Ethnological problems

If we single out these ethnological and anthropological problems, it’s still that there are still areas that I think should be excluded, at least from its main, general research. First of all, this is universal history. Psychology is an important auxiliary tool for it, since psychological interpretation is necessary for any deeper insight into the relationship of historical events. On the contrary, history, taken by itself, can by no means be - due to the complex nature of historical processes - attributed to the main areas of the psychology of peoples.
The historical destinies of an individual people are so peculiar in nature that they allow only analogies between different eras, and not the guidance of generally significant psychological laws of development. When researching in the field of universal history, spiritual motifs are combined, on the contrary, with a mass of natural historical and sociological conditions far beyond the scope of the tasks of psychological analysis, since all these elements, taken as a whole, tend to go into philosophical research. Therefore, always and in all attempts to formulate the general laws of historical development, the latter, regardless of the degree of success of their formulation, by virtue of internal necessity, are in the nature of philosophical principles.
In those cases when the psychology of nations takes part in the installation of these laws, which is inevitable if we do not want history to go on the wrong path of speculative constructions, then the private problems will be discussed. Thus, the problems of clarifying the laws of the evolution of society, customs and law, art, religion, etc., primarily relate to the psychology of peoples and then in a more general connection - to the philosophy of history. But the subject of consideration by the psychology of nations is that these separate developmental processes become only because they, due to the common features of all peoples of human nature, show essentially identical features.
This applies primarily to the initial period of social life, whereas at the later stages of development, together with the growth of external and internal private influences, the diversity of evolutionary processes more and more pushes off the generally significant mental motifs and causes them to dissolve in the totality of historical conditions; therefore, the universal history and the psychology of peoples are contiguous only in the sense that both these disciplines must unite with each other in order to achieve a philosophical study of historical humanity.