Elements of Folk Psychology / Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind

by Wilhelm Max Wundt

Considered from a psychological point of view, the different meanings of the concept 'history' in its relation to the various stages of mental culture, clearly show a fluctuation between two ideas which, though opposite, nevertheless mutually imply each other. On the one hand, there is the purely objective conception of history. History, in this case, is regarded as a course of events of such a nature that the specific occurrences may be brought by an external observer into an orderly sequence of conditions and results. On the other hand, history has been conceived as a course of events, which not only exhibits an orderly sequence from an objective point of view, but which is also subjectively experienced as a nexus by the individuals concerned. In the one case, history is a reconstruction, on the basis of external observation, of the inner connection of phenomena; in the other, it is the conscious experience of the latter connection. Mankind exemplifies all possible transitional stages between these two extremes—history as merely objectively given, and as experienced both objectively and subjectively. Indeed, it is even true to say that, as a matter of fact, none but such transitional stages actually occur. Even the horizon of primitive man includes a narrow circle of consciously experienced history. On the other hand, man is ever far from attaining to a self-conscious grasp of his own history in its entirety. Thus, that which is in a high degree characteristic of world religion is true also of world history. Within the conscious horizon of each individual very different levels of historical consciousness are represented, even in the case of the cultural peoples who participate more or less actively in the course of world history. Here, as in world religion, we find that what was developed in a sequence during the course of ages continues to remain, at any rate roughly speaking, in juxtaposition. Moreover, even apart from this, we never survey more than a segment of the entire nexus of historical factors. One of the most important tasks of the historian consists in tracing the chain of events back to motives which are, in part, inaccessible to superficial observation, and, in part, indeed, remain of a problematical nature even when we believe that, through inference, we have gained an approximately true conception of them. Nevertheless, it is not necessary that immediate knowledge be complete in order that there may be a consciously experienced nexus of events such as is demanded for the content of history proper. It is merely necessary that some interconnection be actually experienced and that its relations be directly apprehended. This knowledge, moreover, must possess sufficient power to influence decisively the actual course of events.

This narrower conception of history brings historical events into relation with the human will. The will is really a phase of conscious experience. It is necessary, however, to single it out for special discussion, because of the fact that popular opinion either regards it as the exclusive factor in history or else stresses it so one-sidedly that the causal view, required in principle even for individual consciousness, threatens to vanish entirely from the conception of historical life. Naturally, the will does not become an influence definitely affecting the course of events until individuals have become consciously aware of the interconnectedness of historical life. Whenever, therefore, an exaggerated importance is attached to the function of volition, the conscious intervention of individual personalities in the course of events readily comes to appear as the decisive feature that distinguishes the historical from the prehistorical stages of human development. But this is erroneous in both its implications. Even the life of primitive peoples of nature is not entirely unaffected by individual personalities, whose influence may be more or less permanently operative even after they themselves have been forgotten. On the other hand, the will acts of individuals constitute but one factor among the many which determine historical life. Moreover, inasmuch as every particular volition is conditioned by motives inherent in the general constitution of individual consciousness, it is subject to the same psychical causality that dominates human consciousness in general. The criterion for differentiating historic from prehistoric existence, therefore, is not the influence of a personal will upon the life of the group, but rather the fact that the conscious experience of historical continuity includes a recognition of the effect of individual personalities upon the destinies of peoples. The advance to such an insight is inaugurated by world empires, in which the vicissitudes of peoples first begin to form a unified history; it reaches its completion in world culture, which creates a common mental heritage for mankind, and thus engenders the consciousness of a universal community.

