Adolf Bastian (1826-1905), after passing through five universities—Heidelberg, Berlin, Jena, Wurzburg, and Prague—began his life of travel in 1851 as a ship’s doctor. The next twenty-five years were mainly spent in voyages of research in all parts of the world, and always with one object in view—the collection of materials for a comparative psychology, on the principles of a natural science. His first journey, which occupied eight years, resulted in the publication in 1860 of the first of a long series of writings. When not engaged in travel, his life was filled with his work in connection with the Berlin Museums. Great though these services were, Bastian’s main interest was always concentrated on psychology. The ideas of folk psychology were in the air, and the study of Welt-Anschauung, or, to use Bastian’s phrase, Völker-Gedanken, was already inaugurated in Germany. To organise this study by introducing wide scientific, inductive, and comparative methods, and to collect evidence from among all the peoples of the earth, was Bastian’s life-work, in which he was still engaged when death overtook him at Trinidad in 1905. Among the conceptions of the Natur-Völker—the “cryptograms of mankind,” as he called them—he worked unceasingly, demonstrating first the surprising uniformity of outlook on the part of the more primitive peoples, and secondly the correlation of differences of conceptions with differences in material surroundings, varying with geographical conditions. This second doctrine he elaborated in his Zur Lehre von den Geographischen Provinzen, in 1886.
The term “psychology of peoples” has become familiar of late, and books have been written on the psychology of special peoples, such as the Esquisse psychologique des Peuples Européens (1903), by A. Fouillée; but these are based on general considerations, and not on experimental evidence.
The place of Comparative Psychology in Anthropology was officially determined in this country by the request which the Anthropological Institute made to Herbert Spencer in 1875, to map out the Comparative Psychology of Man, with a view to providing some sort of method in handling the various questions that came before the Institute. The result of this was Spencer’s provisional Scheme of Character, in which the problem of measurement took an important place.
Experimental Psychology.
In the department of experimental psychology Germany again took the lead. G. T. Fechner[[63]] attempted by means of laboratory tests to discover the law of connection between psychical and bodily events. A band of workers arose, and the new science spread to other countries. In our country Sir Francis Galton took advantage of the International Health Exhibition at London, 1884, to install in the exhibition an anthropometric laboratory, in which a few psychological experiments were made on a large number of people, and since then he has frequently made arrangements for similar laboratories.
[63]. Elemente der Psychophysik, 1860.
In nearly all of the larger universities Experimental Psychology is a recognised study, and almost every variety of mental condition is investigated. Professor W. Wundt, in his Völkerpsychologie (1904), has been a master-builder on these foundations.
The experiments in psychological laboratories were of necessity confined to subjects readily accessible, who naturally were mainly Europeans or of European descent. A few observations had been made on aliens who, as a rule, had been brought from their native countries for show purposes; but in these cases the observations were made under unfavourable conditions so far as the subject was concerned. With the exception of these very few and unsatisfactory investigations, experimental psychology was mainly concerned with the subjects numbered 2, 3, and 5 in the table on p. 81.
A new departure was made in 1898 by the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits. For the first time trained experimental psychologists (Drs. W. H. R. Rivers, W. McDougall, and C. S. Myers) investigated by means of an adequate laboratory equipment a people in a low stage of culture under their ordinary conditions of life. The foundations of ethnical experimental psychology were thus laid.
Professor R. W. Woodworth sums up the conclusions arrived at from his own observations and those of others as follows: “We are probably justified in inferring that the sensory and motor processes and the elementary brain activities, though differing in degree from one individual to another, are about the same from one race to another.”[[64]]