Heredity and National Character. 109 



probable that every character, individual or national, is the very 

 complex result of physiological and psychological laws. But 

 sociology is a science so little advanced that we dare not risk a 

 judgment on the causes of the formation of national characters, 

 and hence we must provisionally regard character as an ultimate 

 cause. On this basis, let us see what part is played by heredity in 

 the formation of national character. 



It is usual to explain the history of a people by their institu- 

 tions, which, in one sense, is true, though institutions themselves 

 are but an effect. In the social and political order, effects and 

 causes are not presented under the form of a simple series, as in 

 the physical order ; we rather find a reciprocity of action between 

 them. The character produces the institutions, and they in turn 

 form the character ; thus, after several generations, the two are but 

 one, the institutions are but the character rendered visible and 

 permanent. Still, we must not forget that the institutions are only 

 an external cause, which is sustained by an internal cause cha- 

 racter and this is transmitted hereditarily. Take a people in its 

 earliest period the Romans under the kings, or the Gauls before 

 Caesar's time the grand outlines of its character are already 

 traced. They are probably the result of its physical constitution, 

 and of the climate. And as a people is perpetuated by genera- 

 tion ; as it is a law of nature that like shall produce like ; as the 

 exceptions to this law tend to disappear when large masses instead 

 of particular cases are examined, obvious facts point out how 

 national character is preserved by heredity. 



This is, after all, only to assert that physical transmission is as 

 much the law for obscure individuals as for famous men. In the 

 preceding chapters we have taken our examples from history, 

 because such examples are known to all. But every one is aware 

 that the various modes of imagination, intelligence, and sensibility 

 may be preserved by heredity in ordinary, obscure families. Every 

 one might readily find in his own experience instances to confirm 

 this. The permanence of national character is at once the result 

 and the experimental proof of psychological heredity in the 

 masses. 



If we had any true science of ethnographical psychology, we 

 should more clearly perceive the part played by heredity in the 