Of the various elements of world culture that give impetus to this development, the world religions occupy the foremost place. In extent and permanence they surpass not only the world empires but also all other forms of material and spiritual interchange between peoples. However much the traditions associated with world religions may be interwoven with mythological and legendary elements, they nevertheless constitute a bond whose primary effect is to arouse among peoples who may otherwise be widely different in culture and history, the idea of a universal human community. The peoples of Eastern Asia, for example, though exhibiting marked political differences, were united by Buddhism into a community of religious thought, in which they became conscious that, in spite of differences of race and of history, they possessed a similar religious and ethical temper. If we compare the Brahmanic doctrines with the sayings of such teachers as Confucius and Lao-tsze, we are struck particularly by the similarity of ethical trend as well as by the divergence of this trend from that of Occidental thought. In its idea of a community of faith, Islamism likewise brought the consciousness of unity to numerous peoples of barbaric culture—to a more limited extent than Buddhism, it is true, but for this reason all the more forcefully. Of Christianity, it is even more true that, from the very beginning, it took as its guiding principle the belief that in the eyes of God there is no distinction either of race or of class and occupation. Hence it has regarded missionary activity among heathen peoples as a task whose purpose it is finally to unite the whole of mankind beneath the cross of Christ. Thus, world religion destroyed the barriers erected by the preceding national religions, and took as its aim the unification of men and races into an all-embracing community. To the adherent of a national religion, the race that believed in a different god was strange and hostile; both characteristics, strangeness and hostility, were included by the Greek in the term 'barbarian.' The Christian speaks of heathen who have not as yet beheld the light of pure truth, but for him there are no barbarians. The god to whom the Christian prays likewise rules the heathen world, and to the heathen, also, the gospel is preached. True, we find a recurring limitation in that it is only the Christian who is a brother to Christians. Nevertheless, it is prophesied of the heathen that they will at one time be received into the brotherhood of the disciples of Christ. At the end of time, there is to be but one shepherd and one flock upon earth. Thus, in the missionary activity which the Christian recognizes as his calling, the assertion, All men are brothers, is based on the two ideas, All Christians are brothers, and All men are destined to become Christians.

It was on the basis of the Christian tradition that science first attempted to treat history, not as the history of a single people or, at best, as a number of histories of successive or contemporaneous races and States, but as true world history. At the outset, world history was objective in character. The underlying thought was that the whole of mankind was controlled by a single idea which governed all events, and that the task of humanity consisted in carrying this idea into realization. Augustine's Civitas Dei was the first attempt at a world history based on the idea of the religious vocation of mankind. That this exposition is limited to the legendary history of the Israelitic people, supplemented by the history of Jesus as transmitted in the Gospels, and by the Apocalyptic prophecies of a future world, should not cause surprise. The limitation is due to the fact that the idea of humanity is considered solely from the religious point of view. The Church, as the institution about which religion centres, is glorified by Augustine's work as the divine State. The adoption of this religious viewpoint causes the history of mankind to appear as record, not of human experiences that come as a result of human striving and activity, but of events that are from the very beginning divinely foreordained.

Nevertheless, Augustine's remarkable work long continued to determine the general direction of conceptions relating to the history of mankind. Up to the eighteenth century, religious development was regarded as establishing the only connection between the various periods of history. The sole exception to this occurred in the case of Giambattista Vico. In his New Science (1725), Vico sought to combine the development of language and of jurisprudence with that of religion. True, the question regarding the origin of the State and the causes of changes in constitutions had concerned men from the time of the early Sophists on. Particularly during the Hellenistic period and at the time of the Renaissance, such inquiries were of focal interest, as a result of the great political changes that were then taking place. Yet, whenever the underlying laws of such changes were sought, it was the single State that formed the basis of investigation; by comparing its vicissitudes with those of other States, the attempt was made to arrive at a general law along some such line as the Aristotelian classification of States into monarchies, aristocracies, democracies, etc. There was hardly ever a suggestion that the historical sequence of civilizations and of States was a connected process intelligible in causal or teleological terms. Religion alone was conceived as a phenomenon which was, on the one hand, independent of the limits of a single people, and yet, on the other, subject, in its development, to law. The idea that Christianity was destined to be a world religion, together with the fact that it had originated historically and had spread widely, did not admit of any other interpretation. Within this Christian circle of ideas, moreover, the historical development and growth of religion were, quite naturally, brought into connection with the world beyond, in which the development was thought to await its completion. The religious philosophy of history thus terminated in a prophecy whose culmination was the final triumph of Christianity. The Age of Enlightenment, after effecting a unification of Christianity with the religion of reason, again made the world of historical experience the scene of triumph. This triumph was held to consist in the ultimate development of Christianity into a religion of reason—a conception in which the idea of the destiny of Christianity to become a world religion undergoes a philosophical transformation which recurs even in the writings of Kant.

