Anthropology

34. Questions of Endowment and Their Validity

Are the human races alike or dissimilar in mentality and character? Are some lower than others, or are they all on a plane as regards potentiality? The answers to these questions are of theoretical import, and naturally also bear on the solution of the practical race problems with which many nations are confronted.

As long as an inquiry remains sufficiently abstract or remote, the desirability of such inquiry is likely to go unquestioned. As soon, however, as investigation touches conduct—for instance, our actual relations with other races—a sentiment has a way of rising, to the effect that perhaps after all the problem does not so much call for knowledge as for action. Thus, in regard to the negro problem in the United States, it is likely to be said that the immediate issue is what may be the best attitude toward “Jim Crow” cars and other forms of segregation. Are these desirable or undesirable, fair or unfair? Here are specific problems which an actual condition presses to have answered. Under the circumstances, it will be said, is not an inquiry into the innate capacity of the negro rather remote, especially when every one can see by a thousand examples that the negro is obviously inferior to the Caucasian? He is poorer, more shiftless, less successful. He has made no inventions, produced no geniuses. He clearly feels himself inferior and comports himself accordingly. Why then raise the issue of capacity at all, unless from a desire to befog it, to subvert the conclusions of common sense and every-day experience by special pleading which substitutes adroitness for sincerity? When a prisoner has been found guilty it is the judge’s business to determine the length of sentence, to decide how far justice should be tempered with mercy. Were he to reopen the case from the beginning, he would be showing partiality. Is not the situation of the scientist proposing to inquire into the accepted verdict that the negro is inferior to the Caucasian, analogous to that of a judge who insists on setting aside the verdict of twelve unprejudiced jurymen in order to retry the defendant himself? In some such form as this, objections may rise in the minds of some.

The answer to such criticism is first of all that racial inferiority and superiority are by no means self-evident truths. Secondly, the belief in race inequalities is founded in emotion and action and then justified by reasoning. That is, the belief is rationalized, not primarily inferred by pure reason. It may be true, but it is not proved true.

As to what is self-evident, there is nothing so misleading as direct observation. We see the sun move and the earth stand still. It is “self-evident” that the sun revolves around the earth. Yet after thousands of years the civilized portion of mankind finally came to believe that it was the earth that spun. Science had no perverse interest, no insidious motive, in advocating the Copernican instead of the Ptolemaic system; in fact, was driven to its new belief gradually and reluctantly. It was pre-scientific humanity, with its direct, homespun, every-day observation, which had really prejudged the matter, and which, because it had always assumed that the earth was flat and stationary, and because every idiot could see that it was so, long combated the idea that it could be otherwise.

As to opinions founded in emotion and subsequently rationalized, instead of being evolved by pure reason from evidence, it may suffice to quote from a famous book on herd instinct, as to the relation of mass opinion and science:

“When, therefore, we find ourselves entertaining an opinion about the basis of which there is a quality of feeling which tells us that to inquire into it would be absurd, obviously unnecessary, unprofitable, undesirable, bad form, or wicked, we may know that that opinion is a non-rational one, and probably, therefore, founded upon inadequate evidence.

“Opinions, on the other hand, which are acquired as the result of experience alone do not possess this quality of primary certitude. They are true in the sense of being verifiable, but they are unaccompanied by that profound feeling of truth which belief possesses, and, therefore, we have no sense of reluctance in admitting inquiry into them. That heavy bodies tend to fall to the earth and that fire burns fingers are truths verifiable and verified every day, but we do not hold them with impassioned certitude, and we do not resent or resist inquiry into their basis; whereas in such a question as that of the survival of death by human personality we hold the favorable or the adverse view with a quality of feeling entirely different, and of such a kind that inquiry into the matter is looked upon as disreputable by orthodox science and as wicked by orthodox religion. In relation to this subject, it may be remarked, we often see it very interestingly shown that the holders of two diametrically opposed opinions, one of which is certainly right, may both show by their attitude that the belief is held instinctively and non-rationally, as, for example, when an atheist and a Christian unite in repudiating inquiry into the existence of the soul.”

Take the attitude of the average Californian or Australian about the Mongolian; of the Texan about the Mexican; of the Southerner about the Negro; of the Westerner about the local tribes of Indians; of the Englishman about the Hindu—is not their feeling exactly described by the statement that inquiry into the possibility of racial equality would be “unnecessary,” “absurd,” or evilly motivated; and that their belief in race superiority rests on an “a priori synthesis of the most perfect sort,” and possesses “the quality of primary certitude”?

In short, the apparently theoretical beliefs held as to race capacity by people who are actually confronted by a race conflict or problem are by no means the outcome of impartial examination and verification, but are the result of the decisions taken and emotions experienced in the course of acts performed toward the other race. The beliefs rest ultimately on impulse and feeling; their reasoned support is a subsequent bolstering up. Of course, the fact that a belief springs from emotion does not render that belief untrue, but does leave it scientifically unproved, and calling for investigation.

These conclusions may vindicate inquiry into the relative capacity of races from the charge of being finespun, insidious, impractical, or immoral.

