William Isaac Thomas

“ Herbart, who must be regarded as the pioneer in folk-psychology, declared that "ideas move in our minds with as much regularity as the stars move in the heavens." The discovery of the law of parallelism in the customs and culture of different tribes and races is a confirmation of this view, and suggests the necessity of a method more fundamental than any based on race differences; and in order to secure a fundamental basis of procedure we shall be wise if we avail ourselves of the knowledge recently brought to light by physiologists in connection with the phenomena of irritability in general. ”

“ The widening of the middle age orbis terrarum through voyages of discovery led to the science of ethnology, and the works of Linnaeus, Buffon, Lamarck, and Darwin hastened the formulation of somatic anthropology. In the course of time prehistoric archæology, folk-lore and folk-psychology have been added to these, and the term anthropology, like biology, is now used in a large way to designate a congeries of separate sciences—if, indeed, we permit ourselves to call any body of knowledge whatsoever a separate science. ”

“ Science, with all its wonders, has presented no more remarkable spectacle than the order of its own development in time, to which Comte first drew attention, namely, the emergence of the special sciences in the order of their remoteness from man. ”

“ The temperament, character, or genius of a people predetermines within certain limits the spirit of its institutions; it is the direct exponent of the quality of racial irritability, and apparently more fundamental, persistent and inimitable than intellectual traits. We are all aware how apt the Orientals who attend our universities are to acquire our intellectual habits, and how superficial an impression our pedagogical systems leave on their character. ”

“ Irritability, or as we call it in human society, sensibility, is the quality in virtue of which we get any reaction; intelligence is the mediation of the direction of the action, and education (association, tradition of ideas, discipline, precept, coercion) , represents all possible stimuli which may reach the individual from society, modifying old impulses and life-directions, and calling out new ones. ”

“ Functionally, also, the importance of the brain has been unduly emphasized by certain anthropologists. There is far less direct connection between intelligence and brain mass and form than was at one time presumed. It is true that the cerebral lobes are the seat of consciousness; but the brain is no more essential to intelligence than is the circulation, or digestion, or the liver. Intelligence is the mediation of action, and all organs and tissues which cooperate in forming an association, are equally important with the brain. ”

“ In each of these aspects the science of man has been making splendid headway, but it has been so absorbed in the preliminary task of collecting and classifying its materials that it has been able to do no more than approach its main task, the determination of the developmental relation of individual to race consciousness, and the relation of both to accompanying institutions and usages. ”

“ The natural approach to this question is through anthropology; but the prominent methods of anthropology have been weighing, measuring, and classifying, and like those of psycho-physics, able to contribute to the developmental history of mind only in a meager and indirect way. If we examine, for example, two of these methods, determination of brain-weight, and craniometry, we shall see that they have had at best only a classificatory value, and no direct bearing on the laws of mind.
The human brain doubtless contains the whole story of its own development, if only the story could be read out ”

“ The general criticism mav be made of German folk-psychologists that in their insistence on the reality of a collective human consciousness they have seemed to make the individual at every point the creation of social conditions, losing sight of the rhythm between the individual consciousness and social consciousness whereby each is enabled to live more fully. They have proceeded, too, in the main, on the assumption that in the savage society we have the culture society at a lower historical point, and that the laws of social growth can be understood only in their most crude manifestations. ”

“ German folk-psvchologists (including many who call themselves ethnologists) have insisted that man has heretofore been only partially viewed; individual psychology has relied on the statistics of education, introspection, and data from insane asylums, and history has heretofore been the relation of the development of castes, whereas the development of spirit, which is ossified in dogmas and systems, can be seen only in the great masses of humanity, who draw their sap direct from mother earth. ”

“ But the fact of similarity or identity of custom, art, superstition, ceremony, tradition, or technology, is no longer to be regarded as a proof of ethnic relationship, but a manifestation of the practical identity of the human spirit in its operations in all times and places. ”

“ In societies, especially in human society, another set of stimuli is introduced, and the nature of reaction on stimuli in general is modified. Language and memory give every member of the group opportunity to play upon the nature of every other member of the group. The individual is no longer a harp played upon by natural forces, but in a far greater degree by social forces: words, ideas and sentiments are substituted for light, gravity and acid. ”

“ Technology, in its relation both to war and to industry, has been connected with food. Art reflects the affective side of the life process, and it has shown in its whole course a predilection for love and war. ”

“ The nature-peoples are not communities in process of becoming culture-peoples; they are as old as we, and in the very fact that they have not become like us we may hope to find the laws of social physics which raised us above them. ”

“ But in determining the chemistry of digestion, for example, the physiologist must work with masses larger and more highly organized than the amœba; and the social structure of savage communities, while very suggestive, is likewise often too incomplete, when taken alone, for the purpose of the folk-psychologist. A knowledge of the present must be combined with the knowledge of the past for an adequate understanding of any part of the past. ”

“ The whole matter of the relation of intelligence to brain-weight, and of the nature and quantity of energy which is a function of this organ, is, indeed, fundamentally a question of physiological chemistry. The assumption that capacity for muscular work is in direct proportion to the mass is approximately correct; but the assumption that capacity for mental work is in proportion to the mass of nerve substance is a gross error, as anthropologists now very well know. ”

