CHAPTER II

_ETHNIC MENTAL DIVERSITY FROM COGNATIC CAUSES_

In the last chapter I have considered the individual in his relation to the group simply as an isolated unit, with his own powers and weaknesses.

Both of these, however, he derives largely from his ancestors, through the fact that he is born a member of a particular species, race, and family. Such traits react powerfully on his mental life, and, indeed, in themselves force him into relation with a human group, his cognatic or kindred associates.

The ethnic psychologist must therefore devote to them insistent attention. For convenience of study the facts may be grouped under three headings, Heredity, Hybridity, and Racial Pathology.

_Heredity._—In body and mind, the child resembles his parents, the individual his ancestors. This is the principle of fixity of type, the permanence of species.

Neither in body or mind is the child ever exactly like his parents or either one of them. Differences are always visible. This is the principle of constant variation, at the basis of the unending transformations of organic forms.

On these two principles rests the law of Evolution, which may be progressive or regressive, that is, toward greater complexity and specialisation or toward simplicity and homogeneity. Of these two principles, one is real, the other merely apparent,—the negative or minus quantity of the other, as cold is to heat or darkness to light. Which is the real?

The question is not idle, for upon its correct decision depends the accuracy of our views of organic life.

So long as the doctrine of the immutability of species was accepted, everyone believed in the fixity of type as the prime law. When Lamarck and Darwin had undermined that position, and up to a very recent date, the two principles were considered somehow equal, dual conflicting forces, the fixity of type being a passive result of the action of the “environment.”

The unphilosophical character of such a conception of facts has now become apparent, at least to a few. The true positive of the two forces is change, variation. This is the one, fundamental, essential characteristic of living matter. Every element of an organism that is not ceaselessly changing ceases to be living, vital.

“Hereditary,” therefore, is a merely negative expression. It means a diminution, not a cessation of change. Inherited traits are those in which the rate of variability has been so reduced that they reappear by repetition in several or many generations. Every one of them began in some single individual, was due to a definite exciting cause, and was transmitted by the route of reproduction. Hence inherited traits have been properly termed “secondary variations.”

The long discussion whether acquired characters can be inherited has virtually been decided in favour of the opinion that every character, whether racial or specific, was originally acquired by a single person or persons and transmitted by them. The data of pathology admit of no doubt on this point, and pathology is but one of the aspects of general organic development.

That not every acquired character can be transmitted goes without saying; and it is equally true that hereditary traits vary widely in their capacity for survival. So evident is this that they have been classified by observers into “strong” and “weak” traits, the latter betraying a feebleness of self-perpetuation compared to the former.

I have been discoursing of physical heredity and some of its observed laws. This has not been beside the mark; for I repeat that the correlation between body and mind is absolute. Psychical traits are passed down from generation to generation hand in hand with physical peculiarities. Men are what they are in good measure because they are born so. About this the students of heredity are unanimous and positive. Hence the necessity in ethnic psychology of learning the laws of physical heredity and applying them to the history of the mind.

An example will illustrate this.

There is a curious manifestation of transmission called “homochronous” heredity. The adjective signifies that a trait which appears first at a certain age in the parent will also appear first at about the same age in the offspring. A familiar physiological example is the date of the beginning and the end of the reproductive period in women. Inherited tendencies to disease will recur in the offspring at the age they revealed themselves in the parent. This is strikingly true of mental traits, especially those which are degenerative.

Even in the mixed populations of modern states, the connection of mental with physical heredity is manifest. Commenting on the population of France, Dr. Collignon observes: “To the difference of races, a purely anatomical fact attested by the form of the skull, the colour of the eyes and hair, and similar bodily traits, there corresponds a cerebral difference, which shows itself in the prevailing direction of the thoughts, and in special aptitudes.” These contrasts are shown by the statistics of Jacoby, who examined the birth and lineage of the most eminent men of France in all departments of activity. He found that the Normans were decidedly ahead in the exact sciences and practical affairs, while in poetry, romance, and works of imagination in general the people of the Midi were far superior to them.

