CHAPTER IV

_PATHOLOGICAL VARIATION IN THE ETHNIC MIND_

We have seen in the preceding chapter that atrophy and regression are an essential process of progressive evolution, necessary in order that the preponderance of nutrition may be cast in favour of the most useful organs and structures.

This is “physiological” degeneration, “degeneration with compensation,” the result of which is finally favourable to the general economy.

But there is another form of degeneration, the tendency of which is distinctly injurious to the organism as a whole, and which, if unchecked, would compass its destruction. This is “pathological degeneration,” “degeneration without compensation.”

Although such processes are also biologic,—that is, carried on by life products (cellular neoplasms),—they are incapable of independent existence and are always warring against that of the organism in which they are engendered. It is an axiom that the laws of progressive evolution do not apply to pathological processes (Virchow).

In the history of the mental life of individuals and nations we find a striking parallelism to these physical processes, certain degenerations bringing with them compensations in the growth of higher faculties, others tending inevitably to the destruction of the individual or the group. The latter belongs to the domain of “ethnic psycho-pathology.”

Psychologists have shunned this field. “Psychology,” says a recent American writer, “must concern itself with the _normal_ mind”; and a German author of merit has insisted that mental pathology has no place in ethnology, because this science occupies itself only with the progress of mankind.

Much more correct is the opinion of Dr. Ireland that “it is quite erroneous to treat the history of the human race as that of the sane alone”; and, indeed, we may almost go so far as Professor Capitan, of the School of Anthropology of Paris, and say: “Everybody is diseased. Nobody is healthy. We are obliged to study mankind in a constantly morbid condition of body and mind.” Or we may go as far as Pascal, when he says, “Men are naturally so insane that he is deemed insane who is not insane with the rest.”

Ethnic psychology is obliged to take into account the constant presence and powerful action of pathological mental elements. Tribes and nations have been destroyed by war or by catastrophes; but much more frequently some disease of the ethnic mind itself has prepared its own extinction.

Here an important distinction is necessary. Ethnic mental disease has no relation to the frequency of individual cases of insanity. These do not affect the ethnic mind because that is the outcome of the intelligence of the community, not of its irresponsible members.

For this reason ethnic psycho-pathology cannot be discussed wholly from the standpoint of insanity, although the analogies are such that we can profitably compare them in outline, and this I shall attempt.

A definition is sometimes useful, so I present the following:

A pathological condition of the ethnic mind is present when it is chronically incapable of directing the activities of the group correctly toward self-preservation and development.

Like all definitions in natural science, this one is not to be applied literally in all cases. The incapacity may be present and yet not to such a degree as to be positively destructive. All nations have some insane tendencies, as have all individuals; and it is true, as a specialist has said: “The more one knows of insanity, the less does it seem to differ from the normal condition.”

These pathological traits of the ethnic mind can be analysed and classified. They will be found to arise

1. From some intellectual deficiency or perversion; or

2. From some persistent disturbance of the emotional life.

No one will demand that every member of a group should suffer from such conditions in order that its collective mind should betray morbid consequences. It is enough if a majority, or even a decided minority, providing it exerts the requisite influence on the mass, is in such a pathological state. A degenerate nobility or a dissolute priesthood has often worked the ruin of a state through the contagion of example and its control of lower classes.

Before considering in detail the varied forms under which these diseased mental traits present themselves, it will be well to examine the general causes to which they are due.

ETIOLOGY.—Each of such pathological conditions of the ethnic mind has a basis in some prevailing physical neurosis, the origin of which can be traced in the ethnic history, and which becomes hereditary in the stock. For of these two principles no student of the subject can doubt, (1) that every pathological mental manifestation corresponds to a neuropathic change, and (2) that whatever may be said about the transmission of acquired characters in physiology, no physician can for a moment doubt that morbid infection may be passed down from generation to generation.

For these reasons the study of causes in ethnic pathology becomes of enormous practical moment. Only by an acquaintance with them can preventive and curative remedies be applied.

These causes are, at first, always _external_ and _individual_. They proceed from some form of “environment,” mental or physical. But the morbid impression, once fully received, is often indelible, becomes fixed in the type, and is but little influenced by external agencies.

These primary causes of true ethnic degeneration I shall consider under four headings.

1. Imperfect Nutrition.

2. Sexual Subversions.

3. Toxic Agents.

4. Mental Shocks.

No one of these can act in the long run in other than a deleterious manner on the ethnic mind. There is nothing “compensatory” in any one of them or so little that it need not be reckoned.

1. _Imperfect Nutrition._—It has been said broadly that all psychopathic and regressive conditions arise from malnutrition (Féré). This is true, in a sense, but does not carry us far in the direction of treatment. We ask a closer definition of origins.

