Elements of Folk Psychology: Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of MankindWundt, Wilhelm Max
Science
Elements of Folk Psychology: Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
Wundt, Wilhelm Max
Ethnopsychology
When this point of view is taken, the question, of course, arises
whether the problem thus assigned to folk psychology is not already
being solved by ethnology, the science of peoples, or whether it ought
not to be so solved. But it must be borne in mind that the greatly
enlarged scope of modern ethnology, together with the increased
number and the deepened character of its problems, necessarily
precludes such a psychological investigation as falls to the task of
folk psychology. I may here be allowed to refer to one who, perhaps
more than any other recent geographer, has called attention to this
extension of ethnological problems--Friedrich Ratzel. In his treatise
on anthropography and in a number of scattered essays on the cultural
creations of peoples, Ratzel has shown that ethnology must not only
account for the characteristics and the habitats of peoples, but
must also investigate how peoples originated and how they attained
their present physical and mental status. Ethnology is the science
of the origin of peoples, of their characteristics, and of their
distribution over the earth. In this set of problems, psychological
traits receive a relatively subordinate place. Apparently insignificant
art products and their modifications may be of high importance in the
determination of former migrations, fusions, or transferences. It is
in this way that ethnology has been of valuable service to history,
particularly in connection with prehistoric man. The central problem
of ethnology concerns not only the present condition of peoples, but
the way in which they originated, changed, and became differentiated.
Folk psychology must be based on the results of ethnology; its own
psychological interest, however, inclines it to the problem of mental
development. Though of diverse origins, peoples may nevertheless
belong to the same group as regards the mental level to which they
have attained. Conversely, peoples who are ethnologically related
may, psychologically speaking, represent very different stages of
mental culture. The ethnologist, for example, regards the Magyars and
the Ostiaks of Obi as peoples of like origin. Psychologically, they
belong to different groups: the one is a cultural people, the other
is still relatively primitive. To the folk psychologist, however,
'primitive' always means the psychologically primitive--not that which
the ethnologist regards as original from the point of view of the
genealogy of peoples. Thus, folk psychology draws upon ethnology, while
the latter, in turn, must invoke the aid of the former in investigating
mental characteristics. The problems of the two sciences, however, are
fundamentally different.
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