Heredity is believed to present itself in another aspect, which has excited much attention. I refer to that form of it called “atavism” or “ancestral reversion,” or “retrogression,” in which a child “takes after,” not his immediate parents, but some remote ancestor; even, as has been often claimed, so remote as beyond the limits of our own species. Such traits have been called “pithecoid” (ape-like) reversions, as they are alleged to be derived from some four-footed precursor of man, an ape, or even a lemur.

Evolutionists whose enthusiasm transcended their discretion have pointed out many such features in the human skeleton. A few years ago (1894) I gathered these together, and in a paper read before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, I undertook to prove that these features can be satisfactorily explained by mechanical and functional processes acting in the individual life or in that of his immediate ancestors, and that we have no occasion to appeal to hypotheses of descent, which have, at least, never been proved. Other American anatomists (Bowditch, Baker) endorsed and supported by further evidence this position, so that physical anthropologists, in our country at least, have said less about atavism than formerly; and the final blow to it has been dealt quite lately by a Dutch writer, Dr. Kohlbrügge. He has established the thesis that “all so-called atavistic anomalies are meaningless for the race-type. They are brought about by arrests of development or general variability. They depend on disturbances of nutrition, leading to excess or deficiency of productive energy, presenting a deceptive appearance of progressive or retrogressive evolution.”

The consideration of these questions in physical heredity is necessary in psychology, whether individual or ethnic, not merely because the laws of physical run parallel to those of psychical life, but as well for the valuation of those expressions about “men recurring to their brute ancestors” in habits or feelings, so frequent in popular literature.

_Hybridity._—The intermixture of human races or stocks, human hybridity as it is sometimes called, has been recognised by all anthropologists to be a prime factor in ethnic psychology, in the psychical history of Man.

But, strange to say, the opinions about its results could not have been more divergent. On the one hand we have a corps of authors, Gobineau, Nott, Broca, Hovelacque, Hervé, etc., who condemn the admixture of human races as leading inevitably to mental and physical degeneration, infertility, and extinction.

In direct contradiction to them we find the not less distinguished names of Quatrefages and Bastian, who maintain not only that such “miscegenation” is harmless, but that it has been the main factor of human intellectual progress! That owing chiefly to it certain tribes and nations have by unconscious selection drawn to themselves the strong qualities of many lines of blood, and thus won the foremost place in the struggle for existence. This was notably the opinion of Quatrefages, who defended the thesis, “In race-mingling the crossing is unilateral and is directed under unconscious selection toward the superior race.”

This is supported by many well-known examples. In our own country, the superiority of the mulatto to the full-blood negro is proved by history and is familiar to all observers; and Dr. Boas has shown by statistical researches that the half-blood Indian is mentally superior to his companion of pure lineage, while the half-blood Indian women, instead of revealing diminished fertility, average two more children to a marriage than their red sisters of unmixed lineage.

But it will not do to ignore the array of facts of contrary tenor which has been marshalled to show that in divers instances the result of race-mixture has been disastrous.

Many of these may easily be explained by the unfortunate social condition of children in such unions, mostly illegitimate, or at odds with extreme poverty and its ill surroundings. If they do inherit an increased ability, it is, under modern conditions, more apt to be directed against than in favour of the social order.

After all such allowances, there remains a residue unexplained by them, and inconsistent with the general theory of advantage in race-intermixture.

The solution of this problem is to be found in the operation of an obscure but certain law of heredity which has been demonstrated by the best modern observers.

This reads that in the struggle for transmission between contrary characteristics in the parents, any trait, mental or physical, may be passed down separately, _independently of others_.

Thus, on the physical side, the father may have red, the mother black, hair. The children will inherit, not a blended colour, but some the red, some the black hair. Or, let us say, one parent has marked musical ability, the other none. Some of the children will have as much as the gifted parent, the others be devoid of the faculty.