35. Plan of Inquiry

In approach to the problem, a consideration stands out. If the human races are identical in capacity, or if, though not absolutely alike, they average substantially the same in the sum total of their capacities, then such differences as they have shown in their history or show in their present condition must evidently be the result mainly of circumstances external to heredity. In that case, knowledge of the historical or environmental circumstances, and analysis of the latter, become all-important to understanding. On the other hand, if hereditary racial inequalities exist, one can expect that the historical or cultural influences, however great they may be, will nevertheless tend to have their origin in the hereditary factors and to reinforce them. In that case, differences between two groups would be due partly to underlying heredity and partly to overlying cultural forces tending on the whole in the same direction. Yet even in that case, before one could begin to estimate the strength of the true racial factors, the historical ones would have to be subtracted. Thus, in either event, the first crux of the problem lies in the recognition and stripping off of cultural, social, or environmental factors, so far as possible, from the complex mass of phenomena which living human groups present. In proportion as these social or acquired traits can be determined and discounted, the innate and truly racial ones will be isolated, and can then be examined, weighed, and compared. Such, at any rate, is a reasonable plan of procedure. We are looking for the inherent, ineradicable elements in a social animal that has everywhere built up around himself an environment—namely, his culture—in which he mentally lives and breathes. It is precisely because in the present inquiry we wish to get below the effects of culture that we must be ready to concern ourselves considerably with these effects, actual or possible.

36. Anatomical Evidence on Evolutionary Rank

But first of all it may be well to consider the relatively simple evidence which has to do with the physical form and structure of race types. If one human race should prove definitely nearer to the apes in its anatomy than the other races, there would be reason to believe that it had lagged in evolution. Also there would be some presumption that its arrears were mental as well as physical.

But the facts do not run consistently. One thinks of the Negro as simian. His jaws are prognathous; his forehead recedes; his nose is both broad and low. Further, it is among Caucasians that the antithetical traits occur. In straightness of jaws and forehead, prominence and narrowness of nose, Caucasians in general exceed the Mongoloids. Thus the order as regards these particular traits is: ape, Negroid, Mongoloid, Caucasian. With ourselves at one end and the monkey at the other, the scale somehow seems right. It appeals, and seems significant. Facts of this sort are therefore readily observed, come to be remembered, and rise spontaneously to mind in an argument on race differences.

However, there are numerous items that conflict with this sequence. For instance, one of the most conspicuous differences of man from the apes is his relative hairlessness. Of the three main stocks, however, it is the Caucasian that is the most hairy. Both Mongoloids and Negroids are more smooth-skinned on face and on body.

In hair texture, the straight-haired Mongoloid is nearest the apes, the wavy-haired Caucasian comes next, and the woolly Negroid is the most characteristically human, or at least unsimian.

In the length of head hair, in which man differs notably from the monkeys, the relatively short-haired Negro once more approximates most closely to the ape, but the long-haired Mongoloid surpasses the intermediate Caucasian in degree of departure.

Lip color reverses this order. The apes’ lips are thin and grayish; Mongoloid lips come next; then those of Caucasians; the full, vivid, red lips of the Negro are the most unapelike of all.

It is unnecessary to multiply examples. If one human racial stock falls below others in certain traits, it rises above them in other features, insofar as “below” and “above” may be measurable in terms of degree of resemblance to the apes. The only way in which a decision could be arrived at along this line of consideration would be to count all features to see whether the Negro or the Caucasian or the Mongoloid was the most unapelike in the plurality of cases. It is possible that in such a reckoning the Caucasian would emerge with a lead. But it is even more clear that whichever way the majority fell, it would be a well divided count. If the Negro were more apelike than the Caucasian in all of his features, or in eight out of ten, the fact would be heavily significant. With his simian resemblances aggregating to those of the Caucasian in a ratio of say four to three, the margin would be so close as to lose nearly all its meaning. It is apparently some such ratio as this, or an even more balanced one, that would emerge, so far as we can judge, if it were feasible to take a census of all features.

It should be added that such a method of comparison as this suffers from two drawbacks. First, the most closely related forms now and then diverge sharply in certain particulars; and second, a form which on the whole is highly specialized may yet have remained more primitive, or have reverted to greater primitiveness in a few of its traits, than relatively unevolved races or species.

Thus, the anthropoid apes are brachycephalic, but all known types of Palæolithic man are dolichocephalic. Matched against the apes, the long-headed Negro would therefore seem to be the most humanly specialized stock. Compared however with the fossil human forms, the Negro is the most primitive in this feature, and the Mongoloid and Alpine Caucasian could be said to have evolved the farthest because their heads are the roundest. Yet their degree of brachycephaly is approximately that of the anthropoid apes. To which criterion shall be given precedence? It is impossible to say. Quite likely the round-headedness of the apes represents a special trait which they acquired since their divergence from the common hominid ancestral stem. If so, their round-headedness and that of the Mongoloids is simply a case of convergent evolution, of a character repeating independently, and therefore no evidence of Mongoloid primitiveness. Yet, if so, the long-headedness common to the early human races and the modern Negroids would probably also mean nothing.

It is even clearer that other traits have been acquired independently, have been secondarily evolved over again. Thus the supraorbital ridges. When one observes the consistency with which these are heavy in practically all Neandertal specimens; how they are still more conspicuous in Pithecanthropus and Rhodesian man; how the male gorilla shows them enormously developed; and that among living races they are perhaps strongest in the lowly Australian, it is tempting to look upon this bony development as a definite sign of primitiveness. Yet there is an array of contradicting facts. The youthful gorilla and adult orang are without supraorbital development. The male gorilla has his powerful brows for the same reason that he has the crest along the top of his skull: they are needed as attachments for his powerful musculature. They are evidently a secondary sex character developed within the species. So among fossil men there seem to have been two strains: one represented by Pithecanthropus and Neandertal man and the Rhodesian race, which tended toward supraorbital massiveness; and another, of which Piltdown man is representative, which was smooth of forehead. Among living races the Asiatic Mongoloids lack marked supraorbital development; the closely related American Indians possess it rather strongly; Caucasians and Negroes show little of the feature; Australians most of all. Evidently it would be unsafe to build much conclusion on either the presence or absence of supraorbital ridges.

