About the Work
The Psychology of Peoples is a work of social and psychological theory by Gustave Le Bon, the French writer and thinker best known for his study of crowd behaviour. The edition described in these notes was published in New York by The Macmillan Co., and its title page identifies the author as the author of “The Crowd.” The book is a compact synthesis rather than an exhaustive treatise: Le Bon states plainly that the questions he raises were treated at length in his earlier works on Eastern civilisations, and that this short volume distils those findings into a general account of how races think, feel, and act, and how those mental traits shape the whole course of their history.
The work belongs to the tradition of nineteenth-century racial and psychological theorising, and it wears that inheritance openly. Its method is comparative and observational: Le Bon draws on natural history, anthropology, travel writing, archaeology, and history, ranging across Egypt, India, Persia, Greece, Rome, China, Japan, Algeria, Brazil, the United States, and the nations of Europe. He writes for a general educated audience rather than for specialists, and he is fond of vivid example — the Egyptian mummy in its golden mask, the guillotined terrorists of the Convention turned into staid officials, the five-and-twenty million Hindoos held by sixty thousand Englishmen. The book is at once a theory of history, a taxonomy of races, and a warning about the future of European civilisation.
It should be read as a period document. Its central claims — that races possess fixed mental constitutions, that some races are inherently inferior to others, that character rather than intelligence determines a people’s destiny — are presented by Le Bon as the conclusions of science, but they belong to an era of racial science that later scholarship has thoroughly discredited. The notes record these claims as the book’s arguments, and any honest account of the work must present them as such: as the convictions of a particular thinker in a particular time, not as established fact.
Context
The book emerges from a moment when the idea of human equality had become, in Le Bon’s view, the reigning dogma of Western politics. His Introduction is explicit about this: barely a century and a half before he wrote, philosophers ignorant of primitive human history, of mental variation, and of the laws of heredity had propounded the equality of individuals and races. That idea, attractive to the masses, implanted itself and bore fruit — it shook old societies, birthed formidable revolutions, and threw the Western world into unforeseeable convulsions. Le Bon positions his book as a corrective, an attempt to show what modern psychology and experience actually teach about the mental gulf between individuals and races.
He is writing against a specific set of democratic and reforming convictions: that institutions cause the character of peoples, that education can remake human intelligence, that all men are born equally intelligent and good, and that perversion comes only from bad laws. These convictions, he argues, have made institutions and education the panaceas of modern democrats. He sees the same levelling principle advancing in his own day in the claims of socialism, which he believes is destined soon to enslave most Western peoples, and in the demands of the modern woman, who, forgetting the deep mental differences separating her from man, demands the same rights and education — a triumph that would, in his view, end by making the European a nomad without home or family.
The intellectual context is also the great age of European empire. Le Bon writes as a citizen of a France that possesses Algeria, and as an observer of an England that rules India. His examples are drawn from colonial administration, from the comparative study of civilisations, and from the new archaeology that was revealing the arts of Egypt, Assyria, and India. He is convinced that the practical statesman needs a psychology of peoples as much as the naturalist needs a classification of species, and much of the book’s energy comes from the sense that modern politics is being conducted on false psychological premises.
Structure of the Book
The work is organised into five Books, each with its own chapters, moving from the formation and nature of the racial soul, through its outward manifestations in civilisation, to its role in history, its modification, and finally its dissolution.
Book I, “The Psychological Characteristics of Races,” establishes the foundation. Its first chapter, “The Soul of Races,” asks how naturalists classify species and whether their methods can be applied to man, examines the defects of current human-race classifications, and argues that races can be defined by average psychological types established through observation. It considers the influence of ancestors as against immediate parents, the common psychological groundwork shared by the individuals of a race, and the immense influence of bygone generations. It traces the spread of the collective soul from family to village to city to district, weighs the advantages and dangers of the city conception, and describes how natural races gave way to historic races. The second chapter, “The Limits of the Variability of the Character of Races,” argues that variability rather than fixity is the apparent rule, but that fundamental characteristics are invariable while secondary ones vary; environment, circumstances, and education touch only accessory characteristics. The men of the Terror and the endurance of national characteristics through revolutions serve as examples. The third chapter, “The Psychological Hierarchy of Races,” divides races into primitive, inferior, average, and superior, holding that character and morality matter most, that intellectual qualities are modifiable by education, and that qualities of character are irreducible. The fourth chapter, “The Progressive Differentiation of Individuals and Races,” maintains that inequality among individuals grows with racial superiority, that inferior races show a mental equality, and that heredity tends to reduce individual superiorities back to the average type. The fifth chapter, “Formation of the Historical Races,” treats cross-breeding, the inferiority of half-breeds, castes, the limited influence of environment, and the prediction that the period of racial formation will soon end.
Book II turns to how racial characteristics appear in the elements of civilisation. Its first chapter treats the elements of civilisation as exterior manifestations of a people’s soul, and argues that their relative importance varies from people to people. The second chapter examines how institutions, religions, and languages are transformed when they pass between peoples, with the example of Japan and the untranslatability of certain languages. The third chapter, “How the Arts Are Transformed,” applies these principles to Egypt, Greece, Persia, India, and Arabian art, treating monuments as “books of stone” that reveal the souls of vanished peoples.
Book III considers history as a consequence of character. Its first chapter argues that the soul of peoples is responsible for their institutions, citing France and the contrast between Anglo-Saxon and Latin ideals. The second applies these principles to the comparison of the United States and the Spanish-American republics. The third examines how the modification of the soul of races affects historical evolution, discussing the fall of Rome through pacific barbarian invasions and the modern invasions of the United States and France.
Book IV addresses the modification of racial characteristics through three agents: ideas, religious beliefs, and great men. Book V, “The Dissociation of the Character of Races,” describes how civilisations fade away and die out — citing the Latin peoples, egoism, and Socialism — and closes with the author’s general conclusions.
Inside the Book
The Title Page and Contents
The book opens with its title page, identifying the work as The Psychology of Peoples by Gustave Le Bon, author of “The Crowd,” published in New York by The Macmillan Co. A stray line, “A. P. Lange / Education,” sits above the title. The table of contents lays out five Books. The first, “The Psychological Characteristics of Races,” runs through five chapters: the soul of races and how naturalists’ methods might classify humanity; the limits of racial variability; the psychological hierarchy of races; the progressive differentiation of individuals and races; and the formation of historical races. The second Book treats how racial characteristics appear in civilizations—in institutions, religions, languages, and the arts. The third considers history as a consequence of character, comparing peoples and tracing how modification of a racial soul shapes historical evolution. The fourth covers what modifies racial characteristics: ideas, religious beliefs, and great men. The fifth addresses dissociation and decadence, how civilizations fade and die, ending in general conclusions.
