Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/117

 Rh that other series of men, who, differing as much as possible from each other, possess a notable personality, to the point of giving a name to a school, a party, a sect, a doctrine, or an epoch. To the former of these varieties of man we now give the name of people, and in this we find the subject-matter of the science which we are studying. The people is that portion of humanity which has not yet arrived by reflection and by culture at acquiring a full consciousness of itself, and to be a real union of individuals, in the full sense of the word. A multitude of men, whose individual effort is lost in history, are confounded in the term people; just as the efforts of each single bee are lost in the honey, which is at the same time the fruit of the work of them all—the product of the contributions of an infinity of flowers.

The very idea of the people as an indifferentiated and anonymous mass pre-supposes a differentiation within humanity, and which appears rationally posterior to the appearance of the latter on our globe, even if its germs might have existed from the beginning.

And we say that we believe the epoch in which the people was formed as a variety of mankind to be posterior to the appearance of this latter on our planet, not because differences did not exist, as there are between individuals of the people itself and between all men, but because those anthropoids who managed to impose themselves on others either by force or craft, if they were tolerated for the reason that wolves do not bite one another, did not form a caste, as happened at a later epoch. The division of power among the strongest supposes already an immense advance in social life. Even among the apes called orators (howlers) there are individuals who, so to say, give the note to their companions, which howl, cry, dance, and gesticulate around, imitating their chief; but these chiefs or aristocratic apes, so to say, never attain to the constitution of a society (or caste) as the Brahmins, for example, or the Shastriyas have formed them even in far distant epochs, and as titles and nobility do in modern times. Humanity presents itself at first as an apparently inorganic and indifferentiated being, which presently unfolds itself and exhibits itself with interior organisms, even to the specification of its functions to the degree in which we see them now in the most civilised lands. Its first division, or separation, seems to be, like that of the cell, into