Perhaps these instances will suffice to show that even the mere physical rating of human races is far from a simple or easy task. It is doubtful whether as yet it is valid to speak of one race as physically higher or more advanced, or more human and less brutish, than another. This is not an outright denial of the possibility of such differential ratings: it is a denial only of the belief that such differentials have been established as demonstrable.

37. Comparative Physiological Data

There is another angle of approach. This consists in abandoning the direct attempt to rate the races in anatomical terms, and inquiring instead whether they show any physiological differences. If such differences can be found, they may then perhaps be interpretable as differences in activity, responsiveness, endurance, or similar constitutional qualities. If the bodies of two races behave differently, we should have considerable reason to believe that their minds also behaved differently.

Unfortunately, we possess fewer data on comparative physiology than on comparative anatomy. The evidence is more fluctuating and intricate, and requires more patience to assemble. Unfortunately, too, for the purposes of our inquiry, the races come out almost exactly alike in the simpler physiological reactions. The normal body temperature for Caucasian adults is 37° (98.5 F.), the pulse about 70, the respiration rate around 17 or 18 per minute. If the Negro’s temperature averaged even a degree higher, one might expect him to behave, normally, a little more feverishly, to respond to stimulus with more vehemence, to move more quickly or more restlessly. Or, if the pulse rate of Mongolians were definitely lower, they might be expected to react more sluggishly, more sedately, like aging Caucasians. But such observations as are available, though they are far from as numerous as is desirable, reveal no such differences: temperature, pulse, respiration, record the same as among Caucasians, or differ so slightly, or so conflictingly, as to leave no room for positive conclusions. Certainly if there existed any important racial peculiarities, they would have been noted by the physicians who at one time or another have examined millions of Negroes, Chinese, Japanese, and thousands of Indians and Polynesians.

Apparently there is only one record that even hints at anything significant. Hrdlička, among some 700 Indians of the Southwestern United States and Northwestern Mexico, found the pulse to average about 60 per minute, or ten beats less than among whites. This would seem to accord with the general impression of Indian mentality as stolid, reserved, slow, and steady. But the number of observations is after all rather small; the part of the race represented by them is limited; and the habitat of the group of tribes is mostly a high plateau, and altitude notoriously affects heart action. Considerable corroboration will therefore be needed before any serious conclusions can be built upon this suggestive set of data.

There are other physiological functions that are likely to mean more than the rather gross ones just considered: for instance, the activity of the endocrines or glands of internal secretion. An excess or deficiency of activity of the thyroid, pituitary, adrenals, and sex glands affects not only health, but the type of personality and its emotional and intellectual reactions. For example, cretinism with its accompaniment of near-idiocy is the result of thyroidal under-development or under-functioning, and is often cured by supplying the lack of thyroidal substance and secretion. But this subject is as difficult as it is interesting; to date, absolutely nothing is known about endocrine race differences. It would be a relatively simple matter to secure first-hand information on the anatomy of the endocrine glands in Negroes as compared with whites; to ascertain whether these differed normally in size, weight, shape, or structure, and how. But this knowledge has scarcely been attempted systematically, and still less is any knowledge available in the more delicate and complex field of the workings of the organs. To be sure, theories have been advanced that race differentiation itself may be mainly the result of endocrine differentiations. There is something fascinating about such conjectures, but it is well to remember that they are unmitigated guesses.

38. Disease

Pathology might seem to promise more than normal physiology. So far as mortality goes, there are enormous differences between races. And the mortality is often largely the result of particular diseases. Measles, for instance, has often been a deadly epidemic to uncivilized peoples, and smallpox has in some regions at times taken toll of a quarter of the population in a year or two. Yet it is short-sighted to infer from such cases any racial predisposition or lack of resistance. The peoples in question have been free for generations, perhaps for their entire history, from these diseases, and have therefore not maintained or acquired immunity. Their difference from us is thus essentially in experience, not hereditary or racial. This is confirmed by the fact that after a generation or two the same epidemics that at first were so deadly to Polynesians or American Indians sink to almost the same level of mild virulence as they show among ourselves.

Then, too, immediate environment plays a part. The savage often has no idea of contagion, and still less of guarding against it; he thinks in terms of magic instead of physiology—and succumbs. How far heavy mortality is the result of lack of resistance or of fundamentally vicious treatment, is often hard to say. If we tried to cure smallpox by subjecting patients to a steam-bath and then having them plunge into a wintry river, we should perhaps look upon the disease as a very nearly fatal one to the Caucasian race.

39. Causes of Cancer Incidence

It may be worth while to consider briefly the facts as to mortality from cancer. This dread disease appears to be not contagious, so that the factor of acquired immunity is eliminated. It is regarded as incurable, except by operation, so that differences in treatment become relatively unimportant. If therefore significant differences in racial liability to cancer exist, they should emerge with unusual clearness and certainty.

At first sight they seem to. It has been alleged that the white race is the most susceptible to this affliction. The supporting figures are as follows: cancer deaths per year per 100,000 population.

It would seem from these figures that Caucasians die more frequently of cancer than members of the darker races. In fact, this has been asserted. Let us however continue with figures.

This table would make cancer mortality largely a function of geographical latitude, instead of race.

Another factor enters: occupation. The following data give the death rate per 100,000 population among males of 45-54 in England and Wales.

That the relative incidence is more than a temporary accident is shown by the approximate recurrence of the frequencies after ten years.