The Introduction: Equality as a Modern Dogma
The Introduction, “Modern Ideas on Social Equality and the Psychological Basis of History,” begins the actual prose. A people’s civilization, Le Bon argues, rests on a small number of fundamental ideas that determine its institutions, literature, and arts. These ideas arise slowly and disappear slowly; long after cultivated minds see their errors, they remain indisputable truths for the masses. Barely a century and a half earlier, philosophers ignorant of primitive history, mental variation, and heredity propounded the equality of individuals and races. The idea, attractive to the masses, implanted itself and bore fruit: it shook old societies, birthed formidable revolutions, and threw the Western world into unforeseeable convulsions. Though inequalities were too apparent to dispute, people persuaded themselves these came only from differences of education, and that reforming institutions and giving identical education would suffice. Science has since proved the vanity of equality theories, showing the mental gulf between individuals and races can be filled only by slowly accumulating heredity. Yet once ideas circulate, philosophers cannot destroy them even upon finding them erroneous; like a swollen stream overflowing its banks, the idea continues its destructive progress.
The notion of equality, far from declining, keeps advancing. In its name socialism claims to secure the welfare of Western peoples, and the modern woman, forgetting the deep mental differences separating her from man, demands the same rights and education—if triumphant, ending by making the European a nomad without home or family. The masses scarcely trouble themselves about the upheavals these levelling principles have caused. The only real measure of an idea’s social importance is its influence on men’s minds; its degree of truth or error interests only philosophy. Once an idea becomes a sentiment with the masses, all its consequences must be undergone in succession. It is through education and institutions that the modern dream of equality seeks realisation, trying to cast in the same mould the intelligences of the negroes of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Senegal, those of the Arabs of Algeria, and those of the Asiatics. The chimera is unrealisable, but only experience can show the danger of chimeras; reason cannot transform men’s convictions.
The Object of the Work
The work’s object is to describe the psychological characteristics constituting the soul of races, and to show how a people’s history and civilisation are determined by them. Neglecting details except where indispensable, Le Bon examines the formation and mental constitution of the historic races—races artificially formed in historic times by conquest, immigration, and political changes—and demonstrates that their history is determined by their mental constitution. He notes the fixity or variability of racial characteristics, asks whether individuals and peoples tend toward equality or ever greater differentiation, and examines whether a civilisation’s elements—arts, institutions, beliefs—are direct manifestations of the racial soul and whether they can pass from one people to another. He concludes by determining the necessities under which civilisations decay and die. After long journeys through varied countries, the point clearest in his mind is that each people possesses a mental constitution as unaltering as its anatomical characteristics, the source of its sentiments, thoughts, institutions, beliefs, and arts. Tocqueville and other illustrious thinkers imagined they found in institutions the cause of peoples’ evolution; Le Bon, choosing examples from countries Tocqueville studied, is persuaded that institutions are of extremely slight importance—most often effects, rarely causes. A people’s life, institutions, beliefs, and arts are but the visible expression of its invisible soul. To transform its institutions, beliefs, and arts, a people must first transform its soul; to bequeath its civilisation to another people, it would have to bequeath its soul. Reformers of the past century tried to change everything—gods, earth, and men—but their efforts wholly failed regarding the century-old characteristics of racial souls established by time. The dream of equality might avail as much as old illusions were it not destined to be shattered early on the immovable rock of natural inequalities.
The Soul of Races
Book I, Chapter I, “The Soul of Races,” opens by noting that naturalists base classification of species on anatomical characteristics regularly and constantly reproduced by heredity. Applied to man, naturalist methods determine perfectly distinct types via skin colour and skull shape and volume, establishing that the human race comprises several quite distinct species. As has been rightly observed, if the Negro and the Caucasian were snails, all zoologists would unanimously affirm them excellent species, never descended from the same couple. These anatomical characteristics allow only summary divisions—white, yellow, negroes. Peoples closely resembling one another physically may differ widely in feeling and acting, hence in civilisations, beliefs, and arts: can a Spaniard, an Englishman, and an Arab be classed in one group? Classification by language, belief, or political organisation has been proposed, but scarcely bears examination. Psychology supplies what anatomy, languages, environment, or political organisation cannot: behind institutions, arts, beliefs, and political upheavals lie moral and intellectual characteristics determining a people’s evolution—the whole forming the soul of a race. Each race possesses a mental constitution as unvarying as its anatomical one, corresponding no doubt to a special brain structure.
Centuries are needed to form a national soul, and the French Revolution’s most important result was hastening this by breaking up minor nationalities—Picards, Flemish, Burgundians, Gascons, Bretons, men of Provence—into which France was formerly divided. Unification remains incomplete; France suffers dissensions unknown to more homogeneous peoples like the English because it comprises too varied races with too different ideas and sentiments. A footnote argues that thirty generations is comparatively short, since a cause acting persistently in one direction produces considerable effects: causes increase arithmetically, effects geometrically; causes are the logarithms of effects, as in the chessboard wheat-doubling problem and compound interest. In England, Saxon, Norman, and Ancient Briton fused into a very homogeneous type, giving the English the three fundamental bases of a people’s soul: common sentiments, common interests, common beliefs. This community, created by slow hereditary accumulations, gives identity and fixity to a people’s mental constitution—the cause of Rome’s ancient greatness and England’s present greatness. When it disappears, peoples break up; Rome’s role ended when it ceased to possess it.
The collective soul—sentiments, ideas, traditions, beliefs—has always existed more or less, but extended slowly: from family to village, city, province, and only in modern times to all inhabitants of a country. Only then did the notion of a native country as understood today arise. The Greeks never got beyond the city, their cities always at war because foreign to one another. For two thousand years India knew no unity beyond the village, hence subjection to foreign rulers whose ephemeral empires ended as easily as formed. The city as sole native country, weak militarily, was effective for civilization: Athens, Florence, and Venice show what small agglomerations attained. Small cities or provinces living independently long enough acquire souls so stable that fusion into a national soul becomes almost impossible. A country like Italy may suddenly form a single State, but does not simultaneously acquire a national soul: there are Piedmontese, Sicilians, Venetians, Romans, but not yet Italians. At present, any civilized race long playing a part in history must be regarded as artificial, not natural. Natural races exist only among savages, where absolute racial purity is found; most civilized races are merely historical races.
The Limits of Racial Variability
Chapter II, “The Limits of the Variability of the Character of Races,” opens with a summary: variability appears the rule, not fixity; fundamental characteristics are invariable, secondary ones variable; only environment, circumstances, and education influence accessory characteristics. Only careful study of civilization’s evolution reveals racial mental fixity; at first sight variability appears general.
The Differentiation of Races and Social Grades
Civilization, Le Bon argues, works in two directions at once: it differentiates races from one another through the growing intellectual exertion it demands of highly cultured peoples, and it widens the distinctions between social grades within each civilized people. Modern industrial evolution condemns the inferior classes to highly specialized labor that lessens rather than increases their intelligence. A century ago a workman was a veritable artist, capable of executing every detail of a mechanism such as a watch; today he is a mere toiler who produces only one speciality, spending his life boring the same holes and polishing the same portion, so that the atrophy of his intelligence is soon complete. The manufacturer or engineer directing him, by contrast, must possess far more acquirements, enterprise, and invention than his predecessor, and his brain becomes more developed through constant exercise. Tocqueville had already pointed out this progressive differentiation of social grades when industry was far less developed, observing that as the division of labour is more thoroughly applied, the workman becomes weaker, of narrower intelligence, and more dependent; art progresses while the artisan falls back, and the difference between employer and workman increases daily.
