Just so there are two parallel kinds of psychology of peoples. There is the descriptive psychology of the tendencies of particular peoples, the biography of nations and peoples, which is what commonly is meant by 'history'; and there is the psychology which seeks to explain in general terms how these tendencies arise, which seeks the general laws of which these diverse national tendencies are the outcome.
This last is the modern science which is beginning to take shape and to undertake the task so inadequately dealt with by the so-called Philosophy of History. It is essentially a branch, and by far the most important part, of Group Psychology[49]. Now individual psychology tends more and more to be a genetic psychology; because we do not feel that we really understand the individual mind, until we know how it has come to be what it is, until we know something of its development and racial evolution. Just so the explanatory psychology of peoples must be a genetic psychology. Here it differs from individual psychology in that the distinction between individual development and racial evolution disappears. For the national mind is a continuous growth; it is not embodied in a temporal succession of individuals, but in a single continuously evolving organism.
Nevertheless, we may with advantage consider separately (1) the nature of the general conditions necessary to the existence and operation of a national mind; (2) the processes of evolution by which such minds are formed and their peculiarities acquired. I propose to take up the former problem in the following chapter.
We have prepared ourselves for the study of the national mind by our preliminary examination of the two extreme types of collective mental life, that of the quite unorganised group, the simple crowd, on the one hand, that of a very highly organised group, the army, on the other hand. We have seen that in the former type the collective actions imply a collective mental life much inferior, both intellectually and morally, to that of the average component individuals; and that in the other type they imply a collective mental life and capacities much superior to those of the average individual.
The mind of any nation occupies some intermediate position in the scale of which these are the extreme types; and it differs from both in being immensely more complex, and also in that the influence of the past dominates and determines to a much greater extent the mental life of the present.