In proportion as latitude and occupation influence the occurrence of cancer, race is diminished as a cause. It is reduced still further by other considerations. The rate for Austria in 1906-10 was 78, for Hungary 44. Here the race is the same: the difference must be social. Austria averaged higher in wealth, education, medical development. This fact would tend to have a double effect. First, among the more backward population, a certain proportion would die of internal cancers difficult to diagnose, without the cause being recognized, owing to insufficient medical treatment. Second, the general death rate would be higher. More children and young people would die of infectious or preventable disease, leaving fewer survivors to die of cancer in middle and old age. Wherever, on the other hand, a public is medically educated, and typhoid, smallpox, diphtheria, tuberculosis claim fewer victims, the proportion of those dying of cancer, nephritis, heart diseases, increases. Such an increase is noted everywhere, and goes hand in hand with a longer average life. The alarm sometimes felt at the modern “increase” of cancer is therefore unfounded, because it is perhaps mainly apparent. If a larger percentage of the population each year died of old age, it would be a sign that sanitation and medicine were increasingly effective: evidence that more people lived to become old, not that age debility was spreading.

Consequently, a high degree of modern civilization must tend to raise the cancer rate; and any group of people will seem relatively immune from cancer in proportion as they remain removed from attaining to this civilization. In Hungary, from 1901-04, the cancer deaths were 239 among the owners of large farms, 41 among the owners of small farms; 108 among employing blacksmiths, 25 among their employees; 114 among employing tailors, 32 among employed tailors. Obviously these pairs of groups differ chiefly in their economic and cultural status.

Here too lies the explanation of why the South African negro shows a rate of only 14, the United States negro of 56; also why the Chinese rate is as low as 5 in Hongkong, rises to 19 in Manila, and 26 in Hawaii, while the closely allied Japanese average 62 for the whole of Japan—as compared with 50 for Spain, which is pure Caucasian, but one of the most backward countries in Europe. In Tokyo and Kyoto the rate soars to 73 and 90 respectively, just as in the United States it is about 10 higher for the urban than for the rural population.

Within the United States, also, the rate rises and falls almost parallel for whites and Negroes according to locality; as,

If allowance is made for the facts that the negro population of the United States is poorer and less educated than the white; that it lives mainly in lower latitudes; and that it tends to be rural rather than urban, the comparative cancer death rates for the country of negro 56 and white 77 would appear to be accounted for, without bringing race into consideration.

In short, what at first glance, or to a partisan pleader, would seem to be a notable race difference in cancer liability, turns out so overwhelmingly due to environmental and social causes as to leave it doubtful whether racial heredity enters as a factor at all. This is not an assertion that race has nothing whatever to do with the disease; it is an assertion that in the present state of knowledge an inherent or permanent connection between race and cancer incidence has not been demonstrated. If there is such a connection, it is evidently a slight one, heavily overlaid by non-racial influences; and it may be wholly lacking.

The case would be still less certain for most other diseases, in which environmental factors are more directly and obviously influential. Racial medical science is not impossible; in fact it should have an important future as a study; but its foundations are not yet laid.

40. Mental Achievement and Social Environment

One point will have become clear in the course of the foregoing discussion: namely, how far the difficulty of coming to positive conclusions is due to the two sets of interacting causal factors, the hereditary ones and the environmental ones that play upon heredity. The environmental factors are themselves a composite of geographical influences and of the economic, cultural, and other social influences that human beings exert upon each other.

If this intermingling of distinct kinds of causes is true of races when considered from the side of physiology and medicine, it is evident that the intermingling will be even more intricate in the mental sphere. After all, bodily functioning varies only within fairly definite limits. When external influences press too strongly upon the innate nature of the organism, the latter ceases to function and dies. The mind, on the other hand, however much its structure may be given by heredity, depends for its content wholly on experience, and this experience can be thoroughly varied. Individuals of the same organic endowment may conceivably be born either in the uppermost stratum of a highly refined civilization, or among the most backward and remote savages. Whether this actually happens, and to what degree, is of course precisely the problem which we are trying to solve. But that it is theoretically and logically possible cannot be denied; and here a vicious circle of reasoning begins. One argument says: there have been no recognized geniuses among peoples like the Hottentots, and the sum total of their group achievement is ridiculously small; therefore it is clear that the Hottentot mind must be inferior. The opposite argument runs: Hottentot cultural environment is so poor and limited that the finest mind in the world reared under its influence would grow up relatively sterile and atrophied; therefore it is probable that the mind of the Hottentot is intrinsically identical with our own, or at least of equivalent capacity, and that Hottentot geniuses have actually been born but have been unable to flourish as geniuses.

Evidently the same facts are before those who advocate these opposite views, but these facts are viewed from diametrically opposite sides. If one starts to travel around the logical circle in one direction, one can keep revolving indefinitely and find ever fresh supporting evidence. If, however, one begins to revolve around the same circle of opinion in the opposite direction, it is just as easy and just as compelling to continue to think in this fashion and to find all testimony corroborative.

In such a situation it is possible to realize that from the point of view of proof, or objective truth, one view is worth as much as the other: which is nothing. It is an emotional bias that inclines one man toward the conviction of race superiority and another to that of race equality. The proofs in either case are for the most part a mere assembling of ex parte testimony. It is easy enough to advocate impartiality. The difficulty is in being impartial; because both the hereditary and the environmental factors are in reality unknown quantities. What we have objectively before us is such and such a race or group of people, with such and such present traits and historical record. These phenomena being the product of the interaction of the two sets of causes, we could of course, if we knew the strength of one, compute the strength of the other. But as we have isolated neither, we are dealing with two indeterminate variables. Evidently the only way out of the dilemma, at any rate the only scientific way, is to find situations in which one of the factors is, for the time being, fixed. In that case the strength of the other factor will of course be proportionate to the attainments of the groups.