A superior people may thus be considered, intellectually, a sort of pyramid of steps: the majority formed by the masses, the upper steps by the intelligent classes, and the point by a very small elite of men of science, inventors, artists, and writers—an exceedingly restricted group, but the only one determining a country’s rank in the intellectual scale of civilization. Le Bon adds a clarifying footnote: “intelligent” is said without adding “cultured,” since it is a characteristic error of the Latin peoples to believe intelligence and culture go together. Culture merely implies memory, requiring no judgment, reflection, initiative, or invention; persons of restricted intelligence often pass examinations, while persons of slight culture are often highly intelligent. The upper portion of the pyramid is formed by elements from all classes, though heredity makes it probable that superior social classes contain the greater number. Saint-Simon is quoted as observing that if France lost its fifty leading men of science, artists, manufacturers, and agriculturists, the nation would become a body without a soul, decapitated; but if it lost all its officials, the country would sustain very little harm.
With the progress of civilization, differentiation between extreme grades proceeds rapidly, tending to increase in geometrical progression. Were it not for certain effects of heredity, time alone would separate superior from inferior grades by a distance as great as that between the white man and the negro, or even the negro and the monkey. Yet this differentiation is not accomplished as rapidly as theoretically possible. First, it is almost confined to intelligence and affects character only slightly; character, not intelligence, plays the fundamental part in the life of peoples. Second, the masses tend to become all-powerful through organization and discipline, and their evident hatred of intellectual superiority means every intellectual aristocracy is destined to be violently destroyed by periodic revolutions, just as the ancient nobility was destroyed a century ago. When Socialism becomes master in Europe, its only chance of enduring will be to exterminate all individuals endowed with superiority capable of raising them above the most humble level.
A further, more important cause is an irresistible natural law preventing the elite from becoming too rapidly differentiated. The laws of heredity tend to bring about the disappearance of individuals who surpass the average too markedly, or to bring them down to this average. Old observations recorded by investigators into heredity prove that descendants of families distinguished by intelligence are subject sooner or later, usually at an early date, to degeneration tending to extinguish them. Great intellectual superiority seems to carry the penalty that those who possess it leave degenerate offspring. The point of the social pyramid can only subsist by assimilating elements from below; if all individuals composing this elite were relegated to an isolated island, their intermarriages would form a race displaying degenerate symptoms and destined to disappear speedily. Great intellectual superiorities may be compared to botanical monstrosities created by a gardener’s artifice: left to themselves they die off or return to the average type, for the species is all powerful since it represents the long series of ancestors.
Attentive study shows that while individuals of a given race may be immensely differentiated as regards intelligence, they are but slightly differentiated as regards character—that unalterable rock whose permanence throughout the ages has already been shown. A race should be considered from two points of view: intellectually, its value depends on a small elite responsible for scientific, literary, and industrial progress; as regards character, acquaintance with the average is alone important, for the strength of peoples always depends on the level of this average. Peoples may do without an intellectual elite but not without a certain level of character. Thus, while individuals of a race become more differentiated intellectually over time, they always tend, as far as character is concerned, to oscillate round the average type of the race. This average type progresses very slowly, and the great majority of a nation’s members belong to it. Around this fundamental kernel is found—at least among superior peoples—a thin layer of eminent minds, whose action is of capital importance as regards civilization but without importance as regards the race. Incessantly destroyed, it is incessantly renewed at the expense of the average grades, which vary but very slowly, since the slightest variations, to become durable, must be accumulated in the same direction by heredity during several centuries. Le Bon notes that several years earlier, basing conclusions on purely anatomical research, he arrived at the same idea touching the differentiation of individuals and races, now justified by psychological reasons; since both kinds of observation lead to the same results, he recalls conclusions from earlier investigations based on measurements.
Interbreeding, Environment, and the Soul of Races
Countries with too large a proportion of half-breeds are doomed to perpetual anarchy unless ruled by an iron hand. This fate awaits Brazil, where white men are only a third of the population, the rest being negroes and mulattoes. Agassiz is cited as rightly observing that merely visiting Brazil makes it impossible to deny the decadence resulting from cross-breeding, which is fatal to the best qualities of white, black, and Indian alike, producing an indescribable type whose physical and mental energy suffers.
The psychological characteristics of a race are weak and fluctuating; fixing them requires hereditary accumulations. The first effect of interbreeding between different races is to destroy the soul of the races—the congeries of common ideas and sentiments that make a people strong and without which there is no nation or fatherland. The period of interbreeding is the critical period of a people’s history, a time of commencement and hesitancy all nations traverse, since scarcely a European people is not formed from the debris of others. It is full of intestine struggles and vicissitudes, lasting until new psychological characteristics are fixed. Interbreeding is thus both a fundamental element in forming new races and a powerful factor in dissolving ancient ones. Peoples of high civilization therefore carefully avoid intermarrying with foreigners. Without the regime of castes, the Aryan invaders of India three thousand years ago would have been swamped by the dark-coloured populations, and no civilization would have arisen there; had the English intermarried with indigenous inhabitants, their Indian Empire would long since have slipped away. A people may recover from losses and catastrophes, but is past recovery once it has lost its soul. When decadent civilizations become prey to invaders, interbreeding first destroys the old civilization by destroying the people’s soul, then fosters a new one, since old psychological characteristics are destroyed and new ones may form under new conditions of existence.
Environment’s influence is effective only on races in course of formation whose ancestral characteristics have been destroyed by contrary heredities. Slight on ancient races, it is very great on new races. Cross-breeding creates a sort of blank tablet on which environment, over centuries, may impress and fix new psychological characteristics, producing a new historical race—thus the French race was constituted. This explains contrary opinions about environment’s action. The insignificance of moral environment is shown by Western civilizations’ failure to influence Eastern peoples even after generations of contact, the Chinese inhabitants of the United States being a case in point. The slight power of physical environment is shown by acclimatisation difficulties: an ancient race—men, animals, plants—perishes sooner than submit to transformation. Egypt has always been the tomb of conquering races; Greeks, Romans, Persians, Arabs, and Turks left no trace of their race, and only the impassible Fellah remains, resembling features engraved seven thousand years ago by Egyptian artists.
Most historical races of Europe are still forming. The Englishman is the only European representing an almost completely fixed race—ancient Briton, Saxon, and Norman gave way to a new homogeneous type. In France, the Provencal differs from the Breton, the Auvergnat from the Norman; no average Frenchman exists, though average regional types do, very distinct in ideas and character, making uniform institutions difficult and requiring energetic concentration. Profound divergences of sentiment and the resulting political upheavals stem mainly from differences of mental constitution. Dissentiments and intestine struggles are more acute the more different the races in contact; too unlike races cannot live under the same institutions and laws.
Borrowed Elements and the Transformative Power of Race
Civilizations and all their components—institutions, languages, beliefs, arts—belong peculiarly to each people and cannot pass between races without profound transformation. European languages descend from a mother-tongue once spoken on the central plateau of Asia; French law is an offshoot of Roman law, itself derived from earlier codes; the Jewish religion proceeds from Chaldaean beliefs and, fused with Aryan elements, became the great faith that swayed the West for nearly two thousand years. The sciences result from centuries of slow labour: Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton are lineal descendants of Ptolemy, who descends through the Alexandrian school from the astronomers of Egypt and Chaldaea. Yet if the source is common, the transformations each people effects in borrowed elements—progressive or regressive, according to its mental constitution—are endlessly varied, and the history of these transformations constitutes the history of civilization itself. The fundamental elements of civilization express a people’s mental structure and cannot cross from one race to another without profound changes, whose extent is marked by linguistic and historical necessities. The next chapter will examine the general laws governing the evolution of the arts.
