SYSTEM. 141 



Anthropology regarding man as a whole, classifiers ought 

 not to neglect his psychological value. Although craniology 

 is only an indirect appreciation of the same, few had ever 

 thought, Linngeus excepted, of using the purely intellectual 

 characteristics of races in order to assist them in classification, 

 when all at once the American school gave an immense import- 

 ance to these characteristics, and placed psychological varieties 

 above all the material differences which can be observed in the 

 configuration of the bony case of the skull. The American 

 school has gone too far, for it is tangible forms especially which 

 must furnish specific characteristics in the animal kingdom. 



However this may be, we may willingly give a secondary value 

 to the intellectual classification of the human race, although data 

 are still wanting in order to establish one which can be con- 

 sidered as complete. We will even add that the characteristics 

 of this order are the more authentic and the more precious since 

 they are not the expression of a given moment, nor that of a 

 certain number of individuals. They belong to a whole race. 



We must seek for them in the literary remains of a people. 

 These teach us surely, even after many ages have elapsed, 

 about the mind, belief, and thoughts of their readers. The 

 monuments of plastic art remain, even if they were a complete 

 contradiction against their time, their epoch, the men who 

 ordered them, and the crowd which now regards without un- 

 derstanding them.* A book, on the contrary, has no success 

 except as it enters into the mind of a people, except as the 

 ideas which it expresses are those of all the world. Each book 

 which is published, then (like the Mosaic books among the 

 Jews, the Koran amongst the Mussulmen), is the true expres- 

 sion of the mind of a race at all the periods of its existence, 

 even were it written in a language which is no longer spoken. 

 The best Greek and Eoman works, written for men of the 

 same blood as ourselves, have remained classical. We must 

 understand them, even at the present day, and we do under- 

 stand them, because the thoughts which animated their 

 authors are still our own. If, on the contrary, we wish to 



* See Michelet, with regard to the paintings in the Sixtine Chapel, Histoire 

 de France, Renaissance. 