“ The substitution of action based on knowledge for action based on feeling is made possible in the individual and in society by the development of higher centers of control and the power of choice through inhibition and legislation. ”

“ Our psycho-physical experiments have to do with the consciousness of the evoluted man; . . . we learn little of psychic development through them. Their application to psychic disturbances will be presumably a limited one; it sheds light upon the nature of the more profound disturbances less by direct investigation than by giving information about the changes which are associated with the condition and rise of these disturbances. ”

“ Different plants and animals respond in various ways to these mechanical stimuli, the same stimulus in some cases attracting one form and repelling another, and the same organism responding in different ways to different degrees of intensity of the same stimulus, but there is no doubt that the control of the sentient life of the lower stadia of living matter falls directly under the fixed laws of physics and chemistry. ”

“ They have insisted that our customs, our laws, our arts, our religion, our speech, our minds, are the product of society in common, and that through a comparative examination of the languages, ceremonies, usages, and institutions of primitive peoples, we have means of entering the region which Wundt despaired of penetrating with the psycho-physical experiment, and of tracing the laws of the progressive unfolding of the psychical activities of man. ”

“ The discovery of a great principle, that of parallelism in development, has resulted from this view. Every community, as far as it rises toward a culture condition, seems to take the same steps as every other community rising to the same level of culture ”

“ Empirically all changes manifest themselves as the result of the universal reciprocal action between the simplest part and the sum of all the parts of nature,—an action which expresses itself physically as gravity, heat, light, chemical affinity ”

“ Morality is a term whose content varies immensely among different peoples, but it is, in its widest meaning, a feeling in favor of the forms of practice which have proven of life-saving advantage to a people, and which by heredity, tradition and authority have become relatively fixed. ”

“ What is important for our purpose is that, given the property of irritability, due to chemical constitution, which responds by movement to certain stimuli and exhibits through dissociation of atoms an energy which from being purely mechanical becomes more and more purposive, we have a starting point for the interpretation of the psychical energies of man. ”

“ War has been primarily with reference to territory on which to find food; and in connection with this, and with that other form of war which we call "the struggle for existence," systems of law, politics, morals and religion have indirectly arisen. ”

“ Man constructed a science of numbers, of the stars, of molar and molecular masses, of plants, of stones, and of creeping things, before he realized that he was himself an object capable of receiving scientific attention. ”

“ And scientific interest in man has, even in these latter days, been so far overshadowed and impeded by an interest in his relation to a spirit world that a denomination of men as "good and bad," like the farmer's classification of animals as "stock and vermin," has been too readily accepted as practically covering the case. ”

“ Another great principle already established, is that every culture community contains in itself survivals of the earlier stages through which it has passed, just as the animal organism of the higher type contains survivals from and reversions to the lower stages of its evolution. ”

“ For working purposes we take the individual as "the simplest part of nature," or rather as the unit on which "the sum of all the parts of nature" act, and which are acted on in turn by him, and it will be convenient to set over against him the variables which condition this action. ”

“ There is, too, an interesting parallelism between lower forms of social organization, lower organic forms of life, and the child, in the fact that they are all controlled largely by mandatory stimuli. Great popular movements and national upheavals, like the French Revolution and the Protestant Reformation, are always temperamental rather than intellectual expressions, and we are correct in calling these movements instinctive. ”

“ Wherever man has been met, his blood has already been mixed through crossing, migration, and conquest. How this mixture came about, and when, is a question which, if not futile, is of much importance, but there is no occasion at present to modify the impatient expression of Sir Henry Maine, that race theories "appear to have little merit except the facility which they give for building on them inferences tremendously out of proportion to the mental labor which they cost the builder. ”

“ Gross anatomy of the brain, especially in the hands of surgeons, and fine anatomy, in the hands of neurologists, have established important laws of growth and of mental pathology, but no anthropologist can venture to say of a series of brains which are male and which female, which Chinese and which German. ”

“ The races of men, like the palm of the south and the fir of the north, are identical in the principle of their growth; and ignoring the local, the incidental and eccentric, we should find similar and universal laws of growth among all peoples. ”

“ But the formation of artificial or historic races, through the influence of milieu and the diffusion of a common fund of beliefs, sentiments, ideas, and interests among a heterogeneous population brought by hap and chance into the same geographical zone, is taking place before our eyes at the present moment, and is a matter of history ”

“ Differences in temperament in individuals and in races must be regarded as due to the same causes as positive and negative heliotropism or chemotropism in plants and animals, namely, chemical constitution. ”

“ In the more lowly organized forms all stimuli are mandatory. Hunger, for example, calls out motion through changes produced by katabolism in the organism, whereby it is attracted chemotropically to food. ”

“ The fact that such a substitution is one of the professed aims both of pedagogy and of sociology gives peculiar interest to the examination of the forms of control which have dominated different types of society, and the determination of the conditions and forces leading from one form of control to another. ”

“ They have been of some service in the attempt to classify races and to distinguish the elements of population in a given region, but every attempt to establish a regular connection between form and function has been disastrous. ”

“ The earliest disturbance of this anthropocentric view came in illusions concerning his relation to the supernatural to which man was subjected through the possession of an elaborate nervous organization ”