How the Arts Are Transformed
The arts offer the clearest demonstration of these principles. Institutions and beliefs are doubtful and obscure, their reality buried in ancient texts requiring laborious argumentation; works of art, especially monuments, are definite and easy to interpret—”books of stone,” the most luminous books, which never lie. The author holds literary documents in utmost suspicion, while the monument rarely deceives and remains the best guardian of vanished peoples’ thought. The inquiry confines itself to Eastern arts, since European arts follow identical laws but would require excessive detail. Egypt’s civilization found its most complete expression in its arts, expressed with such force that its artistic types suited only Egyptians and were adopted by others only after considerable transformation. Egyptian art issued from an ideal peculiar to the race: for fifty centuries an entire people laboured to create for man an imperishable dwelling contrasting with his ephemeral existence. This race despised life and courted death, preoccupied with the motionless mummy in its golden mask, guarded in a sepulchral dwelling vast as a palace. Egyptian architecture is funereal and religious—subterranean vaults, obelisks, pylons, pyramids, pensive giants on stone thrones—everything stable and massive, aiming at eternity. If Egyptians were the only ancient people known, one could say art is the most faithful expression of a race’s soul.
Ethiopia and the Failure of Borrowed Civilization
Peoples differing widely borrowed from Egypt: the Ethiopians, an inferior race, and the Greeks and Persians, superior races. At a late period of Egyptian history, the peoples of the Soudan seized provinces and founded a kingdom with Napata and Meroe as successive capitals, maintaining independence for centuries. Dazzled by the vanquished civilization, they copied monuments and arts, but these copies are mostly rude efforts. These negroes were barbarians, condemned by mental inferiority never to shake off barbarism; despite Egyptian civilizing influence, they never did. There is no example of a negro people reaching a certain level of civilization; whenever a superior civilization fell into negro hands—in ancient times in Ethiopia, in modern times in Haiti—it speedily reverted to wretchedly inferior forms.
Greece: From Crude Copies to Masterpieces
Another race, barbarian but white—the Greeks—borrowed from Egypt and Assyria the first models of its arts, at first making crude copies. Artistic productions of these two civilizations were furnished to the Greeks by the Phoenicians and the peoples of Asia Minor. The Greeks immeasurably surpassed their models. Modern archaeology shows how rude their first attempts were; they required some seven hundred years to convert a foreign art into a personal, superior art, with progress during the last century exceeding all preceding ages. It is not superior but inferior stages of civilization that a people finds most difficult to surmount. The most ancient Greek art, discovered at Mycenae in the twelfth century before our era, points to entirely barbarian efforts, rude copies of Oriental objects; six centuries later Greek art is still very Oriental, and the Apollo of Tenea and the Apollo of Orchomenes bear singular resemblance to their models.
India: The Great Peninsular as History’s Book
If a country inhabited by different races should contain very dissimilar monuments even where beliefs are identical and political domination unified, then India is precisely that phenomenon. India is the easiest place to find examples supporting the work’s general principles, which is why the author constantly refers to the “great peninsular,” the most suggestive and philosophic of history books. It is the only country where, merely by travelling from place to place, one can move from age to age and observe the still-existing series of successive stages humanity has traversed—the stone age and the age of electricity and steam alike. Applying these principles, the author has attempted to solve the long-sought problem of the origin of India’s arts. India appears in history very late: its oldest monuments—the columns of Asoka, the temples of Karli, Bharhut, Sanchi—scarcely date further back than two centuries before our era, when most old civilizations had ended their cycle. India’s profound former isolation and the astonishing originality of its monuments long set aside the hypothesis of foreign borrowings, and early Indian monuments display a superiority of execution never surpassed in later centuries.
India and Greece: Incompatible Geniuses
A recent discovery in the isolated north-west of the peninsula of debris revealing Greek influences led Indian antiquarians to believe India borrowed its arts from Greece. The author’s careful study leads to a different conclusion: India borrowed none of its arts from Greece and could not have done so. The differences between the two races were too great, their thought too unlike, their artistic geniuses too incompatible for mutual influence. Whereas European monuments are full of elements borrowed from Grecian art, India’s present absolutely none. The Hindu genius is too personal to undergo foreign influence at variance with its thought; such influence can be imposed by force, but however long it lasts, it remains superficial and transitory. A Hindu architect may copy a Greek column but will transform it rapidly into one at first sight called Hindu. Even now, given any European model, a Hindu artist adopts its general form but exaggerates certain parts and disfigures ornamental details, so that by the second or third copy all Western characteristics are dropped. The fundamental characteristic of Hindu architecture—also found in Hindu literature—is overflowing exaggeration, infinite richness of detail, the very antipodes of Grecian art’s correct and severe simplicity. Had the Hindus entirely disappeared, their bas-reliefs, statues, and monuments would suffice to reveal their past and to explain why Grecian influence in India could only be transitory and limited to regions where momentarily imposed by force. Archaeological study has confirmed that Hindu sovereigns in communication with the Arsacides dynasty desired to introduce Grecian art but never succeeded in making it take root; this borrowed, wholly official art always disappeared with the political influences that gave birth to it.
History as a Consequence of Character
Book III opens with the argument that a people’s history is determined by its mental constitution, just as a fish’s respiratory organs are determined by its aquatic life. Without knowledge of a people’s mental constitution, its history appears as chaos governed by hazard; with knowledge of the race’s soul, its life becomes a regular, inevitable consequence of psychological characteristics. Political institutions most visibly manifest the soul of the race. France, despite profound upheavals, reveals a perfectly identical common substratum across its parties: Intransigeants, Radicals, Monarchists, and Socialists all pursue an identical end under different names—the absorption of the individual by the State. They desire the old centralised, Caesarian regime in which the State directs, ordains, absorbs, and regulates everything. Whether headed by king, emperor, or president is unimportant. The race’s extreme excitability leads it to constantly change institutions, but the “mighty voice of the dead” condemns it to change only words and appearances. The Great Revolution, though appearing radically different from the old regime, in reality continued the monarchical tradition by completing centralisation begun centuries earlier. Were Louis XIII and Louis XIV to rise and judge the Revolution’s work, they would consider it rigorously conforming to their tradition and programme. They might criticise the substitution of an administrative caste for the aristocratic governing caste, creating an impersonal power more redoubtable than the old nobility—untouched by political changes, irresponsible and perpetual, necessarily becoming sole master. But they would not dwell on this, mindful that Latin peoples care little for liberty but much for equality, tolerating all despotisms provided they be impersonal. They would perceive Socialism as nothing else than the ultimate expression of the monarchical idea, of which the Revolution was merely an accelerative phase.
Institutions and the Character of Peoples
Thus institutions meet both accidental circumstances, giving rise to names and appearances, and permanent laws, creating the destiny of nations.
