THE INFLUENCE OF RACE IN HISTORY. 495 

 THE INFLUENCE OF KACE IN HISTORY.* 



By M. GUSTAVE LE BON. 



HISTORICAL studies have undergone a great transformation 

 in our days. Almost exclusively literary a few years ago, 

 they are tending at this time to become almost as exclusively sci- 

 entific. It is not the recent progress of archaeology alone that has 

 caused a remodeling of our knowledge and our ideas in history. 

 The discoveries in the physical and natural sciences have had a 

 still greater effect upon them ; and it is by means of these discov- 

 eries that the notion of natural causes is entering into history 

 more and more, and that we are habituating ourselves to consider 

 historical phenomena as subject to laws as invariable as those 

 that control the course of the stars and the transformations of 

 bodies. The part which all the ancient historians attributed to 

 Providence or to chance, is now no longer attributed to anything 

 but natural laws, as entirely removed from chance as from the 

 will of the gods. 



The new ideas which are entering into history are due chiefly 

 to the progress of natural science. Making more and more evident 

 the preponderant influence of the past on the evolution of beings, 

 it teaches us that we must first study the past in societies to com- 

 prehend their present condition and foresee their future. In the 

 same way that the naturalist now finds the explanation of beings 

 in the study of their ancestral forms, the philosopher who wishes 

 to comprehend the genesis of our ideas and institutions should 

 examine primitive usages. Thus regarded, history, the interest of 

 which might seem but slight so long as it is limited to the enumer- 

 ation of dynasties and battles, is acquiring an immense significance. 



The method which the modern man of science applies to his- 

 tory to-day is identical with that which the naturalist applies in 

 his laboratory. A society can be regarded as an organism in pro- 

 cess of development. There is a social embryology as there are 

 an animal and a vegetable embryology, and the laws of evolu- 

 tion that govern them all are of the same order. Social embry- 

 ology, or the study of civilizations, shows us the series of ad- 

 vances by which the marvelous and complicated mechanism of 

 refined societies has issued from the savage condition in which 

 the first men long lived ; how our thoughts, feelings, institutions, 

 and creeds had their roots in the primal ages of mankind. Instead 

 of, as formerly, seeing a gulf between the peoples who ate their 

 aged parents and those who lavish cares upon them in their old 

 age and weep at their tombs ; between those who look upon their 



* From the author's work, " Les Premieres Civilisations," now appearing in parts. 



