There is no such thing as a natural death of a Society. It may be crushed by external force, but if it perishes from within, it has deliberately poisoned itself, has fallen a victim to preventable disease.
There is one catholicon, one elixir of life, which will preserve any society from decay, and confer upon it the blessing of eternal youth, if it is constantly remembered and administered.
That catholicon is to cherish and cultivate assiduously the one distinction which, I have pointed out, lifts the human group above the communities of the ants, the bees, and the beavers; that is, that the chief aim of the community shall ever be to give each individual in it the best opportunity for the full development of his faculties.
If the history of the gradual decline and fall of any nation be investigated, it will be seen that the end has come through the violation of this, the one peculiar principle of human association. Hemmed in by castes, classes, or institutions, the human souls have atrophied, degenerated, grown decrepit and impotent, incapable of resisting the natural forces around them.
Though the ethnic mind does not run the same life-course as the individual body, yet it resembles this in its ceaseless change. It is forever altering both its contents, its purposes, and the intensity with which it pursues them.
Psychologists have classified these activities under three general expressions which we may call laws. They are, first, the law of Continuity; second, the law of Diversity of Purpose; and third, the law of Contrast.
The law of Continuity means that in the ethnic mental life there is a regulated course of growth or development; that each phase or condition is the logical result of previous phases or conditions.
The second law emphasises that the rate of growth depends chiefly on the diversity of aims which exists in the community. As they are multiplied, growth is the more rapid. This is analogous to that law of organic forms by which evolution is in proportion to variation.
The third law, that of Contrast, applies to the ethnic mind the curious fact in mental life that a prolonged devotion to one idea leads to a reaction in which the opposite of that idea becomes dominant. This is even more conspicuous in the history of progressive nations than in that of individuals. Upon this depends that periodicity in the lives of peoples which has so often been remarked by historians.
The above mentioned facts and laws demonstrate that there is a true unity of existence in the ethnic mind; that it has its own traits, forms, and processes of growth and decay, quite apart from those of the individual mind; that it is not to be studied by the methods of experimental psychology, but by methods drawn from the observation of its own modes of being; and that it is this abstraction, if you please, which is the prime factor in the fate of the group over which it rules.