and systems of sanctions,
which inevitably weaken the authority of one another; whereas the
code and sanctions of the savage or barbarous society reign absolutely
and without rivalry, so that men are not led to question their
authority.
The conditions of moral conduct are, then, so different as to
forbid any attempt to compare the innate moral dispositions of
primitive and civilised peoples; and all we can do, in order to arrive
at an opinion, is to consider whether the conditions have been such
as to favour the evolution of the moral disposition, the innate basis
of the social tendencies, during the nation-making period.
There can, I think, be no doubt that the principal condition of
the evolution of the moral nature was group selection among
primitive societies constantly at war with one another. In conflicts
[Pg 265]
of that kind it must have been the solidarity of each group, resting
upon the moral dispositions of individuals, the tendency of each
individual to conform to the law and moral code of the society and
to stand loyally by his leaders and comrades, which, more than
anything else, determined success and survival in the struggle of
the group for existence. At first, the nature of the code must have
been of relatively small importance; the all important condition of
survival of the group must have been the strict obedience to it on
the part of the members of the group.
This is not a deduction only from general principles. One may
observe the effect of tribal conflict, on comparing, in various parts
of the world, tribes that have long been subjected to its influence
with closely allied tribes that have long led a peaceful existence[142].
At a later stage, as the traditional codes of morality became
differentiated and more complex with the increasing complexity of
societies, the nature of these codes must have acquired an increasing
influence in determining group survival; but it must still have been
subordinate in importance to the degree of development of the moral
disposition; for a society with an inferior moral code, strictly conformed
to by its members, would in the long run have better chances
of survival than one with a higher code less strictly observed. Hence,
the higher more difficult codes could only be attained by those
peoples among whom the instinctive basis of social conduct had
become highly evolved by a long process of group selection.
But, on passing into the stage of settled societies of large extent,
that is to say, as peoples passed from the stage of tribal organisation
to that of national organisation, the evolution of the social disposition
through the mortal conflict of groups must have tended to
come to an end; because group selection became less active, the
conflicts between the larger and less numerous societies or groups
became rarer and also less fatal to the vanquished societies. In other
words, during the historic period failure in conflict has not usually
meant extermination; national cultures and the power and glory of
nations have come and gone, but the various peoples, the units of
conflict, have in the main survived their failures and persisted in
living. Group selection, the main condition of evolution of the
social disposition, has, therefore, been abolished; and of the various
forms of social selection operating within societies, the chief of which
we have briefly noticed, no one seems to have been of a nature to
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produce further evolution of the social disposition; all of them
must rather have operated adversely to it. Military selection,
selection by the Church’s rule of celibacy, political selection—all
these must have fallen most heavily on the individuals in whom
the social disposition was strong, whose conduct was influenced
largely by the sense of duty, and less by the individual impulses
and desires.
We may conclude, then, with some confidence that there has
not been further evolution of the innate moral disposition in the
historic period. This conclusion is greatly at variance with popular
conceptions; we are apt to pride ourselves upon our superior morality;
to point to our humanitarian laws and institutions, to our tenderness
for the weak, the poor, and the suffering; to our regard even for the
welfare of savage peoples, whom we no longer deliberately exterminate,
and for domestic animals; and to suppose that all this
shows modern civilised men to be innately superior in morality
to their ancestors and to the barbarous peoples. But our conclusion
that the difference implies merely an evolution of moral
tradition, not of moral nature, will appear probable if we reflect upon
the fact that a widespread change of this kind in respect to some
department of conduct has sometimes been produced within a very
short space of time, even within the lifetime of one generation. Take
the attitude of Englishmen towards slavery and the African slave
trade. It is hardly more than half a century since large numbers
of Englishmen, or men of English origin, owned great gangs
of slaves or drew their wealth from slave labour; yet now most
of us look with horror upon slavery of every kind. Take the
case of kindness to domestic animals. It is a comparatively
recent tradition; and, within the memories of those who are not
yet middle-aged, a great improvement has taken place. Again,
there are many persons who, while tender to their domestic
animals, are entirely brutal where wild animals are concerned,
since public opinion or traditional morality does not yet bear
so strongly upon our relations to them. Again, it is not long
since in our factories, our prisons, our schools, the most horrible
tortures were applied to our fellow citizens without provoking
any protest; while now we display perhaps an excessive tenderness
and have passed law after law to protect the feeble against
the strong.
The mental development of peoples in the historic period has,
therefore, not consisted in, nor been caused by, nor in all probability
[Pg 267]
has it been accompanied by, any appreciable evolution of innate
intellectual or moral capacities beyond the degrees achieved in the
race-making period, before the modern nations began to take shape.
There is no reason to think that we are intellectually or morally
superior by nature to our savage ancestors. Such superiority of
morals and intellectual power as we enjoy has resulted from the
improvement and extension of the intellectual and moral traditions
and the accompanying evolution of social organisation.
A different conclusion was reached by the late Benjamin Kidd
in his Social Evolution, which has enjoyed a very wide circulation[143],
and it seems worth while therefore to examine very briefly
the author’s position. Mr Kidd saw clearly and argued convincingly
that the innate intellectual capacities have not improved during the
historic period; but he held that the innate moral tendencies have
been greatly improved during this period; or rather he distinguished
between the innate moral tendencies and the innate religious tendencies;
and, while rejecting Herbert Spencer’s view that the moral
tendencies (as thus arbitrarily distinguished from the religious tendencies)
are slowly becoming improved and strengthened in the
civilised peoples, he held that the innate religious tendencies are
being greatly improved and strengthened; and he regarded this as
the underlying condition of all ‘social evolution.’ In support of his
view he cited an impressive array of facts illustrating the general
softening of manners and morals among the civilised peoples,
especially the legislative changes which have given political power
to the masses of the people. That these evidences of a general
softening of manners and a great extension of social sympathy are
very striking we must all agree; but Kidd advanced no serious
argument in favour of his contention that these changes have been due
to some change or improvement of the innate qualities of the peoples
among whom they have appeared. And he did not suggest any
way in which this alleged improvement or accentuation of the
innate religious tendencies may have been brought about. He
attributed it wholly to the influence of the Christian religion. Now,
if Kidd had accepted the Lamarckian principle of the transmission
of acquired tendencies or effects of use and habit, he might reasonably
have attributed the alleged improvement to such influence. But he
sternly rejected that principle and proclaimed himself a rigid exponent
of the Neo-Darwinian school, which attributes all racial
[Pg 268]
changes to selection. He even assumed the truth of the doctrine that,
in the absence of selective processes making for its improvement,
every race must inevitably degenerate. It might, then, have been
expected that he would have attempted to show how Christianity
can be supposed to have favoured the improvement by selection
of the innate religious tendencies. Yet he made no attempt in this
direction. He seems to have been aware that his view encounters
a great difficulty in the fact that Christianity powerfully swayed
the peoples of Europe for many centuries during which little or
no progress in civilisation was effected, whereas rapid and accelerating
progress of many kinds has marked the last three centuries.
He sought to meet this difficulty by attributing the rapid
progress of recent centuries to the influence of the Protestant form
of Christianity, alleging that it promotes the evolution of the
religious tendencies more powerfully than other forms. Yet this
view of the matter, even if it were acceptable, would leave the
Reformation itself quite unexplained. Kidd seems to hint that,
throughout the earlier centuries of the dominance of the Christian
religion in Europe, it was slowly effecting the alleged improvement
of the religious tendencies in the mass of the people, without these
being able to manifest themselves in social life, until they somehow
broke loose at the time of the Reformation and began for the first
time to operate on a great scale and with tremendous force. The
view might have some plausibility coming from the mouth of a
disciple of Lamarck, but it cannot be reconciled with Kidd’s strictly
Neo-Darwinian principles. There is, then, nothing in Kidd’s grandiloquent
and loosely reasoned, but always interesting pages, to justify
any belief in the improvement of the innate moral disposition during
the historic period[144].
Before leaving this difficult question of the extent and nature
of changes in the innate qualities of peoples during the historic
period, I would define in the following way the position that seems
to me to be well founded. There have been no considerable changes
of innate qualities; and what changes have occurred have probably
been of the nature of retrogression, rather than of advance or improvement;
and this is true of both intellectual and moral qualities.
The improvements of civilised peoples are wholly improvements of
the intellectual and moral traditions. All the great and obvious
changes of social life are in the main changes of these traditions.
Nevertheless, such differences of innate qualities as exist between the
different peoples are very important, because of their cumulative influence
upon their traditions. And, especially, the innate superiorities
of the leading peoples, though relatively small, are of essential significance;
and it is of the first importance for the future prosperity of
the great nations of the present time that they should not suffer
any deterioration of their innate qualities; for they alone have
attained just such a level of innate excellence as renders possible the
existence of civilisation and the growth and continued progress of
great nations. Especially is it essential that they should continue
to produce in large numbers those persons of exceptional moral and
intellectual endowments, whose influence alone can maintain the
vitality of the national traditions and who alone can add anything
of value to them.
Chapter Xix
THE PROGRESS OF NATIONS IN THEIR YOUTH
We have found reason to believe that during the historic period the
peoples of Europe have made no progress in innate qualities, moral
or intellectual; yet that period has been characterised by immense
mental development, a development essentially of the collective
mind. The most striking result of the formation of nations and
the development of civilisation has been this replacement of the
progress of the individual mind by the progress of the collective
national mind. And the most interesting and important problem of
group psychology is—What are the conditions of the progressive
development of the collective mind?
I insist that this is distinctly and primarily a psychological
problem. The conclusion we have just reached, to the effect that it
is not produced by and does not imply a racial evolution, shows that
it is not to be regarded as a biological problem. It cannot be treated
as a problem of economics or of politics; these sciences only touch
its fringe at special points.
We have before us the significant fact that in some cases the collective
mind of a nation has remained stationary at a rudimentary
stage of development for long ages; while in other nations the
collective mind has developed at a constantly accelerating rate,
becoming more highly differentiated and specialised and at the
same time more highly integrated, has in fact developed in a way
closely analogous to the evolution of the individual mind. The
collective mind, in thus developing, reacts upon the development of
individual minds, raising all far above the level they could independently
attain and some in each generation to a very high level
both intellectually and morally.
The merest outline of a discussion of this great problem is alone
possible. I can do no more than offer some suggestions toward the full
solution of it. Let us note, first, that continued progress, far from
being the rule, as is commonly assumed by popular writers, has been a
rare exception, as Sir H. Maine pointed out in Ancient Law. He wrote—“In
spite of overwhelming evidence, it is most difficult for a citizen
of Western Europe to bring thoroughly home to himself the truth
[Pg 271]
that the civilisation which surrounds him is a rare exception in the
history of the world.” “It is indisputable that much the greatest
part of mankind has never shown a particle of desire that its civil
institutions should be improved, since the moment when external
completeness was first given to their embodiment in some permanent
record. Except in a small section of the world, there has
been nothing like the gradual amelioration of a legal system.” And
what is true of systems of law is true of all the other elements of
the intellectual and moral tradition which constitute a civilisation
or national culture.
Sir H. Maine added—“The difference between the stationary
and progressive societies is, however, one of the great secrets
which inquiry has yet to penetrate.” His own contribution, which
he regarded as a partial solution only, was that the difference
depends in part upon the period at which the customs of a
people become codified in written law. If, as the tribes of a
people become settled and enter upon a national existence, there
is no written code of law and custom, customs, he urged, which
at their origin were socially advantageous tend to become extended
by analogy to other fields of practice and to assume
an excessive and senseless rigour; for example, the custom of
cleanliness becomes the exceedingly elaborate ritual of purification,
which among the Hindus limits and restrains social life at every
point. Or a useful distinction of classes becomes a rigid caste
system, than which nothing is more prejudicial to progress, intellectual
or moral. The continuation of the process of extension
by analogy through long ages has resulted in nearly all the uncivilised
and less civilised peoples of the modern world being bound
down on every hand by a system of rigid and worse than useless
customs, which, restricting both thought and action, render progress
impossible. On the other hand, early codification of custom
in a system of written laws secures that thereafter custom shall
not develop in this blind unintelligent and socially prejudicial
manner, but shall be developed only by deliberate intention and
the reasoned fore-thought of the ruling powers of society; it
will then develop in the main, in spite of many mistakes, in a
way which promotes the efficiency of social life and the welfare
of society.
Maine’s suggestion is in harmony with the fact that the
progressive peoples have not been those who invented or learnt
the art of writing at an early period. Writing and the written
[Pg 272]
codification of customary law could not be invented by any people
until they had attained to a settled life and a considerable degree
of social organisation; and then, when the invention was worked
out sufficiently, the damage had been done, socially advantageous
customs had already degenerated into useless rites and ceremonial
observances; and writing served only to establish these more firmly,
to fix their yoke upon the necks of the people, as in the case of the
Hindus.
