Why, then, this failure of its earlier cultivation?
To some extent, but not in full, the answer to this may be found in a critique of the spirit and method of the writers mentioned, offered by one of the most eminent psychologists of our generation, Professor W. Wundt.
With partial justice, he pointed out that these teachers proceeded on a false route in their effort to establish the principles of an ethnic psychology. They approached it imbued with metaphysical ingenuities, they indulged too much in talk of “soul,” and they searched for “laws”; whereas, modern psychology recognises only “psychic processes,” and is not willing to consider that any “soul-constitution” enters to modify of its own force the progress of the race. Wundt also asserted that the field of ethnic psychology is already mainly occupied by general ethnology, or else by the philosophy of history. Yet he did not deny that in a sphere strictly limited to the subjects of language, custom, and myth such a “discipline” might do useful work.
In his later writings, however, Wundt seems to have modified these strictures, and in the last edition of his excellent text-book acknowledges that there is no antagonism between experimental and ethnic psychology, as has been sometimes supposed; that they do not occupy different, but parts of the same fields, and are distinguished mainly by difference of method, the one resting on experiment, the other on observation.
The recognition of ethnic psychology by professed psychologists is, therefore, an accomplished fact; and this was long since anticipated by the general literature of history and ethnography.
Who, for instance, has denied that there is such a thing as “racial” or “national” character? Did anyone take it into his head to denounce as meaningless Emerson’s title, English Traits? Does not every treatise on ethnography assume that there are certain psychical characteristics of races, tribes, and peoples, quite sharply dividing them from their neighbours?
Take, for instance, Letourneau’s popular work, and we find him expressly claiming that the races and subraces of mankind can be classified by the relative development of their psychical powers; and such a “psychological” classification is not a novelty in anthropology.
These mental traits, characteristics, differences, between human groups are precisely the material which ethnic psychology takes as its material for investigations. Its aim is to define them clearly, to explain their origin and growth, and to set forth what influence they assert on a people and on its neighbours.
Ethnic psychology does not hesitate to claim that the separation of mankind into groups by psychical differences was and is the one necessary condition of human progress everywhere and at all times; and, therefore, that the study of the causes of these differences, and the influence they exerted in the direction of evolution or regression, is the most essential of all studies to the present and future welfare of humanity.
In this sense, it is not only the guiding thread in historical research, but it is immediately and intensely practical, full of application to the social life and political measures of the day.