There is no doubt of the intimate relationship of ample nutrition and intellectual progress; but while it is well to avoid the ancient notion of the independence of soul and body and that the former is superior to the latter, we must guard against the modern extreme of Buckle and his followers, that the history of nations can be traced to the food they eat. Man is omnivorous, and his well-being is nourished by food of any kind, providing it is nutritious and easily assimilable. The effort which has often been made to trace the character of tribes and nations to some prevalent diet—be it of fish or flesh, or vegetable products—is fanciful, and yields no positive facts. What does harm is not some particular kind but a general insufficiency of aliment.

Imperfect nutrition may be traced to three principal sources. 1. Insufficient or unsuitable food. 2. Lack of variety. 3. Improper preparation of food.

The careful researches of Collignon, Ranke, Ammon, and others have traced the stunted forms, defective bodies, and low intellectual development of the Lapps, the mountaineers of central Europe and the Bushmen of the Kalihari desert to one cause, _la misére_, lack of sufficient and appropriate food. This is certain to bring about degeneration of organs, incomplete development, and loss of brain power. Continued through generations, a hereditary taint is engendered which saps the vigour of the stock, and cannot be eradicated by improved conditions.

Unsuitable food is usually consumed on account of the scarcity of better material, but at times from a morbid craving. Examples are the unctuous clay which was swallowed by various tribes in America and Australia, and also by some of the “poor white trash” of Georgia. The ergoted rye and maize to which some of the peasantry of France and Italy are forced to have recourse exerts a disastrous influence on both body and mind.

But food may be ever so excellent in itself, yet unsuitable to the geographic and other conditions. The Eskimo thrives on blubber and raw fish; but such a diet in Ceylon would be as inappropriate as the Hindoo’s boiled rice for an exclusive diet in Greenland.

Lack of variety interferes with nutrition even when the food material itself is ample. By structure and habit man is omnivorous, and suffers when confined to a single article of diet. The blood becomes depraved and scorbutic symptoms often appear. Nations who mainly live on some one substance—rice, cassava, potatoes, etc.—suffer, lose their power of adaptation to their surroundings, as was remarked by Alexander von Humboldt, and are more liable to disease. Owing also to the partial sustenance thus furnished, the brain-cells are less progressive and energetic. There are nearly a score of chemical elements in the body, all of which must be supplied by the aliment if maximum physical health is to be attained and the highest energy and moral vigour are desired; for, although it is not correct to assert, as some have claimed, that the physical insures psychical perfection, it is undoubtedly true that the mind is never at its best in a feeble and sickly body. Dr. Johnson was more than half right when he argued that a sick man is a scoundrel!

A volume might be written on the influence of the preparation of food on national character. Cookery is one of the fine arts, and its development has been parallel with general culture. No tribe takes its food habitually raw. The Eskimo will freeze it first, the Tartar readies his steak by placing it beneath his saddle, and the African cannibal will soak his human morsel in water. Before pots or kettles were invented, the flesh was roasted over the fire or in trenches covered with hot coals.

Cookery renders food more assimilable, more digestible, and thus allows the brain a better chance to do its work. Frying hardens and soddens food, and the frying-pan is, therefore, an enemy to civilisation. Chewing coarse, hard, and uncooked food develops the muscles of the jaws and makes the face “prognathic,” an almost sure sign of intellectual inferiority, and directly connected with an unfavourable shape of the skull. The man who invented the mill was one of the greatest benefactors to his race. Condiments add to the digestibility of food and hold an important place in its preparation. Salt and pepper thus sharpen the intellect.

2. _Subversion of Sex-relations._—There is nothing more vital to the growth, even to the very existence, of a nation than the sex-relations which it favours by its laws, customs, and preferences. Upon these depend the processes of natural selection by which the number and the power of future generations are decided through inflexible rules. If these relations, as established by the fixed natural laws of species-perpetuation, are traversed by ignorance or wilful disobedience, nothing can prevent the injury to the physical strength and mental ability of the offspring.

Such subversions of the sex-relations may be presented under five headings:

(_a_) Premature and delayed marriage.

(_b_) Abnormal forms of marriage.

(_c_) Abstention from marriage through various causes.

(_d_) Licentiousness. Divorce.

(_e_) Diminution of natality. Infertility.

_(a) Premature and Delayed Marriage._—Mr. Galton, in one of his thoughtful works, remarks: “An enormous effect upon the average natural ability of a race may be produced by influences which retard the average age of marriage or hasten it.” He has illustrated this by abundant examples now through his many writings familiar to the public, his general thesis being that the wisest policy for a nation is to retard the age of marriage among the weak and to hasten it among the vigorous classes.

This is, of course, to be construed within physiological lines; premature relations of the sexes, too early marriages, are disastrous in every respect. Statistics of European armies show that there is a far higher mortality and much more sickness among the soldiers who have married young than among single men of the same age. Certain Australian and South American tribes force their female children of immature age into marital relations, and to this is due the rapid decrease of their numbers.

