ABSTRACT
We saw above that under the notion of the social mind were included the mental elements common to the members of a given people or society, such as common reactions to similar stimuli, common modes of behaviour due to a similar hereditary structure, and the like. It is these common elements that are frequently summed up under the name of the ‘Soul of a People’, and many writers have used the latter conception to explain the history of a given people, as though it referred to a real entity distinct from the generations of individuals that constitute the people and also to account for the differences between different peoples. In dealing with the problem it is necessary, to begin with, to distinguish between races and nations. We cannot here enter into a discussion of the very difficult problem of the nature of race. Generally the criteria taken by anthropologists are certain bodily characteristics, such as the size and configuration of the head, or colour. But it seems probable that just as there are somatic types which have been fixed by a long stay under the same conditions, by heredity and selection, so psychical types of relative permanance may have emerged. It should be remembered that comparatively little is known with any certainty of psychical racial characteristics, and it is quite possible, at any rate, that the ultimate differences are not so great as they are often alleged to be. But granting that there are psychical types corresponding to different races, in what way are these types to be conceived? Does the existence of a given mental type involve an appeal to a racial soul immanent in all its members? Such an hypothesis does not appear to be at all required by the known facts. At least two other ways of conceiving the matter are possible. We may mean that races differ from one another owing to the fact that all the members of a given race possess certain mental qualities, not possessed by any members of other races. These mental qualities would have to be taken as ‘fluctuations’ in the modern biological sense of the word, i.e. as varying round a mean within given limits; for clearly there are enormous individual differences between the members of a given race. Or, we may mean that all races have the same qualities, but that their distribution varies so that, for instance, certain types of superior ability, though present in all races, are present in greater proportion in some than in others, with the result that the races considered as wholes will differ from one another though individuals of different races may closely resemble one another. Neither of these two possible interpretations of what may be meant by racial types involves or implies the psychical identity of all the members of a race. To appeal to race for the explanation of any psychical factor is in any case dangerous. Remembering the difficulty that anthropologists experience in finding reliable somatic criteria, we ought to be chary of using psychical criteria, until we possess a characterology and a method of record and observation at all comparable in accuracy to, say, craniometry. Further, even where we do find racial psychical peculiarities, we have still the formidable question of deciding how much these are due to heredity and how much to environmental and historical causes. With Professor Maclver we may say that ‘in nothing are we more liable to go astray than in the search for the race spirit, if by that we mean a focus of original characters revealed as independent of environment. To find it involves a perilous initial process of abstraction, the almost or altogether impossible process of unravelling the web of life and character woven by the constant infinite reactions of circumstances and the minds of men’ (Community, p. 148).