The Barbarian Takeover of Rome and the Modern Parallel
The progressive disappearance of Rome’s might is traced to the empire’s long habit of employing Barbarians in its armies, a custom begun under the earliest emperors and grown vast as Romans grew richer and more reluctant to serve. After centuries, the army and administration held only foreigners—Visigoths, Burgundians, Franks serving as federate soldiers. Once Rome had only Barbarians in her service and barbarian chiefs governed her provinces, those chiefs inevitably grew more independent; yet Rome’s prestige was so immense that none thought to overthrow the empire, even when it fell into their hands. When Odoacre seized Rome in 476, he hastened to ask the emperor at Constantinople for authorization to govern Italy as Patrician. Clovis regarded himself as a Roman functionary, proud to receive the title of consul; thirty years after his death his successors still accepted imperial laws. Only at the beginning of the seventh century did barbarian chiefs of Gaul dare to issue coins bearing their own effigy. The author therefore argues that historians begin the history of France two hundred years too soon and count some ten kings too many.
Nothing, the passage insists, less resembles a conquest than the barbarian invasions: populations kept their lands, language, and laws, which never happens in a true conquest such as England’s by the Normans. Rome’s authority faded so gradually as to pass unperceived, and the same regime continued under new masters throughout the Merovingian period—a government that, as Fustel de Coulanges is quoted to confirm, was mainly a continuation of what Rome had given Gaul. The one real change, eventually profound, was the formation of a new historic race and the birth of a new civilisation. Invoking history’s most fixed law—the eternal repetition of phenomena—the author predicts contemporary pacific invasions analogous to those that transformed Roman civilisation. Modern barbarians seem distant, relegated to Asia and Africa, but exist in the very bosom of civilised nations: each people, through civilisation’s complication and the progressive differentiation of individuals, produces an enormous waste population of inferior elements incapable of adapting. These new barbarians direct their steps toward the United States, seriously threatening its civilisation. While immigration was small and mainly English, absorption was easy and useful, bringing America’s astonishing greatness; now the Republic faces a gigantic invasion of inferior elements it neither wishes nor is able to assimilate. Between 1880 and 1890 nearly six million emigrants arrived, almost exclusively low-class workmen of every nationality. Of Chicago’s 1,100,000 inhabitants, not a quarter are Americans—400,000 Germans, 220,000 Irish, 50,000 Poles, 55,000 Czechs. No fusion occurs; immigrants do not learn the language, forming colonies in badly paid occupations, discontented and dangerous. During the recent railway strike Chicago narrowly escaped being burned by them, requiring pitiless gunfire, and only among their ranks are recruited adepts of barbarous, levelling socialism.
In the coming civil war between the America of the Americans and the America of the foreigners, the author deems it evident that triumph will not rest with the barbarians; the struggle will likely end in a hecatomb reproducing on an immense scale the extermination of the Cimbrians by Marius. If delayed and invasion continues, total destruction becomes impossible, and the United States’ destiny will probably be that of the Roman Empire—breaking into independent states as divided and frequently at war as Europe’s or Spanish America’s. America is not alone: France is menaced identically, a rich country whose population does not increase, surrounded by poor countries whose populations constantly grow. Immigration is rendered necessary by working-class exigencies and the needs of agriculture and industry, and immigrants gain evident advantages—freed from military service, few or no taxes as foreign nomads, easier and better-paid work. They invade not merely for riches but because most other countries pass laws forbidding their entrance, and the invasion is more redoubtable because the most inferior elements emigrate. Humanitarian principles condemn France to ever-increasing foreign invasion: forty years ago only 400,000 such immigrants, today over 1,200,000. By number of Italians, Marseilles might be called an Italian colony—Italy possesses no single colony with a like number of Italians. If conditions do not change, a very short time will elapse before a third of France’s population is German and a third Italian. What becomes of a people’s unity under such conditions? The worst battlefield disasters would be infinitely less grave. Ancient peoples’ instinct taught them to dread foreigners, knowing a country’s situation is judged not by inhabitants but by citizens. At the bottom of all historical and social questions lies the inevitable racial problem, dominating all others.
How Ideas Spread and Rule Societies
Persuasion, the argument continues, does not rest on the value of demonstration. Ideas are enforced either by the prestige of the promulgator or by an appeal to the passions; appealing solely to reason exerts no influence. The masses are never persuaded by demonstrations, only by affirmations, whose authority depends solely on the prestige of the person who enunciates them. When apostles convince a small circle of adepts and form new apostles, the new idea enters the domain of discussion, first arousing universal opposition because it clashes with what is old and established. The apostles defending it are excited by this opposition, which convinces them of their superiority, and they defend the idea energetically—not because it is true, for most often they know nothing of its truth or falsehood, but simply because they have adopted it. The idea is then more and more discussed: entirely accepted by one side, entirely rejected by the other. Affirmations and negations, but very few arguments, are exchanged; the sole motives for acceptance or rejection are, for the immense majority of brains, mere sentimental motives in which reasoning has no part.
Thanks to these always impassioned debates, the idea progresses slowly. New generations who find it controverted tend to adopt it merely because it is controverted, for young persons, eager to be independent, find wholesale opposition to received ideas the most accessible form of originality. The idea gains ground until it no longer needs support, spreading everywhere by imitation, acting as a contagion. Once contagion intervenes, the idea enters the phase that necessarily means success: it is soon accepted by opinion, acquiring a penetrating and subtle force that spreads it progressively among all intellects, creating a sort of special atmosphere, a general manner of thinking. Like fine dust of the highway, it penetrates all conceptions and productions of an epoch, and the idea and its consequences form part of the compact stock of hereditary commonplaces imposed on us by education. It has triumphed and entered the domain of sentiment, where for long it has nothing to fear. Of the ideas guiding a civilisation, some—arts, philosophy—remain confined to the upper grades of the nation; others—religious conceptions, politics—go deep down among the crowd, arriving generally much deformed but exerting immense power over primitive minds incapable of reasoning. The idea then represents something invincible, propagated with the violence of a torrent overflowing its banks. It is always easy to find a hundred thousand men ready to risk their lives to defend an idea once it has subjugated them. Then supervene those great events which revolutionise history, which only crowds can accomplish. It is not men of letters, artists, or philosophers who established the religions that ruled the world, the vast empires stretching from one hemisphere to another, or the great revolutions that changed the face of Europe. These were the work of the illiterate, sufficiently dominated by an idea to sacrifice their lives to its propagation. With this theoretically insignificant but practically effective outfit, the nomads of the deserts of Arabia conquered a portion of the old Greco-Roman world and founded one of the most gigantic empires known to history; with a similar moral outfit, the heroic soldiers of the Convention were victorious against the onslaughts of Europe up in arms.
