In his later writings, however, Wundt seems to have modified these strictures, and in the last edition of his excellent text-book acknowledges that there is no antagonism between experimental and ethnic psychology, as has been sometimes supposed; that they do not occupy different, but parts of the same fields, and are distinguished mainly by difference of method, the one resting on experiment, the other on observation. The recognition of ethnic psychology by professed psychologists is, therefore, an accomplished fact; and this was long since anticipated by the general literature of history and ethnography. Who, for instance, has denied that there is such a thing as “racial” or “national” character? Did anyone take it into his head to denounce as meaningless Emerson’s title, _English Traits_? Does not every treatise on ethnography assume that there are certain psychical characteristics of races, tribes, and peoples, quite sharply dividing them from their neighbours? Take, for instance, Letourneau’s popular work, and we find him expressly claiming that the races and subraces of mankind can be classified by the relative development of their psychical powers; and such a “psychological” classification is not a novelty in anthropology. These mental traits, characteristics, differences, between human groups are precisely the material which ethnic psychology takes as its material for investigations. Its aim is to define them clearly, to explain their origin and growth, and to set forth what influence they assert on a people and on its neighbours. Ethnic psychology does not hesitate to claim that the separation of mankind into groups by psychical differences was and is the one necessary condition of human progress everywhere and at all times; and, therefore, that the study of the causes of these differences, and the influence they exerted in the direction of evolution or regression, is the most essential of all studies to the present and future welfare of humanity. In this sense, it is not only the guiding thread in historical research, but it is immediately and intensely practical, full of application to the social life and political measures of the day. Some have jealously feared that it offers itself as a substitute for the philosophy of history. True that it draws some of its material from history; but as much from ethnography and geography. Moreover, it is not, as history, a chronologic, but essentially a natural science, depending for its results on objective, verifiable facts, not on records and documents. To allege that this field is already occupied is wide of the mark. It is no more embraced in general ethnology or in history than experimental psychology is included in general physiology. The advancement of science depends on the specialisation of its fields of research, and it is high time that ethnic psychology should take an independent position of its own.