It is essential, also, to remember that it is the inferior race only which reaps the psychical advantage. Compared to the parent of the higher race, the children are a deteriorated product. Only when contrasted with the average of the lower race can they be expected to take some precedence. The mixture, if general and continued through generations, will infallibly entail a lower grade of power in the descendant. The net balance of the two accounts will show a loss when compared with the result of unions among the higher race alone.

This consideration has led a recent writer, Dr. Reibmayr, to a theory of ethnic mental development which merits close attention.

A family, tribe, caste, or race, to preserve and increase its faculties must sedulously avoid intermarriage with one of inferior gifts. The value of “breeding in-and-in” is familiar to all interested in the improvement of the lower animals. This was attained in primitive life by the tribal law of endogamous marriages, by which a man must take his wife within the tribe, but not of his immediate blood.

The superiority which this developed led to the subjection of other tribes, and this, through capture and enslavement of the women, to intermixture of blood, with its above mentioned first consequences: deterioration of power in the captors, and, next, elevation of the lower, conquered tribe.

The former was sometimes counteracted by the maintenance of purity of blood in a portion of the community, which thus became the ruling class; and if this did not take place, the tribe itself soon fell beneath the sway of some neighbour which had maintained its lineage more purely.

Thus, says Dr. Reibmayr, the history of human mental development is, in fact, the history of human hybridity and its necessary consequences.

Thus it appears that the reciprocal action of these two genetic processes, the one of close and closer interbreeding, the other of wide and wider intermixture of blood, is the prime element in modifying the psychical faculties,—in other words, in creating and moulding the ethnic mind.

How weighty this consideration becomes when we reflect that throughout historic times, that is, from the earliest dawn of civilisation, the subspecies of man have ever been as clearly contrasted in every feature as they are to-day! The oldest monuments of Egypt and Assyria show their portraits as typical as if carved or painted yesterday. No boreal fountain can wash the Ethiopian white; no kisses of tropical Phœbus could turn Cleopatra black.

We are constrained to adopt, therefore, the principle formulated by Orgeas, that, so far as history knows, “the races of men have never altered their traits except through intermarriage.”

The physical criteria of race, such as the colour of the skin, the hair, the shape of the skull, the odour of the glands, are well marked in the gross. I have examined their relative values for purposes of classification in another work, and need not repeat the details here. But the question is pertinent: Are there psychological distinctions separating the subspecies of man as clearly as those of his physical economy?

Conflicting answers have been and still are offered to this inquiry. By some the mental powers of the races are asserted to be as sharply contrasted as their personal appearance, and the gulf between them to be practically impassable.

I have already said that nothing in the minute or gross anatomy of the brain can be offered to support this view. The contributions to the general culture of the species have been markedly unequal; but may not this be explained by other reasons than inherent physical inequalities?

I have already expressed the opinion that human groups have differed less in inherent psychical capacity than in stimuli and opportunities. Such, also, is the belief of that profound student of human development, Professor Bastian. He claims that convincing evidence in favour of such a view can be drawn from the uniformity in the development of thoughts, inventions, customs, religions, and the other elements of culture the world over, up to a certain point at which other intercurrent influences entered, not dependent on race distinctions.

After a prolonged study of primitive peoples the anthropologist Waitz reached the conclusion that there is not and never was any positive difference in the intellectual power of races; and the historian Buckle, reviewing the record of the species in time, announced his conviction that “the natural faculties of man have made no progress.”

In abundant instances the children of savage parents have been brought up in civilised surroundings and have shown themselves equal and occasionally superior to their comrades of the so-called higher race in all the tastes of cultured society. It were useless, therefore, to talk of an average natural inferiority.

The attainment of a possible average, therefore, must be conceded. But this must not be construed as closing the question historically or psychically.

It is constantly observed in education that children of equal ability are by no means equally good scholars. They respond differently to the stimulus of the desire of knowledge.

Such contrasts are witnessed in races also, and, apart from whatever other influences we may name, are hereditary characteristics, recurring indefinitely and controlling the racial mind, its activities and its ambitions.