Apart from this transformation, which was only partially complete even in the Age of Enlightenment, the idea of religious development that grew up in connection with Christian thought involves two presuppositions. The first of these is that the pathway of mankind was determined by God, and not voluntarily chosen by man himself. It is not to religious thought that the characteristic features of the development must be ascribed. The development, moreover, is not immanent in religion; it is the result of external causes. The second presupposition is that this development follows a preconceived plan; it embodies a purpose—indeed, it expresses purpose in the very highest degree precisely because it proceeds from the will of God. Even the co-operation of individuals in the fulfilment of this plan is but the result of divine predetermination, or happens because God has made known His purposes to these individuals. Thus, this course of thought leads with inner necessity to the conception of revelation. This conception combines two essentially irreconcilable ideas, offsetting each by the other. The religious destiny of man is thought to lie outside his own control: it is imposed upon him from without, and is communicated to him in the form of an illumination which he receives from the supersensuous world. Thus, religious development itself becomes a supersensuous process, which falls beyond the possibilities of the ordinary means of human knowledge. As its goal lies in the supersensuous, so also is the development itself a supersensuous process that extends over into the world of sense.

But at this point the religious view of world history necessarily came into sharp conflict with the philosophical view, though the latter had in certain respects appropriated the idea, developed by the former, of a teleological direction of human destinies. The philosopher, always trusting the guidance of his own reason, might admit both a goal and a plan, but that these should be inaccessible to the lux naturalis, as the philosophy of the Enlightenment called rational knowledge in distinction from lux supranaturalis, or revelation, he could not concede. The logical outcome of this course of thought was an auxiliary concept which appeared to surmount the difficulty, and also possessed the happy characteristic of leaving every one free to retain, along with the natural light, as much or as little of the supernatural thought of an earlier period as he might deem wise. This auxiliary concept was that of education—a conception that would readily suggest itself to an age vitally interested in pedagogical questions. The thought here involved represents merely a special application to this particular instance of the idea that the world is governed by a personal deity. Thus it came about that, from the time of Locke and Leibniz down to that of Lessing and Herder, the favourite conception of history was that of an education of mankind. But it is significant that the very work whose title incorporates this idea, Lessing's Education of the Human Race, really ends by displacing it. True, as a result of Biblical tradition, the idea of education is here brought into connection with the thought that the Jewish race is the chosen people of God. Freed from this connection, however, and applied to mankind in general, the idea of education, in Lessing's work, becomes that of self-education, or, what is the same thing, that of a development determined by the general laws of mental life. Hence conditions were ripe for the further advance made by Herder, in his Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind. Though frequently lapsing, in his discussions of details, into the transcendent teleology of the preceding period, Herder nevertheless did away in principle with the restriction of the history of mankind to religious development, substituting for the latter the development to humanity.

Thus was determined the programme which historical science, at about the same time, accepted as its own—the programme of a universal history, whose task did not consist in presenting a loosely connected series of the histories of separate States, but in describing the common participation of peoples and States in the development of a universal culture. Furthermore, the way was cleared for the philosophical position that history is not, as was once thought, the expression of a predetermined plan whose purpose is that of a divine education, but that it is the result of laws immanent in historical life itself. Though variously expressed and partly obscured by surviving ideas of the preceding period, this is the fundamental conviction common to the nineteenth-century philosophers of history. It received its most complete expression in the writings of Hegel, not merely in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, but in his entire philosophy, which reflects throughout a broad historical outlook. History had by this time come to be regarded as a strictly self-dependent development of ideas in which each advance proceeds with rigid logical necessity from that which went before. In other words, it was thought of as a development of reason in time, or, in the phraseology of a religious world-view, as the living development of God himself. God is no longer conceived as a transmundane being who guides the destinies of mankind according to a preconceived plan. On the contrary, He is represented as immanent in the world. His innermost nature is described as the world-reason, and this is said to be unfolded particularly in the history of mankind.

