Читать книгу Elements of Folk Psychology - Wilhelm Max Wundt - Страница 19

For a general estimate of the mental characteristics of a race or a tribe, the observation of a single individual or of several individuals is not adequate. Judgment can be based only on the totality of the various mental phases of culture—language, custom, myth, and art. But, if we would also obtain a conception of the mental capacities of a people or a tribe, we must take into further consideration the mental endowment of the individual. For, in the case of mental capacity, we must consider not merely that which has actually been achieved but also everything within the possibility of attainment. Here, again, the standpoint differs according as we are concerned (to limit ourselves to the two most important and typical aspects) with an intellectual or a moral estimate. These two aspects, the intellectual, taken in its widest sense, and the moral, are not only of supreme importance, but, as experience shows, they in no wise run parallel courses. For an understanding of mental development in general, therefore, and of the relation of these its aspects, the early conditions of human culture are particularly significant.

If, now, we consider the general cultural conditions of primitive man, and recall the very meagre character of his external cultural possessions as well as his lack of any impulse to perfect these, we may readily be led to suppose that his intellectual capacities also have remained on a very low plane of development. How, some have asked, could the Bushman have dispensed for decades with firearms—just as accessible to him as to the surrounding tribes—unless he possessed a low degree of intelligence? Even more true is this of the Negritos of the Philippines or the Veddahs of Ceylon. How, unless their mental capacities were essentially more limited than those of their neighbours, could they have lived in the midst of highly cultivated tribes and have remained for decades on an unchanged mental level? But we need to bear in mind two considerations that are here decisive. The first of these is the limited nature of the wants of primitive man, a condition fostered, no doubt, by his relatively small intercourse with neighbouring peoples. Added to this is the fact that up to very recent times—for here also many changes have arisen—the primitive man of the tropics has found plenty of game and plant food in his forests, as well as an abundance of material for the clothing and adornment to which he is accustomed. Hence he lacks the incentive to strive for anything beyond these simple means of satisfying his wants. It is agreed, particularly by the investigators who have studied those tribes of Malacca and Ceylon that have remained primitive, that the most outstanding characteristic of primitive man is contentment. He seeks for nothing further, since he either finds all that he desires in his environment, or, by methods handed down from the ancient past, knows how he may produce it out of the material available to him. For this reason the Semangs and Senoi, no less than the Veddahs, despise as renegades those mixed tribes that have arisen through union, in the one case, with the Malays, and, in the other, with the Singhalese and Tamils. All the more firmly, therefore, do they hold to that which was transmitted to them by their fathers. Together with this limited character of their wants, we find a fixity of conditions, due to their long isolation. The longer a set of customs and habits has prevailed among a people, the more difficult it is to overturn. Prior to any change we must, in such cases, first have mighty upheavals, battles, and migrations. To what extent all deeper-going changes of culture are due to racial fusions, migrations, and battles we shall presently see. The tribes that have remained relatively primitive to this day have led a peaceful existence since immemorial times. Of course, the individual occasionally slays the man who disturbs his marriage relations or trespasses upon his hunting-grounds. Otherwise, however, so long as he is not obliged to protect himself against peoples that crowd in upon him, primitive man is familiar with the weapon only as an implement of the chase. The old picture of a war of all with all, as Thomas Hobbes once sketched the natural state of man, is the very reverse of what obtained. The natural condition is one of peace, unless this is disturbed by external circumstances, one of the most important of which is contact with a higher culture. The man of nature, however, suffers less from an advanced culture than he does from the barbarism of semi-culture. But whenever a struggle arises for the possession of the soil and of the means of subsistence which it furnishes, semi-culture may come to include more peoples than are usually counted as belonging to it. The war of extermination against the red race was carried on by the pious New England Puritans with somewhat different, though with scarcely better, weapons than the Hottentots and Herero to-day turn against the Bushmen, or the Monbuttus against the Negritos of Central Africa.