At first ethnology was a purely empirical science. It gathered together all the attainable phenomena of ethnic existence, and separately, at first, among single peoples and tribes. After an extensive store of material had accumulated in this manner, the discovery was made that in many provinces of ethno-social life, especially in the provinces of religion, law, and morals, especially also in all provinces of social custom, phenomena of essentially similar character presented themselves among a great number of peoples in the case of whom neither any original tribal relationship nor any infusion from one nation into the other could be assumed; and, curious to say, these were frequently the most singular phenomena, of which one would have thought at first that they had sprung from the individuality of a determinate people. This discovery of universal ethnographic parallels was all the more surprising in view of the fact that historical special inquiry, whose province up to then had been essentially national life, had placed especial emphasis on outwardly prominent events occurring in a different form in every nation, whereas phenomena that appeared uniformly among the different nations were little noticed. People had therefore grown accustomed to regard every nation as something existing by itself and peculiar to itself, and, particularly, had also declared it as inadmissible to employ phenomena of the life of one nation to explain corresponding phenomena of the life of another nation. The discovery of ethnographical parallels led to wholly different ideas. It became clear that a great portion of human ethnical existence was not founded in the peculiar character of particular peoples, but in the character of the human race, in the universal nature of man. And it became in addition clear that that which repeated itself everywhere on the earth, which was therefore an expression of the universal human, was something entirely different from that which previous philosophy had declared to be the actual human. It also became clear, at the same time, that the nations thought quite differently from what the individual man did. With this, however, the foundation of the entire previous philosophy was shaken. If the axiom of modern ethnology is correct, namely that it is not _we_ that think, but _it_ that _thinks in us_,[5] we shall no longer be able to explain our nature from our consciousness, from our ego, from our reason, but we shall have to pursue this momentous “It” that thinks in us, and since we cannot find it _in_ us we shall have to search for it _outside of_ us in the expressions of the human soul in the life of the race.