Actually, such instances are excessively difficult to find. There are occasional individuals with identical heredity, namely, twins produced from the division of a single ovum. In such twins, the strength of environmental influences can be gauged by the difference in their careers and achievements. Yet such twins are only individuals, and it is illegitimate to make far-reaching inferences from them to larger groups, such as the races. It is conceivable that heredity might on the whole be a more powerful cause than environment, and racial groups still average substantially alike in their heredity. Because a natively gifted and a natively stunted individual within the group vary conspicuously in achievement, even under similar environment, it does not follow that races differ in germ-plasm because they differ in achievements.

If, on the other hand, one sets out to discover cases of identical environment for distinct racial strains, the task quickly becomes even more difficult. Very little analysis usually suffices to show that the environment is identical only up to a certain point, and that beyond this point important social divergences begin. Thus, so far as geographical environment goes, the Negro and the white in the southern United States are under the same conditions. There is also uniformity of some of the gross externals of cultural environment. Both Negroes and whites speak English; are Christians; plant corn; go to the circus; and so on. But, just as obviously, there are aspects in which their social environment differs profoundly. Educational opportunities are widely different. The opportunity of attaining leadership or otherwise satisfying ambition is wide open to the white, and practically closed to the Negro. The “color-line” inevitably cuts across the social environment and makes of it two different environments.

It might be said that the southern United States furnish an extreme case of a sharply drawn color-line. This is true. But on the other hand there is no place on earth where something corresponding to a color-line is not drawn between two races occupying the same territory. It sometimes happens that distinctions are diminished and faintly or subtly enforced, as in modern Hawaii, where to outward appearances many races dwell together without discrimination. Yet examination reveals that the absence of discrimination is only legal and perhaps economic. As regards the relations and associations of human beings, the welcome which they extend or the aloofness which they show to one another, there is always a color-line. This means not only difference in opportunity, but difference in experience, habit formation, practices, and interests.

41. Psychological Tests on the Sense Faculties

This factor of experience enters even into what appear to be the simplest mental operations, the sensory ones. The scant data available from experimental tests indicate that a variety of dark skinned or uncivilized peoples, including Oceanic and African Negroids, Negritos, Ainus, and American Indians, on the whole slightly surpass civilized whites in keenness of vision and fineness of touch discrimination, whereas the whites are somewhat superior in acuity of hearing and sensitiveness to pain. Yet what do these results of measurements mean?

Vision is tested for its distance ability. The farther off one can distinguish objects or marks, the higher one’s rating. Civilized man reads—normally—at 14 inches. He works with sharp knives, with machines that are exact; he is surrounded by things made with such exact machines; he handles thin paper and filmy fabrics. His women sew and embroider with the sharpest of needles, the finest of thread. Everything about us tends toward close accuracy and away from the haziness of distant observation. The savage, on the other hand, the half-civilized person even, inspects the horizon, watches for game or its dim tracks, tries to peer to the bottom of streams for fish. He does not read, his needles are blunt, his thread is cord, his carving without precision even though decorative, the lines he makes are free-hand and far-apart. He is trained, as it were, for the usual vision tests. If the psychologist reversed his experiment and sought the degree of power to see fine differences at close range, it is possible that the savage might prove inferior because untrained by his experience. Such tests seem not to have been made. Until they are, and again show uncivilized man superior, there is no real proof that innate racial differences of serious moment exist.

The whole act of vision in fact involves more than we ordinarily think. After all, seeing is done with the mind as well as with the eye. There is the retinal image, but there is also the interpretation of this image. A sailor descries the distant shore, whereas the landsman sees only a haze on the horizon. To the city dweller a horse and a cow a mile off are indistinguishable. Not so to the rancher. There is something almost imperceptible about the profile of the feeding end of the animal, about its movement, that promptly and surely classes it. At still longer ranges, where the individual animals have wholly faded from sight, a herd of cattle may perhaps be told from one of horses, by the plainsman, through the different clouds of dust which they kick up, or the rate of motion of the cloud. An hour later when the herd is reached and proves to be as said, the astonished traveler from the metropolis is likely to credit his guide’s eyes with an intrinsic power greater than his field glasses—forgetting the influence of experience and training.

In keenness of hearing, on the contrary, one should expect the civilized white to come out ahead, as in fact he does; not because he is Caucasian but because he is civilized and because the instruments of experimentation, be they tuning forks or ticking watches or balls dropped on metal plates, are implements of civilization. Make the test the howl of a distant wolf, or the snapping of a twig as the boughs bend in the wind, and the college student’s hearing might prove duller than that of the Indian or Ainu. There is a story of a woodsman on a busy thoroughfare, amid the roar of traffic and multifarious noise of a great city, hearing a cricket chirp, which was actually discovered in a near-by open cellar. Extolled for his miraculous keenness of audition, the man in the fur cap dropped a small coin on the pavement: at the clink, passers-by across the street stopped and looked around.

As to the pain sense, an introspective, interpretative element necessarily enters into experiments. What constitutes pain? When the trial becomes disagreeable? When it hurts? When it is excruciating? The savage may physiologically feel with his nerve ends precisely as we do. But being reared to a life of chronic slight discomforts, he is likely to think nothing of the sensation until it hurts sharply; whereas we signal as soon as we are sure that the experience is becoming perceptibly unpleasant.

In short, until there shall have been more numerous, balanced, and searching tests made, it must be considered that nothing positive has been established as to the respective sensory faculties of the several human races. The experiments performed are tests not so much of race as of the average experience and habits of groups of different culture.

