CHAPTER XIII

NATIONS OF THE HIGHER TYPE

Let us consider now the type of nation which from our present point of view is the most interesting, the type which approximates most nearly to a solution of the problem of civilisation, to the reconciliation of individuality with collectivity, to the synthesis of individualist and collectivist ideals; that in which the rights and wills of individuals are not forcibly subordinated to those of the State by the power of a governing class, and in which the deliberative side of the national mind is well developed and effective.

Such are in a certain degree the French, but still more the British and the American nations. In the two latter countries the rights of the individual are made supreme over all other considerations, the welfare of the whole is only to be advanced by measures which do not override individual wills and rights; or, at least, the only power which is admitted to have the right in any degree to override individual wills is the will of the majority. In such a nation the greatest efforts are concentrated on the perfection of the deliberative organisation, by means of which the general mind may arrive at collective judgment and choice of means and may express its will. A vast amount of time and energy is devoted to this deliberative work; while the executive organisation, by which its decisions have to be carried into effect, is apt to be comparatively neglected and hence imperfect.

These two complementary features of such states we see well exemplified here and in America[99]; where the amount of time, money, and effort spent upon the deliberative processes and the elaboration of the organisation through which they are effected is enormously greater than in other nations. And, in spite of the energy expended on deliberative processes and on the elaboration of their organisation, the interests of the nation as a whole are not at present forwarded in a manner at all comparable with those of such a State as Germany. Nevertheless, such national actions as we do achieve are far more truly the expression of the national will; and, if the national mind is to be developed to a high level, this vast expenditure of energy, which to some impatient spirits seems wasteful and useless, must go on.

As was said in a former chapter, such collective deliberation of modern nations is only rendered possible by the great facilities of communication we enjoy; telegraph, post, and railway, and especially the press. The ancients saw truly enough that, with their limited means of communication, the higher form of state-organisation must be restricted to a small population of some thousands only—the City-State.

It is important to note that not only do modern facilities of communication render possible a truly collective mental life for the large Nation-States of the present age; but that these modern conditions actually carry with them certain great advantages, which tend to raise the collective mental life of modern nations to a higher level than was possible for the ancient City-State, even though its members were of high average capacity and many of them of very great mental power, as in Athens.

The assembly of citizens in one place for national deliberation rendered them much more susceptible to those less desirable peculiarities of collective mental life which characterise simple crowds; particularly, the excess of emotional excitement, increased suggestibility, and, hence, the ease with which the whole mass could be swayed unduly by the skilful orator. In the modern nation, on the other hand, the transmission of news by the press secures a certain delay, and a lack of synchronism, in its reception by different groups and individuals; and it secures also a certain delay in the action and reaction of mind on mind, which gives opportunity for individual deliberation. Also the sympathetic action of the mass mind on the individual mind is in large part indirect, rather than direct, representative rather than perceptual, and therefore less overwhelming in its effects. These conditions greatly temper the violence of the emotional reactions and permit of a diversity of feeling and opinion; an opposed minority has time to form itself and to express an opinion, and so may temper the hasty and emotional reaction of the majority in a way that is impossible in a general assembly.

A further advantage of the large size of nations may arise from the fact that actual decision as to choice of means for effecting national action has to be achieved by means of representatives who come together in one place. Representative government is not merely an inferior substitute for government by general assembly; it is superior in many respects. If each representative were a mere delegate, an average specimen of the group he represents, chosen by lot and merely charged to express their will, this feature would modify the crude collective mental processes in one important respect only; namely, it would counteract to some extent that weakening of individual responsibility which is characteristic of collective mental action. But, in addition to this, internal organisation, in the form of tradition and custom, comes in to modify very greatly the collective process.

We see such modifying influence very clearly in the election of the English House of Commons and in the methods of its operations. Owing partly to a natural tendency, partly to a fortunate tradition, the people do not elect just any one of themselves to serve as a delegate or average sample of the mass; but as a rule they choose, or try to choose, some man who displays special capacity and special qualifications for taking part in the national deliberations. In so far as they are successful in this, their representatives are able men and men to whose minds the social consciousness, the consciousness of the whole people, of its needs and tendencies and aspirations, is more fully and clearly present than to the average mind. They are also in the main men of more than average public spirit. Hence it is not unknown that a purely working class constituency, being offered liberal, conservative, and labour candidates, instead of choosing the labour man, one of themselves, gives him only a small fraction of the total votes. Then, within the body of representatives, this process, by which greater influence is given to the abler men, to those whose minds reflect most fully the whole people, is carried further still. A small group of these men exerts a predominant influence in all deliberations; and not only are they in the main the best qualified (for they only attain their leading positions by success in an intense and long continued competition) but they are put in a position in which they can hardly fail to feel a great responsibility resting upon them; and in which they feel the full force of political traditions. The deliberative organisation of the American nation illustrates, when compared with our own, the importance of these traditions; for its lesser efficiency is largely due to the absence of such traditions, and to the fact that their system banishes from the House of Representatives its natural leaders and those on whom responsibility falls most heavily.

Lastly, the existence of two traditionally opposed parties ensures that every important step shall be fully discussed. The traditional division into two parties, which from one point of view seems so irrational, nevertheless exerts very important and valuable influences, of which the chief is that it prevents the assembly of legislators becoming a mere psychological crowd easily swayed to a decision by collective emotion and skilful suggestion; for each suggestion coming from the one party acts by contra-suggestion upon the other and provokes an opposition that necessitates discussion[100].

In these two ways, then;—first, through the culmination of national deliberation among a selected group of representatives, among whom again custom and tradition accord precedence and prestige to the natural leaders, the most able and those in whose consciousness the nation, in the past, present and future is most adequately reflected; secondly, by means of the party system, which ensures vigorous criticism and full discussion of all proposals, under a system of traditional conventions evolved for the regulation of such discussions;—in these two ways the principal vices of collective deliberation are corrected, and the formal deliberations and decisions of the nation are raised to a higher plane than the collective deliberations of any assembly of men lacking such traditional organisation could possibly attain. The part played by unwritten tradition in the working of the British constitution is of course immense, as for example, the existence and enormous prestige of the cabinet, and the tradition that a party coming into power must respect the legislation of the party previously in power. Without this last, representative government, or at any rate the party system, would be impossible. The smooth working of the system depends entirely upon the influence of these and similar traditions which exist only in the minds of men. Or, take as another example, the tradition of absolute impartiality on the part of the Speaker and of loyal acceptance of his rulings by every member of the House; or the tradition which distinguishes sharply between political and private relations, in virtue of which the parties to a most bitter political strife may and very generally do remain in perfectly friendly private relations.