On the other hand, the progressive peoples have been those who
remained in a savage or barbarous condition until a relatively late
period, and who then acquired by imitation the arts of writing and of
reducing custom to written law, acquired them in a fully developed
condition from the peoples who had invented and developed these
arts. They have, therefore, enjoyed the advantages of written laws
from the beginning of their civilisation.
But, as Maine recognised, the acquisition of writing at the
outset of national life is by no means sufficient to account for
the progressiveness of the nations of South and Western Europe;
we must seek other causes and conditions of their mental
progress.
We have already noted certain features of the racial constitution
which were probably essential to the continued progress of the
European peoples—namely, the high degree of evolution of the social
disposition through group selection in the long prehistoric or race-making
period; a group selection which probably was far more
severe and prolonged than the peoples of any other part of the world
were subjected to; and which in turn was due probably, as we have
seen, to the great diversity of physical surroundings and to the
comparative severity of the climate of Europe, especially of the
northerly parts in which the most progressive European race was
formed; for these physical conditions generated in the race an innate
energy, a capacity for sustained effort.
Without the highly developed social disposition in the mass of
their members, primitive societies could not have survived those
changes of custom and institution which were essential features of
their progress. Without their innate energy, active rivalry and
competition, which have been chief factors in social progress, would
not have been constant features of the relations of these societies.
Still the possession of a highly evolved social disposition by the
European peoples does not in itself suffice to account for the continued
mental evolution of the leading nations. For not all the European
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peoples have progressed; and, of those that have progressed, some
have done so much more effectively than others.
Let us first examine the question—In what has progress primarily
consisted? Has it been primarily a progress of the moral or of the
intellectual traditions? As I mentioned in an earlier chapter, we
have here one of the main points of dispute.
Buckle was the great advocate of the primacy of intellectual
development in the sense of increase of natural knowledge. The
argument by which he sought to establish the position runs as follows:
Progress must have been due to improvement either of moral or of
intellectual principles. But moral principles have been almost the
same in all ages. “To do good to others; to love your neighbour as
yourself; to honour your parents—these and a few others, are the
sole essentials of morals; but they have been known for thousands
of years, and not one jot or tittle has been added to them by all
the sermons, homilies and text-books which moralists and theologians
have been able to produce.” On the other hand, knowledge
and intellectual principles have made immense strides; hence all
progress must have been primarily intellectual rather than moral.
Buckle did not deny that there has been some moral progress;
rather he insisted upon it as an essential feature of the progress of
civilisation; but it has, according to him, consisted only in the more
effective operation of unchanging principles, and this more effective
operation is secondary to, and due to, intellectual progress.
I think we must agree with Buckle that the increasing store of
knowledge and the increased command over nature that comes with
it has been the primary condition of the progress of nations. For,
since the early middle ages, the moral natures of men and the
teaching of Christianity have been the same in all essentials; yet
for many centuries there was practically no progress. Kidd himself
admitted that progress only set in rapidly about the time of
the Reformation. And it is notorious that this progress, including
the Reformation itself, was due to the stimulation of the intellect
by a number of influences—by the renewed study of classical art
and literature, by the discovery of the New World, by the increased
intercourse of nations resulting from the improvement of the art of
navigation, by the accumulation of wealth and the formation of a
powerful middle class. It is clear also that religion, far from having
been the sufficient cause or instrument of progress, was largely
responsible for the stagnation of the middle ages, through sternly
repressing the sceptical spirit and leading off men’s minds from
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inquiry into natural laws, to the discussion of many topics on which
it was impossible to achieve knowledge and which were necessarily
barren of results making for human progress. Nevertheless the
Christian religion has in the long run co-operated in forwarding the
mental evolution of the European peoples in an important manner
which we must briefly consider later—namely, through its effects
upon social organisation.
Without raising the question of the natural or supernatural
origin of religion or of any particular religion, we may say that
from the point of view of national life, a religion is essentially a
system of supernatural sanctions for social conduct, for conduct
conforming to the moral code of the society, and especially for customs
regulating the family and the relations of the sexes, on which,
more than on anything else, social stability depends. It is, thus, the
great conservative agency; for it enforces the observance of custom
by a system of rewards and punishments; in the earlier stages of
society, especially by punishments. It is essentially intolerant of
change of custom or belief; and even the Christian religion has
exemplified this principle in the terrible persecutions and innumerable
wars for which it has been responsible.
The great function and tendency of any religion, once established
among a people, is to preserve intact the current moral code and
to secure conformity to it. Nevertheless, some religions are less
prohibitive of progress than others; and, when such a religion replaces
a more restrictive one, an important condition of progress is realised.
But, in so far as progress is then favoured, this is not due to the
changed operations of the religious emotions and sentiments; it is
due to the great religious teachers who have succeeded in breaking
down the bonds imposed by the more primitive religion, and so have
given freer play to the intellectual faculties; the improvements of
religious systems have been negative or permissive conditions of
progress, rather than its effective cause.
Progress has, then, always resulted primarily from the gains made
by the intellect and added to the intellectual tradition, that is to
say, from the progress of knowledge. Nevertheless, the free play of
the intellect is always a danger to society, for the reason that the
customs and moral code of a society, however imperfect and sanctioned
by a religion however narrow, are yet the bonds by which
alone it can be held together; to their influence has been largely
due in every age the subordination by the members of a society of
their individual egoistic ends to the welfare of the society as a whole.
The spirit of inquiry, which always leads men to question the
authority of these customs and moral codes and of their religious
sanctions and thus tends to weaken them, is, then, a socially disruptive
force, at the same time that it is the source of all progress.
Hence, though the free play of the intellect and of the spirit of inquiry
may secure for a time the rapid progress of civilisation, it cannot
alone secure continued progress. Continued progress has only
resulted where there has been maintained a happy balance
between the conservative and the progressive forces, between the
authority of custom and the moral code on the one hand and the
free activity of the intellect on the other. Wherever the progressive
force has outrun the conservative, progress has been
first rapid and then has come abruptly to an end. Greece exemplified
this process in the clearest manner. It was the excessive
seeking of individuals for their own power and glory, unrestrained
by the customs and religious systems which their intellect had
outgrown, that ruptured the bonds of society, plunged the State
into war and civil strife, and eventually destroyed it by the extermination
of the Greek aristocracy. The same is true of the
brilliant but brief periods of rapid progress exhibited by the
medieval Italian States. Intellect outran and undermined morals,
and progress was brought to an end.
Some observers have maintained that history will pass the same
verdict upon modern France, and that most of our leading nations
of the present day are seriously threatened by the same danger.
Any long continued progressive evolution of the mind of a
people has been, then, a rare exception in the history of the world;
partly because the free play of the spirit of inquiry and of the
intellectual faculties, which is the source of all progress, exerts a
socially disruptive tendency, so that progress is by its very nature
dangerous to the stability of any nation; but partly also because
the free play of the spirit of inquiry has been so rarely achieved
or permitted, so that even such progress as has led on to social
disruption has been exceptional.
A long period of intellectual and moral stagnation in the rigid
bonds of custom and religion has been the rule for nearly all the
peoples of the earth, so soon as they had attained to a settled mode
of existence. The primary question, then, to be answered in seeking
to account for the progress of nations, is—What conditions enabled
the spirit of inquiry to break the bonds of custom and religion and to
extend man’s knowledge of man and of the world in which he lives?
Bagehot, in considering more particularly the progress of political
institutions, put the problem in much the same way. He pointed
out that the first age of the life of nations is always an age dominated
by custom resting on unquestioned religious sanctions; an age in
which there is often a vast amount of discussion of detail, as, for
example, discussion of the details of military expeditions, but never
discussion of principles; and he maintained that an age marked by
the discussion of principles, involving the questioning of traditions,
moral and intellectual, initiates and characterises every period of
progress.
There is much to be said for the view that the most important
condition of progress in its earlier stages was in most cases, perhaps
in all, the conquest of a more primitive people by one more advanced
in culture or of superior racial type, who remained to settle in the
conquered territory, and, not driving out or exterminating the
conquered inhabitants, established themselves as a governing class.
History and archaeology show that this occurred at least once in
most of the areas where nations have developed spontaneously to
any considerable degree; the earliest known instances being those
of Egypt and Chaldea as long as ten thousand years ago. The same
thing occurred again in India, and later still in Greece; and throughout
early European history the process was frequently repeated in
various areas. Every one of the modern peoples of Europe has been
formed through such fusion by conquest of two peoples, in some
instances several times repeated; and, though none of these modern
European peoples originated their own civilisations, but largely took
over by imitation the civilisation ready made for them by the more
precocious peoples of Asia and by Greece and Rome, these fusions and
the resultant composite character of the European peoples no doubt
have tended greatly to promote progress. And it is easy to see how
in several ways such a fusion by conquest of two peoples must have
tended to set free the spirit of inquiry, that prime condition of
progress. Three of these seem to have been of chief importance.
The most obvious way in which progress has been promoted was
that the conquering invaders became a leisured aristocracy, having
their material needs supplied by the labour of the indigenous population,
which became a more or less servile class. All the ancient
civilisations were thus founded upon servile labour. We may be sure
that, until such a social system resulted from conquest, no people
made much progress; because all individuals were fully occupied in
securing their means of subsistence, either by warfare, by the tending
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of herds, or by agriculture. Each people was self-supporting, and
knew no or few needs beyond those which their own labour was able
to supply; and labour was individual, or was co-operative only
among small groups, such as the communal family groups. It
could, therefore, undertake no great works, whether of building or
engineering, such as large public buildings, irrigation, or road
making. Each family consumed what it produced, and consequently
there was no large accumulation of capital; for there
were no motives for storing up their primitive wealth, and generally
no wealth of durable and storable form.
But, as soon as a ruling class could dispose of the labour of a
large part of the population, making them work for a mere subsistence
wage, there was initiated that régime of capital and labour
on which, up to the present time, all civilisation has been founded.
Wealth was accumulated; great works, such as the pyramids, demanding
enormous expenditure of human life and work, could be
undertaken; and a leisured class was created, which, being freed
from the necessity of bodily toil, was able to turn its energy to
speculative inquiry, to the enjoyment of art and luxury, to directing
and organising the labour of the multitude, to inventing the tools
that render labour more effective, to studying natural phenomena
such as the cycle of the seasons, a more accurate knowledge of which
added to the productivity of labour; for it was in the service of
wealth production, that in the main science arose, especially mathematics
and mechanical and astronomical science, arithmetic and
geometry through the need of a practical art of measurement,
astronomical science through the need of foreseeing the seasons.
The desire to enjoy art and luxury is one which feeds itself and
grows, when once aroused; and it was these growing desires of the
leisured and wealthy classes which created trade, or at any rate
first developed it beyond the merest rudiments; and in doing so led
to regular and friendly intercourse between nations.
A second very important result of such fusion by conquest must
have been the breaking up to some extent of custom and the
weakening of the religious sanctions. Under the new régime, both
the conquering and the conquered peoples would find their old
customs unsuited to their novel social relations, and inadequate to
regulate their changed occupations. The old customs of both would
inevitably be thrown into the melting pot; at the same time the
religious sanctions of both would be weakened by the intimate
contact of two systems, neither of which, in the presence of a rival
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system, would henceforth be able to claim unquestioned authority,
until one had suppressed the other or a stable synthesis of the two had
been effected. So long as each individual never had intercourse with
any but those who accepted the national or tribal religion, it was well-nigh
impossible for anyone to question its authority; but as soon as
the devotees of two religions lived intermixed, the question—Which
religion was true? must inevitably have arisen in some minds. The
weight of custom and of religious sanctions, which lies so heavily on
a primitive society, restricting all enterprise, forbidding inquiry and
repressing the use of the intellectual powers, would thus be lightened
and scope be given for experiment in thought and action. And
either people, coming into more or less intimate contact for the first
time with a system of beliefs and customs and institutions other
than their own, must have been led to compare, discuss, and reflect
upon these things; the sceptical spirit and the intellect must have
been greatly stimulated. There must have been a conflict of
ideas and the initiation of an age of discussion. In short such a
fusion by conquest must have broken up what Bagehot calls the
‘cake of custom’ as nothing else could, and so have rendered the intellectual
and moral traditions once more plastic and capable of progress.
No doubt in many cases such disintegration of the old systems
went too far, and the society, before it could evolve anew a sufficiently
strong and adequate system of customs and sanctions, went to pieces.
In modern times many primitive societies have been broken up and
destroyed in just this way—namely, their customs and the religious
sanctions of their morality have been undermined and weakened
by the contact of the more complex systems of civilised men, and
they have not been able to assimilate the new system rapidly enough
to enable it effectively to replace their own shaken and decaying code.
