INTRODUCTION. 15 



organization, we cannot, in man, make our ignorance of his 

 inner life the ground for considering him merely in his physical 

 aspect. It is a distorted view which Cuvier takes* in order to 

 keep psychological arguments at a distance in the classification 

 of animals, when he says that all vital manifestations which 

 occur only periodically are useless in classification. The psy- 

 chical life of every species of animals is no doubt as constant as 

 physical life, though certainly less accessible to investigation. 

 This should, however, not make us forget that all classifications 

 of animals which rest exclusively on their organic peculiarities 

 are only provisional, and can have no absolute and universal 

 value, since, owing to our necessarily imperfect knowledge, 

 they cannot be subjected to exhaustive investigation. But with 

 regard to man, the mere physical organization and its muta- 

 tability is insufficent to enable us to decide the question of 

 unity of species, since the character of humanity consists, first 

 and foremost, in the specific development of psychical life, and 

 only secondarily in the physical organism as the embodiment 

 of this spiritual essence. Hence it is inappropriate to treat 

 man merely as an object of natural history, and to divide man- 

 kind into races or species, according to external forms, without 

 taking into consideration that the most striking distinctions 

 between individuals and peoples are to be found in mental 

 qualifications. When, for instance, Bory de St. Vincent f 

 considers it as undoubted that the Negro, in spite of his com- 

 paratively smaller brain, possesses the same mental capacity as 

 the Austrian, whom he foolishly enough calls the Boeotian of 

 Europe, and the same capacity as four-fifths of Frenchmen; 

 and when he ascribes to all his species of mankind the same 

 degree of perfectibility, and attributes to nine Europeans out 

 of ten no higher mental endowments than to the Hottentots, it 

 may be considered as a complete recantation of his theory with 

 regard to specific differences existing among mankind. Van 

 Amzingej; appears, up to this period, to have been' the first 

 author who considered a classification of mankind, founded on 



* Thierreich ubersetz (Animal "Kingdom, translated), by Voigt, 1, p. 5. 

 t "L'Homme," 2nd edit., 1857, ii, p. 62, 



j Investigation of the Theories of the Natural History of Man," New 

 York, 1848. 