These and other such traditions, which secure the efficient working of the organisation for national deliberation, all rest in turn upon a traditional and tacit assumption—namely, the assumption that both parties are working for the good of the nation as they conceive and understand it, that both parties have this common end and differ only in their judgment as to the means by which it can best be achieved. They rest also on the traditional and tacit admission that one’s own judgment, and that of one’s party, may be mistaken, and that in the long run the legislation which any party can effect is an expression of the organised national mind and is therefore to be respected. It is this acquiescence in accomplished legislation in virtue of this tacit assumption which gives to the decisions of Parliament the status, not merely of the expression of the will of a bare majority, but of the expression of the will of practically the whole nation. Underlying the stability of the whole system, again, is the tradition, sedulously fostered and observed by the best and leading minds, that the raison d’être and purpose of the representative parliament is to organise, and to give the most complete possible expression to, the national mind and will; and that no constitutional change or change of procedure is justifiable unless it tends to the more complete realisation of these objects.

In virtue of these traditions our Parliament and Press constitute undoubtedly the best means for effecting organisation of the national mind in its deliberative aspect that has yet been evolved; and we should remember this when we feel inclined to gird at the ‘great talking shop,’ at the slowness of its procedure and at the logical absurdities of the two-party system; and, above all, we should realize how valuable and worthy of conservation are these scarcely formulated traditions, for they are absolutely essential to its efficiency. It is just because the efficiency of the deliberative organisation of a nation depends upon the force of such traditions, that, though it is possible to take the system of parliamentary representation and establish it by decree or plebiscite in a nation which has hitherto had no such deliberative organisation, it is not possible to make it work smoothly and efficiently amongst such a people. Hence, although almost every civilised nation has done its best to imitate the British system of parliamentary government, hardly any one has made a success of it; and, in nearly all, it is in constant danger of being superseded by some more primitive form of government—one need only mention Mexico, Portugal, Russia, France, Austria-Hungary. In all these countries, and even in America, there seems to be already a not very remote possibility of the supersession of parliamentary government by a dictatorship—a process which has actually occurred in many of the municipal governments of America, and the fear of which has constantly checked the smooth working of the parliamentary system in France.

As a single illustration of the way in which the conditions we have been considering affect the collective acts of the nation, consider what happened at the time of the Russian outrage in the North Sea during the Russo-Japanese war. When a Russian fleet fired upon our fishing boats doing considerable damage to them, the means of communication were sufficiently developed among us to allow of the action and reaction of all on each which produces the characteristic results of collective mental action, the exaltation of emotion, the suggestibility, the sense of irresponsible power; and, in the absence of the deliberative organisation which, by concentrating influence and responsibility in the hands of a few of the best men, controlled and modified this collective action, we should have rushed upon the Russian fleet and probably have brought on a general European war. The control and counteraction of this kind of outburst of collective emotion and impulsive action is one of the heaviest responsibilities of those to whom predominant influence is accorded.

It is only in virtue of the strong organisation of the national mind resting upon these long traditions of parliamentary government, that at such a time control of the popular emotion and impulse is possible. And the weaker and less efficient is such traditional organisation, the more does any such incident tend to provoke a collective manifestation which approximates in its uncontrollable violence and unconsidered impulsiveness to the behaviour of an unorganised crowd. Hence governments, where the democratic principle is acknowledged but the traditional organisation is less strong, are constantly in danger of having their hands forced by some outburst of popular passion—as in France.

It is worth noting that, when Aristotle inveighed against democracy as an evil form of government, the only form of democratic government he had in mind was government by the voices of a mob gathered together in one place and lacking all the safeguards which, as we have seen, render our British national deliberations so much superior to those of a mere crowd of persons of equally good average capacity and character.

But it is not only in the formal deliberations of the nation that internal organisation, resting on tradition, secures the predominance of the influence of the best and ablest minds. The same is true of all national thought and feeling. There exists in every great nation the vague influence we call public opinion, which is the great upholder of right and justice, which rewards virtue and condemns vice and selfishness. Public opinion exists only in the minds of individuals (for we have rejected, provisionally at least, the conception of a collective consciousness); yet it is a product not of individual, but of collective, mental life. And it has in any healthy nation far higher standards of right and justice and tolerance than the majority of individuals could form or maintain; that is to say, it is in these respects far superior to an opinion which would be the mere resultant or algebraic sum of the opinions of all the living individuals. In reference to any particular matter its judgment is far superior to that of the average of individuals, and superior probably in many cases to that which even the best individuals could form for themselves.

How does public opinion come to be superior to individual and to average opinion? There seems to be something paradoxical in the statement.

The fact is of the utmost importance; for public opinion is the ultimate source of sanctions of all public acts, the highest court of appeal before which every executive act performed in the name of the nation must justify itself. If public opinion were merely the immediate expression of the collective feelings and judgments of an unorganised mass of men, its verdicts would be (as we have seen) inferior to those of the average individuals, whereas, as a matter of fact, its expressions are much superior to those of the average individuals.

The influence of public opinion is especially clear and interesting in its relations to law. In this country it is not made by law, but makes law. Where law is imposed and long maintained by the authority of despotic power, it will of course mould public opinion; but, in any progressive highly organised nation, law and the lawyers are always one or two or more generations behind public opinion. The most progressive body of law formally embodies the public opinion of past generations rather than of the generation living at the time.

The fact of the superiority of public opinion is generally admitted and various explanations are current, for the most part very vague and incomplete. There is the mystical explanation embodied in the dictum that the voice of the people is the voice of God. A rather less vague explanation is that adopted by Mr Beattie Crozier[101] (among others). It is said that the average man carries within him a germ of an ideal of justice and right, and that he applies this to the criticism or approval of the actions of other men; though he often fails to apply it to his own actions, because, where his own interests are concerned, he is apt to be the sport of purely egoistic impulses.

But this explanation is only partially true. It represents the average man as more hypocritical than he really is, and as falling farther below the standards he acknowledges than he actually does fall. It leaves unexplained the fact that he has this sentiment for an ideal of justice and right; and it proceeds on a false assumption as to the nature of the problem, in assuming that men judge the actions of other men by higher standards than those which they apply to their own conduct; whereas this is by no means generally true.