A third way in which the fusion by conquest of two peoples must
have made for progress was by biological blending, the crossing by
intermarriage of the two stocks. We have seen that there is a
considerable amount of evidence to show that, when two stocks are
very widely different in mental and physical characters, the result
of crossing is likely to be bad, the crossed race is likely to be inferior
to, and less fit for the battle of life than, both parental stocks; the
characters of individuals will be apt to be made up of a number of
elements more or less inconsistent with one another; such a composite
character made up of inharmonious elements will be apt to
be unstable and constantly at war with itself. Character of this kind
and the tragic struggles to which it is liable to find itself committed
[Pg 279]
has been well described in fiction by a number of authors, especially
in stories of the Mulattoes of America. On the physical side it has
been shown that such cross-bred races tend to die out owing to
lack of balance of the physical constitution.
On the other hand, we saw that the crossing of two closely allied
racial stocks seems to have a tendency to produce a cross-bred race
superior to both parent stocks, and especially to produce a variable
stock. It is, I think, probable that the frequently repeated blending
of allied stocks in Europe has been the fundamental biological
condition of the capacity of the European peoples for progressive
national life.
In the case of the conquest of one people by another differing
very markedly in racial qualities, there seem to be two alternatives
equally prejudicial to the continued progress of the nation so formed.
On the one hand, free intermarriage may take place, resulting in
an inferior cross-bred race incapable of high civilisation, as seems
to have occurred in most of the countries of South America,
where it is with the greatest difficulty that the outward forms
of the high civilisation which they have imitated from Europe are
maintained. On the other hand, where especially the outward
physical characters are very different, the conquering people may
hold itself apart from the conquered, and maintain itself as a
ruling class, which prides itself on the purity of its blood and
which tends to harden into a caste. Such conquest without subsequent
blending gives rise to a civilisation which, being founded
upon a rigid caste system, is incapable of continued progress. This
is what has happened in India. The fair-skinned Aryan invaders
despised the dark-skinned indigenous peoples, whom they spoke of
as being scarcely human, and, in spite of a good deal of crossing,
they have in theory and in the case of the Brahmans at least to a
considerable extent in practice, maintained the purity of their
blood, by means of the development of the caste system.
Europe on the other hand was fortunate in that all the different
peoples, or most of the peoples, from which its nations have been
formed were of allied race; they were all, with few exceptions, of the
white race, sufficiently nearly allied not to produce inferior cross-races
but rather to produce some superior subraces. The conquered
peoples have been so similar to their conquerors in physical
type that crossing could take place without the cross-bred offspring
bearing the indelible marks of inferior or mixed parentage, such
as a dark skin or a woolly head. Hence, although caste systems
[Pg 280]
were formed, they did not prove rigid; free intermarriage took
place, and it was not impossible for individuals of the conquered
race or of the mixed stock to rise into the superior ruling class.
The importance of this may be seen, on reflecting how the merest
trace of negro-blood in individuals of mixed origin in North America
is apt to show itself in the physical features and how, even in that
enlightened and Christian country, a trace so revealed suffices to
condemn a man, no matter how great his powers or refined his
character, to remain a member of the inferior caste.
But, apart from the possible improvement of the racial qualities
of the whole people, or of the average individuals in general, which
may well have occurred in Europe, the biological blending of allied
races may give important advantages to the resulting people in
another way—namely, by increasing its variability, the variability
of its mental qualities. If a people is extremely homogeneous in
the racial sense, it may be expected to display little variability, its
members will be of essentially similar mental qualities and of a
uniform level of mental capacity; and this will tend to make them
a very stable, but a very conservative unprogressive, nation. This
seems to be true of China, and to be in large part the source of its
extreme stability and extreme conservatism.
Where, on the other hand, a people is formed by the intimate
blending by intermarriage of two or more racial stocks, it is likely
to be a variable one; there will be large departures in many directions
from the average type of mental ability, and there will be individuals
varying by excess of development of various capacities as well as
others varying by defect of development.
And a people of variable and therefore widely diversified mental
capacities will, even though its average capacity is no greater than
that of a more homogeneous people, be more likely to make progress
in civilisation, and this for three reasons.
First, variability is the essential condition of all race progress
by biological adaptation; for it is by the selection of variations,
the survival and multiplication of types varying in certain directions
in larger proportions than the average type, that all race progress
and adaptation seems to have been achieved. Hence, increased
variability, resulting from the blending of races, will render a people
so formed capable of race progress and of more rapid adaptation;
for example, in the peoples of Northern Europe it would have
favoured the adaptation of the constitutions of the people to the
severity of the climate and to those peculiar social conditions which,
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as we have seen reason to believe, have been the source of their
unique combination of qualities.
Secondly, variability of mental qualities would be favourable to
the coming of the age of discussion; for in such a people custom would
rule with less force, its sway would be more apt to be questioned and
disputed, than among a highly homogeneous people.
Thirdly, and this is probably the most important manner in
which race blending has favoured the progress of nations, among
the variations from the average type produced by race crossing
would be men of exceptional capacities in various directions.
We have already noted that all progress of the intellectual and
moral traditions eventually depends upon the activities of men of
exceptional powers of various kinds, upon the great religious or
ethical teacher, the inventor, the artist, the discoverer. A people
may, like the Chinese, have a high average capacity of intellectual
ability; but, if it cannot from time to time produce men of far more
than average capacity along various lines, it will not progress very
far spontaneously. Exceptional intellectual capacity is, however, a
variation from the type, as the biologists say, just such as may be
expected to result from race blending; there will be, among the
variations in all directions, variations in the direction of exceptional
capacity of various kinds. Hence a nation of blended variable
stocks will, other things being the same, be far more likely to be
capable of continued evolution than a homogeneous people of equal
average mental capacity, among whom few men are capable of rising
to any distinguished height.
This view of the effects of race blending is borne out empirically by
the comparison of the peoples of the world. The European peoples
have been the most progressive, and they, more than all others, have
been formed by repeated blendings of allied stocks. Within Europe
it is the peoples among whom this blending has been carried furthest
who have proved most progressive—the French, the English, and the
Italian; and, conversely, the least blended peoples have been the
most backward, and have contributed least to the general progress
of civilisation in Europe; for example the large, almost purely Slav,
population which forms the bulk of the Russian nation.
We pass on to consider other conditions which have contributed
to setting free and stimulating the spirit of inquiry. We have seen
that physical environment played a predominant part in moulding
the mental qualities of races in the prehistoric period. And we must
recognise that, although with the beginning of settled national life
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it probably ceased to modify race-qualities to any considerable
extent, it has yet been important in favouring the rapid evolution
of the intellectual tradition of some peoples, and this in several ways.
First, by its direct influence upon the minds of individuals. Buckle
and others have pointed out that, while, in India and throughout a
great part of Asia, the physical environment was unfavourable to
intellectual progress, while its vast and terrible aspects fertilised
the superstition of the people, and repressed the spirit of inquiry
by rendering hopeless any attempt to cope with its terrific displays
of force, in Europe and especially in South and Western Europe,
the comparatively small scale on which the physical features are
planned and the relative feebleness of the forces of nature encouraged
men to adopt a bolder attitude towards them.
Buckle, contrasting Greece with India in this respect, showed
how the physical features of both countries were reflected in their
national cultures; how, while the Hindus cringed in fear before
monstrous and cruel gods, the Greeks fashioned their gods in their
own image, simply personifying each leading human attribute, and
made of them a genial family of beings, differing from men and women
in little but their immortality and their superior facilities for the
enjoyment of life. In general the buoyancy and serenity of the
Greek attitude towards life and nature reflected the beautiful, secure
and diversified aspects of their physical environment. In such an
atmosphere the spirit of inquiry would naturally flourish more freely
than where man’s spirit was oppressed by the fear of terrible and
uncontrollable forces and where he was made to feel too keenly
the limitations of his mental and physical powers. Buckle summed
up his review of these effects as follows:—“In the civilisations
exterior to Europe, all nature conspired to increase the authority
of the imaginative faculties and to weaken the authority of the
reasoning ones. In Europe has operated a law the reverse of
this, by virtue of which the tendency of natural phenomena is,
on the whole, to limit the imagination, and embolden the understanding;
thus inspiring man with confidence in his own resources,
and facilitating the increase of his knowledge, by encouraging that
bold, inquisitive and scientific spirit, which is constantly advancing
and on which all future progress must depend.”
I think we must accept this view of the importance of the direct
action of physical environment on the minds of individuals. To
deny, as Hegel did, the important influence of physical environment
upon the development of Greek culture, because the Turks have
[Pg 283]
enjoyed a similar climate without producing a similar culture, is
unreasonable. The progress of civilisation has always been the
result of a multiplicity of causes and conditions; and we cannot
deny all importance to any one, whether race or climate or social
organisation or religion or any other, because in some particular
instance it has failed to produce the progress of which in other
instances it has been one of a number of co-operating causes.
The diversity and small scale of the physical features of South
and Western Europe has favoured the progress of the intellectual
tradition in another important way. The land is divided by natural
barriers into a number of natural territories, the population of
each of which has naturally tended to become one nation and to
develop a national culture. In this way there arose a number of
nations and States in close proximity with one another, yet each
developing along its own lines. When the development of wealth
and commerce brought these diversified cultures into friendly intercourse
with one another, the exchange of ideas and the general
imitation of the useful arts of one people by its neighbours must
have made very strongly for progress; the culture of each of a group
of neighbouring peoples no longer progressed only by the addition
of the ideas and inventions of its own exceptional intellects, but
each group had the opportunity of selecting and imitatively adopting
whatever seemed to them best among the ideas, the arts and inventions
of the neighbouring peoples.
It is generally admitted that this was one of the main conditions
of the rapid development of the culture of the ancient Greeks,
situated as they were within easy reach of several of the oldest
civilisations, those of Egypt and of South-Eastern Asia; they were
also within reach of a number of less civilised peoples, and therefore
enjoyed opportunities for trade of a kind which, being peculiarly
lucrative, has in all ages hastened the acquisition of wealth and
capital and stimulated the development of commerce. All the
most progressive European peoples have enjoyed similar advantages;
and it has been maintained with some plausibility that the principal
cause of the shifting of the centre of progressive civilisation from the
Eastern Mediterranean to the west of Europe has been the improvement
of the art of navigation and the discovery of the New World
and of the sea route to Asia and the East Indies; for these gave the
western countries the most advantageous positions for the conduct
of a world wide commerce. No doubt the factor mentioned has
been important in producing this change.
But, when we consider the ancient European civilisations and
compare them with our own, we realize that, in spite of all the circumstances
which we have enumerated and briefly considered as
factors stimulating the spirit of inquiry and making for progress of
their intellectual tradition, and in spite of their brilliant and in
some respects unapproachable achievements, they were nevertheless
radically incapable of continued progress. Greek civilisation certainly
progressed at a marvellous rate for some centuries; yet there is
every reason to believe that it bore within itself the inevitable
causes of its ultimate decay or stagnation. And, when we consider
Roman civilisation, we see that, through all the long centuries of
the greatness of Rome, it was essentially unprogressive. There
was no continued evolution of the national mind and character.
Save in respect to the single province of law, Roman civilisation,
when it entered upon the period of its decay, had not appreciably
progressed in any essential respects beyond the stage reached more
than a thousand years earlier. Rome was in fact less truly a nation
in its later than in its earlier age. It had superficially imitated
rather more of Greek culture and it had incorporated a number of
bizarre elements from the many peoples which had been brought
under the sway of the Roman sceptre; but neither in religion, nor
in philosophy, nor art, nor science, nor in any of the practical modes
of controlling the forces of nature, had it made any substantial gains;
and its social organisation tended more and more to the type of a
centralised irresponsible bureaucracy[145].
On the other hand, it cannot be denied that in the last thousand
years the nations of Western Europe have made immense progress;
nor that this progress has been accelerating from century to century
in a way which seemed to reach a climax in the wonderful century
just closed; though there appears good prospect of continued progress
and perhaps of continued acceleration throughout the century to
come and perhaps for many more.
What then is the cause of this great difference between the
civilisation of Western Europe and all preceding civilisations?
The difference is, I think, essentially due to difference of social
organisation. As argued in a previous chapter, social organisation
was of less influence in the earlier ages, but has assumed a
constantly increasing importance throughout the evolution of civilisation;
and it is now predominant over all other conditions.
We must, then, first define this difference of social organisation;
secondly, we must show how it makes for progress; and thirdly,
conjecture how the social organisation of Western Europe, so favourable
to the continued development of nations, has been brought
about.
The great difference which divides the social organisation of
the modern progressive peoples from that of all the ancient European
civilisations is that, under it, the individual enjoys greater liberty
and more securely founded rights as against the community, and
as against all other individuals. This change is summed up in
Sir H. Maine’s dictum that “the movement of progressive societies
has hitherto been a movement from status to contract.”
