Again, a very high state of civilisation may co-exist with a relatively primitive social organisation. Thus the civilisation of Athens in the classical age was equal to, or even superior to, our own in many respects; yet the social organisation was very much less highly evolved. It had hardly emerged from the barbaric patriarchal condition, and had at its foundation a cruel system of slavery[105]; and it had also another great point of inferiority—namely, the very restricted number of persons included in the social system. These deficiencies, this rudimentary character, of its social organisation was the principal cause of the instability and brief endurance of that brilliant civilisation.
We have so far distinguished three principal factors or groups of factors in the evolution of national mind and character: (1) Evolution of innate or racial qualities: (2) Development of civilisation: (3) Social evolution, or the development of social organisation.
Now the first two of these we may with advantage divide under two parallel heads, the heads of intellectual and moral development. No doubt, the intellectual and the moral endowment of a people continually react on each other; and many of the manifestations of the national mind are jointly determined by the intelligence and the morality of a people; especially perhaps is this true of their religion and their art. Nevertheless, it is clear that we can distinguish pretty sharply between the intellectual and the moral traditions of a people; and that these may vary independently of one another to a great extent. A rich and full intellectual tradition may go with a moral tradition of very low level, as in the Italian civilisation of the renascence; and a very high moral tradition with a relative poverty of the intellectual, as in the early days of the puritan settlements of New England.
The same distinction between the intellectual and the moral level is harder to draw in the case of the racial qualities of a people, but it undoubtedly exists and is valid in principle, no matter how difficult in practice to deal with.
We have, then, to distinguish five classes of factors, five heads under which all the factors which determine the evolution of national character may be distributed. They are
| (1) Innate moral disposition | } racial qualities. | |
| (2) Innate intellectual capacities | ||
| (3) Moral tradition | } national civilisation. | |
| (4) Intellectual tradition | ||
| (5) Social organisation. | ||
Every nation that has advanced from a low level to a higher level of national life has done so in virtue of development or progress in one or more of these respects. And a principal part of our task, in considering the evolution of national mind and character, is to assign to each of these its due importance and its proper place in the whole complex development.
The distinction between the racial and the traditional level of a people is too often ignored; chiefly, perhaps, for the reason that it has usually been assumed that whatever is traditional becomes innate and racial through use. Since in recent years it has been shown that this assumption is very questionable, a number of authors have recognised the importance of the distinction as regards the intellectual qualities of a people; but, as regards the moral qualities, the distinction is still very generally overlooked.
The neglect of these distinctions between the innate and the traditional has in great measure vitiated much of the keen dispute that has been waged over the question whether the progress of civilisation depends primarily on intellectual or on moral advance. For example, T. H. Buckle and Benjamin Kidd agreed in recognising clearly the distinction between the innate and the traditional intellectual status of a people; and they agreed in maintaining that we have no reason to believe that in the historic period any people has made any considerable advance in innate intellectual capacity; and that any such advance, if there has been any, has not been a principal factor in the progress of civilisation. But they differed extremely in that Buckle maintained that the primary cause of all progress of national life is the improvement of its intellectual tradition, that is, increase in the quantity and the worth of its stock of knowledge and accepted beliefs, and improvements in methods of intellectual operation; and he held that improvements of morals and of social organisation have been secondary results of these intellectual gains. Kidd, on the other hand[106], maintained that the progress of European civilisation has been primarily due to an improvement of the morality of peoples; that this has led to improvement of social organisation; and that this in turn has been the essential condition of the progress of the intellectual tradition, because it has secured a stable social environment, a security of life, a free field for the exercise of intellectual powers; in the absence of which conditions the intellectual powers of a nation cannot effectively organise themselves and apply themselves to the understanding of man and nature, or to securing the traditional perpetuation of the gains which they may sporadically achieve. We have to examine these views and try to determine what truth they contain, and to show that they are not wholly opposed but can in some measure be combined.
I propose to make first a very brief critical survey of some of the most notable attempts that have been made to account for racial qualities, and I shall try to supplement and harmonise these as far as possible. We may with advantage consider at the outset the race-making period, and afterwards go on to consider changes of racial qualities in the historic period. This Part of the book is necessarily somewhat speculative, but its interest and importance for our main topic may justify its inclusion.