So visible are the mental differences of races that some writers have advocated a psychological classification in anthropology. Professor Letourneau has attempted it in one of his many treatises.

_Pathology._—But it is not sufficient in this study of racial psychology to recount what a race has done and left undone in the work of the world. We must also turn a gloomier page and take into account the pathological mental symptoms it betrays; for these may be indicative of a disease so deep seated and so fatal that the doom of the race is inevitable. When we see whole peoples dying out, not through external violence, but through some internal lack of vital force or adaptability, as in the instances of the Tasmanians, Australians, Polynesians, and American Indians, we may be sure that either in mind or body they are the victims of some deep-seated, fatal disease.

Most writers, treating the subject superficially, have sought for the cause of the decline and destruction of peoples in the decay of their institutions, in the immorality of their lives, in their apathy to danger, or in the loss of their ambitions. These are but symptoms of the mental or physical malady which, “mining all within, infects unseen.” They are the results of the incurable ailment which is hurrying them to destruction. Dr. Orgeas is right in his contention that “the pathological characteristics of peoples have played leading parts in the grand dramas of history, though they have too often escaped the observation of historians.”

It finds its expressions in such phenomena as Ratzel enumerates as the cause of the deaths of peoples—restlessness, indifference to life, debauchery, infanticide, murder, cannibalism, constant war, slavery, laziness. When these are carried to the extent of reducing the personal and numerical vigour of a tribe or race, it indicates that its intellect is awry, its mind is diseased.

Thus the ineradicable restlessness of the red race, which more than any other one trait has stood in the way of their self-culture, belongs in the pathology of their nervous system. As Dr. Buschan points out, and as I have elsewhere emphasised, they are especially subject to “diseases of excitement,” contagious nervous disorders, leading to scenes of the wildest riot and tribal loss.

They share this pathological condition with the Malayo-Polynesian peoples of the Pacific island-world. Among them both we find numerous examples of that outbreak of homicidal mania called “running amuck” (properly _amok_), where the maniac rushes into a crowd, killing whom he can; a crowd, not of enemies, as in the “Berserkerwuth” of the Northmen, but of friends and relatives. The abandonment of both races to alcoholism and narcotics is an evidence of the same morbid nervous excitability. This is an inherited racial pathological tendency and is not to be measured by the mere prevalence of nervous diseases. These may arise from the increased strain on the neurons when the struggle for existence is intensified. The enfranchised blacks since they have been obliged to support themselves present a much larger percentage of brain and nerve disease; such maladies among the Jews of Europe are six times more frequent than among the Aryans; and certain forms, such as progressive paralysis, are unknown in any but the most civilised communities.

The immunity of races to disease, or its reverse, reacts powerfully on their mental life, leading in the latter case to discouragement and apathy, in the former to confidence and conquest.

Two of the most striking examples are measles and smallpox. In the white race, the former has become merely one of the “diseases of children,” exciting little alarm, and, against the latter, vaccination provides an efficient protection. Among native Polynesians and Americans the ravages of both have been so dreadful as not merely to decimate a population but to leave the survivors mentally prostrate and indifferent to life. To such an extent has this mental depression sometimes progressed that some tribes, as the Lenguas of La Plata, have decided on the self-destruction of their race, and destroyed all their children at birth.

The immunity of the white race to malignant measles is not due to any special power of resistance, but to well-known laws of natural selection in disease, and does not extend to many diseases. The Japanese are practically immune to scarlet fever, the black race to yellow fever, etc., and that all such exemptions react favourably on the ethnic mind cannot be doubted. Such immunity is strictly _cognatic_, a legacy of blood in the true physiological sense, the human cells having undergone changes by the repeated attacks of the disease-germs resulting in practical indifference to their assaults.

Indirectly, the march of epidemics has often not only decided the fate of nations but worked remarkable changes in national character. A familiar and striking example is the result of the Black Death (bubonic typhus) in England in the reign of Edward III.