Just so there are two parallel kinds of psychology of peoples. There is the descriptive psychology of the tendencies of particular peoples, the biography of nations and peoples, which is what commonly is meant by ‘history’; and there is the psychology which seeks to explain in general terms how these tendencies arise, which seeks the general laws of which these diverse national tendencies are the outcome.
This last is the modern science which is beginning to take shape and to undertake the task so inadequately dealt with by the so-called Philosophy of History. It is essentially a branch, and by far the most important part, of Group Psychology[49]. Now individual psychology tends more and more to be a genetic psychology; because we do not feel that we really understand the individual mind, until we know how it has come to be what it is, until we know something of its development and racial evolution. Just so the explanatory psychology of peoples must be a genetic psychology. Here it differs from individual psychology in that the distinction between individual development and racial evolution disappears. For the national mind is a continuous growth; it is not embodied in a temporal succession of individuals, but in a single continuously evolving organism.
Nevertheless, we may with advantage consider separately (1) the nature of the general conditions necessary to the existence and operation of a national mind; (2) the processes of evolution by which such minds are formed and their peculiarities acquired. I propose to take up the former problem in the following chapter.
CHAPTER VII
THE MIND OF A NATION
We have prepared ourselves for the study of the national mind by our preliminary examination of the two extreme types of collective mental life, that of the quite unorganised group, the simple crowd, on the one hand, that of a very highly organised group, the army, on the other hand. We have seen that in the former type the collective actions imply a collective mental life much inferior, both intellectually and morally, to that of the average component individuals; and that in the other type they imply a collective mental life and capacities much superior to those of the average individual.
The mind of any nation occupies some intermediate position in the scale of which these are the extreme types; and it differs from both in being immensely more complex, and also in that the influence of the past dominates and determines to a much greater extent the mental life of the present.
The study we have already made of collective mental life will enable us to understand what we mean, or ought to mean, when we speak of national character. There are two senses in which this phrase is used, and they are often confused. On the one hand, the phrase may be used to denote the character of individuals who are taken to be typical representatives or average specimens of their nations. On the other hand, it may be taken to mean the character of the nation as a collective whole or mind. These two things are by no means the same; they are rather very different. We saw that this was true in the case of the crowd and also of the army; and it is true in a still higher degree of the nation than of any other social aggregate, just because the influence of its past over its present is greater than in any of the others. It is in the second and preferable sense that Fouillée uses this expression. He writes—“The national character is not the simple sum of the individual characters. In the bosom of a strongly organised nation, there are necessarily produced reciprocal actions between the individuals which issue in a general manner of feeling, thinking and willing very different from that of the individuals existing in isolation, or even from the sum or resultant of all the mental actions of isolated individuals. The national character is not simply the average type which one would obtain if one could imitate for minds the procedure adopted by Galton in the case of faces and so obtain a collective or generic image. The face which the process of compound photography produces exerts no action and is not a cause; while the national spirit does exert an effect which is different from all effects of individual minds; it is capable of exerting a sort of pressure and a constraint upon the individuals themselves; it is not only an effect, but is also in turn a cause; it is not only fashioned by individuals, it fashions them in turn. The average type of the Frenchman existing to-day, for example, does not adequately represent the French national character, because each people has a history, and ancient traditions, and is composed, as it is said, of the dead even more than of the living. The French national character resumes the physical and social actions that have been taking place through centuries, independently of the present generation, and imposes itself upon this generation through all the national ideas, the national sentiments and national institutions. It is the weight of the entire history to which the individual is subjected in his relations with his fellow citizens. Just, then, as the nation, as a certain social group, has an existence different from (though not separable from) the existence of the individuals, so the national character implies that particular combination of mental forces of which the national life is the external manifestation[50].” That is a precise and admirable statement of what we are to understand by national mind and character.