42. Intelligence Tests

If this is true as regards the sense faculties, it might be expected to hold to a greater degree of those higher mental faculties which we call intelligence; and such is the case. Intelligence tests have been gradually evolved and improved, the best known being the Binet-Simon series. These are arranged to determine the mental age of the subject. Their most important function accordingly has been the detection of defective adults or backward children. During the World War, psychological examinations were introduced on a scale unheard of before. The purpose of these examinations was to assign men to the tasks best commensurate with their true abilities; especially to prevent the unfit from being entrusted with responsibility under which they would break down and bring failure on larger undertakings. Men subject to dizziness were to be kept from flying; those unable to understand orders, out of active line service. The tests throughout were practical. They tried to decide whether a given man was fit or unfit. They did not pretend to go into the causes of his fitness or unfitness. This is an important point. Whatever illumination the army intelligence tests shed on the problem of race intelligence is therefore indirect. Different racial or national groups represented in the examinations attain different capacity ratings, but there is nothing in the results themselves to show whether they are due to racial or environmental factors. Evidence on this point, if it can be derived at all from the tests, has to be “analyzed out.”

In general, examinees in the United States were rated by being assigned, on the basis of their scores, to grades which were lettered from A to E, with plus and minus subgrades. The most comprehensive presentation of results is to express the percentage of individuals in each group that made the middle grade C, better than C, and worse than C. On this basis we find:

These figures at face value seem to show deep group differences in intelligence; and these face values have been widely accepted. The reason is that they flatter national and race egotism. To be sure, the Englishmen in the American draft make a better showing than the drafted men at large; but this has been complacently explained by saying that the English represent in comparative purity the Anglo-Saxon or Nordic stock which is also the dominant strain among Americans, but which has been somewhat contaminated in their case by the immigration of Latins and Slavs, who rate much lower, as shown by the Italians and Poles tested. Lowest of all, as might be expected, is the Negro. So runs the superficial but satisfying interpretation of the figures—satisfying if one happens to be of North European ancestry.

But there is one feature that raises suspicion. The Italians and the Poles are too close to the Negroes. They stand much nearer to them in intelligence, according to these figures, than they do to the white Americans. Can this be so—at least, can it have racial significance? Are these Mediterraneans, descendants of the Romans, and these Alpines, so large a strain of whose blood flows in the veins of many white Americans, only a shade superior to the Negro? Scarcely. “Something must be wrong” with the figures: that is, they contain another factor besides race.

A little dissection of the lump results reveals this factor. The northern Negro far surpasses the southern in his showing. He gets ten times as high a proportion of individuals into the above-average grades, only half as many into the below-average. Evidently the difference is due to increased schooling, improved earning capacity, larger opportunity and incentive: social environment, in short. So strong is the influence of the environment that the northern Negro easily surpasses the Italian in America.

Evidently the psychological tests are more a gauge of educational and social opportunity than of race, since the Italian, although brunet, is of course a pure Caucasian.

This conclusion is reinforced by another consideration. The type of test first used in the army had been built up for reasonably literate people, speaking English. Among such people it discriminated successfully between the more and the less fit. But the illiterate and the foreigner knowing no English failed completely—not because their intelligence was zero, but because the test involved the use of non-congenital abilities which they had not acquired. A second set of tests, known as Beta, was evolved for those who were obviously ineligible, or proved themselves so, for the old style of test, which was designated as Alpha. The illiteracy of the subjects given the Beta test was in most cases not an absolute one. Men who could not write an intelligible letter or read the newspaper or who had had only half or less of the ordinary grammar school education, together with aliens whose comprehension of English remained imperfect, were put in the group of “illiterates” or badly educated. Separating now the literates from the illiterates among a number of racial, national, or sectional groups, we find:

It must be borne in mind that the two groups were not set apart as the result of tests, but that the two tests were devised to meet the problem of treating the two groups with reasonable uniformity. The point was to find the excellent man, and the unfit man, with the same degree of accuracy whether he was literate or illiterate. When found, he was assigned to the same grade, such as A, or D—, whether his examination had been Alpha or Beta.

Now let us observe some of the figures. The New York negro is nearly on a par with the Alabama white, among literates, and a bit ahead of him among illiterates. Approximately the two groups come out the same; which means that bringing up in a certain part of the country has as much to do with intelligence, even in the rough, as has Caucasian or colored parentage.

The literate negroes of the draft, irrespective of section, slightly surpass the illiterate whites.

In every case the literate members of a race or nationality make a far better showing than the illiterate.

It is now clear also that the important factor of education enters so heavily into the first figures cited that they can mean little if anything as to inherent capacity. Of the Englishmen tested, nine-tenths fell in the literate group; of the Poles, a fifth; of the Italians, a seventh. In the draft generally, nearly three-fourths of the whites were literate; of the negroes, less than a third.

In short, in spite of the fact that the Beta test was intended to equalize conditions for the illiterate and semi-illiterate, the outstanding conclusion of the army examinations seems to be that education—cultural advantage—enormously develops faculty.

Is there anything left that can positively be assigned to race causation? It may be alleged that within the same section the white recruits regularly surpass the colored. Alabama whites may rate disappointingly, but they do better than Alabama negroes; New York negroes show surprisingly well, but they are inferior to New York whites; illiterate whites from the whole country definitely surpass illiterate negroes; and still more so among literates. But is this residuum of difference surely racial? As long as the color-line remains drawn, a differential factor of cultural advantage is included; and how strong this is there is no present means of knowing. It is possible that some of the difference between sectionally and educationally equalized groups of whites and negroes is really innate and racial. But it is also possible that most or all of it is environmental. Neither possibility can be demonstrated from the unrefined data at present available.