Is it, then, that superior abilities, which enable a man to gain prestige and to impress his ideas and sentiments upon his fellow men and so to influence public opinion, are commonly combined with a natural superiority of moral sentiment, with a love of right and a hatred of injustice? There may be some degree of such natural correlation of superior abilities with superior moral qualities, but the supposition seems very doubtful; and certainly, if it exists, it is not sufficient to account for the elevation of public opinion. We frequently see consummate ability combined with most questionable moral sentiments, as in Napoleon and many other historic personages.

The true explanation is, I submit, to be found in the basal fact that the moral sentiments are essentially altruistic, while the immoral and non-moral sentiments are in the main self-regarding[102]. Hence, the person who has great abilities but is lacking in moral sentiments and altruism applies his abilities to secure his personal satisfactions and aggrandisement; and, in so far as he aims at affecting the minds of others, he tries only to secure their obedience to his commands and suggestions, to inspire them with deference, admiration, fear and awe, and to evoke an outward display of these feelings. But, as to the ideas and sentiments of the people in general, save in so far as they affect his own gratification, he cares nothing. Accordingly we never find great abilities deliberately, consistently and directly applied to the degradation of public opinion and morals, save occasionally in relation to some particular end. And we find few or no great works of literature and art deliberately aiming at such degradation.

But with those persons in whom great abilities are naturally combined with moral disposition the case is very different. The moral disposition is essentially altruistic; it is concerned for the welfare of others, of men in general. Hence such a man deliberately applies his abilities to influence the minds of others. The exertion of such influence is for him an end in itself. He seeks and finds his chief satisfaction in exerting an influence, as wide and deep as possible, over the minds of men; not merely in evoking fear or admiration of himself, but in inspiring in them the same elevated sentiments and sympathies which he finds within himself.

For this reason such men as G. F. Watts, Carlyle and Ruskin exert a much greater and more widespread and lasting influence over the minds of men than do equally able men who are devoid of moral disposition; for the former make the exertion of this influence their chief end, while the others care not at all about the state of public opinion and the minds of the mass. Still less does the non-moral man of great ability strive with all his powers to make others act upon base motives like his own and to degrade their sentiments; rather, he sees that he can better accomplish his selfish ends if other men are unlike himself and are governed by altruistic sentiments; and he sees also that he can better attain his ends if he does lip-service to altruistic ideals; and he is, therefore, apt to exert whatever direct influence he has over the sentiments of men in the same direction as the moral leaders, praising the same actions, upholding in words the same ideals. In this way the men of great abilities, but of immoral or non-moral character, actually aid the moral leaders to some extent in their work; whereas under no conditions is the relation reversed; the moral leaders never praise or acquiesce in bad actions, but always denounce them and use their influence against them.

It follows that, in a well organised nation, public opinion, which is formed and maintained so largely by the influence of leading personalities, will usually be more in conformity with the sentiments of the best men than of the average man, will be above rather than below private opinion. For, if the bad and the good men of exceptional powers were equal in numbers and capacity, the sum of their influences tending directly to exalt public opinion would be enormously greater than the sum of their influences tending to degrade it; and, as a matter of fact, the influence for good of a few altruistic leaders is able to outweigh the degrading influences of a much larger number of purely selfish men of equally great capacities, and is able to maintain a high standard of public opinion.

We have distinguished a formal and an informal organisation of the national deliberative processes, the latter expressing itself as public opinion. These two organisations co-exist and are, of course, not altogether independent of one another; yet they may be to a considerable extent independent; though the more intimate the functional relations and the greater the harmony between them, the healthier will be the national life.

We may note in passing an interesting difference in respect to organisation of the national mind between the English and the American peoples, a difference which illustrates this relative independence of the formal and informal organisations.

In England both the formal and informal organisations have achieved a pretty good level; in both cases the best minds are enabled to exert and have long exerted a dominant influence; and the interaction between the two organisations is very intimate. But in America, while the informal organisation expressed in public opinion seems to be very highly developed, the formal organisation is much inferior; it has not yet such traditions as give the greatest influence to the best minds and embody the effects of their influence. And the better Americans tend to value lightly the formal organisation, to take no part in the working of it, deliberately to ignore it, and to rely rather upon public opinion to repress any evils when they are in danger of reaching an intolerable development.

Both in the formal organisation of the national mind, which is the parliamentary or other national assembly, and in the informal organisation which is public opinion, we see, then, that (in the nation of higher civilisation at least) organisation results in a raising of the collective mental process above the level of the average minds, because it gives a predominant influence to the best minds who form and maintain the traditions, especially the moral traditions; and these press upon the minds of all members of the community from their earliest years, moulding them more or less into conformity with themselves, fostering the better, repressing the purely egoistic, tendencies.

And the ideal organisation after which we ought to strive, is that which would give the greatest possible influence of this sort to the best minds, an influence which consists not in merely organising and directing the energies of the people in the manner most effective for material or even scientific progress, as in modern Germany; but one which, by moulding the sentiments and guiding the reasoning of the people in all matters, public and private alike, secures their consent and agreement and the co-operation of their wills in all affairs of national importance.

When such organisation is in any degree attained and a more or less consistent system of national traditions is embodied in the political, religious, literary, and scientific culture, which moulds in some degree the minds of all men, the national mind clearly becomes, as we said in an earlier chapter, a system of interacting mental forces which are not merely tendencies of the living members of the nation, but are also, in an even greater degree, the ideas and tendencies of the dead; and we see also that in such a people the national consciousness is most truly embodied, not in the minds of the average men, but in the minds of the best men of the time.

