two: one segment, which is represented by the people, and the other, by the series of individuals more differentiated from each, as a group or distinct society.
The people can only be considered as primitive humanity in so far as from it as the stars from the nebulae, were separated, by slow and unappreciable segmentation, at first, the individuals, who by more or less affinity of character, formed the ancient castes, of which the so-called social classes are the remains to-day. But by the fact that this formation was slow, and that the individuals who had not energy enough to break through the barriers that imprisoned them were retained in the common mass by the community of life to which their relative physical or intellectual impotence condemned them, these accentuated the common note, and lived and developed themselves in a more uniform manner and in greater dependence on the conditions of the medium in which they existed. There is, therefore, such a thing as a demo-biology; the people, even as a whole, advances and progresses; superstition and even belief are modified and vary with the course of time; the myths, for example, and the greater errors formed or invented to-day by the people, though analogous, are different from those of primitive man, and for this reason we do not think that the study of the mental phenomena of savage races, past or present, exactly corresponds with the mental phenomena of the people.
The people has for its distinctive, characteristic, and peculiar mark, its intense conservatism.[1] The reason of this is very obvious. Since the number of ideas which it possesses are but few, and as it hears these will greater frequency, they are the more deeply impressed upon the brain. Tradition is charged with the task of transmitting them
- ↑ The authoritative sanction of the illustrious Portuguese mythologist, Theóphilo Braga, confirms this opinion. In a different connection he writes in the Introduction to the interesting work Cantos Populares do Brazil, by Professor Sylvio Romero: "The colony preserves the condition of civilisation which it received at a given epoch, and which its isolation has rendered permanent, in the same way as the individual the farther he has sunk into the lowest social depths the longer he remains in the rudimentary psychological condition from which the cultivated classes have already emerged. Similar is the phenomenon of the survival of customs among the poor."