_(b) Abnormal Forms of Marriage._—Among early Semitic tribes, and to-day in parts of Tibet and India, the custom prevails of “polyandry,” in which one woman is the wife of several husbands. This sometimes arose from female infanticide, sometimes, as in Tibet, where all the brothers of a family have one wife in common, in order to preserve undivided the family property.[2]

Footnote 2:

[An obvious gap in the manuscript occurs at this point, but one which in no way affects the general argument of the author.—EDITOR.]

_(c) Abstention from Marriage._—Mr. Galton has pointed out with great force the injury worked by sacerdotal celibacy in the history of European civilisation. The commendation of the single life in man or woman as “the better part” has been by no means confined to certain sects of Christianity. Long before that religion started, this sacrifice was enjoined on the priests of Cybele, the virgins of Vesta, the Egyptian ministrants, and many other officials in Old World rites; while in the New World not only were there houses of “nuns” among the Quechuas of Peru and the Mayas of Yucatan, but the priests in those cults and even the “medicine men” of rude Northern tribes were frequently vowed to perpetual and absolute chastity.

In the struggle of modern life, and also in the greater facility for the pursuit of pleasure, of self-culture or devotion to some cherished pursuit, the unmarried person has an advantage, and hence it is noted that marriage is either long delayed or wholly avoided. The division of a community along narrow social, financial, or religious lines greatly aids this isolation by narrowing the selection of partners for life. War, emigration, and the love of adventure prompt the males to desert remote and quiet localities, leaving the females in the majority and imbuing the males with a distaste for domestic pursuits. During the Crusades there were considerable areas in Europe where there was only one man left to seven women.

Students of psychopathic conditions have pointed out another and apparently growing cause of indifference to marriage,—that sentiment called “homosexuality,” an inversion of the sexual instinct toward one’s own sex. This may be innocent in action and emotion, when it means merely the preference for friendship in the same gender and a congenital indifference to sexual feelings; or it may progress to any degree of monosexual devotion, such as classic tradition attributed to the characters of Sappho and Heliogabalus.

Whatever the cause which leads to the presence of many old bachelors and spinsters in a community, it must be condemned by the anthropologist, because it is certain to bring about mental deterioration of the stock; and the higher the motive, the more exalted the reason offered for such abstention, the surer is the deterioration, because it means that the class capable of such superior motives will be extinguished in the community.

_(d) Licentiousness; Divorce._—No one will need to be persuaded that open licentiousness, the disregard of those sentiments and principles which attach in lasting unions persons of opposite sex, can have other than a detrimental effect on individual and national character. Wherever this has prevailed, the community has been weakened and its powers misdirected. Any stimulus to the sex feeling beyond that for its physiological purpose detracts from the general energy, physical and mental; and any indulgence of it in other than physiological methods develops degenerative tendencies.

Sexual psychopathy has been abundantly investigated of late years by Krafft-Ebing, Ellis, and other students, and its prevalence is too extended for it not to have profound effect on the ethnic mind. What is one of the worst features is the attraction that such psychopathic subjects have for each other, whether of the same or opposite sexes. It thus becomes an inherited trait, and in a majority of the cases this is easily recognised.

The question here arises, to what extent in a community the marriage tie may be relaxed without injury to or to the advantage of the general psychical welfare. This practical inquiry should be decided not by religious or social prejudice, but by a study of the peculiar conditions of the community and of the application of general principles to them.

It is impossible for me here to enter into this vast and vital question; but some of these general principles may be briefly stated.

Students of primitive conditions have reached the conclusion that neither sex in the human species is inclined to permanent sexual unions. They point out that among savage tribes, and indeed in various advanced religions, ceremonies and customs are in vogue to expiate such attachments as contrary to the divine ordinances. They further show that the forms of marriage were instituted either for selfish sensual purposes on the part of the male or for property reasons; and that in a condition of freedom and advanced culture neither sex is inclined to regard them as durably binding.

With progressive enlightenment, bringing with it, as it must, the freedom of woman from civil disabilities, divorces increase, and only those marriages are stable in which both parties are satisfied. The result of this is constantly beneficial. Facility of separation is a potent stimulus to connubial harmony; for the one most satisfied with the relation will always strive to render it agreeable to the other, in order to avoid a dissolution of the tie.

Licentiousness, therefore, is not synonymous with loose marriage relations, but the reverse.

_(e) Diminution of Natality._—There is no more certain sign of the degeneration of a race, nation, or class than a decreasing birth-rate. When it reaches the point that the deaths in its ranks exceed the births, extinction has already begun. Providing that fecundity continues normal, the onslaughts of war, famine, and pestilence may be remedied; but when, through agencies of any description, the birth-rate sensibly falls off, there is no escape from destruction. This disaster may arise from physical, but is generally due to psychical causes, and therefore points distinctly to mental pathology in the group where it occurs.