A strong conviction is so irresistible that only a conviction of equal strength can resist it victoriously. Faith is the only serious enemy faith has to fear. It is sure to triumph where material force opposed to it serves weak sentiments and enfeebled beliefs. If confronted by a faith of equal intensity, the struggle becomes very severe, and success is determined by accessory circumstances, most often of a moral order—the spirit of discipline or better organisation. A close study of the history of the Arabs shows that in their earlier conquests—always the most difficult and important—they encountered adversaries morally weak, though their military organisation was fairly good. Syria was the first country they invaded, meeting only Byzantine armies composed of mercenaries, little disposed to sacrifice themselves for any cause. Animated by an intense faith that increased their strength tenfold, they dispersed these troops who lacked an ideal, as before their time a handful of Greeks, sustained by love of their city, had dispersed the innumerable soldiers of Xerxes. The upshot would have been quite different had they collided a few centuries earlier with the Roman cohorts. When equally powerful moral forces are pitted against one another, victory rests with the side best organised.
The Visible Decadence of the Latin Nations
Le Bon turns from causes to effects, arguing that a visible decadence now threatens the vitality of most of the great European nations, and above all the Latin peoples — Latin by tradition and education even where the blood has been mixed. These nations, he says, are losing day by day their initiative, their energy, their will, and their capacity to act. The satisfaction of endlessly growing material wants has become their only ideal. The family is breaking up, the social springs are strained to breaking, and discontent and unrest spread through every class, from the richest to the poorest.
The modern man is likened to a ship that has lost its compass, drifting at hazard through spaces once peopled by the gods and left a desert by science. He has lost faith, and with it hope. The masses, excessively impressionable and changeable, held back by no barrier, oscillate between the wildest anarchy and the most oppressive despotism. Words turn their heads; the divinities of a day soon become their victims. They seem to desire liberty but will have none of it, forever appealing to the State to forge them chains, yielding blind obedience to the obscurest sectaries and the narrowest despots. The rhetoricians who imagine they lead the masses most often merely follow them, mistaking a nervous craving for a change of master for true independence. The State, under whatever nominal regime, is the divinity to which all parties turn, begged for ever more oppressive regulations and Byzantine, tyrannical formalities.
The Abdication of Effort and the Decay of Morals
The younger generations increasingly renounce the careers that demand judgment, initiative, energy, personal effort, and will; the slightest responsibility alarms them, and they accept the mediocre prospects of State-paid employment. The commercial classes ignore the colonies, which are peopled solely by functionaries. Among statesmen, energy and action give way to empty personal discussions; among the masses, to passing enthusiasms or hatreds; among men of letters, to tearful, vague, unfruitful sentimentalism and colourless dissertations on the miseries of life. Boundless egoism develops; the individual is preoccupied solely with himself; consciences capitulate; morality deteriorates and dies out. Losing all empire over himself, the man who cannot govern himself must soon be governed by others.
A footnote drives the point home with a speech delivered in the Chamber of Deputies on 27 November 1890 by M. Etienne, then Under Secretary for the Colonies. Cochin China, he reported, has 1,800,000 inhabitants, of whom 1,600 are Frenchmen — 1,200 of them functionaries. The country is administered by a colonial council elected by these 1,200 functionaries, and it has a Deputy; hence anarchy, amid exclamations and laughter. Nine millions out of a budget reduced to twenty-two millions go to functionary expenses. In 1877 Etienne had tried to reduce the number of functionaries, cutting 3,500,000 francs from nine millions in October; in December his Cabinet was overthrown, and the following March the suppressed functionaries were reinstated.
The Statistics of Demoralisation
A second footnote measures the lowering of morality in professions where honesty was once as general as courage among soldiers. Official statisticians affirm forty-three accused persons per ten thousand among notaries, against one per ten thousand for the whole population of France. A report to the President of the Republic by the Minister of Justice, published in the Journal Officiel of 31 January 1890, notes that the disasters began by 1840 and increased until 1876, when a predecessor had to alert the magistrates; dismissals and catastrophes rose from thirty-one in 1882 to forty-one in 1883, fifty-four in 1884, and seventy-one in 1886; embezzlements totalled sixty-two million francs between 1880 and 1886; and in 1889, 103 notaries were dismissed or gave up practice. Connected with the ruin of major financial enterprises — the Comptoir d’Escompte, the Dépôts et Comptes Courants, Panama, and others — this suggests that Socialist invectives against the morality of the leading classes are not unfounded. The same demoralisation appears among all the Latin peoples: the Italian State banks scandal, robbery on an immense scale by politicians of the foremost rank; the bankruptcy of Portugal; the wretched financial situation of Spain and Italy; and the profound decadence of the Latin republics of America — all proving that the character and morality of certain peoples have sustained an incurable injury, their world role nearly at an end.
Education, Military Service, and the Choice of Servitude
Changing this is hard, Le Bon concedes; it requires first changing “our lamentable Latin education,” fatal to any initiative and energy that heredity has spared. It extinguishes intellectual independence by making hateful examinations the sole ideal; demanding only memory, it places servile imitators at the head of the professions, negating individuality and personal effort. An English schoolmaster told Guizot, visiting British schools, “I try to pour iron into the soul of my pupils.” Among Latin nations, no schoolmasters or programmes could realise such an ambition — perhaps the military regime will, the sole educator capable of it. A principal condition of improvement for decadent peoples is very severe universal military service and the permanent menace of disastrous wars.
The general lowering of character, the citizens’ powerlessness to govern themselves, and their egoistic indifference explain the Latin peoples’ difficulty in living under liberal laws equidistant from despotism and anarchy. Such laws little please the masses, for Caesarism promises not liberty — which they little value — but considerable equality in servitude.
Main Arguments
The book’s central claim is that each people possesses a mental constitution as unaltering as its anatomical characteristics, and that this constitution — the soul of the race — is the source of its sentiments, thoughts, institutions, beliefs, and arts. History, Le Bon insists, is determined by the mental constitution of races. The particular events of history are full of accidents that might not have happened, but beside these chances stand great permanent laws governing each civilisation’s general course, and the mental constitution of races proceeds from the most general and primordial of those laws. A people’s life, institutions, beliefs, and arts are but the visible expression of its invisible soul.
From this it follows that institutions are of extremely slight importance in the evolution of civilisation — most often effects, rarely causes. Le Bon acknowledges Tocqueville and other illustrious thinkers who imagined they found in institutions the cause of peoples’ evolution, and he says that, choosing examples from the countries Tocqueville studied, he hopes to prove the opposite. Reformers of the past century tried to change everything — gods, earth, and men — but their efforts wholly failed regarding the century-old characteristics of racial souls established by time. To transform a people’s institutions, beliefs, and arts, one must first transform its soul; to bequeath a civilisation to another people, one would have to bequeath its soul.
The second major argument concerns the fixity of fundamental racial characteristics. At first sight variability appears the rule: Cromwell’s Englishman differs from the modern Englishman, the circumspect modern Italian from the fierce and impulsive Italian of Benvenuto Cellini’s memoirs, the ferocious Conventionalists from the docile servants of Napoleon. Yet careful study of the evolution of civilisation reveals racial mental fixity beneath these apparent changes. A psychological species, like an anatomical one, comprises a few irreducible fundamental characteristics around which group modifiable accessory characteristics. The breeder who transforms an animal’s structure, or the gardener who transforms a plant beyond recognition, has not affected fundamental characteristics but only accessory ones; the fundamental characteristics reappear each generation. So too with mental constitution: environment, circumstances, and education change only the accessory traits. At great political or religious crises, momentary character changes appear, as if manners, ideas, and conduct had all changed — like a tranquil lake lashed by storm — but lasting change is rare. The “giants of the Convention” who held Europe in check and guillotined their adversaries were at bottom respectable, pacific citizens who in ordinary times would have led tranquil, retired lives in studies or behind counters. Born a hundred years later, Robespierre would have been an upright magistrate on excellent terms with the local priest; Saint-Just an excellent schoolmaster, esteemed by his chiefs and proud of a decoration.
