Generalization about national or racial characteristics is a dangerous—if, for one’s leisure moments, rather fascinating—game, above all if played with no sense of humour. The Germans and their followers in this and other countries have cultivated the sport to a most tiresome degree. Very systematically and very solemnly they have constructed a marvellously complete index of mental and spiritual characteristics, tabulating opposite each the particular race which, in their opinion, embodies those characteristics. The game then consists in tracing, in the mixture of races inhabiting Europe since history began to be recorded, the proportion of this or that racial element and the precise intellectual, physical, or social characteristic for which it is held to be responsible.

It is, of course, far removed from the intention of this essay to assert that there is nothing in anthropology, even in German anthropologists. The question under discussion, which concerns the growth in Europe of our day, above all in Germany, of what may be called an “end of Europe” literature—the reason why this has been introduced with this apparently irrelevant remark is that, in the first place, the methods of the German race-theorists will form a good object-lesson for use later on in this article ; second, because tht writer wished to be above all suspicion in himself making a generalization concerning national characteristics. It is this—and it will be seen that it differs from German race-theories in being based, not on an entirely questionable assumption of racial elements in this or that nation, but on the proved and generally observed practice of representative German historians, philosophers, and scientists.