The _permanence_ of the ethnic group has been a matter much discussed by philosophers. Led on by a supposed analogy to the individual, governed by the notion that the social unit is an “organism” and subject to the same laws as physical organisms, supported, as they imagined, by the teachings of history, writers of merit have claimed that the _ethnos_ has a birth, an adolescence, a period of maturity, and old age and death, as has the individual. Even such an acute thinker as Quetelet was so enamoured of this theory that he worked out the “natural longevity” of a nation, discovering it to be about ten times the greatest longevity of its individual members! The doctrines of ethnic psychology, as I understand them, do not sanction such an opinion. The analogy of the group to an organism is purely fictitious; the historic causes of the decay of nations are not the same and are not allied to those which bring about mortality in the individual. There is no such thing as a natural death of a Society. It may be crushed by external force, but if it perishes from within, it has deliberately poisoned itself, has fallen a victim to preventable disease. There is one catholicon, one elixir of life, which will preserve any society from decay, and confer upon it the blessing of eternal youth, if it is constantly remembered and administered. That catholicon is to cherish and cultivate assiduously the one distinction which, I have pointed out, lifts the human group above the communities of the ants, the bees, and the beavers; that is, that the chief aim of the community shall ever be to give each individual in it the best opportunity for the full development of his faculties. If the history of the gradual decline and fall of any nation be investigated, it will be seen that the end has come through the violation of this, the one peculiar principle of _human_ association. Hemmed in by castes, classes, or institutions, the human souls have atrophied, degenerated, grown decrepit and impotent, incapable of resisting the natural forces around them. Though the ethnic mind does not run the same life-course as the individual body, yet it resembles this in its ceaseless change. It is forever altering both its contents, its purposes, and the intensity with which it pursues them. Psychologists have classified these activities under three general expressions which we may call laws. They are, first, the law of Continuity; second, the law of Diversity of Purpose; and third, the law of Contrast. The law of Continuity means that in the ethnic mental life there is a regulated course of growth or development; that each phase or condition is the logical result of previous phases or conditions. The second law emphasises that the rate of growth depends chiefly on the diversity of aims which exists in the community. As they are multiplied, growth is the more rapid. This is analogous to that law of organic forms by which evolution is in proportion to variation.