Much more correct is the opinion of Dr. Ireland that “it is quite erroneous to treat the history of the human race as that of the sane alone”; and, indeed, we may almost go so far as Professor Capitan, of the School of Anthropology of Paris, and say: “Everybody is diseased. Nobody is healthy. We are obliged to study mankind in a constantly morbid condition of body and mind.” Or we may go as far as Pascal, when he says, “Men are naturally so insane that he is deemed insane who is not insane with the rest.”
Ethnic psychology is obliged to take into account the constant presence and powerful action of pathological mental elements. Tribes and nations have been destroyed by war or by catastrophes; but much more frequently some disease of the ethnic mind itself has prepared its own extinction.
Here an important distinction is necessary. Ethnic mental disease has no relation to the frequency of individual cases of insanity. These do not affect the ethnic mind because that is the outcome of the intelligence of the community, not of its irresponsible members.
For this reason ethnic psycho-pathology cannot be discussed wholly from the standpoint of insanity, although the analogies are such that we can profitably compare them in outline, and this I shall attempt.
A definition is sometimes useful, so I present the following:
A pathological condition of the ethnic mind is present when it is chronically incapable of directing the activities of the group correctly toward self-preservation and development.
Like all definitions in natural science, this one is not to be applied literally in all cases. The incapacity may be present and yet not to such a degree as to be positively destructive. All nations have some insane tendencies, as have all individuals; and it is true, as a specialist has said: “The more one knows of insanity, the less does it seem to differ from the normal condition.”
These pathological traits of the ethnic mind can be analysed and classified. They will be found to arise
1. From some intellectual deficiency or perversion; or
2. From some persistent disturbance of the emotional life.