The term ‘public opinion’ is sometimes, perhaps generally, used in a looser and wider sense than the meaning implied in the foregoing pages. It is used in the looser sense by President Lowell in his Public Opinion and Popular Government. By ‘public opinion’ he seems to mean simply the algebraic sum or balance of individual opinions; he writes “the opinion of the whole people is only the collected opinions of all the persons therein[103].” In accordance with this view, he regards representative institutions as merely one means by which this sum of opinions may be collected and recorded. And he seems to be prepared to regard the ‘referendum’ or the ‘initiative’ in any of their forms, or other methods of direct legislation, as equally good methods, if only all individuals would take the trouble to register their votes upon every question proposed to them. He is aware, of course, that this can hardly be expected of persons who have other interests and occupations than the purely political, and that the direct methods are therefore impracticable as general methods of legislation. If it were true that representative institutions do and should merely collect and record the individual opinions of all members of the public, then it is obvious that each representative should be merely a delegate sent to record the votes of the majority of his constituents. Whereas, if representative institutions should, and in various degrees do, constitute the formal deliberative organisation of the national mind, through which national deliberation and judgment are raised to a higher plane than that of a mere crowd, it follows that the representative should exert his own powers of reasoning and judgment, aided by his special knowledge and equipment, by the special sources of information that he enjoys, in the light of the discussions in which he takes part, and influenced by all those political traditions whose force he experiences in exceptional fulness by reason of his priviledged position. President Lowell, in discussing the functions of the representative, does not decide in favour of the former view, as consistency should perhaps lead him to do; thereby showing that he is not wholly committed to the individualist view. He discusses the question whether the member of Parliament or Congress should regard himself as representing the interests of his constituents alone, or as concerned primarily and chiefly with the interests of the whole people; and he rightly inclines to the latter view. This is not quite the same distinction as that which is insisted upon in these pages. Even if each representative were concerned only for the welfare of the nation as a whole, yet so long as he regarded it as his sole function to vote as he believes the majority of the citizens would vote in any process of direct legislation, he would fall short of the highest duty which is laid upon him by his position—namely, not merely that of recording the opinion of the majority, but that of taking part in the organised deliberative activities of the national mind by which it arrives at judgments and decisions of a higher order than any purely individual, or algebraic sum of individual, judgments and decisions[104].

Public opinion, in the sense in which I have used the words in this chapter (which seems to me the only proper use of them) is, then, not a mere sum of individual opinions upon any particular question; it is rather the expression of that tone or attitude of mind which prevails throughout the nation and owes its quality far more to the influence of the dead than of the living, being the expression of the moral sentiments that are firmly and traditionally established in the mind of the people, and established more effectively and in more refined forms in the minds of the leaders of public opinion than in the average citizen. This tone of the national mind enables it to arrive at just judgments on questions of right and wrong, of duty and honour and public desert; though it may have little bearing upon such practical questions as bimetallism, tariff reform, or railway legislation. The current use of the term, in this country at least, does, I think, recognise that public opinion properly applies only to the sphere of moral judgments and can and should have no bearing upon the practical details of legislation. Public opinion is, both in its development and in its operations, essentially collective; it is essentially the work of the group mind. Its accepted standards of value are slowly built up under the influence of the moral leaders of past ages; and, in the application of those standards to any particular question, the influence of the moral leaders of the time makes itself felt. I have kept in mind in the foregoing pages the public opinion of the nation; but every community, every association, every enduring group has its own public opinion, which, though it is influenced by, and indeed is, as it were, a branch of, the main stem of national public opinion and is therefore of the same fibre and texture, has nevertheless its own peculiar tone and quality, especially in regard to the moral questions with which each group is specially concerned.

PART III

In an earlier chapter, in connexion with the question of the importance of homogeneity of mental qualities as a condition of the existence of the national mind, I argued that race has really considerable influence in moulding the type of national mind. I recognized that differences of innate qualities between races, at any rate between allied subraces, are not great, and that they can be, and generally are, almost completely over-ridden and obscured in each individual by the moulding power of the social environment in which he grows up; but I urged that these racial qualities are very persistent, and that they exert a slight but constant pressure or bias upon the development of all that constitutes social environment, upon the forms of institutions, customs, traditions, and beliefs of every kind, so that the effect of such slight but constant bias accumulates from generation to generation, and in the long run exerts an immense influence.

One way of treating the part played by the racial mental qualities in the development of the national mind would be to attempt to define the racial or innate peculiarities of the peoples existing at the present time, and to assume that these peculiarities were produced in the remote past, before the formation of nations began, and that they have persisted unchanged throughout the period of the development of nations. Something of this sort was proposed by Walter Bagehot in his Physics and Politics. He distinguished in the development of peoples two great periods—on the one hand the race-making period, which roughly corresponds to the whole prehistoric period, and on the other hand the nation-making period, which roughly corresponds to the historic period. This distinction has undoubtedly a certain validity.

It seems probable that man was evolved from his prehuman ancestry as a single stock, probably a stock somewhat widely distributed in the heart of the Eurasian continent, or possibly in Africa according to the recent view of some authors, or in the area which is now the Indian Ocean. If this be true, it follows that the differentiation of the mental and physical qualities of the principal human races, the differentiation of the white and black and yellow and brown races, as well as of the chief subraces, such as the Semitic, the races of Europe—the Homo Europaeus, Alpinus and Mediterraneus—was the work of the immensely prolonged prehistoric period. For these races and subraces, as we now know them, seem to have been in existence and to have had recognisably and substantially the same leading qualities, both mental and physical, that they now have, before the beginning of the historic period.

The racial differentiation during the prehistoric period must have been much greater than during the historic period; and this was not only because the former period was immensely longer, but also because, in all probability, the rate of racial change has been on the whole slower in the historic period.

The differentiation of racial types in the prehistoric period must have been in the main the work of differences of physical environment, operating directly by way of selection, by way of the adaptation of each race to its environment through the extermination of the strains least suited to exist under those physical conditions. But this process, this direct moulding of racial types by physical environment, must have been well nigh arrested as soon as nations began to form. For the formation of nations implies the beginning of civilisation; and civilisation very largely consists in the capacity of a people to subdue their physical environment, or at least to adapt the physical environment to men’s needs to a degree that renders them far less the sport of it than was primitive man; it consists, in short, in replacing man’s natural environment by an artificial environment largely of his own choice and creation.

In a second and perhaps even more important way, the formation of nations with the development of civilisation modified and weakened the moulding influence of the physical environment; namely, it introduced social co-operation in an ever increasing degree, so that the perpetual struggle of individuals and of small family groups with one another and with nature was replaced by a co-operative struggle of large communities against the physical environment and with one another. And in this process those members of each community who, by reason of weakness, general incapacity, or other peculiarity, would have been liable to be eliminated under primitive conditions became shielded in an ever increasing degree by the powers of the stronger and more capable against the selective power of nature and against individual human forces. And, although within the community the rivalry of individuals and families still went on, it was no longer so much a direct struggle for existence, but rather became more and more a struggle for position in the social scale; and failure in the struggle no longer necessarily meant death, or even incapacity to leave an average number of descendants. That is to say, primitive man’s struggle for existence against the forces of nature and against his fellow men, which made for racial evolution and differentiation through survival of those fittest to cope with various environments, tended to be replaced by a struggle which no longer made for racial evolution towards a higher type, and which may even have made for race-deterioration, at the same time that civilisation and national organisation continued to progress.