All the ancient civilised societies, Greece and Rome no less than
all the others, rested upon the fundamental assumption of the
absolute supremacy of the State, the assumption that the individual
existed only for the State and that the welfare of the State was the
supreme end to which all individual rights and liberties must be
subordinated absolutely, was the end to the securing of which all
custom, and all law, all social and family relations and institutions
and religion itself were but the means. And the State was a politico-religious
organisation, membership of which implied the blood-relationship
of its citizens and a common participation in the
state-religion; while the State gods were conceived as being themselves
ancestors, or in some other way kinsmen, of the citizens[146].
This bond of blood or kinship between the members of the State
and its gods went back to the earliest times. It is the rule of
[Pg 286]
almost all savage peoples; and the religious rites of many include
some rite symbolising or renewing this blood bond, such as smearing
the blood of the kinsmen on the altars of the gods, or drinking the
blood of some animal which is held to be the symbolic representative
of the god. And the supreme end of the State itself was the
increase of its own power and stability, through the exercise of
military power and through military conquest.
All human beings outside the State, outside this moral-politico-religious-bond,
were regarded as prima facie enemies of the State,
without rights of any sort, without even the slightest claim to
humane treatment. Hence, in war the slaughter of the conquered
was the rule; and the practice of making slaves of prisoners of war
and of conquered peoples only arose through its profitableness, and
was regarded as a great concession to the victims, whose natural
fate was sudden death. Under this system, which inevitably became
to some extent a caste system, with a caste of freemen or citizens
ruling over slaves, each individual was born to a certain status as
a member of a particular family. His position and duties and rights
in the family were rigidly prescribed by custom, and the law took
account only of the relations of the family to the State.
Chapter Xx
THE PROGRESS OF NATIONS IN THEIR MATURITY
In the foregoing chapter we have noted the great fact that the
leading modern nations of Western Europe have shown a much
greater capacity for progress than all the earlier civilised peoples,
not excepting those of ancient Greece and Rome. I urged that this
difference between the ancient and the modern European civilisations
seemed to be chiefly due to a difference of social organisation.
I pointed out how the older nations were essentially caste nations,
resting on a basis of slavery, and how all individual rights were
entirely subordinated to the welfare of the State, a politico-religious
organisation held together by the bond of kinship; how,
within that organisation, the rights of each person were strictly
defined throughout his life by the status to which he was born;
and how all persons outside this organisation were regarded as
natural enemies, towards whom no obligations of any kind were
felt. We have now to notice that the form of social organisation
towards which all the leading modern nations have been tending,
and which some of them have now pretty well achieved, is one in
which the last vestiges of the caste system and the rigid bonds of
customary status are rapidly being abolished. In this new organisation
social classes persist, but they are no longer castes; all members
of the nation are regarded as being by nature free and equal; a
career is open to every talent, and any man may rise to any position
by the exertion of his abilities. His position is one of extreme liberty
as compared with that of any member of the ancient nations. He
has definite rights as against the State. The State claims only a
minimum of rights over him, the right to prevent him interfering
with the rights of his fellow-citizens, the right to make him pay for
his share of the privileges conveyed by its activities. And these
rights it claims in virtue of contract between each citizen and all
the rest. For each citizen is free to throw off his allegiance to the
State and to leave it at will, and his continuance as a citizen of
the State implies his acceptance of the contract.
Even in religion, personal liberty has at last been achieved;
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religion is no longer a State-religion, the gods are no longer the
national gods, and each man may accept any religion or none. This
is the most striking instance of the immense distance, as regards the
liberty of the individual, that divides the modern from the ancient
nations. For with the latter, the function of religion was to preserve
the security of the State; and to question it in any way was to
threaten the State, a principle fully acted upon by Athens in the
time of her highest enlightenment and glory.
The change is very striking also as regards the attitude of the
citizens of one State towards those of any other and towards even
the members of savage and barbarous communities. We no longer
regard ourselves as devoid of all obligation towards such persons.
Rather we tend to treat them as having equal rights with ourselves,
the few specifically national rights excepted, and as having equal
claims with our fellow citizens upon our considerate feeling and
conduct towards them.
The relations of individuals are, then, tending to be regulated, on
the one hand, by contractual justice; on the other hand, by the moral
obligation felt by each individual, an obligation not enforced by any
exercise of the power of the State, but supported only by public
opinion. The end we set before ourselves is no longer the welfare
of the State, to be attained at any cost to individual liberty; it is
rather an ideal of justice for every person, to which the welfare of
the State must be, if necessary, subordinated. In short, instead of
maintaining universal intolerance, we have made great strides
towards universal tolerance.
All this represents a profound change of social organisation, a
great advance in social evolution. That it is intimately bound up
with the progressiveness of a people is shown by the fact that the
degree to which the change has proceeded among the various nations
runs parallel with their progress in all the essentials of civilisation.
The change seems, indeed, to be one of the principal conditions of
the progress of the nations of Western Europe and, we may add,
of the American nation, by which it has been carried further than
by any other. How, then, does it make for progress? We may
answer this question by considering how the social system which
has given place to this new kind of social organisation—namely, the
caste system—renders progress difficult or impossible.
Where the caste system is highly developed and rigidly maintained,
as among the Hindus of India, its conservative unprogressive
tendency is obvious enough. Each man is born a member of some one
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of many castes, and he can never hope to pass from one caste to
another and higher caste. That fact alone removes at once the two
greatest spurs to effort, the two most powerful motives that urge on
the members of our modern societies to the fullest development and
exercise of all their faculties; namely, the desire to rise in the social
scale and to place one’s children at a more advantageous starting
point in the battle of life, and the fear of falling back in the social
scale, of sinking to a lower level, with the consequent sacrifice of all
the social consideration and other advantages which one’s position
at any given social level brings with it. Under the Hindu caste
system, the poor Brahmin who has no possessions, perhaps not even
a rag to cover his nakedness, is sure of the social consideration which
his birth gives him, both for himself and his children. He can look
disdainfully upon the rich man and the prince of lower caste; and
public opinion approves and supports him. This perhaps is the
most important way in which the caste system prevents progress.
But there are others almost equally serious.
The occupations open to the members of each caste are rigidly
limited. The members of one caste must be priests only, of another
soldiers only, of another scavengers, of another potters, and so on.
Now, if it were true that, when dexterities or mental powers generally
are specially developed by use, the improvements of faculty resulting
from this long practice and use were transmitted in any degree
from generation to generation, we should expect the caste system
to result, after many generations, in so many distinct breeds of men
of highly specialised and perfected powers of the kinds used in the
pursuit of each of the caste occupations. And this might make for
progress. Each man would be employed in the occupation for which
he was best suited. But, as we have seen, it is probable that use-inheritance
does not occur; and there seems to be no evidence that
differentiation and hereditary specialisation of faculties of this sort
result from the caste system[147]. In each caste men continue to be born
of the most diverse powers suited for the most diverse occupations;
and one effect of the caste system is that the best powers of any man
will in the great majority of cases be prevented from finding their
most effective outlet. That involves a great waste of faculty, which
makes strongly for stagnation. We shall realize the importance of
this influence, if we reflect on the great achievements, in the most
diverse fields, of men who under our modern system have risen from
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some humble station and occupation, to which under the caste system
they would have been rigidly confined.
Again, within each caste custom rules the lives of the members
with much greater force than it can exert in a large and complex
society in the absence of the caste system. For each caste has its
own tradition and customary code, which is necessarily narrow
because of the uniformity of the conditions of life of those who
obey it; hence tradition and custom have a narrow and well-defined
field of operation; and the narrower the field of its application, the
more rigidly will custom control action.
The caste system is thus one which permits of great differentiation
and specialisation of pursuits, without any weakening of the conservative
forces of society. It is for that reason presumably that the
social organisation of all early civilisations tended to this form. It
was the most easily attained form which combined diversity with
stability sufficiently to permit of the formation of a large society
or nation; and it was one which made for military efficiency. It
formed, therefore, a natural stage of social evolution.
In so far as the caste system still survives, it owes its survival
to the continuance of the need of the State for military efficiency.
And we see how its maintenance is still only rendered possible by
its alliance with a State religion and its system of religious sanctions.
In Russia, for example, the caste system was thus maintained by
the alliance of the military power with the religious system. While
we see how in modern Germany the attempt to maintain the caste
system and the supremacy of the State over the rights and liberties
of individuals is breaking down, as the religious sanctions are losing
their hold upon the people. Social democracy, secularism, and the
demand for liberty go hand in hand[148].
It is clear, then, that the caste system tends to produce a stable
society and to prevent progress; and that, in proportion as it gives
way to liberty and equality of all men, both legal and customary,
and to the recognition of the rights of individuals as against the
State, progress must be favoured.
In yet another way (perhaps more important than any other)
the abolition of caste may favour development. In an earlier
chapter I pointed out how every step in the development of the
intellectual or the moral tradition of a people is initiated by some
person of exceptional intellectual or moral power. I pointed out
also how the existence of a hierarchy of social classes which are
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not exclusive castes, together with the operation of the social
ladder by means of which individuals and families are enabled
to climb up and down the social scale, tend to the segregation
of ability in the classes of the upper part of the scale. They tend,
in short, to produce classes capable of producing in each generation
a relatively large number of persons of more than average
capacities. Or, in other words, they lead to the concentration and
mutual enrichment of the strains of exceptional capacity; they
concentrate the best capacities of the people in a relatively small
number of individuals of the favoured classes. And abilities so
concentrated and raised in a certain proportion of individuals to a
higher power will be more favourable in every way to the growth
of the national mind than the same sum of abilities more evenly
diffused throughout the population. At present it is impossible to
say how far this segregation of abilities has gone, and what part it
has played in forwarding the mental development of any nation.
But that it has played some part, perhaps a very important one in
some instances, can hardly be doubted[149].
In Europe the feudal system served to tide over the period of
transition from the ancient social organisation founded on caste and
the supremacy of the politico-religious State to the modern system,
the transition from the system founded on status and regulated by
custom to the system founded upon equality and liberty and regulated
by contract. For the feudal system, although still more or less
a caste system, was nevertheless founded to some extent on contract.
The tenure of land involved a contract to perform services in return;
and such contract was the essence of the feudal system.
But it was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
when the feudal system was finally broken up and the Reformation
initiated the age of religious tolerance, that the modern system
substantially replaced the ancient system, and the age of rapid
progress set in.
In proportion as the change was achieved, the powers of all
men were set free in an unfettered competition such as had
never before been possible. Independence of thought and action,
free discussion of all principles, and the recognition of the relativity
of all truths, succeeded to unquestioning subservience to ancient
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formulas and customs. Each man became comparatively free to
follow his natural bent, to develop his best powers to the utmost,
and to secure by the exercise of those powers the maximum of
social consideration and of well-being, unfettered by arbitrary
restrictions, civil or ecclesiastical. I think we may fairly say that the
modern pragmatic or humanistic movement in philosophy, in the
midst of which we are living, represents the final stage of this emancipation
of man from the bonds which he has created for himself.
We have seen, then, that the modern system of social organisation
does not make for the racial progress of a whole people, but probably,
up to the present time, for race-deterioration; nevertheless, it certainly
makes for progress of the intellectual and moral traditions of
peoples; and we can now see in what way it makes for progress.
The improvement of racial qualities by natural selection of the
innately superior individuals has been brought to an end; the
mortal conflict of societies has also practically been abolished as a
factor of race progress, as also of collective or social progress. These
have been replaced by a new form of struggle for existence and of
selection—namely, the rivalry and competition of ideas and of the
institutions in which ideas become embodied, and the selection for
survival of those ideas and institutions which are found, under the
tests of practice and experience, most accordant with the truth and,
therefore, best adapted to promote the welfare of societies and of
their members[150].
And this process of survival of the fittest and elimination of the
unfit among ideas and institutions takes place not only within
nations, but has also international scope. The members of each nation
no longer, as of old, regard all foreigners as their natural enemies,
no longer despise their institutions and reject their ideas with
scorn. They are ready to learn from others, to let the ideas current
among other peoples enter into competition with native-born ideas;
and so the number and variety of competing elements increases and
the intensity of the competition waxes ever keener. Every idea that
constitutes an important advance in our intellectual outlook or in our
practical command over nature rapidly finds acceptance throughout
the civilised world and displaces some less true idea, some less appropriate
institution, some less effective mode of action.