A third argument concerns the psychological hierarchy of races. Le Bon divides humanity into primitive races, which show no trace of culture and remain near animality, such as the Fuegians and aboriginal Australians; inferior races, represented especially by the negroes, who can attain only the rudiments of civilisation and never got beyond barbarian forms even when chance made them heirs of superior civilisations, as at Saint Domingo; average races, including the Chinese, Japanese, Mongolians, and Semitic peoples, who created high civilisations surpassed only by European peoples; and superior races, comprising only the Indo-European peoples, who in antiquity (Greeks and Romans) and in modern times alone made great inventions in arts, sciences, and industry, discovering steam and electricity. The mental abyss separating these divisions is, in his view, evident. Among primitive and inferior races there is a greater or less incapacity to reason — an inability to associate past and present sensations so as to compare them and perceive analogies and differences — producing great credulity and a complete absence of the critical spirit. Inferior races also display infinitesimal attention and reflection, a high spirit of imitation, the habit of drawing inaccurate general conclusions from particular cases, feeble observation, extreme mobility of character, and a notable lack of foresight. The instinct of the moment guides them; like Esau, the type of the primitive being, they would sell their birthright for a mess of pottage.
A fourth argument holds that character, not intelligence, determines a people’s historical evolution and governs its destiny. Superior races differ from inferior races in both character and intelligence, but superior races differ from one another more especially by character. Character is formed by varying combinations of sentiments, among the most important being perseverance, energy, and the power of self-control, more or less dependent on the will. Morality is also a fundamental element of character — a hereditary respect for the rules on which a society’s existence is based. Intellectual qualities can be slightly modified by education; those of character almost wholly escape its influence. Discoveries of intelligence transmit easily between peoples; qualities of character cannot be transmitted. The Romans of the decadence had more refined intelligence than their rude ancestors but had lost the latter’s character qualities — perseverance, energy, invincible tenacity, the capacity to sacrifice themselves to an ideal, inviolable respect for laws — which had made their forefathers’ greatness. It is due to character that sixty thousand English maintain beneath their yoke two hundred and fifty millions of Hindoos.
A fifth argument concerns the progressive differentiation of individuals and races. Civilisation has two principal consequences: it differentiates races through the growing intellectual exertion it demands of highly cultured peoples, and it widens distinctions between the various social grades within each civilised people. Modern industrial evolution condemns the inferior classes of civilised peoples to highly specialised labour that lessens rather than increases their intelligence. A century ago a workman was a veritable artist capable of executing all the details of a mechanism such as a watch; today he is a mere toiler who produces only one speciality, spending his life boring the same holes, polishing the same portion, driving the same machine, so that the atrophy of his intelligence is soon complete. By contrast, the manufacturer or engineer directing the workman must possess far more acquirements, enterprise, and invention than his predecessor of a century back. A superior people may thus be considered, intellectually, a sort of pyramid of steps: the majority formed by the masses, the upper steps by the intelligent classes, and the point by a very small elite of men of science, inventors, artists, and writers — an exceedingly restricted group but the only one determining a country’s rank in the intellectual scale of civilisation. Saint-Simon observed that if France lost its fifty leading men of science, artists, manufacturers, and agriculturists, the nation would become a body without a soul, decapitated; but if it lost all its officials, the country would sustain very little harm.
Yet this differentiation is checked by an irresistible natural law. The laws of heredity tend to bring about the disappearance of individuals who surpass the average too markedly, or to bring them down to that average. Descendants of families distinguished by intelligence are subject sooner or later, usually at an early date, to degeneration tending to extinguish them. Great intellectual superiority seems to carry the penalty that those who possess it leave degenerate offspring. The point of the social pyramid can only subsist by assimilating elements from below. Great intellectual superiorities may be compared to botanical monstrosities created by a gardener’s artifice; left to themselves they die off or return to the average type, for the species is all powerful since it represents the long series of ancestors. Thus while individuals of a race may be immensely differentiated as regards intelligence, they are but slightly differentiated as regards character. A race should be considered from two points of view: intellectually, its value depends on a small elite responsible for scientific, literary, and industrial progress; as regards character, acquaintance with the average is alone important, for the strength of peoples always depends on the level of this average. Peoples may do without an intellectual elite but not without a certain level of character.
A sixth argument concerns interbreeding and environment. Countries with too large a proportion of half-breeds are doomed to perpetual anarchy unless ruled by an iron hand — a fate Le Bon predicts for Brazil, where white men are only a third of the population. Agassiz is cited as observing that merely visiting Brazil makes it impossible to deny the decadence resulting from cross-breeding, which is fatal to the best qualities of white, black, and Indian alike. The first effect of interbreeding between different races is to destroy the soul of the races — the congeries of common ideas and sentiments that make a people strong and without which there is no nation or fatherland. Interbreeding is thus both a fundamental element in forming new races and a powerful factor in dissolving ancient ones. Peoples of high civilisation therefore carefully avoid intermarrying with foreigners. Without the regime of castes, the Aryan invaders of India three thousand years ago would have been swamped by the dark-coloured populations, and no civilisation would have arisen there. Had the English intermarried with the indigenous inhabitants, their Indian Empire would long since have slipped away. A people may recover from losses and catastrophes, but is past recovery once it has lost its soul.
Environment’s influence, by contrast, is effective only on races in course of formation whose ancestral characteristics have been destroyed by contrary heredities. It is slight on ancient races and very great on new races. Cross-breeding creates a sort of blank tablet on which environment, over centuries, may impress and fix new psychological characteristics, producing a new historical race — thus the French race was constituted. The moral environment’s insignificance is shown by Western civilisations’ failure to influence Eastern peoples even after generations of contact, the Chinese inhabitants of the United States being a case in point. The physical environment’s slight power is shown by acclimatisation difficulties: an ancient race, whether of men, animals, or plants, perishes sooner than submit to transformation. Egypt has always been the tomb of conquering races — Greeks, Romans, Persians, Arabs, and Turks left no trace of their race; only the impassible Fellah remains, resembling features engraved seven thousand years ago by Egyptian artists.
A seventh argument concerns the elements of civilisation and their transmission. Languages, institutions, ideas, beliefs, arts, and literature are exterior manifestations of the soul of the men who created them, and their importance varies with period and race. Artistic development does not invariably correspond to intellectual development. Some peoples express their soul most in art; others, highly civilised, give art a secondary part. The Egyptians had very weak literature and poor painting but masterpieces in architecture and statuary. The Romans, though coming after Egyptians and Greeks with educators and models, created no personal art, displaying less originality than perhaps any people; they held arts in slight esteem, viewing them as imported articles like metals, aromatics, and spices. Among even the most civilised peoples, the arts do not always reach their highest development at the culminating period of civilisation. Among the Egyptians and the Hindoos, the most perfect monuments are generally the most ancient; in Europe, the marvellous Gothic art flourished in the Middle Ages, an epoch regarded as semi-barbarian, and its productions have never been equalled. It often happens that among peoples at the head of civilisation — the Romans in ancient times and the Americans at the present day — artistic productions show the most weakness. The period of personality in the arts seems to belong to a people’s childhood or youth, not its maturity.
