But I must return again to the definition of the Group. It must not be said that I leave any obscurity in the connotation of that prominent word.
There may be—there always are—many forms of groups in the same community, and these by no means cover each other coterminously. Take many an American village, for example. There are the religious groups, Protestant and Catholic; the political parties, Republicans and Democrats, not at all of the same individuals as the former; and there may be the linguistic groups, German and American, different again from both the former; and the racial groups, whites and negroes.
Something similar to this is found on a large scale in every people, every nation; and the serious problem presents itself,—how are we, from these heterogeneous elements, to reach anything which we can properly call the common sentiment, the general mind of the mass?
The example I have chosen of the American village is an extreme one. In a primitive, isolated tribe of Indians, in a remote mountain village, or a rarely visited island, the task would be vastly easier. But the principle in all cases is the same.
By eliminating particular after particular, as the logicians say, we finally reach a general, a consensus of opinion and aspiration on a variety of topics, with which the full number required by the mathematical method already stated will agree. These common sentiments will represent the active influence of that community, and very accurately measure its value in development.
Being an American village, we can without doubt predict that it will be of one mind that making money should be the chief aim of active exertion; that respect for the law of the land should be cultivated; and that performing recognised duties to one’s family should be taught as indispensable.
One must not take it for granted, however, that such like salient features are necessarily the ones which govern and measure the powers and actions of the group. Such an error is very common. The chief trait of the Scot is popularly supposed to be his stinginess; but the solid and lasting character of that people prove that they have souls above lucre. The English are pre-eminently mercantile, and Napoleon called them a nation of shopkeepers, but he discovered his mistake at Waterloo; the apostle called the Cretans “liars and slow bellies,” but Crete was the source of Greek law, and when the apostle elsewhere quoted a Gentile poet’s concept of God as his own, that poet was a Cretan.
How, then, it will be asked, are we to distinguish the most vital from the most prominent traits of the ethnic mind, since they are not always, even not often, the same?
The answer to that question is the main object of the second part of the present volume. Suffice it, therefore, here to say that all ethnic traits must be weighed and measured by the contributions they make to the cultural history of mankind, to the realisation in daily life of those ideas which are the formative elements in civilisation.
Reverting once more to the definition of the group as portrayed in the ethnic mind, its traits are further brought into relief by the comparison of group with group.