Two great conditions, making for continued improvement of
the moral and intellectual traditions, characterise, then, Western
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civilisation. First, within each nation there is going on the process
of emancipation of all human faculties, so that they enter into the
freest possible competition with one another on a footing of equality;
this process, although now far advanced in all the leading nations, is
still being carried further, and the whole trend of modern legislation
is to confirm the change and hasten it to its completion[151]. Secondly,
there is a circle of peoples whose ideas are thrown into the arena of
rivalry, to suffer extinction or to gain universal acceptance. This
circle also is constantly widening by the inclusion of peoples hitherto
outside it; and each new admission, as of Japan in recent years, is
a new stimulus to the further evolution of the collective mind of
each nation concerned. Both these conditions depend upon improved
social organisation.
How then has this great change of social organisation been
effected? To put this question is to approach an immense subject,
the history of liberty and toleration. I can only make one or two
brief remarks. It has been suggested by many authors, notably
by Kidd in his volume on Western Civilisation, that we owe this
great change to the Christian religion. It is pointed out that the
Christian religion, unlike most earlier religions, was from the first
not a national or State religion but a universal religion, and that its
adoption has weakened the tyranny of the State by breaking
up its alliance with religion. Further, it is a religion which, by its
doctrine of the immortality of the souls of all men, has tended to
give dignity and value to each individual life, quite independently
of personal status. Again, by its teaching of universal charity, it
has to some extent softened and moralised the relations of men
and of societies. But, that the replacement of a national religion by
a universal religion which teaches the equality of all believers does
not suffice to secure continued collective evolution is shown by the
instances of Bhuddism and Mohammedanism. Both of these are
of this character, yet both have failed to render continuously progressive
the societies that have accepted them.
That the spread of the Christian religion does not in itself suffice
to account for the evolution from the ancient to the modern type
of social organisation is shown also by the fact that it had held undisputed
sway among the peoples of Western Europe for more than
a thousand years before social evolution made any considerable
advance. Throughout that period, religion constantly called in the
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civil and military power of the State to enforce the acceptance of its
dogmas. And that its teachings did not suffice to produce religious
or civil tolerance is shown by the fierce and incessant persecutions
of heretics and the many religious wars that fill the history of
medieval Europe.
The religious tolerance and liberty of the modern era are rather
features of a wider phenomenon, the general increase of tolerance
and liberty, and they must be ascribed to the same causes as this
wider fact. They imply a great evolution of the moral tradition,
the most important and striking feature of which is the expansion
of the sphere in which the sympathetic feelings find application.
There is no reason to suppose that the feelings and emotions
underlying the sympathetic and considerate treatment of others have
changed in character in the historic period. For long ages men have
felt such sympathy and given considerate and just treatment to those
who have been nearest to them; at first to the members of their
own immediate family; later to the fellow-members of their own
small society; and then, as societies expanded into complex caste
societies, to the members of their own caste; later, as castes were
broken down, to all their fellow citizens; and still later in some
degree to all men.
It is this progressive extension of the sphere of imaginative
sympathy which, more than anything else, has broken down all the
social barriers that confined the energies of men and has set free
their various faculties in that competition of ever increasing severity
which is the principal cause underlying the modern progress of
peoples. It is this which has destroyed nearly all the old bonds that
fettered and limited men’s activities in religion, in science, in politics,
in art, in commerce, in manufacture, and has brought men in all
these spheres into that intense, because free and equal, competition,
which produces an ever accelerating progress. It is this which has
produced the almost universal acceptance of the entirely and most
characteristically modern principle of ‘one man one vote,’ a principle
so hard to justify on any ground of expediency, from any considerations
of the stability and welfare of the State. It is this also which
has led to so greatly increased intercourse between peoples.
It is sometimes contended that the realisation of the principles
of equality and justice for all men has been secured only by the strife
of the social classes, by the success of the lower classes in forcing
a series of concessions from the ruling classes. This is a very imperfect
and partial view of the process. If the ruling classes had consistently
[Pg 295]
sought to maintain their power and exclusive privileges, and to
maintain all the rest of society in a state of servitude or serfdom,
there is little doubt that they could have done so. But their position
has been weakened from within by the extension of their sympathies.
Consider the great series of legislative changes which, during the
nineteenth century, transformed the social organisation of this
country, especially the factory laws, the franchise extension laws,
and the laws for the abolition of slavery. These were for the most
part of the nature of a voluntary abdication of power on the part
of the classes in possession. Consider the topics which chiefly engross
the attention of our legislators and are the centre of political and
social discussion. They are the providing of a better and freer education
for the children of the working classes, who of themselves would
probably never have thought of such a thing; the providing of free
meals for school children; the providing of work and food for the
unemployed; temperance laws, land settlement, and emigration, the
eight-hours day, housing of the working classes, free trade and cheap
food, old age pensions; all measures for raising the standard of life of
the labouring classes and securing them against the tyranny of capital.
In respect of our relations to the lower peoples the same proposition
holds good. It would be easy for the European nations to
exterminate the black people of Africa, and to possess themselves
of all their lands[152]. But public opinion will not now allow this; it
insists upon our moral obligation towards such peoples, that we are
bound to try to help them to survive and to raise themselves to our
level of culture.
The extension of the sphere of application of imaginative sympathy
has then been a factor of prime importance in producing the
social evolution which underlies modern progress.
The factors that have brought about this extension have been
many and complex, and it is perhaps a hopeless task to attempt to
enumerate them and to apportion to each its share of influence.
Undoubtedly, it has been produced largely by the influence of a
relatively small number of enlightened leaders of opinion, such men
as Wilberforce, Stuart Mill, Shaftesbury, John Locke, Rousseau, and
Voltaire—men whose original intellectual powers enabled them to
criticise and reject the settled principles of their time. It was a
work of liberation from custom and traditional prejudice effected
by the spirit of inquiry, which questioned the validity of the old
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narrow conceptions of the relations of men and peoples, the old
narrow prejudices of caste and nation, and discovered their fallacies
to the world; discovered, for example, that men of a religious persuasion
slightly different from one’s own are not necessarily wicked,
nor those of a different nationality necessarily despicable and possessed
of no ideas worthy of admiration and adoption.
But the ground was prepared for the reception of the teachings
of such men by the conflicts of men who desired nothing of tolerance
and equality and liberty. This is best illustrated by the history of
religious toleration. As I said before, religion is essentially conservative
and intolerant of heresies. The first effect on religion
of that revival and liberation of the spirit of inquiry which we call
the Renascence, was to produce not religious toleration, but rather
a bitter conflict of mutually intolerant sects. And religious toleration
was eventually achieved largely by the realisation of the necessity
of compromise among these warring and constantly multiplying
sects; it was found impossible to weed out heresy by persecution.
Yet who can doubt that the Church, if it believed that it saw its
way to secure the universal acceptance of its doctrines by means of
persecution, would long hesitate to return to its ancient practices?
The coming of religious toleration was due to the application of
the spirit of inquiry to religious systems; these inquiries produced
irreconcilable sects, whose strife prepared the way for compromise
and toleration.
The strife of parties and sects was itself part of a still wider
process; and this process must be recognised as the most important
single condition of that widening of the sphere of imaginative
sympathy which has been the root cause of the improvement of
social organisation, of the general increase of liberty, and thus of
the progress of the modern nations. This wider process is the general
increase of human intercourse, both within nations and between
them. Only so long as men know little of one another, can they
continue to regard one another with entire hostility or cold indifference.
The knowledge and understanding brought by personal
intercourse is necessary to sympathy; but as soon as, and in proportion
as, such knowledge is acquired, the innate social tendencies
common to all men are brought into play. As soon as man understands
that his fellow man suffers the same pains and joys as himself,
longs for the same goods, fears the same evils, throbs with the same
emotions and desires, then he shares with him in some degree these
feelings, in virtue of that fundamental law of all social beings, the
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law of primitive sympathy; then also pity and sympathetic sorrow
and tender regard are awakened in his breast; then his fellow man is
no longer the object of his cold or hostile glances, as a certain rival
and probable enemy, but is seen to be a fellow toiler and sufferer
whom he is willing to succour, a fellow creature whose joys and
sorrows alike he cannot but share in some degree.
Increasing freedom of intercourse throughout the civilised world,
and beyond its boundaries also, has been the most characteristic
feature of the age of progress, and in it we may recognise the most
fundamental condition of that progress. Science and mechanical
invention have been the means by which this greater freedom of
intercourse has been brought about. First and most important
perhaps was the invention of printing, the consequent spread of the
habit of reading, and the wide diffusion of the written word. Second
only to this was the improvement of the art of navigation, which
brought the remotest peoples of the world within the ken of Europe
and greatly promoted the intercourse of the European peoples, as
well as the circulation of persons and news within each nation; for
the development of commerce over seas implies a corresponding
development of commerce within the national boundaries. Then
came the use of steam in locomotion on sea and land, the press and
the telegraph; and, with the advent of these, intercourse within
and without became really free and abundant; mutual knowledge
and understanding between men and nations grew rapidly, and the
age of progress was assured.
The progressive character of the modern nations has been due,
then, to the actions and reactions between the spirit of inquiry and
the improvement of forms of social organisation; each step in the
one respect has reacted upon the other, stimulating further change
in the same direction. And the medium through which they have
chiefly thus worked upon one another has been the increase of
intercourse between men and nations. The spirit of inquiry has
urged men on to explore their fellow men and to study foreign
nations, and it has provided the means for so doing; the greater
mutual knowledge and sympathy thus brought into being have in
turn brought greater liberty to the spirit of inquiry, freeing it from
the rigid bonds of custom and conservative tradition and enabling
it to render human intercourse yet more free and abundant.
In this way we reconcile and synthesize the rival theories of the
causes of progress, the view that sees in the spirit of inquiry the
sole agent of progress and that which attributes it wholly to the
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improvement of morals and of social organisation. The great commandment,
“Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” pointed the
way of all progress; but great and beautiful as it was, it could not
immediately avail to break the bonds of the human spirit, the bonds
of ignorance and fear; only gradually through increase of knowledge
could man learn that all men are his neighbours, and that not only
the foreigner just beyond the frontier, but also the naked savage,
chipping his stone axe or weaving his rude basket for the reception
of his neighbour’s head, is a man of like passions with himself, with
equal claims upon justice and freedom and all that makes the
humanity of man.
It only remains to point out the part in human life of a new
factor of progress which promises to eclipse all others in importance.
The main theme of my earlier work[153] was that only through increase
of knowledge of others is each man’s knowledge of himself slowly
built up and enriched, until it renders him capable of enlightened self-direction.
So the main theme of this book is the development of the
group mind, the increase of its self-knowledge and of its power of self-direction
through increase of knowledge of other human societies.
The age of progress through which the world has recently passed
was an age of progress due to increase of human intercourse and
consequent increasing understanding by each nation of other nations
and peoples. This better knowledge of other peoples is now reacting
upon the self-knowledge of each nation, rapidly enriching it. Each
of the great nations is beginning to understand itself, and to take
thought for the morrow in the light of this self-knowledge; and this
increase of national self-knowledge, this enrichment of national
self-consciousness, is the great new factor which alone can secure
the further progress of mankind. We saw in an earlier chapter that
a nation is essentially the realization of an idea, the idea of a nation,
that only in so far as the idea of the nation exists and operates in
the minds of the members of the nation, controlling their conduct
and directing it to actions having reference to the nation as a whole,
does a nation come into and continue in existence. The self-consciousness
of nations is therefore not a new factor in their life. But
their self-consciousness is now becoming reflective and immensely
richer in content; so much so that it promises to operate virtually
as a new factor of tremendous efficiency.
We may illustrate the influence of this new factor by reverting
again to the analogy between the mind of the individual and the
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mind of the nation which we developed at some length in an earlier
chapter. In the developing individual, as in the evolving animal
series, the development of self-consciousness is the condition of the
development of true volition. Before self-consciousness and a self-regarding
sentiment are developed, conduct is determined by feelings
and impulses or by ideas and the desires they arouse, either some
one desire rising alone to consciousness and issuing at once
in action, or through a conflict of impulses and desires, some one
of which eventually predominates over the others and determines
action; but action issuing from such a conflict of impulses and
desires is not true volition. Action is truly volitional only when the
ideal of the self in relation to the idea of the end to be achieved by
each of the conflicting tendencies determines the issue of the conflict.
In the mental life of nations, all those conflicts of ideas, of
parties, of principles and of systems, in which each strives to predominate
over and displace others, and by natural selection of which
(the death of the many less fit, the survival of the few better or more
fit) the progress of recent centuries has been chiefly due; all these
conflicts have been more or less blind conflicts, in which the idea of
the whole nation, in relation to the end to be achieved by each of
the conflicting tendencies, has generally played but a small part and
a part that often has not made strongly for progress. National
actions were in the main impulsive and instinctive actions, like those
of young children or the higher animals. And for this reason—that
nations had too little true self-knowledge, and had not developed a
true and rich ideal of national life—the self-consciousness of nations
was too poor in content to serve as the guide of actions making for
progress.