We may, then, recognise a certain truth in Bagehot’s distinction of two great periods, the race-making and the nation-making periods. Nevertheless, it would not be satisfactory to follow the course suggested above and simply assume certain racial characters as given fixed data without further consideration. For, firstly, it is interesting and perhaps not altogether unprofitable to indulge in speculations on the race-making processes of the prehistoric period. Secondly, although it seems likely that racial changes have been in the main slower and on the whole relatively slight in the historic period, yet they have not been altogether lacking; and, in proportion to their magnitude, such changes as have occurred have been of great importance for national life; and changes of this kind are still playing their part in shaping the destinies of nations. Possible racial changes of mental qualities must therefore be considered, when we seek to give a general account of the conditions of the development of nations.

On the other hand, we must reject root and branch the crude idea, which has a certain popular currency, that the development of civilisation and of nations implies a parallel evolution of individual minds. That idea we have already touched upon and rejected in a previous chapter, where we arrived at the conclusion that there is no reason to suppose the present civilised peoples to be on the whole innately superior to their barbaric ancestors.

If we use the word ‘tradition’ in the widest possible sense to denote all the intellectual and moral gains of past generations, in so far as they are not innate but are handed on from one generation to another by the personal intercourse of the younger with the older generation, and if we allow the notion of tradition to include all the institutions and customs that are passed on from generation to generation, then we may class all the changes of a people that constitute the evolution of a national character under the two heads: evolution of innate qualities and evolution of traditions. Using the word ‘tradition’ in the wide sense just now indicated, the traditions of a people may be said to include the recognised social organisation of the whole people into classes, castes, clans, phratries, or groups of any kind, whose relations to one another and whose place in the national system are determined by law, custom and conventions of various kinds. This part of the total tradition is relatively independent of the rest, and we may usefully distinguish the development of such social organisation as social evolution—giving to the term this restricted and definite meaning—and we may set it alongside the other two conceptions as of co-ordinate value.

If we thus set apart for consideration under a distinct head the evolution of social organisation, the rest of the body of national traditions may be said to constitute the civilisation of a people. For the civilisation of a people at any time is essentially the sum of the moral and intellectual traditions that are living and operative among them at that particular time. We are apt in a loose way to consider the civilisation of a people to consist in its material evidences; but it is only in so far as these material evidences, the buildings, industries, arts, products, machinery, and so forth, are the expression and outcome of its mental state that they are in any degree a measure of its civilisation. We may realize this most clearly by considering the case of a people on which the material products of civilisation have been impressed from without. Thus the peasants of India live amongst, and make use of, and benefit materially by, the railways and irrigation works created by their British rulers, and are protected from invasion and from internal anarchy by the British military organisation and equipment; and they play a subordinate though essential part in the creation and maintenance of all these material evidences of civilisation. But these material evidences are not the expression of the mental state of the peoples of India, and form no true part of their civilisation; and, in fact, they affect their civilisation astonishingly little; although if these products of a higher civilisation should be maintained for a long period of time they would, no doubt, produce changes of their civilisation, probably tending in some degree to assimilate their mental state to that of Western Europe.

We may, then, with advantage distinguish between the social organisation and the civilisation of a people. In doing so we are of course making an effort of abstraction, which, though it results in an artificial separation of things intimately related, is nevertheless useful and therefore justifiable. In a similar way the progress of civilisation may be distinguished from social evolution. Social evolution is profoundly affected by the progress of civilisation, and in turn reacts powerfully upon it; for any given social organisation may greatly favour or obstruct the further progress of civilisation. There could have been no considerable advance of civilisation without the evolution of some social organisation; but that the two things are distinct is clear, when we reflect that there may be a very complex social organisation, implying a long course of social evolution, among a people that has hardly the rudiments of civilisation. Extreme instances of social organisation in the absence of civilisation are afforded by some animal societies—for example, societies of ants, bees, and wasps. Among peoples, the native tribes of Australia illustrate the fact most forcibly. They are at the very bottom of the scale of civilisation; yet it has been discovered that they have a complex and well-defined social organisation, which can only have been achieved by a long course of social evolution. These people are divided into totem clans, which clans are grouped in phratries, each individual being born, according to well recognised rules, into a clan of which he remains a life-long member; and his membership in the clan and phratry involves certain well-defined rights and obligations, and well-defined relations to other persons, especially as regards marriage; and these rights, obligations and relations are recognised and rigidly maintained throughout immense areas.

On the other hand, although no people has attained any considerable degree of civilisation without considerable social organisation, nevertheless we can at least imagine a people continuing to enjoy a high civilisation, practising and enjoying much of the arts, sciences, philosophy, and literature, which we regard as the essentials of civilisation, yet retaining a bare minimum of social organisation. And this state of affairs is not only conceivable, but is held up as a practicable ideal by philosophical anarchists such as Tolstoi and Kropotkin; and it is, I think, true to say that the American nation presents an approximation to this condition.

Again, a very high state of civilisation may co-exist with a relatively primitive social organisation. Thus the civilisation of Athens in the classical age was equal to, or even superior to, our own in many respects; yet the social organisation was very much less highly evolved. It had hardly emerged from the barbaric patriarchal condition, and had at its foundation a cruel system of slavery[105]; and it had also another great point of inferiority—namely, the very restricted number of persons included in the social system. These deficiencies, this rudimentary character, of its social organisation was the principal cause of the instability and brief endurance of that brilliant civilisation.

We have so far distinguished three principal factors or groups of factors in the evolution of national mind and character: (1) Evolution of innate or racial qualities: (2) Development of civilisation: (3) Social evolution, or the development of social organisation.

Now the first two of these we may with advantage divide under two parallel heads, the heads of intellectual and moral development. No doubt, the intellectual and the moral endowment of a people continually react on each other; and many of the manifestations of the national mind are jointly determined by the intelligence and the morality of a people; especially perhaps is this true of their religion and their art. Nevertheless, it is clear that we can distinguish pretty sharply between the intellectual and the moral traditions of a people; and that these may vary independently of one another to a great extent. A rich and full intellectual tradition may go with a moral tradition of very low level, as in the Italian civilisation of the renascence; and a very high moral tradition with a relative poverty of the intellectual, as in the early days of the puritan settlements of New England.

