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emerging with fresh disguises, but easily detected as but repetitions of the dear primordial faiths of the

race.

The Ethnic Ideas and their Origin.-From the monotonous unity of the elementary ideas, the common property of mankind in its earliest stages of development, branched off the mental life of each group and tribe, not discarding the old, but adding the new under the external compulsion of environment and experience.

Where such externals were alike or nearly so, the progress was parallel ; where unlike, it was divergent ; analogous in this to well-known doctrines of the biologist.

Such branches were constantly blending in peace or colliding in war, leading to a perpetual interaction of the one growth with the other, engendering a complexity of relation to each other and to the primitive substratum. But the ethnic character, once crystallised, remained as ingrained as the national life or the bodily stigmata. It compelled the members as a mass to look at life and its aims through certain lights, to comprehend the world under certain forms, to move to a measure, and dance to a tune.

Such is the power of the Ethnic Mind, fraught with weal or woe for the nation over whom it rules, tyrannical, portentous, a blind natural force, which

may lift its helpless followers to skyey heights or drag them into the abyss.

How it is formed and what decides its fateful beneficent or maleficent decrees, I shall consider in detail in the next chapters.

CHAPTER II

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE GROUP. THE

ETHNIC MIND

HE ethnic character becomes more fixed with

THE

advancing culture, and its component parts— that is, the individuals who compose it-more uniform. This has not been understood by one of the latest writers on the subject, Professor Vierkandt, who maintains that in savage groups there is a much greater sameness between the individuals who compose them. Superficially, this is true on account of the limited range of their activity; but in proportion to that range the individuals differ more widely, because they are so much more subjected to external influences. and emotional attacks. Dr. Krejči is more correct in his opinion that the sum of the differences between cultured individuals and peoples is less than that between the uncultured. This obviously flows from the fact that cultivated minds are governed by reason and knowledge, whose prescriptions are everywhere

the same; while illiterate minds are victims of ignorance and passion. All who learn that twice two are four act on the knowledge of it; but the Brazilian Indian, who has no word in his language for numerals above two, may disregard it.

Some have maintained that the promptings of the group-mind as felt by the individual belong in the unconscious or involuntary part of his nature, and partake of the character of mechanical necessity.

There is indeed this tendency, but it is not by any means a necessary character of the collective mind, as an example easily shows. I may adopt a prevailing custom or belief merely through imitation, which is a mechanical procedure; or I may adopt it, being led to examine it from its prevalence and to approve it from my examination,—and this is a voluntary action.

In this we see the contrast of cultured and uncultured group-minds. The latter demand assent merely from their unanimity, the former wish it only from enlightenment; the latter ask faith, the former knowledge; the latter command obedience, the former urge investigation.

Plato has a dialogue on the problem of "The One and the Many"; and the abstract subtleties he brings forward are almost paralleled by the concrete facts which we encounter in an endeavour to state the mutual relations of the Individual and the Group.

This science of ours, ethnic psychology, has, in one sense, nothing to do with the individual. It does not start from his mind or thoughts but from the mind of the group; its laws are those of the group only, and in nowise true of the individual; it omits wide tracts of activities which belong to the individual and embraces others in which he has no share; to the extent that it does study him, it is solely in his relation to others, and not in the least for himself.

On the other hand, as the group is a generic concept only, it has no objective existence. It lives only in the individuals which compose it; and only by studying them singly can we reach any fact or principle which is true of them in the aggregate.

Yet it is almost as correct to maintain that the group is that which alone of the two is real. The closer we study the individual, the more do his alleged individualities cease, as such, and disappear in the general laws by virtue of which society exists; the less baggage does he prove to have which is really his own; the more do all his thoughts, traits, and features turn out to be those of others; so that, at last, he melts into the mass, and there is nothing left which he has a right to claim as his personal property. His pretended personal mind is the reflex of the groupminds around him, as his body is in every fibre and

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