It is constantly observed in education that children of equal ability are by no means equally good scholars. They respond differently to the stimulus of the desire of knowledge.
Such contrasts are witnessed in races also, and, apart from whatever other influences we may name, are hereditary characteristics, recurring indefinitely and controlling the racial mind, its activities and its ambitions.
So visible are the mental differences of races that some writers have advocated a psychological classification in anthropology. Professor Letourneau has attempted it in one of his many treatises.
Pathology.—But it is not sufficient in this study of racial psychology to recount what a race has done and left undone in the work of the world. We must also turn a gloomier page and take into account the pathological mental symptoms it betrays; for these may be indicative of a disease so deep seated and so fatal that the doom of the race is inevitable. When we see whole peoples dying out, not through external violence, but through some internal lack of vital force or adaptability, as in the instances of the Tasmanians, Australians, Polynesians, and American Indians, we may be sure that either in mind or body they are the victims of some deep-seated, fatal disease.
Most writers, treating the subject superficially, have sought for the cause of the decline and destruction of peoples in the decay of their institutions, in the immorality of their lives, in their apathy to danger, or in the loss of their ambitions. These are but symptoms of the mental or physical malady which, “mining all within, infects unseen.” They are the results of the incurable ailment which is hurrying them to destruction. Dr. Orgeas is right in his contention that “the pathological characteristics of peoples have played leading parts in the grand dramas of history, though they have too often escaped the observation of historians.”
It finds its expressions in such phenomena as Ratzel enumerates as the cause of the deaths of peoples—restlessness, indifference to life, debauchery, infanticide, murder, cannibalism, constant war, slavery, laziness. When these are carried to the extent of reducing the personal and numerical vigour of a tribe or race, it indicates that its intellect is awry, its mind is diseased.
Thus the ineradicable restlessness of the red race, which more than any other one trait has stood in the way of their self-culture, belongs in the pathology of their nervous system. As Dr. Buschan points out, and as I have elsewhere emphasised, they are especially subject to “diseases of excitement,” contagious nervous disorders, leading to scenes of the wildest riot and tribal loss.
They share this pathological condition with the Malayo-Polynesian peoples of the Pacific island-world. Among them both we find numerous examples of that outbreak of homicidal mania called “running amuck” (properly amok), where the maniac rushes into a crowd, killing whom he can; a crowd, not of enemies, as in the “Berserkerwuth” of the Northmen, but of friends and relatives. The abandonment of both races to alcoholism and narcotics is an evidence of the same morbid nervous excitability. This is an inherited racial pathological tendency and is not to be measured by the mere prevalence of nervous diseases. These may arise from the increased strain on the neurons when the struggle for existence is intensified. The enfranchised blacks since they have been obliged to support themselves present a much larger percentage of brain and nerve disease; such maladies among the Jews of Europe are six times more frequent than among the Aryans; and certain forms, such as progressive paralysis, are unknown in any but the most civilised communities.
The immunity of races to disease, or its reverse, reacts powerfully on their mental life, leading in the latter case to discouragement and apathy, in the former to confidence and conquest.
Two of the most striking examples are measles and smallpox. In the white race, the former has become merely one of the “diseases of children,” exciting little alarm, and, against the latter, vaccination provides an efficient protection. Among native Polynesians and Americans the ravages of both have been so dreadful as not merely to decimate a population but to leave the survivors mentally prostrate and indifferent to life. To such an extent has this mental depression sometimes progressed that some tribes, as the Lenguas of La Plata, have decided on the self-destruction of their race, and destroyed all their children at birth.