43. Status of Hybrids

In nearly all tests of the American Negro, full bloods and mixed bloods are not discriminated. Evidently if races have distinctive endowments, the nature of these endowments is not cleared up so long as individuals who biologically are seven-eighths Caucasian are included with pure Negroes merely because in this country we have the social habitude of reckoning them all as “colored.”

On the other hand, an excellent opportunity to probe deeper is being lost through the failure to classify tested colored people according to the approximate proportion of Negro blood. Suppose for instance that on a given examination whites scored an average of 100 and Negroes of 60. Then, if this difference were really due to race, if it were wholly a matter of superior or inferior blood, mulattos should average 80 and quadroons 90; unless intelligence were due to simple Mendelian factors, in which case its inheritance would tend to segregate, and of this there is no evidence. Suppose, however, that instead of the theoretically expectable 80 and 90, the mulattos and quadroons scored 65 and 68. In that event it would be clear that the major part of the Negro’s inferiority of record was due to environment; that the white man’s points from about 70 up to 100 were clearly the result of his superior social opportunities, whereas the range between 60 and 70 approximately represented the innate difference between Negro and Caucasian. This is a hypothetical example, but it may serve to illustrate a possible method of attacking the problem.

There are however almost no data of this kind; and when they are obtained, they will be subject to certain cautions upon interpretation. For instance, in the army examinations one attempt was made to separate a small group of colored recruits into a darker-skinned group, comprising full blooded Negroes and those appearing to be preponderantly of Negro blood; and a lighter complexioned group, estimated to contain the mulattos and individuals in whom white ancestry was in excess. The light group made the better scores. In the Alpha test for literates it attained a median score of 50, the dark Negroes only 30; in the Beta tests for illiterates, the respective figures were 36 and 29.

The caution is this. Is the mulatto subject to any more advantageous environment than the full blooded Negro? So far as voting and office-holding, riding in Pullman cars and occupying orchestra seats in theatre are concerned, there is no difference: both are colored, and therefore beyond the barrier. But the mulattos of slavery days were likely to be house servants, brought up with the master’s family, absorbing manners, information, perhaps education; their black half-brothers and half-sisters stayed out in the plantation shacks. Several generations have elapsed since those days, but it is possible, even probable, that the descendants of mulattos have kept a step or two ahead of the descendants of the blacks in literacy, range of experience, and the like.

It is impossible to predict what the social effect of miscegenation will be. The effect undoubtedly varies and must be examined in each case. Thus, Indian half-breeds in one tribe may usually be the result of wholly transient or mercenary unions between inferior whites and debauched native women and may therefore grow up in an atmosphere of demoralization to which the full blooded Indian is less exposed. This demoralization would, to be sure, affect character and not intelligence as such; but it might stand in the way of schooling, and otherwise indirectly react on measurable traits of mind. In another tribe or section of a tribe, to the contrary, the half-breed might normally grow up in the house of a permanently settled white father, a squaw man, and in that event would learn English better, go to school earlier, and in case of a test therefore achieve a higher rating than the full blood.

44. Evidence from the Cultural Record of Races

An entirely different method of approach to the problem of race capacity is that of examining the cultural record, the achievements in civilization, of groups. While this approach is theoretically possible, and while it is often attempted, it is subject to little control and therefore unlikely to yield dependable conclusions.

First of all, the culture history record of a people must be known for considerable periods before one may validly think of inferring therefrom anything as to the faculties of that people. The reason is that active civilization, as a productive process, is slow to grow up, slow to be acquired. Mere momentum would normally keep the more advanced of two peoples ahead of the other for a long time. In proportion as not nations but groups of nations were involved, the momentum would continue for still longer periods. Civilization flourished for some thousands of years in the Near East, and then about the Mediterranean, before it became established with equal vigor and success in northern Europe. Had Julius Cæsar or one of his contemporaries been asked whether by any sane stretch of phantasy he could imagine the Britons and Germans as inherently the equals of Romans and Greeks, he would probably have replied that if these northerners possessed the ability of the Mediterraneans they would long since have given vent to it, instead of continuing to live in disorganization, poverty, ignorance, rudeness, and without great men or products of the spirit. And, within limits, Cæsar would have been right, since it was more than a thousand years before northern Europe began to draw abreast of Italy in degree and productivity of civilization. Two thousand years before Christ, a well informed Egyptian might reasonably have disposed in the same sweeping way of the possibility of Greeks and Italians being the equals of his own people in capacity. What had these barbarians ever done to lead one to think that they might yet do great things? To-day we brush Negroes and Indians out of the reckoning with the same offhandedness.

In general, arguing from performance to potentiality, from accomplishment to achievement, is valid under conditions of set experiment—such as are impossible for races—or in proportion as the number and variety of observations is large. A single matched competition may decide pretty reliably as between the respective speed capacities of two runners. But it would be hazardous to form an opinion from a casual glimpse of them in action, when one might happen to be hastening and the other dallying. Least of all would it be sound to infer that essential superiority rested with the one that was in advance at the moment of observation, without knowledge of their starting points, the difficulty of their routes, the motive or goal of their courses. It is only as the number of circumstances grows, from which observations are available, that judgment begins to have any weight. The runner who has led for a long time and is increasing his lead, or who has repeatedly passed others, or who carries a load and yet gains ground, may lay some claim to superiority. In the same way, as between races, a long and intimate historical record, objectively analyzed, gives some legitimate basis for tentative conclusions as to their natural endowment. But how long the record must be is suggested by the example already cited of Mediterranean versus Nordic cultural preëminence.

