German folk-psvchologists (including many who call themselves ethnologists) have insisted that man has heretofore been only partially viewed; individual psychology has relied on the statistics of education, introspection, and data from insane asylums, and history has heretofore been the relation of the development of castes, whereas the development of spirit, which is ossified in dogmas and systems, can be seen only in the great masses of humanity, who draw their sap direct from mother earth. They have insisted on the identity of human spirit in all zones—an identity underlying all external differences and local coloring. The races of men, like the palm of the south and the fir of the north, are identical in the principle of their growth; and ignoring the local, the incidental and eccentric, we should find similar and universal laws of growth among all peoples.[1]
The discovery of a great principle, that of parallelism in development, has resulted from this view. Every community, as far as it rises toward a culture condition, seems to take the same steps as every other community rising to the same level of culture; whether these steps are taken invariably in the same order, folk-psvchologists are not yet able to say. But the fact of similarity or identity of custom, art, superstition, ceremony, tradition, or technology, is no longer to be regarded as a proof of ethnic relationship, but a manifestation of the practical identity of the human spirit in its operations in all times and places. Another great principle already established, is that every culture community contains in itself survivals of the earlier stages through which it has passed, just as the animal organism of the higher type contains survivals from and reversions to the lower stages of its evolution. Folk-lore has been so active in amassing survivals that we may say of superstition, for instance, that it is as dense today in central Germany as in central Africa.
The general criticism mav be made of German folk-psychologists that in their insistence on the reality of a collective
- ↑ Cf. A. Bastian. Der Mensch, Vol. I, p. 11; Der Völkergedanke, pp. v, 172, et passim.