However superior this conception may be to the preceding semi-mythological and semi-rationalistic theory of a divine education, it is clearly apparent that it was the outcome of a continuous development, characterized, we may doubtless say, by strict logical necessity. Antecedent to it were, first, the conception that this world is a preparation for the kingdom of God, and, later, the thought that life is an education in accordance with a predetermined plan. That the Hegelian conception is the result of such a development is evident from the very fact that it continues to regard the destinies of mankind as guided by a plan. This plan has, from stage to stage, merely passed from transcendence to immanence, inasmuch as it is finally thought to be present to the mind of the philosopher who interprets the meaning of history. Hence this later philosophy of history resembles the earlier in still another respect. Ultimately, both are more concerned with the future than with the past, thus being at once history and prophecy. Even at the later period, the central question to whose answer everything else is preparatory concerns the final goal toward which mankind is striving. Hence it is that the philosophers of this age are led time and again to divide the total life of humanity into periods inclusive of past, present, and future, precisely as did the world-plan of Augustine, whose basal conception was the idea of redemption. Since these periods are not derived from the progress of events, but are for the most part imposed upon it in conformity to the dictates of logic, the course of history is mapped out by reference to logical categories. Each of the great cultural peoples is portrayed as representing a specific idea, and, disregarding everything that might disturb their sequence, these ideas are arranged in a logical series. Thus, Hegel begins his reconstruction of history with an account of the Chinese as the people who possessed the earliest civilization. He does so, however, not because Chinese culture was as a matter of fact the earliest, but because it has apparently been more stable than other cultures, as well as more closely bound up with rigid external forms. Correspondingly, all succeeding stages of history are arranged by Hegel according to the principle, on the one hand, of a progress from bondage to spiritual freedom, and, on the other, of a transition from finite limitation to a striving for the infinite. This philosophy of history should not be criticized for its lack of knowledge concerning the beginnings of culture. Its fundamental error lies in the fact that, in tracing the development of mankind, it is guided, not by the rich concrete actuality of events but by a logical schematism which is in large measure imposed upon history, and only to a far less degree abstracted from it. That which was once a plan prescribed by God for mankind here at length becomes a plan elaborated by philosophers.

Without question, therefore, a philosophy of history must henceforth adopt a different course. True, it cannot dispense with principles that are in a certain sense external to history itself. Yet the function of such a philosophy would appear to consist in considering historical life from the point of view of the purposes that come to realization within it, and of the values that are created on the various levels of historical culture. Such a teleology of history—indeed, in the last analysis, every teleology—must be preceded by a causal investigation, which begins, here as everywhere, by entirely ignoring purposes and values. Now, history is really an account of mental life. As such, it gives consideration to physical factors only in so far as they furnish the indispensable basis of mind. Hence the direct approach to a philosophy of history which aims, not to acquire a knowledge of reality from a priori concepts but, conversely, to derive ideas from reality, is a psychological account of the development of mankind. Although the concrete significance of the particular, as such, precludes the historian from disregarding it, everything that is merely particular should be ignored by one who is giving a psychological account of events. The aim, in this latter case, should be that of discovering the determining motives of historical life and its changes, and of interpreting these by reference to the universal laws of mind. Supplementing this aim should be the endeavour to gain, so far as possible, an insight into the laws that are immanent in history itself. Our first three chapters have attempted to give an account of the development of folk consciousness during the periods that, for the most part, preceded self-conscious historical life. But neither this account nor the bare outline which our final chapter gives of the beginnings of the development to humanity must pretend to be a substitute for, or in any way to represent, a philosophy of history. The difference between an investigation such as ours and a philosophy of history is precisely the same as that which distinguishes a psychological description of mental life in general from a philosophical interpretation. But, if anywhere, it is especially in the field of history that a psychological analysis, concerned primarily to understand life in its actual occurrence, must precede questions regarding the meaning of events and the value which individual historical characters possess as respects both themselves and their permanent influence. In other words, we may henceforth demand that any philosophy of history which seeks to contribute to our understanding of the questions just mentioned, should be based on a psychological account of the development of mankind.