Striking examples of this have been presented by studies of the noble families of Europe. Placed in positions where their chief aims were amusement, self-indulgence, and ostentation, their best faculties were allowed to rust and finally to decay, bringing with this the extinction of their lines.

Researches in European history show that the ennobled families of France, Germany, and England have rarely survived the fifth generation, and not more than six per cent. are in existence after three hundred years. Of 427 English noble families, but 41 were represented at the beginning of the 17th century. The patrician families who controlled the free cities of the Middle Ages are now known in history only. Scarcely a score have outlived the degenerative agencies of wealth, idleness, and indulgence.

The other extreme of the social scale is equally unfriendly to productiveness. It is popularly thought that the poor man has children if he has nothing else. But he must not be too poor. Surgeons of the Indian civil service have proved by ample statistics that the famines which periodically ravage the East bring in their train widespread and lasting infertility. Arrest of puberty and organic deterioration of the reproductive system are common results of the prolonged starvation, and prevent child-bearing.

The psychic contrast between this result and that of malignant epidemics is marked and singular. During and after famines the feelings dependent on sex are almost extinguished; while in epidemics of acute diseases, such as plague, cholera, and yellow fever, they are notably exalted, as they are also in leprosy.

There is also a class of maladies known in medicine as “dystrophic” on account of their tendency to diminish virility, and thus both lessen the birth rate and lead to morbid psychic states. Prominent among these are malarial fevers, tuberculosis, and the later stages of alcoholism and the opium habit. By many writers the inordinate use of tobacco is believed to exert a similar effect.

In modern life, notably in France and the eastern United States, there is a very observable infecundity in certain classes, and they the wealthiest and best educated, due unquestionably to intention on the part of the married—to purely psychic causes, therefore. In the “best society” of those localities two or three children to a marriage are as many as are wanted and as many as arrive.

That this limitation is deliberate, and not the result of reproductive debility, has been shown by an application of the law of sex at birth as formulated by Dumont. This is, that when the proportion of the sexes at birth are as 105 males to 100 females, the diminished natality is voluntary; and when it is involuntary, due to disease or malformations, this ratio is always disturbed.

As statistics prove that in modern life two-thirds of the children born alive never perpetuate their kind, through death, the single life, sterility, or other reason, it is plain that intentional limitation of offspring to a number less than four means certain extinction of the family.

3. _Toxic Agents._—The toxic agents of ethnic degeneration belong to two classes, stimulant-narcotics and disease-germs. The former are voluntarily consumed by the individual, the latter he absorbs through exposure to insalubrious conditions. Both belong to preventable causes of deterioration.

Of the stimulant-narcotics, alcohol, opium, and tobacco are the most familiar. But they by no means exhaust the list. Everywhere and at all times man has had an intense craving for these nervines. Where the Koran forbids alcoholic drinks, the Arabs take refuge in kief and other species of hemp. The native Mexicans cull the _peyotl_, the Siberians a toadstool, the Peruvians coca.

The precise degree to which these agents have altered the intellectual and moral powers of communities has long been the theme of controversies.

This is especially true of alcohol. Professor Lapouge, certainly an unbiassed observer, citizen of a land where temperance societies are unknown, does not hesitate to call it “the most formidable agent of degeneration in modern society.” Its worst effects are not the violence to which it occasionally leads or the frightful nervous diseases which its excessive use entails, but the slow hardening of the “axis cylinders” in the nerve sheaths, the immediate consequence of which is permanent deterioration of mental activity. Extended throughout a community, this means a lessening of its energy and of its finest mental qualities. Chronic alcoholism of this kind does not materially shorten life, but it is eminently transmissible, and this soddens the stock. The white race is most exposed to these mental and nervous effects of alcohol, while the red and black races escape them in large measure.

The second class of toxic agents affecting the community at large includes the various forms of disease-germs. No one can doubt the debilitating influence of malaria on the mental faculties of the population exposed to its poisonous action. Vast tracts of the earth’s surface are by it rendered incapable of sustaining the highest types of humanity. Their energy is sapped, their vitality lowered, by the insidious miasm. No race or nationality is immune. Though the white race is most liable to its attacks, the African blacks are so far from being exempt that in the more intense malarial districts of their continent nearly one-third of the natives suffer from the disease.

Marsh poison is usually confined to the lowlands. But the mountain valleys also generate a noxious agent, most unfriendly to mental growth. It displays itself in a threefold form, embracing goitre, cretinism, and deaf-mutism, the three closely related and bringing with them a positive debility of psychical powers. The mountains have not only been the refuge of the feeble, escaping from the plains, but they have worked to render these outcasts feebler still by reducing them in stature and viability. Goitre is not confined to Alpine regions, though more prevalent there. It is distinctly hereditary, and the offspring of goitrous parents are predisposed to cretinism and allied forms of imbecility. The southern and western slopes of the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Himalayas, and the Cordilleras are especially the homes of this class of diseases.

