The Group Mind: A Sketch of the Principles of Collective Psychology / With Some Attempt to Apply Them to the Interpretation of National Life and Character

by William McDougall

But, when, under the influence of Welshman’s theories, the majority of biologists came to the conclusion that acquired qualities are not transmitted, the position of the ‘race theorisers’ was immensely strengthened. For selection, natural or social or artificial, remained as the only recognised cause of change of racial qualities; and, since it is clear that the development of civilisation tends to bring to an end the operation of natural selection, owing to the more efficient shielding of the weaker by the stronger members of societies, and since no other form of selection seems to have operated forcibly to change race qualities, it was inferred that race qualities endure throughout long ages with very little change.

Another revolution of opinion has had a similar effect. One of the old assumptions which seemed to justify the belief in rapid modifiability of race qualities was that the difference of culture between ourselves and our savage ancestors corresponds to, and is the expression of, an almost equally great difference of innate capacities, intellectual and moral. But this was in the main a misunderstanding. One well established fact suffices to show its improbability—namely, the larger size of the brains of Palæolithic men as compared with our own. Our superiority of civilisation is due to slow accumulation, each generation adding comparatively little to the mass of intellectual and moral tradition which it inherits and passes on to later coming generations. In so far as differences of cultural level are associated with differences of level of innate intellectual and moral qualities, cultural superiority must be regarded as the effect, rather than the cause, of innate mental superiority. There are strong grounds for holding that, in so far as Europeans are innately superior to negroes, that superiority was achieved not by means of, and in the process of, the development of, civilisation; but rather before civilisation began; and that the principal mental differences of the various human stocks were, like their principal physical differences, produced in the course of the immensely long ages of human life that preceded the dawn of civilisation, or at any rate of history, ages compared with which the historic period is but a very brief span.

This view—namely, that there has been no great change, and certainly no great increase, of the mental powers of men during the historic period—was forcibly maintained by Dr A. R. Wallace[61]. Wallace pointed to the pyramids of Egypt and other great achievements of earlier civilisations, such as writing, as evidence of the highly developed intellectual powers of men thousands of years before the Christian era. He concluded that the men of the early stone age were probably our equals, intellectually and morally, in respect to innate qualities.

If, then, so little change of man’s mental constitution has been produced in the course of many thousand years, even though the growth of civilisation has so profoundly modified his mode of life and the nature of his pursuits, that is good evidence of the great persistency of racial mental qualities. But we have more direct evidence of their persistence. As Wallace points out, the negro and the yellow races are scattered over many parts of the earth, and, though these regions present great diversities of physical environment, men of either of the two races everywhere present the same mental peculiarities or strong similarities, for example, the Papuan and African and American negroes. And the characteristic differences between the two races are not diminished even where, as in the islands of the far East, they have been subjected to the same physical environment and modes of life for long periods of time. In the eastern Archipelago, Papuans and Malayans occupying the same or adjoining islands are cited by Wallace as illustrating the persistence of racial mental differences; and I can bear out his remarks from my own observations in that region.

But we must beware of excess in the direction of the unalterability of race. The dogma of the non-transmissibility of acquired qualities is by no means established; it seems not improbable that mental acquisitions are so transmitted in some degree, though with only very slight effect in each generation. Even now, when the difficulties of the principle of transmission of acquired qualities are generally understood, almost all those who deal with the problem of the genesis of mental and physical peculiarities of races find themselves driven to postulate the principle in order to explain the facts. And this in itself constitutes evidence of a certain value in support of the validity of the principle.

Again, we must beware of assuming that there are no selective processes operating among us. Although natural selection may be almost inoperative, there may well be at work other forms of selection, social selections; and these are specially powerful amongst populations of blended stocks.

Summing up on the durability of racial peculiarities, we may say that racial qualities are extremely persistent; but that, nevertheless, they are subject to slow modifications when the conditions of life are greatly changed, as by emigration, or by changes of climate, or by social revolutions, and especially among populations of mixed origin.

To return now to the question of mental homogeneity of a population as a condition of national character and collective mental life. Purity of race is the most obvious condition of such homogeneity; but few, if any, nations that have attained any high level of civilisation have been racially homogeneous; probably for the simple reason that the civilisation of such a nation would crystallise at an early stage into rigid forms which would render further progress impossible. This has been the fate of most civilisations of the past; as Walter Bagehot put it, their cake of custom has so hardened as to become brittle, incapable of partial modification and growth, so that, like a crystal, it must either resist completely every modifying influence or be shattered irretrievably[62].

Certainly none of the European nations are racially homogeneous. Nevertheless, some of them approach homogeneity of innate qualities, or, rather, the degree of heterogeneity is much less in some than in others. Consider the case of England. Before the Anglo-Saxon invasion the population consisted in all probability of a mixture of the northern fair race with a darker race, probably that of H. Mediterraneus, in some proportion that we cannot determine, with small islands of H. Alpinus or of stocks formed by an earlier blending of this with the Nordic race. The Anglo-Saxon invasion brought great numbers of the pure representatives of the Northern race of closely allied stocks; and these did not confine themselves to any one region, but, entering at many points of the south and east coasts, diffused themselves throughout almost all England, imposing themselves as masters upon those Britons whom they did not drive out. Ever since that time a crossing of the stocks has been going on freely, little hindered by differences of area, language, law, or custom. And, with the exception of small numbers of the Northern stock, Danes and Normans, the population has not received any considerable additions since the Saxon invasion.

Now it has been shown by a simple calculation that, given three generations to the century, each one of us might claim ten million ancestors in the year 1000 A.D.; while in the fifth century, when this process of intermarriage began, the number would be enormous, some thousands of millions; that is, if consanguine marriages had never taken place. These figures make it clear that, in any mixed population in which intermarriage takes place freely, the two or more stocks must, after a comparatively brief period of time, become thoroughly blended, on one condition—namely, that the cross between the pure stocks is a stable stock, fertile inter se and with both the parent stocks. There seems to be no doubt that this was the case with the British and the Anglo-Saxon stocks, and that the English form now a stable new subrace, or secondary race, in which the qualities of the northern race predominate. The subrace may be regarded as innately homogeneous in fairly high degree; not so homogeneous as a people of unmixed racial origin, or one formed by a blending of more remote date, but more so than most of the European nations. This is the sense in which we must understand the word race, in discussing the influence of race upon national character.