The fallacy that is most commonly committed is to argue from what in the history of great groups is only an instant: this instant being that at which one’s own race or nationality is dominant. The Anglo-Saxon’s moment is the present; the Greek’s, the age of Pericles. Usually, too, the dominance holds only for certain aspects: military or economic or æsthetic superiority, as the case may be; inferiorities on other sides are merely overlooked. The Greek knew his venality, but looked down on the barbarian nevertheless. Anglo-Saxon failure in the plastic and musical arts is notorious, but does not deter most Anglo-Saxons from believing that they are the elect in quality, and from buttressing this conviction with the evidences of present industrial, economic, and political achievements—and perhaps past literary ones.

45. Emotional Bias

Inference from record to potentiality where the record of one’s own group is favorable, and failure to draw such inference where the achievement of other groups is superior, is a combination of mental operations that is widely spread because it arises spontaneously in minds not critically trained. Here is an instance:

One of the great achievements of science in the nineteenth century was Galton’s demonstration, in a series of works beginning with “Hereditary Genius,” that the laws of heredity apply to the mind in the same manner and to the same degree as to the body. On the whole this proof has failed to be recognized at its true importance, probably because it inclines adversely to current presuppositions of the independence of the soul from the body, and freedom of the will, propositions to which most men adhere emotionally.

From this perfectly valid demonstration, which has been confirmed by other methods, Galton went on to rate the hereditary worth of various races, according to the number of their men of genius. Here a fallacy enters: the assumption that all geniuses born are recognized as such. A great work naturally requires a great man, but it presupposes also a great culture. It may be that, historically speaking, a great genius cannot arise in a primitive degree of civilization. That is, the kind of concentrated accomplishment which alone we recognize as a work of genius is culturally impossible below a certain level. Biologically the individual of genius may be there; civilizationally he is not called forth, and so does not get into the record. Consequently it is unsound to argue from the historical record to biological worth. However, this Galton did; and his method led him to the conclusion that the negro rates two grades lower than the Englishman, on a total scale of fourteen grades, and the Englishman two lower than the fifth century Athenian.

This conclusion has never been popular. Most people on becoming familiar with Galton’s argument, resist it. Its fallacy is not easy to perceive—if it were, Galton would not have committed it—and the average person is habitually so vague-minded upon what is organic and what is social, that the determination of the fallacy would be well beyond him. His opposition to Galton’s conclusion is therefore emotionally and not rationally founded, and his arguments against the conclusion are presumably also called forth by emotional stimulus.

On the other hand, most individuals of this day and land do habitually infer, like Galton, from cultural status to biological worth, so far as the Negro is concerned. The same persons who eagerly accept the demonstration of a flaw in the argument in favor of Athenian superiority, generally become skeptical and resistive to the exposition of the same flaw in the current belief as to Negro inferiority. It is remarkable how frequently and how soon, in making this exposition, one becomes aware of the hearer’s feeling that one’s attitude is sophistical, unreal, insincere, or motivated by something concealed.

The drift of this discussion may seem to be an unavowed argument in favor of race equality. It is not that (§ 271). As a matter of fact, the bodily differences between races would appear to render it in the highest degree likely that corresponding congenital mental differences do exist. These differences might not be profound, compared with the sum total of common human faculties, much as the physical variations of mankind fall within the limits of a single species. Yet they would preclude identity. As for the vexed question of superiority, lack of identity would involve at least some degree of greater power in certain respects in some races. These preëminences might be rather evenly distributed, so that no one race would notably excel the others in the sum total or average of its capacities; or they might show a tendency to cluster on one rather than on another race. In either event, however, the fact of race difference, qualitative if not quantitative, would remain.

But it is one thing to admit this theoretical probability and then stop through ignorance of what the differences are, and another to construe the admission as justification of mental attitudes which may be well founded emotionally but are in considerable measure unfounded objectively.

In short, it is a difficult task to establish any race as either superior or inferior to another, but relatively easy to prove that we entertain a strong prejudice in favor of our own racial superiority.

46. Summary

It would seem that the subject of race problems, that is, the natural endowment of human races, can be summarized as follows:

The essential difficulty of these problems lies in the fact that the performance of groups is the product of two sets of factors, biological and cultural, both of which are variable and not always readily separable.

Progress in solution of the problems will be made gradually, and will be hastened by recognition of how few positive determinations have been made.

Most of the alleged existing evidence on race endowment is likely to be worthless.

The remainder probably has some value, but to what degree, and what it demonstrates, cannot yet be asserted.

The most definite determinations promise to eventuate from experiment. If fully controlled experiments in breeding and rearing human beings could be carried out, the problems would soon begin to solve. Experiments on animals would prove practically nothing because animals are cultureless—uninfluenced by social environment of their own making.

Progress will be aided by increasing shift of attention from the crude consideration of comparative lump rating of the races, that is, their gross superiority or inferiority, to a consideration of such specific qualitative differences as they may prove to show. The question of finding the race in which the greatest number of qualitative excellences are concentrated is subsequent and of much less scientific importance.

Scientific inquiries into race are for the present best kept apart from so-called actual race problems. These problems inevitably involve feeling, usually of considerable strength, which tends to vitiate objective approach. On the other hand, the practical problems will no doubt continue to be met practically, that is, morally and emotionally. Whether the Japanese should be forbidden to hold land and the Negro be legally disfranchised are problems of economics and of group ethics, which probably will for a long time be disposed of emotionally as at present, irrespective of the possible findings of science upon the innate endowment of Caucasian, Mongoloid, and Negroid strains.