The Group Mind: A Sketch of the Principles of Collective Psychology / With Some Attempt to Apply Them to the Interpretation of National Life and Character

by William McDougall

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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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.

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