The immunity of the white race to malignant measles is not due to any special power of resistance, but to well-known laws of natural selection in disease, and does not extend to many diseases. The Japanese are practically immune to scarlet fever, the black race to yellow fever, etc., and that all such exemptions react favourably on the ethnic mind cannot be doubted. Such immunity is strictly cognatic, a legacy of blood in the true physiological sense, the human cells having undergone changes by the repeated attacks of the disease-germs resulting in practical indifference to their assaults.
Indirectly, the march of epidemics has often not only decided the fate of nations but worked remarkable changes in national character. A familiar and striking example is the result of the Black Death (bubonic typhus) in England in the reign of Edward III.
CHAPTER III
THE INFLUENCE OF THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT
At the risk of needless repetition I again emphasise the fact that Ethnic Psychology, the group-mind, is a product of social relations, a result of aggregation, and cannot be fully explained by the processes of the individual mind. The resemblances between them are analogies, not homologies. They act and react, one on the other, with the force of independent psychic entities.
The general proposition to this effect I have laid down in the second chapter of Part I. Now I shall go more into detail and examine just what influences the ethnic mind brings to bear upon that of the individual to bring it into rapport with itself, to make it conform to the mass, to expunge, in fact, all that is individual within it.
I have also briefly but sufficiently referred to the psychologic measures by which this is accomplished, such as imitation, opposition, and continuity, by which the anti-social instincts are curbed, but at the same time originality and independence are also often crushed.
It remains to point out the exact instruments which the group-mind employs in this process and to estimate their relative force.
These may be classified under five headings: Language, Law, Religion, Occupation, and Social Relations. This is in the order of the influence which they generally exert on the individual mind, which influence is to be understood as reciprocal, the individual working most potently on the ethnic mind in the same order of instruments. It is true, however, that the relative potency of each of them varies considerably with the condition of culture. Let us briefly examine their several characteristics.
Language.—Of all bonds which unite men, none other is so strong as language. This, indeed, it is which first developed the human in man. I have shown that the one distinguishing trait which divides man from brute is his power of general conceptions under symbols. The word “language” provides the symbol. To form words is the necessary first step in reasoning; to attach to words precise meanings, perfect connotations, is the main effort of all subsequent reasonings. Words are the storehouse of all knowledge; they are the tools of the mind, by which all its constructions are framed.
Language is the involuntary product of the human intellect. The man speaks with like spontaneity as the dog barks or the bird sings; but the brute’s inarticulate cry expresses mere emotion, while the man’s articulate sounds convey thought.