Another series of toxic agents which calls for consideration in this connection are the so-called “constitutional diseases.” These are contagious and transmissible, the poison of the blood being handed down from generation to generation.

The most noteworthy of these is syphilis. Its extreme prevalence among lower classes of the community and in some of the darker races is a present and potent cause of their mental inferiority. It is well known to specialists that children born of syphilitic parents are deficient in mental energy and physical stamina. They are liable to scrofulous symptoms and tubercular degenerations, and are deficient in ambition and love of labour.

Less widely distributed, but yet affecting whole communities, are ergotism and pellagra, due to the consumption of diseased grain, and leprosy which is undoubtedly hereditary and vitiates the blood of whole families. Certain stocks are especially liable to it, notably the African blacks and next to them the Semites, both Jews and Arabs.

4. _Mental Shock._—History presents many instructive examples of the destructive power of mental shock on the ethnic mind. It is brought about by some great, sudden, unexpected catastrophe, which breaks asunder the associations or institutions in which the community has lived its mental life.

Such a disruption may arise from an intensely malignant epidemic, from war, or from a natural catastrophe.

An example of the first was the frightful “black death” which swept over Europe in 1348–50, destroying nearly a fourth of the whole population. All accounts agree that the despair and desperation which accompanied such an unexampled affliction showed themselves in an abandonment of all restraint, a reckless indulgence in the wildest debaucheries, an entire disregard of social restrictions. The same is true of the “plague and famine” years, 1491–95, when, in the words of a medical historian, “the corruption of morals reached a height without parallel in ancient times.”

The depressing power of sudden defeat and subjugation has been repeatedly exemplified. The “spirit is broken” of the conquered people. Only by such a profound mental depravation can we explain why such a warlike and numerous nation as the Aztecs sank instantly to be the serfs of a handful of white conquerors.

A writer on the history of the Christian church has remarked that “every nation has its peculiar heresy.” A student of mental pathology might justly add that every nation has its peculiar form of insanity. An irrational tendency is present and active in every community, ever striving to gain the ascendancy, and when it succeeds, as has often been the case in history, it makes steadily for the destruction and extinction of the national existence.

The forms of mental alienation are as various in the collective as in the individual mind, and as they are extensions of the symptoms seen in the latter, they may be classified on similar lines. I shall examine them, therefore, first as they are connected with intellectual and next with emotional disturbances, in accordance with the following scheme:

ETHNIC PSYCHOPATHIC CONDITIONS.

I.—_In the Intellectual Life._

1. Conditions of Deficiency │(_a_) Imbecility. │(_b_) Criminality.

2. Conditions of Perversion │(_a_) Delusions. │(_b_) Dominant Ideas.

II.—_In the Emotional Life._

1. Conditions of Hypersthenia (active motor │(_a_) Hysteria. states) │ │(_b_) Exaltation. │(_c_) Destructive │ Impulses.

2. Conditions of Asthenia (passive sensory │(_a_) Melancholia states) │ (Depression). │(_b_) Neurasthenia │ (Exhaustion).

I. PSYCHOPATHIC CONDITIONS IN THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE—1. CONDITIONS OF DEFICIENCY.—The intellect of a group, like that of the individual, has its limits, beyond which it is not possible to educate it. This is conspicuously seen in intellects below the normal, such as in feeble-minded persons. No amount of training can cure their radical defects and make them the equals of their average associates. These are instances of intellectual deficiency. It may express itself either in some degree of imbecility or in the active form of criminal habits.

Another class do not seem below the average in general powers, may, perhaps, appear in various directions above it; but they have some twist or obliquity in their mental make-up which separates them from their fellows, usually to their detriment. In common life such persons are known as “cranks” or “eccentrics,” men of one idea and paranoiacs. They are examples of intellectual perversion. Ethnic psychology can also supply abundant instances of this character.

_(a) Imbecility._—To say that there are tribes or whole peoples actually imbecile would perhaps be going too far. Yet this has been asserted of some by competent observers. Mr. Horatio Hale, who was among the native blacks of Australia, related that the impression they produced on his mind was one of “great natural obtuseness, downright childishness, and imbecility.” The only arguments which availed with them were “such as we should use towards a child or a partial idiot.” Mr. Hale attributed this to generations of semi-starvation and malnutrition, and was so convinced of this that he believed the most favoured race would, by similar conditions, be reduced to the same low intellectual stage.

A prevailing inability to judge of evidence is common among many peoples and classes, and this is a marked sign of mental deficiency. They mistake associations of time and place for relations of cause and effect, and their reasoning is vitiated in consequence. Superstition is fostered by this mental obliquity. The casual objective relation is mistakenly assumed as the subjective necessity. This is especially common among savages, and the illiterate classes of higher culture. It is a mark of mental inferiority tending to irrational action and confusion of thought.