The same law of transformation governs religions. All great religions — Brahmanism, Buddhism, Christianity, Mahometanism — have provoked mass conversions among entire races that seemed to adopt them suddenly; but closer study shows peoples changed chiefly the name of their old religion, not the religion itself. Buddhism, transported into China, became so unrecognisable that the learned first took it for an independent religion before recognising it as Buddhism transformed by the adopting race. Chinese Buddhism is in no sort the Buddhism of India, itself very different from that of Nepaul, which differs from that of Ceylon. Islamism, despite its simple monotheism, has not evaded this law: it is a far cry from the Islamism of Persia to that of Arabia and India. The Hindoo, essentially polytheist, has rendered polytheistic even the most monotheistic belief. In Algeria, the Islamism of the Arabs is far removed from that of the Berbers; the Koran’s polygamy has become monogamy among the Berbers, whose religion is scarcely more than a fusion of Islamism and the old paganism practised since the distant ages of Carthaginian rule. Under the uniform name of Christians are found in Europe veritable pagans, such as the Bas-Breton who worships idols; fetichists, such as the Spaniard who adores amulets; polytheists, such as the Italian who venerates the madonnas of each village as very different divinities. The great religious schism of the Reformation was the necessary consequence of one and the same religious book interpreted by different races: those of the North wishing to discuss their belief and regulate their life themselves, those of the South having remained far behind in independence and philosophic spirit.
An eighth argument, developed through the arts, holds that monuments are the most faithful records of a people’s soul. Le Bon holds literary documents in utmost suspicion; the monument rarely deceives and is always instructive, the best guardian of vanished peoples’ thought. Egyptian art issued from an ideal peculiar to the race, for fifty centuries the preoccupation of an entire people: to create for man an imperishable dwelling contrasting with his ephemeral existence. This race despised life and courted death, interested in the motionless mummy with enamel eyes in a golden mask, gazing eternally at hieroglyphics, guarded in a sepulchral dwelling vast as a palace. Egyptian architecture is funereal and religious, for the mummy and the Gods — subterranean vaults, obelisks, pylons, pyramids, and pensive giants on stone thrones. Everything is stable and massive, aiming at eternity. When other peoples borrowed from Egypt, the results varied with the race. The Ethiopians, an inferior race, copied monuments and arts but produced mostly rude efforts; there is no example of a negro people reaching a certain level of civilisation, and whenever a superior civilisation fell into negro hands — in ancient times in Ethiopia, in modern times in Haiti — it speedily reverted to wretchedly inferior forms. The Greeks, a barbarian but white race, borrowed from Egypt and Assyria the first models of their arts, at first making crude copies, and required some seven hundred years to convert a foreign art into a personal, superior art. India, despite accidental contact with Greek civilisation, borrowed none of its arts from Greece and could not have done so: the differences between the two races were too great, their thought too unlike, their artistic geniuses too incompatible for mutual influence.
Key Concepts
The soul of races. The organising concept of the entire book. Behind institutions, arts, beliefs, and political upheavals lie moral and intellectual characteristics determining a people’s evolution; the whole forms the soul of a race. Each race possesses a mental constitution as unvarying as its anatomical one, corresponding no doubt to a special brain structure. The soul is created by slow hereditary accumulations and gives identity and fixity to a people’s mental constitution.
The collective soul and the native country. The collective soul — sentiments, ideas, traditions, beliefs — has always existed more or less, but extended slowly: from family to village, city, province, and only in modern times to all inhabitants of a country. Only then did the notion of a native country as understood today arise; it is impossible until the national soul is formed. The Greeks never got beyond the city, their cities always at war because foreign to one another. For two thousand years India knew no unity beyond the village.
Fundamental and accessory characteristics. A psychological species, like an anatomical one, comprises a few irreducible fundamental characteristics around which group modifiable accessory characteristics. Fundamental characteristics are as immutable as anatomical ones; accessory characteristics are easily modified by environment, circumstances, and education.
Possibilities of character. All possess possibilities of character that circumstances do not always let manifest; when they surface, a new, ephemeral personality takes shape. At great political or religious crises, momentary character changes appear, as if manners, ideas, and conduct all changed — like a tranquil lake lashed by storm.
The psychological hierarchy of races. The division of humanity into primitive, inferior, average, and superior races, with the Indo-European peoples alone counted as superior.
Character versus intelligence. Character is formed by combinations of sentiments — perseverance, energy, self-control, and morality. Intellectual qualities can be slightly modified by education; those of character almost wholly escape its influence. Discoveries of intelligence are humanity’s common patrimony; qualities or defects of character are each people’s exclusive patrimony.
Morality as hereditary respect for rules. To possess morality means having fixed rules of conduct and not departing from them. Rules vary with time and place, so morality appears variable; but for a given people at a given moment it ought to be quite invariable. Morality is the offspring of character, not intelligence, and is not solidly constituted until hereditary and thus unconscious.
The social pyramid. A superior people may be considered, intellectually, a sort of pyramid of steps: the majority formed by the masses, the upper steps by the intelligent classes, and the point by a very small elite of men of science, inventors, artists, and writers.
The average type. Individuals of a race, however differentiated intellectually, tend as regards character to oscillate round the average type of the race. This average type progresses very slowly, and the great majority of a nation’s members belong to it.
Interbreeding and the blank tablet. Interbreeding destroys the soul of races and creates a sort of blank tablet on which environment, over centuries, may impress and fix new psychological characteristics, producing a new historical race.
Historical races versus natural races. Any civilised race long playing a part in history must be regarded as artificial, not natural. Natural races exist only among savages, where absolute racial purity is found; most civilised races are merely historical races.
Books of stone. Monuments are the most luminous books, never lying; the monument rarely deceives and is always instructive, the best guardian of vanished peoples’ thought.
Themes
The deepest theme of the book is the sovereignty of the unconscious and the hereditary over the conscious and the deliberate. Le Bon returns again and again to the idea that the forces shaping a people’s life are accumulated in the same direction by heredity during centuries, and that the individual, however brilliant, is a momentary ripple on a deep and slow-moving current. The elite of a nation is “incessantly destroyed” and “incessantly renewed at the expense of the average grades”; great intellectual superiorities are botanical monstrosities that die off or return to the average type. This is a vision of history in which the species is all powerful and the individual nearly powerless — a vision that gives the book its peculiar mixture of fatalism and grandeur.
A second theme is the critique of the reforming and levelling spirit of the age. Le Bon’s Introduction is a sustained polemic against the idea of equality, which he treats not as a moral ideal but as a psychological force that has implanted itself in the masses and must now work out all its consequences. He is less interested in whether the idea is true than in what it will do: once an idea becomes a sentiment with the masses, all its consequences must be undergone in succession. The only real measure of an idea’s social importance is its influence on men’s minds; its degree of truth or error interests only philosophy.