In the individual man, it is the growing richness and accuracy
of self-knowledge which alone enables him to direct his actions
effectively to secure his own welfare and to improve his character
and powers. Just so in nations the rapid growth of their self-knowledge
and the enrichment of their ideals of national life which
characterise the present time must render their self-consciousness a
far more efficient guide of all national deliberation and action.
The self-knowledge of the individual grows chiefly, as we have
seen, through intercourse with his fellows; his idea of himself develops
in fulness and accuracy in the light of his knowledge of other
selves, and this knowledge in turn develops in the light of his increasing
knowledge of himself. Just so the self-knowledge of nations
is now growing rapidly through the intercourse of each nation with
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others, an intercourse far freer, more multiplex, than ever before in
the history of the world; a result largely of the improved means of
communication which we owe to science and the spirit of inquiry.
Perhaps the most striking illustration of the operation of this
new factor is the rapid spread in recent years of parliamentary
institutions. The parliamentary system of national organisation was
worked out in these islands by long centuries of more or less blind
conflict of ideas and parties and institutions; and now other nations
in rapid succession have observed and admired the system and have
deliberately and self-consciously adopted it; and still the process
goes on, as recently in Russia.
Japan offers a striking illustration of the way in which the
new factor operates. An intelligent people in which the national
sentiment was strong, but in which national self-knowledge was
rudimentary because of the isolation of the nation, was suddenly
brought into contact with other peoples; through observation of
them, it learnt its own deficiencies and set about deliberately to
remedy them in the light of its new knowledge; and in doing so has
reorganised itself from top to bottom.
In England also national self-knowledge is beginning rapidly to
increase in accuracy and extent. We have begun to compare ourselves
at all points with other nations, and are no longer content
with the good old creed, that everything British is best. We are
learning in this way our weaknesses; and the knowledge is becoming
a main cause of accelerated progress. The best illustration is, perhaps,
the present stir over educational questions, which is directly due
to the increase of national self-knowledge resulting from the observation
of other nations.
But in the future our national self-consciousness will be enriched
and fitted for the guidance of the national will in a still more effective
manner than by the knowledge of our weaknesses being forced upon
us by the nations who are our rivals in the world. In many directions—by
the historians, the biologists, the anthropologists, the statisticians—data
are being gathered for a science of society whose sure indications
will enable us deliberately to guide the further evolution of the
nation towards the highest ideal of a nation that we can conceive.
In this way, it may be hoped, the modern nations will be able to
avoid that danger which has destroyed the great nations of the
past, and which has been the dark cloud shadowing the brilliance of
the age of progress that resulted from increasing human intercourse
and mutual understanding. In this way the free play of the spirit
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of inquiry, which in all earlier ages has been highly dangerous to
the stability of nations and which, while it was the sole cause of
progress, nevertheless destroyed many of the nations whom it impelled
upon that path, will make for a greatly accelerated progress;
and, at the same time, it will enable us to secure, by deliberate
voluntary control, the bases of society, which in all previous ages
have rested solely upon custom, instinct, and the religious sanctions.
Not by any voluntary surrender of the reason, not by any
subjugation of the intellect to the dominion of obscure transcendental
ideas, such as is preached by Benjamin Kidd, Chatterton-Hill[154] and
others who have realized the disintegrating effects of intellect on
earlier societies, but by a more strenuous use of our intellectual
faculties, and by a growth of knowledge, especially a knowledge of
the laws of human societies, will the stability and further evolution
of nations be maintained.
The nations whose progress will rest upon this basis will be in
a position very different from that of the older societies to which
the emancipation of the intellect was fatal. They fell for lack of
knowledge of natural laws, as soon as the progress of intellectual
inquiry had weakened their instinctive and customary bases. The
modern nations may reasonably hope that they are within sight of
knowledge which will enable them to avoid these dangers and to
continue their progress during an indefinitely long period. They
may even hope to progress, not only in respect of the intellectual
and moral tradition, but also in respect of racial qualities; for a
better knowledge of the factors at work and of the laws of heredity
will enable them to put an end to the influences now making for
race deterioration and to replace them by others of the opposite
tendency.
Such national progress will be truly teleological; it will be a
progress whose direction will be determined by the desire of an ideal
end present to the consciousness of all and striven after by the
collective deliberation and volition of the nation.
Thus the group spirit, rising above the level of a narrow patriotism
that regards with hostility all its rivals, recognising that only
through the further development of the collective life of nations can
man rise to higher levels than he has yet known, becomes the
supreme agent of human progress.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] History of European Thought in the 19th Century.
[2] Political Thought in England from Bacon to Halifax, Home University
Library, p. 49.
[3] Essay on “The Nature of Democracy” in Popular Government, London
1885.
[4] Psychology, the Study of Behaviour, Home University Library, London,
1912.
[5] Community, by R. M. Maciver, London, 1917.
[6] In Body and Mind, London, 1911.
[7] Op. cit. p. 76.
[8] Op. cit. p. 77.
[9] Op. cit. p. 90.
[10] E. Barker, Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the
present day, Home University Library, London, 1915.
[11] Op. cit. p. 11.
[12] Op. cit. pp. 62-64.
[13] Op. cit. p. 74. I consider Mr Barker’s brief statement of the nature of
the group mind entirely acceptable, and it has given me great pleasure to find
myself in such close harmony with it. It will perhaps give further weight to the
fact of our agreement, if I add that the whole of this book, including the rest
of this introductory chapter, was written before I took up Mr Barker’s brilliant
little volume.
[14] Op. cit. p. 175.
[15] This principle of primitive sympathy or simple direct induction or contagion
of emotion was formulated in Chapter IV of my Social Psychology.
[16] It was my good fortune to witness the almost instantaneous spread of anger
through a crowd of five thousand warlike savages in the heart of Borneo. Representatives
of all the tribes of a large district of Sarawak had been brought
together by the resident magistrate for the purpose of strengthening friendly
relations and cementing peace between the various tribes. All went smoothly,
and the chiefs surrounded by their followers were gathered together in a large
hall, rudely constructed of timber, to make public protestations of friendship.
An air of peace and good-will pervaded the assembly, until a small piece of
wood fell from the roof upon the head of one of the leading chiefs, making a
slight wound from which the blood trickled. Only the immediate neighbours
of this chief observed the accident or could perceive its effect; nevertheless
in the space of a few seconds a wave of angry emotion swept over the whole
assembly, and a general and bloody fight would have at once commenced, but
that the Resident had insisted upon all weapons being left in the boats on the
river 200 yards away. The great majority of the crowd rushed headlong to
fetch their weapons from their boats, while the few who remained on the
ground danced in fury or rushed to and fro gesticulating wildly. Happily the
boats were widely scattered along the banks of the river, so that it was possible
for the Resident, by means of persuasion, threats, and a show of armed force,
to prevent the hostile parties coming together again with their weapons in hand.
[17] The Souls of Black Folk, by W. E. B. Du Bois, London, 1905.
[18] The Crowd, p. 11.
[19] In a recent work (What is Instinct? by Bingham Newland) the author,
who shows an intimate knowledge of the life of wild animals, seems to postulate
some such direct telepathic rapport between animals of the same species.
[20] See The Dissociation of a Personality, by Dr Morton Prince; Double
Personality, by A. Binet; The Psychology of Suggestion, by Boris Sidis;
L’automatism psychologique, by Pierre Janet; and the descriptions and discussions
of William James in his Principles of Psychology.
[21] Philosophy of the Unconscious.
[22] Die Psychophysik.
[23] Psychologie des idées forces.
[24] Les Sociétés animales, Paris, 1877.
[25] Bau und Leben des Socialen Körpers.
[26] Medicinische Psychologie.
[27] I have argued that the great increase of knowledge of the functions and
structure of the nervous system attained by recent research does but provide
for the argument a surer basis of empirical data; and I have contended
that some at least of the cases of disintegration of personality are more easily
reconcilable with this view, than with the contrary doctrine which regards
the individual consciousness as the collective consciousness of the brain-cells.
See my Body and Mind, a book I found myself compelled to write in order
to arrive at a reasoned judgment on this difficult problem, which obtrudes
itself at the outset of the study of group life.
[28] Social Psychology, Chapter IX.
[29] See especially A. Stoll’s Suggestion und Hypnotismus in der Völkerpsychologie,
where the events of the French revolution have been treated in
some detail from this point of view.
[30] Hon. Maurice Baring in an article in the Morning Post of April 21, 1906.
[31] Social Psychology, Chapter IX.
[32] Op. cit. Chapter VII.
[33] One great difference between the professional army, such as that of
England, and the citizen armies of Europe, consists in the fact that the special
sentiment for the army is stronger in the former; the more general patriotic
sentiment, in the rank and file of the latter; though in the regular officers of
the continental army the sentiment for the army itself is no doubt usually
the stronger.
[34] Cp. The Pagan Tribes of Borneo, by Ch. Hose and W. McDougall, London,
1912.
[35] From Religion to Philosophy, p. 77.
[36] Op. cit. p. 82.
[37] Cf. The Pagan Tribes of Borneo, by Ch. Hose and W. McDougall, London,
1912.
[38] Mr Cornford’s book might in fact be entitled with greater propriety
From Philosophy to Religion.
[39] 1 Oct. 1914.
[40] Les Fonctions mentales dans les Sociétés inférieures, Alcan, Paris, 1910.
[41] At this point I would refer the reader to the discussion of the self-regarding
sentiment (Chapter VII) in my Social Psychology.
[42] For a brief history of the nation-state the reader may be referred to Prof.
Ramsay Muir’s Nationalism and Internationalism, London, 1917. He rightly
describes ‘nationalism’ as one of the most powerful factors in modern history.
It is, I think, obviously true that we may go further and say that it is the
most powerful factor in modern history.
[43] Op. cit. p. 38.
[44] Op. cit. p. 54.
[45] Op. cit. p. 51.
[46] Chapter II. On the question of the definition of the terms ‘mind’ and
‘character’ I would refer the reader to my Psychology, The Study of Behaviour,
Home University Library.
[47] Prof. Hans Driesch’s conception of ‘super-individual entelechy’ seems
to be of this order, arrived at by the same line of reasoning. See Science and
Philosophy of the Organism, Gifford Lectures, 1907.
[48] Psychological Laws of the Evolution of Peoples.
[49] As examples of the best work as yet accomplished in this immense and
fascinating field, I would refer the reader to the books of M. Alfred Fouillée
one of the most clear-sighted, judicious, and readable of modern philosophers,
especially his Psychologie des peuples européens, his Psychologie du
peuple français, and his Science Sociale Contemporaine.
[50] Psychologie du peuple français, p. 4. Paris 1903.
[51] Social Psychology, p. 330.
[52] Les inégalités des races humaines.
[53] This fantastic doctrine has found its fullest expression in Chamberlain’s
work The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century.
[54] Other prominent exponents of this view are Mr J. M. Robertson in his
book The Germans and in his Introduction to English Politics, and M. J. Finot
in his Race Prejudice.
[55] I here use this word in the large, loose and convenient sense in which it
is used by M. Tarde in his Lois de l’imitation. I have examined the nature of
imitative processes more closely in my Social Psychology.
[56] Meredith Townsend regards this as one of the leading qualities of the
peoples of India. See Europe and Asia, London, 1901.
[57] Cp. Ripley’s Races of Europe and Prof. H. J. Fleure’s Human Geography
in Western Europe, London, 1919.
[58] Cf. The Black Republic, by Sir Spencer St John and Where Black rules
White, by H. Hesketh Prichard.
[59] M. le Bon and more than one Indian civil servant in conversation.
[60] By G. Lowes Dickinson, Hibbert Journal, Jan. 1911.
[61] In the Fortnightly Review, Jan. 1910, and in his Social Environment and
Moral Progress, London, 1913.
[62] Physics and Politics.
[63] Cp. Ripley, op. cit. and Fleure, op. cit.
[64] This was written in 1910, and now in 1919 the dissolution which was so
obviously impending is an accomplished fact.
[65] The great myth of the racial unity and superiority of the German people,
which we have noticed above, has been cultivated and propagated, with
elaborate disregard for fact by the German State and its henchmen in the
universities and elsewhere, in a deliberate effort to remedy by art the lack of
natural boundaries and of true national homogeneity.
[66] In his Works of Man Mr March Philips shews clearly the influence of the
Egyptian landscape upon the arts of sculpture and architecture.
[67] Cf. Sir S. Dill’s The Roman Empire from Nero to Augustus, London, 1905.
[68] Since these lines were written a new mode of rapid locomotion, namely
the aerial, which has resulted from the invention and rapid development of
the internal combustion engine, threatens to eclipse all others in its effects
upon the organisation of the world.
