Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/226

 2IO Reviews.

war, religion, commerce, education, morals, of each of these in turn he has traced the specific evolution. And now he under- takes to correlate his manifold results in an ethnic psychology which shall expound the history of the human mind from every point of view at once. Or rather, from every point of view bar one. There is to be no introspection, no prating of "soul," "free will," and such like. We must fix our regards on "tangible, observable, controllable reality." This apparently means that the culture of each grade of society is to be studied in its objective manifestations, in the institutions in which it clothes irself. An " appreciation," it is assumed, of the " mentality " involved is obtained without further ado. Hence ethnic psychology in our author's hands resolves itself into a loose concatenation of such appreciations, so designed as to present an ascending scale of " mental values." Which scale runs thus : Australians, Africans, Papuans, Polynesians, Americans (Southern, Central, and Northern), Mongols (including Esquimaux and Malays), Chinese, Egyptians (including " Periegyptians," such as Tuaregs, Kabyles, and Hovas), Semites, Hindus, Greeks, Romans, Europeans of the Middle Ages. Seeing the immense difficulties of the task, it would perhaps be ungracious to object that the logic of this classification is some- what mixed. Whereas its declared object is to exhibit a scheme of graduated values, it is obvious that geographical, chronological, and ethnological considerations have largely influenced the order- ing and grouping. Meanwhile, as regards the manner of the separate appreciations, no one at any rate is likely to complain that Professor Letourneau cannot see the wood for the trees : whereas a less skilful artist might well have failed to reduce some of the groups, for instance the Africans or the Americans, to any sort of specious unity. The book winds up with a so-called " synthesis of mental evolution," -which, however, confines itself to generalities such as these : that biology provides the key to the history of mind, that the clan is the cradle of human morality, that religion arose in animism, and that in all its forms religion is destined to go down before natural science — the science which shows it to be true " beyond criticism " that " consciousness is a function of the nervous centres."

The English reader will admire the airy grace with which the practised litterateur disports himself amid the mazes of a subject the scope of which approaches to that of the Teufelsdrockhian