In civilised communities those of the population who are thus constituted form the “dependent” class, incapable of making their own living, and supported either by their families or the state. They may thus survive and reproduce their kind, but ethnic groups afflicted with such intellectual retardation either perish or become subject to those with higher gifts.

_(b) Criminality._—Criminality in its common forms must be classed as a condition of intellectual deficiency brought about by one or several of the causes I have already rehearsed. It is not necessary, here, to enter into the discussion as to whether a criminal is born or made, nor do I speak now of those violators of the law in favour of a higher law, the reformers, apostles, martyrs to a faith and a truth in advance of their time and place, nor of those who have yielded for a moment to some mastering temptation. I speak of the ordinary criminal who for selfish ends habitually violates the usages of the group in which he lives, and to this extent aims at its destruction.

This class cannot be disciplined into the rules necessary to the peace and welfare of the society in which they live. Researches on their psychology show them, as a rule, defective in physical sensibility, more frequently colour-blind, mental instability is always present, vanity is exaggerated, the emotions are violent, and the general intelligence is below the average. We must regard them as pathological, rapidly approaching a self-destructive degree of degeneration. When they are numerous in a group it is a sure sign of its general inferiority.

The most advanced criminologists of to-day have returned to the opinion advocated a generation ago by Quetelet in these words: “Society creates the germs of all crimes which are committed. She instigates them, and the criminal is merely the instrument of their execution.”

Translated into other words, this means that the psychic traits of any group are the direct parent of its anti-social, self-destructive, criminal instincts. To the extent that such traits are remediable the body politic is directly responsible for the violations of its own laws. If left unremedied, the ruin of the group must follow.

2. CONDITIONS OF PERVERSION.—Alienists have frequent occasion to observe cases of mental disease where all the faculties of the mind seem intact and equal to the average, except that there is a persistent irrational delusion on some single point or a few points; or else the mind is controlled by the insistent recurrence of a single idea, which obstinately aims to govern the whole man. The latter is known as an _idée fixe_, a fixed or dominant idea.

In ethnic psycho-pathology the same conditions may be constantly observed, and they react on the character and fate of peoples with visible power. That which passes under the name of “popular prejudice” is an example. A community will adopt an opinion, without reason, and will not permit a discussion of its merits. Any one not accepting it will be regarded as a public enemy.

_(a) Delusions._—In primitive conditions the most common delusion is that of the identity of waking and dream-life. There is no distinction allowed in the equal reality of both, or, if any, it is in favour of the superiority of the dream-life, for in dreams the person seems possessed of powers which he loses on awakening. So highly are dreams esteemed, that many savage tribes and many nations of respectable culture have risked their gravest undertakings on the interpretation of these visions of the night.

Such a delusion is, of course, most contrary to reason and good order. On account of an inauspicious dream a Brazilian tribe will desert its village and its plantations; while if a Kamchatkan dreams that he has been given another man’s wife, it is held necessary for public welfare that his dream be realised.

Another delusion, deeply rooted in the philosophy of India and which has worked untold misfortunes on its peoples, is that of the unreality of the distinction between subject and object—that is, between thought and the external world. Hence arose the doctrine that real life is _mâyâ_, an illusion or deception of the senses, and its aims and duties unworthy the contemplation of the true philosopher. The consequent neglect of the practical duties of life could not fail to weaken the peoples who juggled with sound reason in this manner.

A wonderful example of long-persistent delusion was the Crusades. For nearly two centuries (1095–1289) the Christian nations of Europe neglected state and domestic affairs in order to rescue the Holy Sepulchre from the hands of the infidels. All classes, from kings to peasants, fell a prey to the same obsession. It was accompanied by repeated and unmistakable signs of epidemic manias and neuropathias unequalled in history. Lykanthropy, in which the possessed howled and destroyed like wolves, was extremely common; the dancing mania spread through wide areas, forcing old and young into wild gestures and crazy motions; and, stranger than all, young children were attacked with a mad desire to leave their homes and to wander forth they knew not whither. Were they prevented, they pined and died. These “children’s crusades” began in Germany in 1212, extended through France, Switzerland, and Italy, and continued as late as 1418.

_(b) Dominant Ideas._—The weightiest topic in universal history may possibly be the study of dominant or fixed ideas in ethnic psychology. A philosophic observer may regard each nation as the destined representative of some one idea, which, when its usefulness has ended, yields to others more germane to existing conditions; and by the successive action of all, the progress of the species is secured through the gradual elimination of those which are regressive.

Certain it is that in any group the constituent minds are controlled at a given time by some one idea common to all. This is, in one sense, a perversion of the intellect. The dominant idea assumes a magnitude out of proportion to its actual value; and by this disproportion—that is, by the undue attention it receives, others, often of equal or greater value to the group, are neglected.