[69] This state of affairs has no doubt been considerably altered during the
great war; the political education of Germany, a painful but salutary process,
is progressing rapidly.
[70] Cf. N. Angell, The Great Illusion.
[71] Incipient nations have appeared where the Bantu stock has produced
occasionally great warrior chiefs such as Chaka and Cetewayo.
[72] Psychological Laws of the Evolution of Peoples.
[73] I do not propose to examine in this book the much discussed question—Are
the leaders of a nation to be regarded as produced by the nation according
to the general laws of biology and psychology, or as given to them by some
supernatural process? This question belongs to a branch of Social Psychology
which is not included in the volume.
[74] Psychologie du peuple français, p. 13.
[75] Ramsay Muir, op. cit. and J. Holland Rose, The Development of the
European Nations. London, 1905.
[76] J. Holland Rose, op. cit.
[77] I suggest that international emulation in this sphere may prove to be an
effective, probably the only effective, substitute for war.
[78] Bau und Leben des socialen Körpers.
[79] Decadence.
[80] Cf. A. Smith’s Village Life in China. The author insists on the lack of
public spirit, of the idea of action pro bono publico.
[81] 1906.
[82] In his Theory of the State.
[83] By Schaffle, op. cit., and all the school of German ‘idealism’.
[84] The substance of this chapter was contained in a paper entitled ‘The
Will of the People,’ read before the Sociological Society and published in the
Sociological Review, 1912.
[85] Philosophical Theory of the State and Article in International Journal of
Ethics, 1907.
[86] Cf. H. Rose, The Development of the European Nations and Ramsay Muir,
Nationalism and Internationalism.
[87] The Russo-Japanese War, Vol. II, p. 25.
[88] La Science Sociale contemporaine, p. 115.
[89] Social Psychology, Chapters V-IX. Dr Bosanquet’s failure (as it seems
to me) to achieve a satisfactory account of the social will is the inevitable
consequence of the inadequacy of his conception of individual volition. This
is set out in his Psychology of the Moral Self, where he shews himself to be an
uncompromising adherent of the intellectualist tradition. He totally ignores
the existence and organisation of the conative side of the mind. His notion
of volition is based upon the now discredited theory of ideo-motor action.
[90] This was written before the war with Germany.
[91] Emulation in the administration of backward peoples offers perhaps the
greatest possibilities as ‘a moral equivalent for war.’
[92] Cp. Principal L. P. Jacks on the Japanese in his Alchemy of Thought.
[93] W. L. George, English Review, May, 1915, “The Price of Nationality.”
“Anger, indeed, is the soul of what is called the national will. To call it a
will is perhaps too much, it is an instinct and mainly an instinct to hate….
Love of country is mainly hatred of other countries.”
[94] Cf. Gilbert Murray, Collection of Addresses on The War given at Bedford
College, 1915.
[95] Incidentally he holds up my Social Psychology as a dreadful example of
such an attempt and a woeful evidence of the parlous state of present-day
culture in England. Such dislike of any attempt to understand that which
we hold sacred is intelligible enough in the vulgar, for whom all analysis is
destructive of the values they unreasoningly cherish. But it may be hoped
that men of letters who set out to defend patriotism will learn to rise above
this attitude, just as the more enlightened leaders of religion are learning to
welcome psychological inquiry in their domain.
[96] In these respects the Church alone can enter into serious rivalry as an
object of loyalty.
[97] As Dean Inge has remarked—“If they love not those whom they have
seen, how shall they love those whom they have not seen?”
[98] Cp. Fielding Hall, The Soul of a People.
[99] This, as President Lowell clearly shows in his Public Opinion and Popular
Government, is carried to an extreme in America and lies at the root of many
administrative evils.
[100] President Lowell (op. cit.) has clearly shown other benefits resulting
from the party system; he shows especially how the party is needed to prepare
a program and select candidates, if the popular vote is to give expression to
the dominant opinion of the people.
[101] Cp. his Civilisation and Progress.
[102] On the nature and development of the moral sentiments in the individual
mind, see my Social Psychology, Chapter VIII.
[103] Op. cit. p. 210.
[104] In this connexion I would refer the reader to The New State by M. P.
Follett (London, 1918), an interesting book in which the true nature and
function of collective deliberation is forcibly expounded.
[105] Cf. W. R. Patterson, The Nemesis of Nations, London, 1906.
[106] Social Evolution, Principle of Western Civilisation, and The Science of
Power.
[107] Essai d’une Psychologie politique du Peuple Anglais, Paris, 1903.
[108] Op. cit. p. 20.
[109] History of Civilisation, p. 137.
[110] In this connexion it must be remembered that in Hindu society the man
of proved and acknowledged holiness is permitted and encouraged to procreate
a large number of children.
[111] Europe and Asia.
[112] Op. cit.
[113] Guizot asserted that, even when new ideas and institutions have
originated elsewhere, it has usually been only by their adoption in France that
they have been spread through Europe (A History of Civilization in Europe).
[114] I cite these passages after M. Boutmy, op. cit. p. 168.
[115] The most frank, perhaps somewhat exaggerated, expression of the
difference is The Superiority of the Anglo-Saxon, by Ed. Demolins.
[116] History of Civilisation in England, Vol. II, p. 114.
[117] Comment la route crée le type social, Paris, Didot et Cie.
[118] Histoire de la Formation particulariste, Paris.
[119] The reality of selective effect of migration is shown by the stature of
American immigrants; those from Scotland are said to be two inches taller
than the average Scotchman; and De Lapouge shows (Les Sélections Sociales,
Paris, 1896, p. 367) that a superiority of stature almost as marked, may be
inferred for the French and German immigrants of America from the statistics
of the armies of the Civil War.
[120] A. Reibmayer (Inzucht u. Vermischung beim Menschen, Leipzig, 1897) insists
upon the importance of isolation and consequent inbreeding for the
formation of superior strains and subraces. He points out that the geographical
barriers of Europe have favoured in this way the production of distinctive
national types. Like Stewart Chamberlain, Flinders Petrie, and others, he
regards the dark ages of Europe as a period of chaos directly due to the overcoming
of these geographical barriers and the consequent prevalence of crossbreeding
on a large scale.
[121] White Capital and coloured Labour.
[122] Aristotle says “want of men was the ruin of Sparta.” Fathers of three
sons were exempted from military service, and of four sons from all State
burdens.
[123] Several writers have pointed out the importance of these facts and at
least one professional historian has insisted strongly upon them, namely
O. Seeck in his Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt, Berlin, 1910, vol. 1.
[124] On this topic cp. Dr Archdall Reid’s The Present Evolution of Man and
his Principles of Heredity, in which books the effects of selection by disease
and by alcohol are vividly set out.
[125] Op. cit.
[126] O. Ammon, Gesellschaftsordnung und ihre natürlichen Grundlagen, Jena,
1900.
[127] De Lapouge, Les Sélections Sociales; cf. also W. Alexis, Abhandlungen
zur Theorie der Bevölkerungs-und Moralstatistik, Jena, 1903, and W. Schallmayer’s
Vererbung und Auslese in ihrer soziologischen und politischen Bedeutung,
Jena, 1910.
[128] Ammon’s Law.
[129] Pointed out by Francis Galton and Fouillée.
[130] On the other hand it tends (partly no doubt by deliberate design) to
spread itself by insisting upon the duty of procreation. This effect is said to
be very considerable in French Canada and only to be partially counteracted
by a very high rate of infantile mortality.
[131] The Nineteenth Century for April, 1906.
[132] In National Life and Character, a pessimistic though intellectually
stimulating book.
[133] Provident Societies, by Sidney Webb, and The London Population, by
D. Heron.
[134] It must be recognised also that in Great Britain emigration has, during
the last three centuries, tended in all probability in the same direction as the
various forms of social selection—namely, to the deterioration of the home
population; for in all ages it is the bold and enterprising persons who seek
new homes in far countries, leaving the weakly, the timid, the dull, and the
defective behind in the mother country. Even the convicts that we exported at
one time to our colonies were probably persons of more than average capacity,
though some of them may have been innately defective in moral disposition.
[135] Études sur la sélection chez l’homme. Paris, 1904.
[136] England and the English.
[137] Notably by Prof. Flinders Petrie in his Revolutions of Civilisation.
[138] Op. cit. p. 407.
[139] De Laponge does not stand alone in this opinion. Many biologists
and leaders of thought have expressed it hardly less strongly, though not all
of them have attached so much importance to the influence of the towns.
It has been expressed in general terms by Dr and Mrs Whetham (in the Hibbert
Journal for Oct. 1911), by Dean Inge in a number of forcible articles, by
Mr W. Bateson in his ‘Herbert Spencer Lecture’ for 1912, and by other
writers in a number of articles in the Eugenics Review and other journals.
[140] This conclusion may perhaps be said to be now generally accepted by
those who have given any thought to the matter. A. R. Wallace argued
strongly in this sense; the late Benjamin Kidd set out the evidence impressively
in his Social Evolution, Chapter IX; and it is implied by all the many writers
who, as we have noted, agree in regarding the processes of selection in the
civilised nations as in the main reversed or detrimental.
[141] I refer the reader to my Social Psychology.
[142] In this connection I may again refer to The Pagan Tribes of Borneo,
by C. Hose and W. McDougall.
[143] It has been translated into nine languages and was reprinted ten times
in the first year after its publication.
[144] Shortly before his death Mr Kidd published (in the year 1918) his
Science of Power. In this book he showed a complete change of face on the
question of the importance of innate qualities. He denied all importance to
changes of innate qualities, whether for better or worse, because, as he maintained,
“the social heredity transmitted through social culture is infinitely
more important to a people than any heredity inborn in the individuals
thereof” (p. 273); and he made in this book a violent and scornful attack
upon the late Francis Galton and upon all who follow him in believing that the
decay or improvement of the racial qualities of a people are of importance
for its prosperity and development, and who, therefore, approve of Galton’s
effort to found a science of Eugenics. Kidd did not anywhere in his last book
acknowledge that he had made this very great change of principle, which
completely undermines the whole argument of his Social Evolution, but complacently
suggested that, as Newton and Darwin are regarded as the fathers
of modern physical and biological science respectively, so in the future Kidd
will be regarded as having founded anew in his Social Evolution the science
of society. On reading the Science of Power after having written this chapter,
I was amazed at this assumption on behalf of a book whose most fundamental
doctrine the author had himself renounced, and I turned again to the earlier
work to verify my brief summary of its argument. I confess that it is not
easy to make sure of what the author was driving at. But I find that Kidd,
in discussing the influence of religious systems, wrote (on p. 307) “Natural
selection seems, in short, to be steadily evolving in the race that type of
character upon which these forces act most readily and efficiently; that is to
say, it is evolving religious character in the first instance, and intellectual
character only as a secondary product in association with it.” On the following
page I find—“The race would, in fact, appear to be growing more and more
religious,” and “a preponderating element in the type of character which the
evolutionary forces at work in human society are slowly developing, would
appear to be the sense of reverence.” And there are many other passages
which, in spite of the habitual lack of precision of Kidd’s language, can only
be interpreted to mean that the improvement of moral or religious character,
on which he so strongly insists as a feature of recent centuries, involves and
depends upon improvement of innate qualities in the mass of the people.
[145] Otto Seeck (op. cit. vol. 1. p. 270) writes—“The equipment of the legionaries
remained unchanged from Augustus to Diocletian: no improvements of
tactics, no new munitions of war were brought into use during more than three
hundred years. The Roman saw his enemies becoming ever more terrible, his
own army ever less efficient; for now this, now that, Province was laid waste
and all were threatened. It was, therefore, to the most urgent interest of every
citizen that this state of affairs should be remedied; the most cultured circles
were familiar with the needs of the army, for all the higher officers came from
the class of Senators and nobles. Nevertheless, there appeared not a single invention,
which might have assured to the Roman soldiers their erstwhile
superiority! Books indeed were written upon tactics, strategy and fortification,
but their authors almost without exception were content to expound in a
formal manner what their more capable forefathers had taught; in this literature
the expression of any new idea was carefully avoided…. As in the
military sphere, so also was it in all others. Neither in agriculture, nor in
handicrafts, nor in the practice of statecraft, did a new idea of any importance
appear since the first century after Christ. Literature and art also moved only
in sterile imitation, which became always more poverty-stricken and technically
feebler.”
[146] Cf. La Cité Antique of F. de Coulanges.
[147] A fact which provides another argument against use-inheritance.
[148] This was written before the Great War but needs, I think, no modification.
[149] Francis Galton and his disciples have produced much evidence to show
that the educated class of Englishmen includes a very much larger proportion
of strains of high ability than the rest of the people, it having been formed by
the long continued operation of the social ladder. There is no reason to doubt
the truth of this conclusion.