The same distinction between the intellectual and the moral level is harder to draw in the case of the racial qualities of a people, but it undoubtedly exists and is valid in principle, no matter how difficult in practice to deal with.

We have, then, to distinguish five classes of factors, five heads under which all the factors which determine the evolution of national character may be distributed. They are

Every nation that has advanced from a low level to a higher level of national life has done so in virtue of development or progress in one or more of these respects. And a principal part of our task, in considering the evolution of national mind and character, is to assign to each of these its due importance and its proper place in the whole complex development.

The distinction between the racial and the traditional level of a people is too often ignored; chiefly, perhaps, for the reason that it has usually been assumed that whatever is traditional becomes innate and racial through use. Since in recent years it has been shown that this assumption is very questionable, a number of authors have recognised the importance of the distinction as regards the intellectual qualities of a people; but, as regards the moral qualities, the distinction is still very generally overlooked.

The neglect of these distinctions between the innate and the traditional has in great measure vitiated much of the keen dispute that has been waged over the question whether the progress of civilisation depends primarily on intellectual or on moral advance. For example, T. H. Buckle and Benjamin Kidd agreed in recognising clearly the distinction between the innate and the traditional intellectual status of a people; and they agreed in maintaining that we have no reason to believe that in the historic period any people has made any considerable advance in innate intellectual capacity; and that any such advance, if there has been any, has not been a principal factor in the progress of civilisation. But they differed extremely in that Buckle maintained that the primary cause of all progress of national life is the improvement of its intellectual tradition, that is, increase in the quantity and the worth of its stock of knowledge and accepted beliefs, and improvements in methods of intellectual operation; and he held that improvements of morals and of social organisation have been secondary results of these intellectual gains. Kidd, on the other hand[106], maintained that the progress of European civilisation has been primarily due to an improvement of the morality of peoples; that this has led to improvement of social organisation; and that this in turn has been the essential condition of the progress of the intellectual tradition, because it has secured a stable social environment, a security of life, a free field for the exercise of intellectual powers; in the absence of which conditions the intellectual powers of a nation cannot effectively organise themselves and apply themselves to the understanding of man and nature, or to securing the traditional perpetuation of the gains which they may sporadically achieve. We have to examine these views and try to determine what truth they contain, and to show that they are not wholly opposed but can in some measure be combined.

I propose to make first a very brief critical survey of some of the most notable attempts that have been made to account for racial qualities, and I shall try to supplement and harmonise these as far as possible. We may with advantage consider at the outset the race-making period, and afterwards go on to consider changes of racial qualities in the historic period. This Part of the book is necessarily somewhat speculative, but its interest and importance for our main topic may justify its inclusion.

CHAPTER XV

THE RACE-MAKING PERIOD

Let us now see what can be said about the process of racial differentiation which, as we saw in the foregoing chapter, was in its main features accomplished in the prehistoric or race-making period. We cannot hope to reach many positive conclusions, but rather merely to discuss certain possibilities and probabilities in regard to the main factors of the differentiation of racial mental types.

I would point out at once that the answer to be given to the question—Are acquired qualities transmitted? Are the effects of use inherited? is all important for our topic. I do not propose to discuss that difficult question now. I will merely say that the present state of biological science makes it seem doubtful whether such inheritance takes place, and that, although the question remains open, we are not justified in assuming an affirmative answer; that, therefore, we must not be satisfied with any explanation of racial and national characteristics based upon this assumption; and in the following discussion I shall provisionally assume the truth of the Neo-Darwinian principle that acquired modifications are not transmitted.

Assuming, as we must, that all peoples are descended from some one original stock, the problem is—Can anything be said of the conditions which have determined the differentiation of races of different mental constitutions, of the development of racial qualities which, having become relatively fixed, have led to the evolution of different types of national organisation and culture? And especially we have to consider the conditions which have produced, and may still produce in the future, the qualities that make for the progress of nations.

We must suppose a certain social organisation to have obtained among that primitive human stock from which all races have been evolved, probably an organisation in small groups based on the family under the rule and leadership of a patriarch.

It is possible that considerable divergences of social organisation may have taken place, without any advance towards civilisation; such divergences of social organisation must have tended to divert the course of mental evolution along various lines; but they must themselves have had their causes; they cannot in themselves be the ultimate causes of divergence of racial mental types.

Such ultimate causes of the differentiation of mental qualities must have been of two orders only, so far as I can see: (1) differences of physical environment; (2) spontaneous variations in different directions of the innate mental qualities of individuals, especially of the more gifted and energetic individuals of each people.

In the mental evolution of animals these two factors are not distinguishable. We may say that the main and perhaps the sole condition of their evolution is the selection by the physical environment of spontaneous favourable variations and mutations of innate mental qualities; if we include under the term physical environment of the species all the other animal and vegetable species of its habitat. For it is only by its selective influence upon individual variations that physical environment can determine differentiation of races.

But with man the case is different; spontaneous variation not only provides the new qualities which, by determining the survival of the individual in his struggle for existence with the physical environment, secure their own perpetuation by transmission to the after coming generations. The new qualities determine mental evolution in another manner, by a mode of operation which is almost completely absent in animal evolution; namely, the spontaneous variations create a social environment which profoundly modifies the influence of the physical environment, and itself becomes a principal factor in the determination of the trend of racial evolution.

Man is distinguished from the animals above all things by his power of learning. Whereas the behaviour of animals, even of the higher ones, consists almost entirely of purely instinctive actions, innate modes of response to a limited number of situations; man has an indefinitely great capacity for acquiring new modes of response, and so of adapting himself in new and more complex ways to an almost indefinite variety of situations. And his new mental acquisitions are not made only by the slow process of adaptation in the light of his own individual experience of the consequences of behaviour of this and that kind; as are most of the few acquisitions of the animals. By far the greater part of the mental stock-in-trade by which his behaviour is guided is acquired from his fellow men; it represents the accumulated experience of all the foregoing generations of his race and nation. Man’s life in society, together with the great plasticity of his mind, its great capacity for new adaptations, secures him this enormous advantage; the two things are necessarily correlated. Without the plasticity of mind, his life in society would benefit him relatively little. Many animals that lead a social life in large herds or flocks are not superior, but rather inferior, in mental power to animals that lead a more solitary life; and indeed this seems to be generally true, as we see on comparing generally the herbivorous gregarious animals with the solitary carnivores that prey upon them. The social life of such animals, rendering individual intelligence less necessary for protection and escape from danger, tends actually against mental development.