These dominant ideas form the national ideals, after which the individual lines are consciously patterned, and by the practical application thus given, add to the cohesion of the group through the unification of its members. Acting under natural laws, common to organic forms as well as to societies, these ideas are the chief agents in social selection, and thus control almost absolutely the traits and destinies of nations, as has been traced in a masterly manner by Vacher de Lapouge.

Such ideas are easily recognised in a community. A slight acquaintance with history and literature teaches us that the early Romans were exclusively possessed by the military ideal, the lust of conquest; that the ideal of the Israelites has always been the thirst for commercial gain; and that art was the ruling aim in the palmy days of Greece.

But the finest example that occurs to me of many different peoples being dominated by a fixed idea is seen in the votaries of the Mohammedan religion. They are bound together by one sacred language, in which one book, the Koran, lays down all law, civil, criminal, and ecclesiastical, and the expressed dicta of which set them in sharpest opposition to all who do not accept it. The religious idea, thus stimulated out of all proportion to others, has developed in them a fanatical force which at one time almost enabled them to conquer the known world, and which has since resulted in the inevitable decay of their greatest states, their literature and arts.

II. PSYCHOPATHIC CONDITIONS IN THE EMOTIONAL LIFE.—Apart from the perversions of intelligence which cloud the reasoning faculties of nations, they are subject to widespread and persistent disturbances of their emotional lives, which frequently react disastrously on the common weal.

Following the division adopted by some competent alienists in individual cases, I may with propriety classify these into two divisions, as they represent, on the one hand, excessive, misdirected, and morbid activity, or, on the other, unhealthy depression and apathy.

1. CONDITIONS OF HYPERSTHENIA.—It is a popular error in scientific circles that diseases of the nervous system increase with civilisation. The opposite is true. The lowest stages of culture are far more pathological than the higher, in this, as well as in most respects. True that certain neuroses belong to cultured peoples; but morbid emotional states are especially prevalent in lower conditions.

_(a) Hysteria._—This is well illustrated in the history of epidemic hysteria. It may occasionally be seen among ourselves in a hospital ward or at a camp-meeting; but such outbreaks are sporadic. They belong in the ethnic temperament of many tribes of the Malayan and native American races.

The Jesuit fathers described in vivid colours such outbreaks among the Hurons of Canada, attacking whole villages and frequently leading to their destruction. Father de Quen was quite right when he wrote: “The old saying alleges that every man has a grain of madness in his composition; but this is a tribe where each has half an ounce.” He correctly regarded them as in a permanently pathological state.

Quite similar recitals are preserved of such outbreaks among the Guaranis of Paraguay, and other primitive stocks, notably the Malay peoples.

From the accounts of travellers it would seem, contrary to what we might suppose, that such excessive nervous sensibility is peculiarly present in extreme northern latitudes, while tropical tribes are much more liable to conditions of depression. Castren, who lived long among the northern Sibiric tribes, dwells with astonishment on their nervous sensitiveness. A sudden blow on the outside of the skin yurt will throw its occupants into spasms.

Among these “neuroses of excitement” which at times seize upon the souls of communities, none is more inexplicable, and none more fraught with consequences to world-history than the goading restlessness which has driven single tribes or groups of tribes into aimless roving. This _Wanderlust_ arises as an emotional epidemic, not by a process of reasoning. It drives communities from fixed seats and comfortable homes, transforming them into migratory and warring hordes.

_(b) Exaltation._—Under the heading of exaltation of nervous impulse the alienist includes a morbid devotion to sexual thoughts and acts (erotomania); to vanity, ambition, and self-magnification; and those states of megalomania where the patient is subject to delusions of greatness, _idées de grandeur_.

To all of these we may easily find parallels in ethnic life. They have all their analogies in tribal or national history, with consequences as disastrous as they disclose in the individual.

No more positive examples of erotic mania could be found in an asylum than those presented by the whole of some Polynesian tribes. The life of both sexes was devoted chiefly to the pleasures of the genital nerves. Societies were formed where such practices were developed into arts; children before maturity were initiated into them; and no mode of excitement, unnatural though it might be, was omitted or shunned.

The destructive results of such licentiousness in the history of these tribes, already extinct or nearly so, need not be insisted upon. But why seek to demonstrate it from remote times or savage lands? Within a year a philosophic student, from a wide range of investigation, has attributed chiefly to the same pathological cause the deterioration of the leading so-called Latin nations of Europe in the last two centuries. In them, says Signor G. Ferrero, the sex impulse develops earlier, and absorbs and wastes the life energies more than in the Teutonic nations, yielding to the latter the superior place in the struggle for existence.

