As the American mind gradually reveals itself, the effect of this political isolation at the formative stage of the race will be clearly seen. A nation is the sum of many influences, but none have more weight in the formation of character and the mental type of a people than the natural phenomena of the country in which they live. Extreme heat and cold are reflected not only in the physical appearance of the race, but also in its mental characteristics. Nature, to help man adapt himself to his environment, has made the races that dwell nearest the sun more lithe, more sinewy, less burdened with superfluous flesh than those who live in colder climates, who need greater protection from the extreme rigors of their long winters; and as they are physically so they are mentally. The men and women of the south, in whose veins run the fire and heat of the sun, who bask in a riot of color, who are influenced by the witchery of radiant, caressing moonlight, have always been gifted with temperaments more vivid, more poetic, and more imaginative than the men and women of the north, slower, more precise, more practical. The plainsman is a different type from the mountaineer, and both show a variation from the inhabitant of the seacoast. An arid, sterile country produces a race unlike that in which the land is fruitful and rivers abound. Trees and mountains, valleys and prairies are the indelible pictures of memory that unconsciously color life, as the pictures of childhood leave an ineffaceable recollection.1 These things are not new, they are as old as creation itself. Man has always been influenced by his surroundings, always keenly sensitive to exterior impressions. To a certain extent their force is blunted when countless generations have looked upon the same mountains or the same valleys, for each succeeding generation has in it a part at least of the stored emotions and sensations of its predecessors, the inherent faculty of comprehension without ratiocination, exactly as the animal instinctively takes to the water or avoids it. To the child who opens his eyes on the unfathomable mystery of the sea, the sea is as natural as the mountain, which he beholds for the first time, is abnormal and terrifying. The civilization of most peoples runs too far back for us to appreciate the influences of climate and natural phenomena in moulding the characteristics of race, but in America we are so close to its genesis that we not only know but we can actually see what the effects have been. To have a correct understanding of the American character it is necessary at the outset to establish certain facts which nearly all writers on American race development have treated, if they touched on them at all, as only incidental instead of being a primary cause. I maintain that when a highly 1 1 Cf. May: Democracy in Europe, introduction, p. xxxix et seq. civilized race is transplanted to a new environment, that environment entirely different from the old, different in climate and other physical characteristics, and to support life it is necessary for these people from the very first to engage in an unrelenting struggle against nature, the effect of that struggle will be seen in the mental characteristics of the people new to the soil. It is a remarkable fact that the great evolutionary authorities - Darwin, Spencer, Wallace, Haeckel, Le Conte, to mention only a few of the most eminent are either silent on this important branch of psychological investigation, or else dismiss it with merely a passing reference, and yet its truth cannot be doubted. It is sustained by the teachings of biogeny, morphology, and sociology, and is further fortified by the historical study of race development. No one, I think, can study the psychology of history and not be profoundly impressed by the dominant influence that nature has exercised in the progress of organized society. In the ascertainment of the causes that have resulted in the shoot of the race varying so materially from the parent stem the importance of the physical cannot be overestimated. Spencer says: "We see that . . . the changes or processes displayed by a living body are especially related to the changes or processes in its environment. And here we have the needful supplement to our conception of life. Adding this all important characteristic, our conception of life becomes the definite combination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive, in correspondence with external coexistences and sequences.” 1 At much greater length in his Principles of Sociology, under the title of "Original External Factors," Spencer treats of the influence of climate and physical conditions on race development, but stops just short of the question involved, frankly admitting that it is outside of his province and is the property of the specialist. After showing that temperature, heat, light, moisture, the configuration of the surface, the fertility of the soil, and the nature of the flora and fauna all "have their effects on human activities, and therefore on social phenomena," he says: "But a detailed account of the original external factors, whether of the more important kinds outlined in the preceding pages or of the less important kind exemplified, pertains to Special Sociology. Any one who, carrying with him the general principles of the science, undertook to interpret the evolution of each society, would have to describe completely these many local causes in their various kinds and degrees. Such an undertaking must be left for the sociologists of the future. "Here my purpose has been," he says, "to give a general idea of the original external factors, in their different classes and orders; so as to impress on the reader the truth, barely enunciated in the preceding chapter, that the characters of the environment 1 Spencer: The Principles of Biology, vol. i, p. 74. cooperate with the characters of human beings in determining social phenomena." 1 I give one more quotation from Spencer. “Divesting this conception of all superfluities, reducing it to its most abstract shape, we see that Life is definable as the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations. And when we so define it, we discover that the physical and the psychical life are equally comprehended by the definition." Huxley says: "It is a general belief that men of different stocks differ as much physically as they do morphologically; but it is very hard to prove, in any particular case, how much of a supposed national characteristic is due to inherent physiological peculiarities, and how much to the influence of circumstances." 3 66 Darwin gives the weight of his authority to the influence of conditions upon physical development. "We have seen in the second chapter," he says, that the conditions of life affect the development of the bodily frame in a direct manner, and that the effects are transmitted. Thus, as is generally admitted, the European settlers in the United States undergo a slight but extraordinarily rapid change of appearance. Their bodies and limbs become elongated; and I hear from Colonel Bernys that during the late war in the United States, good evidence was 1 Spencer: The Principles of Sociology, vol. i, part 1, p. 16 et seq. Huxley: Methods and Results of Ethnology, p. 240. |