68 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



related 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 punish- 

 ment 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 suffi- 

 cient 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 sophis- 

 tical 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, 

 Volkerpsychologie, Volkergedanken, racial psychology, ethnic sen- 

 timents, and the like, are looked upon with distrust. The ex- 

 ternal 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 with- 

 out 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 eth- 

 nic 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 eth- 

 nic groups hold to-day is one merely of opportunity and exter- 

 nalities. 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 splanch- 



