Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/172

 158 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

is present he prol?ably, as Lewis Morgan suggests, raises his group to a higher level of culture by producing a new food epoch. The relation of the "great man" to crisis is indeed one of the most important points in the problem of progress. Such men as Moses, Mohammed, Confucius, Christ, have stamped the whole character of a civilization. The pride with which the German people refer to themselves as the "Volk der Dichter und Denker," and their extraordinary policy with respect to specialization, which has made the German university a model for other nations, are attributed largely to Fichte and his associates who, after the disastrous battle of Jena, preached a policy of scholarship as over against a policy of war. Similar cases of the reconstruction of the habits of a whole people by the dominating attention of a great man are found among the lower races. Dingiswayo and Chaka converted pastoral Zululand into a military encampment, as a result of witnessing the maneuvers of a regiment of Euro- pean soldiers in Cape Colony. And Howitt's Native Tribes of South East Australia has interesting details on the influence of extraordinary men in a low race.

2. The level of culture of the group limits the power of the mind to meet crisis and readjust. If the amount of general knowledge is small and the material resources scanty, the mind may find no way out of an emergency which under different conditions would be only the occasion for further progress. If we could imagine a group without language, numbers, iron, fire, and without the milk, meat, and labor of domestic animals, and if this group were small, as it would necessarily be under those conditions, we should have also to imagine a very low state of mind in general in the group. In the absence of mathematics, fire, and iron, for example, the use of electricity as a force would be out of the question. The individual mind cannot rise much above the level of the group-mind, and the group-mind will be simple if the outside environmental conditions and the antecedent racial experiences are simple. On this account it is just to attrib- ute important movements and inventions to individuals only in a qualified sense. The extraordinary individual works on the material and psychic fund already present, and if the situation