Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/78

68 with certain mental traits, but it is not the business of the ethnologist to pursue them to their last analysis in the realm of metaphysics. For instance, we may trace all forms of punishment back to the individual's passion for revenge, or we may analyze all systems of religion until we find the common source of all to be man's dread of the unknown, and these will be sufficient ethnologic explanations of both these phenomena, but not a final analysis of the emotion of dread or the thirst for vengeance. Ethnology declines to enter these realms of abstraction.

I repeat that to define "the universal in humanity" is the aim of ethnology—that is, the universal soul or psyche of humanity.

But let me not be understood as speaking of this as of some entity, like the ame humaine of the Comtists. That were sophistical word-mongering in the style of ancient scholasticism. There is no such entity as humanity, or race, or people, or nation. There is nothing but the individual man or woman, the "single, separate person," as Walt Whitman says. Hence some of the most advanced ethnologists are ready to give up the ethnos itself as a subject of study. Those terms so popular a few years ago, Völkerpsychologie, Völkergedanken, racial psychology, ethnic sentiments, and the like, are looked upon with distrust. The external proofs of the psychical unity of the whole species have multiplied so abundantly that some maintain strenuously that it is not ethnic or racial peculiarities, but solely external conditions on the one hand and individual faculties on the other, which are the factors of culture evolution.

While I admit that this question is still sub judice, I add that the position just stated seems to be erroneous. All members of the species have common human mental traits; that goes without saying; and in addition it seems to me that each of the great races, each ethnic group, has its own added special powers and special limitations compared with the others; and that these ethnic and racial psychic peculiarities attached to all or nearly all members of the group are tremendously potent in deciding the result of its struggle for existence.

I must still deny that all races are equally endowed, or that the position with reference to civilization which the various ethnic groups hold to-day is one merely of opportunity and externalities. I must still claim that the definition of the ethnos is one of the chief aims of ethnology; and that the terms of this definition are not satisfied by geographic explanations. Let me, with utmost brevity, name a few other connotations, prepotent, I believe, in the future fate of nations and races.

None, I maintain, can escape the mental correlations of its physical structure. The black, the brown, and the red races differ anatomically so much from the white, especially in their