[150] Prof. S. Alexander, in his Moral Order and Progress, was perhaps the
first to draw attention to this form of the struggle for existence.
[151] This last sentence perhaps is only partially true. A rigid system of State
Socialism would involve a retrogression in this respect.
[152] As the Spaniards well-nigh exterminated in the name of the Church the
civilisation and the nations of Mexico and Peru.
[153] Introduction to Social Psychology.
[154] Heredity and Selection in Sociology, London, 1907; an interesting work
similar in tendency to Kidd’s Social Evolution.
Index
- Abdication of classes, 295
- Abstract psychology, 2
- Adam Smith, 4
- Aesthetic faculty, 157
- Africa and lack of leaders, 136
- American homogeneity, 124
- Ammon, O., 252
- Analogy of national with individual mind, 147
- Ancestor worship, 183
- Ancient States, 285
- Angell, N., 133
- Anglo-Saxon origins, 238
- Animal societies, 33, 66
- Arab nation and Mahomet, 136
- Aristotle, 3, 192, 248
- Army, as organised group, 51;
- organisation, 81
- Asiatics and authority, 114
- Athens depleted, 248
- Bagehot, W., 201
- Balfour, A. J., on decadence, 146
- Baring, M., on Russians, 46
- Barker, E., 16, 18
- Bateson, W., 262
- Beattie Crozier, 193
- Bengal, 161
- Bentham, 4
- Binet, 32
- Bingham Newland, 29
- Birthrate, 253
- Blending of races, 241, 278
- Boer armies, 58
- Bosanquet, on general will, 155
- Boutmy, 215, 221, 228
- Brains, size of, 137
- Buckle, 206, 217, 227, 255, 282
- Bulgaria and war, 143
- Burke, Ed., 181
- Butler, 5
- Caste, 183, 271, 288
- Celts, 235
- Chamberlain, H. S., 108, 244
- Chinese stability, 141
- Christianity and morals, 267;
- and progress, 274
- Church, as a group, 95
- Civilisation, and natural selection, 261;
- defined, 204
- Clans, 159
- Claqueurs, 29
- Classification of groups, 89
- Climate and race qualities, 214
- Collective consciousness, 31 et seq., 71;
- Communications, freedom of, 132
- Comte, 5
- Concreteness in psychology, 2
- Conflict and progress, 296
- Conquest and progress, 276
- Contact of cultures, 283
- Contagion of emotion, 27
- Continuity, national, 145
- Cornford, 70
- Crowd, anger in Borneo, 26;
- Crowds, 22 et seq.
- Darwin, 5
- De Lapouge, 241, 252, 253, 261
- Deliberative organisation, 187, 191
- Demolins, Ed, 226, 233
- Dickinson, G. L., 119
- Differentiation of races, 201, 208
- Dill, Sir S., 132
- Dissociation of personality, 32
- Driesch, H., 103
- Du Bois, 27
- Durkheim, on race, 109
- Edict of Nantes, 252
- Egyptian culture and nature, 128
- Energy and climate, 221;
- of races, 272
- England and Germany contrasted, 146
- Ephemeral groups, 88
- Equality, ideal of, 184
- Espinas, 33
- Eurasians, 83
- European progress, 287;
- races, 114
- Evolution of man, 209
- Factors of national development, 206
- Family as essential group, 82, 165;
- consciousness, 159
- Fear in India, 218
- Fechner, 32
- Feudal system, 291
- Fleure, J. H., 115
- Fouillée, 19, 101, 105, 139, 162, 255
- French conquests, 184;
- sociability, 223
- [Pg 303]Fusions of civilisation, 276;
- by conquest, 277
- Galton, F., 255, 291
- Gauls, 231
- General will, 53
- Genetic view in psychology, 4
- Genius and national life, 137
- Geography and progress, 283
- George, W. L., 178
- German idealism, 15;
- Giddings, 5
- Gobineau, 108
- Gods, national, 102
- Gooch, 3
- Good of whole and of all, 172
- Greek people substituted, 247
- Green, T. H., 15
- Group action, types of, 57
- Group mind, conditions of, 48;
- Group psychology, the task of, 7
- Group spirit, 62 et seq., 302;
- its merits, 79
- Guizot, 223
- Hamilton, Sir I., on Japanese, 162
- Hartmann, v., 33, 103
- Hayti, 117
- Hebrew nation, 159
- Hegel, 16
- Heron, D., 258
- Hierarchy of groups, 80;
- of sentiments, 81
- Hill, Chatterton, 301
- Historians and psychology, 99
- Hobbes, 3
- Holland Rose, 143
- Homogeneity of group, 23;
- of nations, 121
- Hose, Ch., 72
- House of Commons, 189
- Idea of nation, 162, 173
- Ideals, national, 183
- Imaginative sympathy, 295
- Impulse, national, 192
- Independence, English, 224
- India, and China contrasted, 124, 244;
- and Western culture, 118
- Individual, and group psychology, 6;
- Individualistic family, 237
- Induction of emotion, 25
- Infertility of peoples, 251
- Inge, Dean, 262
- Innate qualities, 110;
- and culture, 112
- Inquiry, spirit of, 275, 301
- Intellect, disruptive effects of, 275
- Intense emotion of crowds, 24, 29
- Intercourse of peoples, 167
- International rivalry, 144, 167
- Irish qualities, 236
- Isolation of China, 165
- Jacks, L. P., 167
- Jacobi, 258
- James, Wm., 32
- Janet, P., 32
- Japanese patriotism, 162
- Jesuit system of education, 83
- Justice, contractual, 288
- Kidd, B., 206, 267;
- on Galton, 268
- Kitchener, Lord, 64
- Leaders and national life, 135
- Leadership in armies, 60
- Le Bon, 20, 28, 136
- Le Play, school of, 231
- Levy Brühl, 74
- Liberty, and progress, 287;
- ideal of, 184
- Limits of State, 188
- Locke, 3
- Locomotion, modes of, 132
- Lotze, 36
- Lowell, President, 187, 197
- Lynching, 47
- Maciver, R. M., 9 et seq.
- Maine, Sir H., 5, 229, 270
- Maitland, 18
- Marie, 20
- Marx, K., 104
- Matteuzzi, 104
- Merz, Th., 2
- Mill, J. S., on race, 108
- Modern and primitive man, 120
- Mongrel races, 140, 243, 279
- Montesquieu, 104
- Moral tradition changing, 246
- Morality, traditional, 264;
- primitive, 264
- Muir, Ramsey, 96
- Munsterberg, on Americans, 124
- Murray, G., 178
- My country, right or wrong, 174
- Nation, definition of, 97 et seq.
- National action, types of, 170;
- genius, 139
- Nationalism, 94, 164
- Nationality a psychological problem, 143
- Natural boundaries, 127
- Negro race and leaders, 136
- Negroes and American nation, 126
- Neighbour, who is our? 298
- Newspapers in national life, 133
- Normans, 238
- North Sea outrage, 192
- Northmen, 238
- [Pg 304]Olivier, Sir S., 244
- Organic and higher unity, 157
- Organisation, types of, 150;
- Organism, contractual, 173
- Outcastes, 85
- Paine, 25
- Paradox of group life, 20
- Parliamentary traditions, 191
- Patriarchal system, 234
- Patriotism, 54, 164, 177;
- disparaged, 181
- Pearson C. H., 257
- Pearson, Karl, 258
- Pelasgians, 247
- Petrie, Flinders, 244, 260
- Philippines, Americans in, 118
- Philosophy of history, 105
- Physical environment and race qualities, 202, 213
- Plato, 17, 83
- Political philosophy, German, 152
- Populations, increase of, 250
- Practical interests and psychology, 3
- Prestige, 64
- Price, Collier, 260
- Prichard, H. H., 117
- Primitive Societies, 64;
- sympathy, 25
- Prince, Morton, 10, 32
- Progress, ideal of, 185;
- of nations, 273
- Protestanism, distribution of, 115
- Public opinion, 192, 197
- Punans of Borneo, 72
- Race qualities shape institutions, 116;
- Racial differences, 111
- Reid, Archdall, 252
- Relations of sciences, 1
- Religion and Reason, 259
- Religious excitement, 27
- Renan, 4
- Representative institutions, 198
- Responsibility, communal, 68;
- national, 144
- Ripley, 115
- Ritual, 92
- Rivalry, national, 167
- Roman Church and celibacy, 254;
- civilization, 284
- Rousseau, 3, 53, 155
- Russian armies, 59
- Satisfactions of group life, 78
- Scandinavian conditions, 237
- Schaeffle, 35
- Seeck, O., 250, 270
- Selection by environment, 209;
- Self-consciousness in crowds, 44;
- Sentiment, national, 164
- Sidis, 32
- Sighele, 20
- Social evolution, 211, 288;
- Social Psychology, 1, 3
- Sociology and psychology, 8
- Solidarity of human race, 185
- Spain depleted, 254
- Sparta depleted, 248
- Spencer, H., 7
- State and nation, 175
- States, limits of size, 131
- Status to contract, 285
- St. John, Sir S., 117
- Stoll, 46
- Subraces, 120
- Suggestibility and emotion, 41
- Superiority, intellectual, 263;
- Sympathetic action, national, 188
- Tancred de Hauteville, 239
- Telepathy, 28
- Tolerance, 294
- Tolstoi and anarchism, 152
- Tourville, H. de, 231, 233
- Townsend, Meredith, 221
- Tradition in political life, 191
- Tribal conflict, 245;
- consciousness, 159
- Two party system, 190
- Unity of nation, 157
- Utilitarianism, 3
- Value of nationality, 177
- Variability of blended races, 140;
- and progress, 280
- Variation, spontaneous, 209
- Volney on colonists, 226
- Voluntary groups, 77
- Vue d’ensemble in psychology, 2
- Wallace, A. R., on our ancestors, 120
- War and national unity, 142
- Webb, Sidney, 258
- Welldon, Bishop, on sons of clergy, 255
- Whetham, 262
- Will of the people, 156
- Wingfield, Stratford, 179
- Womb of peoples, 238
- World communications, 133
- Written Codes, influence of, 271
THE
CAMBRIDGE PSYCHOLOGICAL
LIBRARY
General Editor
G. DAWES HICKS, M.A., Ph.D., Litt.D.
PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON
The progress of Psychology during the last half century has been
both rapid and extensive. Along the lines of theoretical inquiry
significant and far-reaching results have been attained; the methods
of experimental research have been successfully applied to a wide
range of mental phenomena; and it is now generally recognised that
in connexion with the subject-matter of many branches of scientific
pursuit psychological problems of fundamental importance present
themselves for solution. The object of the Cambridge Psychological
Library is to furnish a series of books, written by men actually
engaged in the work of research, dealing with the various subjects
that come within the field of Psychology. The extent of this field
may be gauged from the titles of the volumes given below, some of
which have already appeared, the others being in preparation.
For the reasons indicated, the Cambridge Psychological Library
will appeal not only to Psychologists but also to students of many
other departments of scientific thought and investigation, such as
Philosophy, Sociology, Art, Comparative Religion, Anthropology,
Physiology, Zoology, Medicine, Education and Industrial Efficiency.
The following volumes have been arranged:
| Psychological Principles. | |
| By Prof. James Ward, Sc.D., F.B.A. | |
| Royal 8vo. 2nd edition. 24s. net. | [Now ready |
| An Introduction to the Study of Colour Vision. | |
| By J. Herbert Parsons, D.Sc., F.R.C.S. | |
| Royal 8vo. Frontispiece and 75 text-figures. 12s 6d | [Now ready |
| The Group Mind. | |
| By W. Mcdougall, F.R.S. | |
| Royal 8vo. | [Now ready |
| Prolegomena to Psychology. | |
| By Prof. G. Dawes Hicks, M.A., Ph.D., Litt.D. | |
| Psychology in Relation to Theory of Knowledge. | |
| By Prof. G. F. Stout, M.A., LL.D., F.B.A. | |
| The Nervous System. | |
| By Prof. C. S. Sherrington, M.D., F.R.S. | |
| The Structure of the Nervous System and the Sense Organs. | |
| By Prof. G. Elliot Smith, M.D., F.R.S. | |
| Mental Measurement. | |
| By W. Brown, D.Sc. and G. H. Thomson, D.Sc., Ph.D. | [In the Press |
| The Psychology of Mental Differences. | |
| By C. Burt, M.A. | |
| The Psychology of Personality and Suggestion. | |
| By T. W. Mitchell, M.D. | |
| The Psychology of Dreams. | |
| By Prof. T. H. Pear, M.A. | |
| Comparative Psychology. | |
| By Prof. Carveth Read, M.A. | |
| The Process of Conventionalisation. | |
| By F. C. Bartlett, M.A. |
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