Although such processes are also biologic,—that is, carried on by life products (cellular neoplasms),—they are incapable of independent existence and are always warring against that of the organism in which they are engendered. It is an axiom that the laws of progressive evolution do not apply to pathological processes (Virchow).
In the history of the mental life of individuals and nations we find a striking parallelism to these physical processes, certain degenerations bringing with them compensations in the growth of higher faculties, others tending inevitably to the destruction of the individual or the group. The latter belongs to the domain of “ethnic psycho-pathology.”
Psychologists have shunned this field. “Psychology,” says a recent American writer, “must concern itself with the _normal_ mind”; and a German author of merit has insisted that mental pathology has no place in ethnology, because this science occupies itself only with the progress of mankind.
Much more correct is the opinion of Dr. Ireland that “it is quite erroneous to treat the history of the human race as that of the sane alone”; and, indeed, we may almost go so far as Professor Capitan, of the School of Anthropology of Paris, and say: “Everybody is diseased. Nobody is healthy. We are obliged to study mankind in a constantly morbid condition of body and mind.” Or we may go as far as Pascal, when he says, “Men are naturally so insane that he is deemed insane who is not insane with the rest.”
Ethnic psychology is obliged to take into account the constant presence and powerful action of pathological mental elements. Tribes and nations have been destroyed by war or by catastrophes; but much more frequently some disease of the ethnic mind itself has prepared its own extinction.
Here an important distinction is necessary. Ethnic mental disease has no relation to the frequency of individual cases of insanity. These do not affect the ethnic mind because that is the outcome of the intelligence of the community, not of its irresponsible members.
For this reason ethnic psycho-pathology cannot be discussed wholly from the standpoint of insanity, although the analogies are such that we can profitably compare them in outline, and this I shall attempt.