Any definition of evolution which carries with it the justification of optimism is as erroneous in history, as it would be in biology to assert that all variations are beneficial. There is no more certainty that the human species will improve under the operation of physical laws than that any individual will; there is far more evidence that it will not, as every species of the older geologic ages has succumbed to those laws, usually without leaving a representative.
I am aware that I am here in opposition to the popular as well as the scientific view. No commonplace is better received than that, “Eternal progress is the law of nature;” though by what process eternal laws are discovered is imperfectly explained.
Applied to history, a favorite dream of some of the most recent teachers is that the life of the species runs the same course as that of one of its members. Lord Acton, of Oxford, in a late lecture states that: “The development of society is like that of individual;”[8-1] and Prof. Fellows, of the University of Chicago, advances the same opinion in the words, “Humanity as a whole developes like a child.”[8-2]
The error of this view was clearly pointed out some years ago by Dr. Tobler.[8-3] There has been no growth of humanity at large at all comparable to that of the individual. There are tribes to-day in the full stone age, and others in all stages of culture above it. The horizons of progress have been as local as those of geography. No solidarity of advancement exists in the species as a whole. Epochs and stadia of culture vary with race and climate. The much talked of “law of continuity” does not hold good either in national or intellectual growth.
Such are the criticisms which may be urged against the historical methods now in vogue. What, you will ask, is offered in their stead? That which I offer is the view of the ethnologist. It is not so ambitious as some I have named. It does not deal in eternal laws, nor divine the distant future. The ethnologist does not profess to have been admitted into the counsels of the Almighty, nor to have caught in his grasp the secret purposes of the Universe. He seeks the sufficient reason for known facts, and is content with applying the knowledge he gains to present action.
Before stating the view of the ethnologist, I must briefly describe what the science of Ethnology is. You will see at once how closely it is allied to history, and that the explanation of the one almost carries with it the prescription for the other.
It begins with the acknowledged maxim that man is by nature a gregarious animal, a zoon politikon, as Aristotle called him, living in society, and owing to society all those traits which it is the business of history, as distinguished from biology, to study.
From this standpoint, all that the man is he owes to others; and what the others are, they owe, in part, to him. Together, they make up the social unit, at first the family or clan, itself becoming part of a larger unit, a tribe, nation or people. The typical folk, or ethnos, is a social unit, the members of which are bound together by certain traits common to all or most, which impart to them a prevailing character, an organic unity, specific peculiarities and general tendencies.
You may inquire what these traits are to which I refer as making up ethnic character. The answer cannot be so precise as you would like. We are dealing with a natural phenomenon, and Nature, as Goethe once remarked, never makes groups, but only individuals. The group is a subjective category of our own minds. It is, nevertheless, psychologically real, and capable of definition.
The Ethnos must be defined, like a species of natural history, by a rehearsal of a series of its characteristics, not by one alone. The members of this series are numerous, and by no means of equal importance; I shall mention the most prominent of them, and in the order in which I believe they should be ranked for influence on national character.