Another and familiar exemplification of this neuropathic frame of the ethnic mind is that exaggerated national boastfulness known (from a soldier under Bonaparte) as _Chauvinism_. It is patriotism passed into mild dementia; so well known that it has a special name in English also, _Jingoism_. The profound conviction that our own country—whichever that may be—is the greatest in the world, leader of all in intelligence, power, culture, and vigour, is invariably and everywhere a mental delusion, a type of megalomania. Such a notion prepares the way for increase of ignorance and self-esteem so blind that it is sure ere long to fall in the pit ever open for fools.

_(c) Destructive Impulse._ The passion for wanton destruction may seize equally upon a person or group. It may be directed toward inanimate objects or against human life. John Addington Symonds gives a thrilling sketch of the monster, Ezzelino da Romano, Vicar of the Emperor Frederick II., in northern Italy (about 1250). His own passion was the mutilation, torture, and murder of men, women, and children. His inordinate cruelty and repeated massacres led to his becoming the hero of a fiendish cycle in Italian literature.

We may call him, if we wish to palliate his monstrous deeds, a monomaniac; but, as Symonds says, if we thus excuse him “we shall have to place how many Visconti, Sforzeschi, Malatesti, Borgias, Farnesi, etc., in the list of maniacs?” No, it was an ethnic tendency of Italy at that period, and for long afterwards, and could be illustrated by scores of traits from popular as well as princely life.

The mania for murder which seized the Parisian populace in 1793 was a true pathological outburst. No sense of patriotism thrilled the crowds who ran by the tumbrils and surrounded the guillotines. It was hæmatomania, the blood-madness, that was upon them.

The suicidal impulse occasionally assumes an epidemic form which arises from conditions of the ethnic life. The aborigines of Cuba when enslaved by the Spanish conquerors practised self-destruction on a scale which contributed much to their prompt extinction. In the city of Frankfort-on-the-Main in the last century suicide became so frequent among women that the dead bodies were suspended by the feet in order to check the impulse in the survivors.

In a less degree the destructive passion directed against objects, or figuratively against institutions, known as _iconoclasm_, is often a mere outburst of unreasoning emotion. Its energy is misdirected and fruitless. What was the result of that which during the eighth and ninth centuries raged in Constantinople and Asia Minor? It altered image-worship into picture-worship, nothing more.

2. CONDITIONS OF ASTHENIA.—In contrast to the repeated explosions of nerve force which give rise to the active motor states of ethnic dementia I have been considering, are those characterised by a loss of reaction to stimuli, by passive, merely sensory, conditions.

These are of two varieties, well marked in their differences, each highly significant in its ethnological and historic relations. The one is allied to melancholia, being marked by depression or inaction of the psychic forces, the other by their exhaustion, by incapacity for reaction to ordinary stimuli.

_(a) Melancholia._—The consequence of mental shock, I have already pointed out, is to bring about a sort of mental paralysis, a listless, apathetic state; and this I have illustrated by some examples.

A touching one is recorded of the Greek colony which erected the city of Pæstum on the Tyrrhenian Sea, whose stately ruins still attract thousands of visitors annually.

A clearly ethnic type of melancholia is _nostalgia_ or homesickness. Of course it is found in some degree in all lands, but with some peoples, notably dwellers in high northern latitudes, the Lapps and Eskimo, it is severe and general. If removed from their surroundings they mope and die.

_(b) Neurasthenia._—Diseases of nervous and mental exhaustion belong exclusively among nations of advanced culture. There are those which have not merely increased, most of them have originated in stages of high civilisation; not, as some have falsely argued, from conditions essential to culture, but to errors and misdirections in that culture. As, in all rapid motions, slight deviations entail more serious consequences than when motion is slow, so, in the rapid progress of modern times, slight neglects of hygiene bring about more serious results than in ruder countries.

This explains the relative increase of some forms of insanity, of suicide and criminality, and the appearance of new maladies, such as progressive paralysis, in civilised centres. They are due to exhaustion of the nerve centres in those who are not adapted to bear the strain of contemporary competitive life, or who, if able, fail to direct their activities in successful channels.

Another evidence of exhaustion, one which properly exercises the attention of the student of modern life, is the progressive distaste for the sex relation, especially among women. The consequences of this mental attitude are the prevalence of spinsterhood and the limitation of families in marriage, to which I have already referred. The attraction of the “higher culture” and of their new facilities for seeing and enjoying liberty have led to atrophy of the maternal instinct and of the desire of marriage. This can have but one result,—the diminution and final extinction of the group in which it prevails.

There is also such an ethnic malady as moral exhaustion. After a period of intense but ill-regulated ethical enthusiasm there often follows a reaction, when all ethical principles are thrown to the winds. This has been plausibly explained by Dr. Laycock as an overstimulation of the brain-cells most closely connected with this class of sentiments, with consequent exhaustion in transmission to the next generation. “The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”

The bigotry of Puritan England in the 17th century was followed by the laxity of the Restoration.