On the other hand, man’s great plastic brain would be of comparatively little use to him if he lived a solitary unsocial life. His great brain is there to enable him to assimilate and make use of the accumulated experience, the sum of knowledge and morality, which is traditional in the society into which he is born a member; that is to say, the development of social life, which depended so much upon language and for the forwarding of which language came into existence, must have gone hand in hand with the development of the great brain, which enables full advantage to be secured from social co-operation and which, especially, renders possible the accumulation of knowledge, belief, and traditional sentiment.

Now this traditional stock of knowledge and morality has been very slowly accumulated, bit by bit; and every bit, every least new addition to it, has been a difficult acquisition, due in the first instance to some spontaneous variation of some individual’s mental structure from the ancestral type of mental structure. That is to say, throughout the evolution of civilisation, progress of every kind, increase of knowledge or improvement of morality, has been due to the birth of more or less exceptional individuals, individuals varying ever so slightly from the ancestral type and capable, owing to this variation, of making some new and original adaptation of action, or of perceiving some previously undiscovered relation between things.

These new acquisitions, first made by individuals, are, if true or useful, sooner or later imitated or accepted by the society of which the original-minded individual is a member, and then, becoming incorporated in the traditional stock of knowledge and morality, are thereby placed at the service of all members of that society.

Thus favourable spontaneous variations do not, as with the animals, render possible mental evolution merely by conducing to the survival of, and the perpetuation of the qualities of, those individuals in whom the variations occur. They may do this, or they may not; but, in addition and more importantly, they contribute to the stock of traditional knowledge and morality, and so raise the social group as a whole in the scale of civilisation; they render it more capable of successfully contending against other groups and against the adverse influence of the physical environment; and they promote the solidarity of the group by adding to its stock of common tradition; thus the acquisitions of each member benefit the group as a whole and all its members, quite apart from any philanthropic purpose or intention of producing such a result.

The achievement of this unconscious undesigned solidarity of human societies is one of two great steps in the evolution of the human race by which the process is rendered very different from, and is raised to a higher plane than, the mental evolution of the animal world. The second and still more important step is one which is only just beginning to be achieved in the present age; I shall have to touch on it in a later chapter.

The original or primary divergence of mental type between any two peoples must, then, have been due to these fundamental causes—namely, differences of physical environment and spontaneous variations of mental structure, the latter adding to the traditional stock of knowledge and belief, of moral precepts and sentiments.

Intellectual or moral divergence produced by these two primary causes would tend to determine the course of social evolution along different lines and so to produce different types of social organisation. And different social organisations thus produced would then react upon the moral and intellectual life of the people to produce further divergence; for example, one type of social organisation determined by physical environment, say a well developed patriarchal system, may have made for progress of intellect and morals; another, say a matriarchal organisation, or one based on communal marriage, may have tended to produce stagnation.

As social evolution proceeded and brought about more extensive and more complex forms of social organisation, which included, within any one society or group, larger numbers of individuals in more effective forms of association, social organisation must have assumed a constantly increasing importance as a condition of mental evolution relatively to all other factors, especially as compared with the influence of physical environment; until, in the complex societies of the present time, it has an altogether predominant importance. This truth is concisely stated in the old dictum that “in the infancy of nations men shape the State; in their maturity the State shapes the men.” Accordingly, in considering the mental evolution of peoples we must never lose sight of the influence of social organisation. It follows that the conditions of the mental evolution of man are immensely more complex than those of the mental evolution of animals.

We must recognise not only the selection, through survival in the struggle for existence, of new mental qualities arising as spontaneous variations of individual mental structure. This, which is the only, or almost the only, process at work in the mental evolution of animals, is immensely complicated and overshadowed in importance by two processes. The first is the accumulation of knowledge and morality in traditional forms. The traditional accumulation, which so far outweighs the mental equipment possible to any individual isolated from an old society, not only constitutes in itself a most important evolutionary product, but it modifies profoundly the conditions of evolution of the individual innate qualities of mind; for example, the greater and more valuable the stock of traditional knowledge and morality becomes, the more does fitness to survive consist in the capacity to assimilate this knowledge and to conform to these higher moral precepts, the less does it consist in the purely individualistic qualities, such as quickness of eye and ear, fleetness of foot, or strength and skill of hand. Secondly, the processes of natural selection are complicated by the social evolution, which tends progressively to abolish the struggle for existence between individuals, and to replace it by a struggle between groups; in which struggle success is determined not only by the qualities of individuals, but also very largely by the social organisation and by the traditional knowledge and morality of the groups.

Each variety of the human species, each race considered as a succession of individuals having certain innate mental qualities, has been evolved, then, not merely under the influence of the physical environment, like the animal species, but also and to an ever increasing extent under the influence of the social environment. The social environment we regard as consisting of two parts; namely, the social organisation and the body of social tradition; for these, though interdependent and constantly interacting, may yet with advantage be kept apart in thought. We must, then, bear constantly in mind the fact that man creates for himself an environment which becomes ever more complex and influential, overshadowing more and more in importance the physical environment.

Here I would revert to some points of the analogy, drawn in Chapter X, between the mind of a nation and that of an individual. The mind of an individual human being develops by accumulating the results of his experience; and so does that of a people. In this respect the analogy holds good. But the development possible to an individual is strictly limited in two ways. First, by the short duration of the material basis of his mental life; secondly by the extent of his innate capacities. Neither of these limitations applies to the national mind. Its material basis is in principle immortal, because its individual components may be incessantly renewed; and its development has no limit set to it by its innate capacities, because these may be indefinitely extended and improved. In these respects the national mind resembles the species rather than the individual.

The development of the national mind, and of the minds of those who share in the mental life of the nation, thus combines the methods and advantages of the development of individuals and of species, methods which are essentially different. The result is that the mental development of man, since his social life began, has been radically different from that of the animals; it has been a social process; it has been the evolution of peoples rather than of individuals. The evolution of man as an individual has been wholly subordinated to that of peoples; and it is incapable of being understood or profitably considered apart from the development of the group mind.

Assuming, as we must, that all the races of men are derived from a common stock, it is obvious, I think, that the first differentiation of racial types was determined almost exclusively by differences of physical environment, and that the other conditions only very slowly developed and did not assume their predominant importance until the time which may be roughly defined as the beginning of the historic or nation-making period.

Physical environment affects the mental qualities of a people in three ways: firstly, it directly influences the minds of each generation; secondly, it moulds the mental constitution by natural selection, adapting the race to itself; thirdly, it exerts indirect influence by determining the occupations and modes of life and, through these, the social organisation of a people. We may consider these three modes of influence in turn.

There has been much speculation on the direct influence of the physical environment in moulding the mental type of a people, but little or nothing can be said to be established.

There is a fair concensus of opinion to the effect that what we may call climate exerts an important influence. In climate the two factors recognised as of chief importance are temperature and moisture. High temperature combined with moisture certainly tends to depress the vital activity of Europeans and to render them indolent, indisposed to exertion of any kind. On the other hand, high temperature combined with dryness of the atmosphere seems to have the effect of rendering men but little disposed to continuous activity, and yet capable of great efforts; it tends to produce a violent spasmodic activity. A cold climate seems to dispose towards sustained activity and, when combined with much moisture, to a certain slowness.

These effects, which we ourselves experience and which we see produced upon other individuals on passing from one climate to another, we seem to see impressed upon many of the races which have long been subjected to these climates; for example, the slow and lazy Malays have long occupied the hottest moistest region of the earth. The Arabs and the fiery Sikhs may be held to illustrate the effect of dry heat. The Englishman and the Dutchman seem to show the effects of a moist cool climate, a certain sluggishness embodied with great energy and perseverance.

In these and other cases, in which the innate temperament of a people corresponds to the effects directly induced by their climate, it seems natural to suppose that the innate temperament has been produced by the transmission and accumulation from generation to generation of the direct effects of the climate. The assumption is so natural that it has been made by almost every writer who has dealt with the question. And these instances of conformity of the temperament of peoples to the direct effects of climate are sometimes offered as being among the most striking evidences of the reality of hereditary transmission of acquired qualities; and the argument is reinforced by instances of what seem to be similar results produced by climate on physical types. Thus, it is said that in North America a race characterised by a new specific combination of mental and physical qualities is being rapidly formed; and it seems to be well established that long slender hands are among these features; for in Paris a specially long slender glove is made every year in large quantities for the American market. Again, we see apparently a change of physical type in the white inhabitants of Australia. They seem to be becoming taller and more slender ‘cornstalks’; and this is commonly regarded as the direct effect of climate.

Now, that a new race or subrace with a specific combination of qualities should be forming in America is certainly to be expected from the fact that the intimate blending of a number of European stocks has been going on for some generations. But what gives special support to the assumption that these new qualities are the direct effects of climate is that these qualities, the physical at least, seem to be approximations to the type of the Red Indians, the aboriginal inhabitants. And, it is said, this approximation of type can only be due to hereditary accumulation of the direct effects of the climate on individuals.

Another way in which climate has been held to modify racial mental qualities by direct action is through the senses, especially the eye. M. Boutmy, in his book on the English people makes great play with this principle[107]. He points out that the thick hazy state of the air, so common in our islands, renders vague and dull all outlines and colours, so that the eye does not receive that wealth of well-defined hues and forms which give so great a charm to some more sunny lands, such as the Mediterranean coast lands. Hence, he says, the senses become or remain relatively dull, and the sense-perceptions slow and relatively indiscriminating. Such relative deficiency of aesthetic variety and richness in the appearance of the outer world produces secondarily a further and deeper modification of mental type. In the lands where nature surrounds man with an endless variety of rich and pleasing scenes, he can find sufficient satisfaction in mere contemplation of the outer world; and, when he takes to art production, he tends merely to reproduce in more or less idealised forms the objects and scenes he finds around him; his art tends to be essentially objective. On the other hand, in the dull northern climes, man has not ever at hand these sources of satisfaction in the mere contemplation of the outer world; consequently he is driven back upon his own nature, to find his satisfactions in a ceaseless activity of mind and body, but chiefly of the latter. Hence, races so situated are characterised by great bodily activity and their art and literature are essentially subjective. The thick air, the monotony of vague form and colour, drive the mind to reflection upon itself; and in art the objects of nature serve merely as symbols by aid of which the mind seeks to express its own broodings. “The painter paints with the intentions of the poet, the poet describes or sings with the motives of the psychologist or moralist. All the literature of imagination of the English shows us the internal reacting incessantly upon the external with a singular power of transfiguration and interpretation[108].” Hence also poetry is the privilege of a few rare spirits and is for them the product of deep reflection, not a simple lyrical expression in which all can equally share.

It is certainly true that climate tends to produce these effects by its direct action on individuals. Anyone who has lived for a time in the southern climes must have noted these effects upon himself. But we have no proof that the effects of climate are directly inherited. It suffices to suppose that the direct effects are imposed afresh by the climate on the minds of each generation. This view is borne out by the fact that two races may live for many generations in the same climate and yet remain very different in temperament in these respects; for example the Irish climate is very similar to the English, perhaps even more misty and damp; yet the Irish have much more wit and liveliness than the English. And in every case in which adaptation to physical environment has clearly become innate or racial, an explanation can be suggested in terms of selection of spontaneous variations, or of crossing of races. Thus, the approximation of the American people to the type of the aboriginals, if it is actual, and some observers deny it, may well be due to the small infusion of the native blood which has admittedly taken place. It may well be that certain qualities of the Red Indian, for example, the straight dark hair and prominent cheek bones, are what the biologists call ‘dominant characters’ when the Indian is crossed with the European; that is, qualities which always assert themselves in the offspring, to the exclusion of the corresponding quality of the other race involved in the cross. If that is so, a very small proportion of Indian blood would suffice to make these features very common throughout the population of America. As an exception to the supposed law of direct hereditary adaptation to climate take the colour of the skin. The black negroes live in the hot moist regions of Africa, and it has been said that pigmentation is the hereditary effect of a hot moist climate. But there are men of a different race who have long lived in an equally hot and moist climate, but who do not show this effect—namely, tribes in the heart of Borneo, right under the equator, whose skins are hardly darker than the average English skins and less dark than the Southern Europeans’. Take again the indolence of the peoples of warm hot climates and the energy of peoples of colder climates. These certainly seem to be racial qualities; but their distribution is adequately explained by the indirect effect of physical environment exerted by way of natural selection; and these differences of energy afford the best illustration of such indirect action of physical environment in determining racial mental qualities.