Anthropology by Robert Ranulph Marett (top ten books to read txt) 📕

upon the subject of colour. Now-a-days civilized peoples, as well as many of the ruder races that the former govern, wear clothes. In other words they have dodged the sun, by developing, with the aid of mind, a complex society that includes the makers of white drill suits and solar helmets. But, under such conditions, the colour of one's skin becomes more or less of a luxury. Protective pigment, at any rate now-a-days, counts for little as compared with capacity for social service. Colour, in short, is rapidly losing its vital function. Will it therefore tend to disappear? In the long run, it would seem—perhaps only in the very long run—it will become dissociated from that general fitness to survive under particular climatic conditions of which it was once the innate mark. Be this as it may, race-prejudice, that is so largely founded on sheer considerations of colour, is bound to decay, if and when the races of darker colour succeed in displaying, on the average, such qualities of mind as will enable them to compete with the whites on equal terms, in a world which is coming more and more to include all climates.

Thus we are led on to discuss race in its mental aspect. Here, more than ever, we are all at sea, for want of a proper criterion. What is to be the test of mind? Indeed, mind and plasticity are almost the same thing. Race, therefore, as being the stiffening in the evolution of life, might seem by its very nature opposed to mind as a limiting or obstructing force. Are we, then, going to return to the old pre-scientific notion of soul as something alien to body, and thereby simply clogged, thwarted and dragged down? That would never do. Body and soul are, for the working purposes of science, to be conceived as in perfect accord, as co-helpers in the work of life, and as such subject to a common development. Heredity, then, must be assumed to apply to both equally. In proportion as there is plastic mind there will be plastic body.

Unfortunately, the most plastic part of body is likewise the hardest to observe, at any rate whilst it is alive, namely, the brain. No certain criterion of heredity, then, is likely to be available from this quarter. You will see it stated, for instance, that the size of the brain cavity will serve to mark off one race from another. This is extremely doubtful, to put it mildly. No doubt the average European shows some advantage in this respect as compared, say, with the Bushman. But then you have to write off so much for their respective types of body, a bigger body going in general with a bigger head, that in the end you find yourself comparing mere abstractions. Again, the European may be the first to cry off on the ground that comparisons are odious; for some specimens of Neanderthal man in sheer size of the brain cavity are said to give points to any of our modern poets and politicians. Clearly, then, something is wrong with this test. Nor, if the brain itself be examined after death, and the form and number of its convolutions compared, is this criterion of hereditary brain-power any more satisfactory. It might be possible in this way to detect the difference between an idiot and a person of normal intelligence, but not the difference between a fool and a genius.

We cross the uncertain line that divides the bodily from the mental when we subject the same problem of hereditary mental endowment to the methods of what is known as experimental psychology. Thus acuteness of sight, hearing, taste, smell and feeling are measured by various ingenious devices. Seeing what stories travellers bring back with them about the hawk-like vision of hunting races, one might suppose that such comparisons would be all in their favour. The Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits, however, of which Dr. Haddon was the leader, included several well-trained psychologists, who devoted special attention to this subject; and their results show that the sensory powers of these rude folk were on the average much the same as those of Europeans. It is the hunter's experience only that enables him to sight the game at an immense distance. There are a great many more complicated tests of the same type designed to estimate the force of memory, attention, association, reasoning and other faculties that most people would regard as purely mental; whilst another set of such tests deals with reaction to stimulus, co-ordination between hand and eye, fatigue, tremor, and, most ingenious perhaps of all, emotional excitement as shown through the respiration—phenomena which are, as it were, mental and bodily at once and together. Unfortunately, psychology cannot distinguish in such cases between the effects of heredity and those of individual experience, whether it take the form of high culture or of a dissipated life. Indeed, the purely temporary condition of body and mind is apt to influence the results. A man has been up late, let us say, or has been for a long walk, or has missed a meal; obviously his reaction-times, his record for memory, and so on, will show a difference for the worse. Or, again, the subject may confront the experiment in very various moods. At one moment he may be full of vanity, anxious to show what superior qualities he possesses; whilst at another time he will be bored. Not to labour the point further, these methods, whatever they may become in the future, are at present unable to afford any criterion whatever of the mental ability that goes with race. They are fertile in statistics; but an interpretation of these statistics that furthers our purpose is still to seek.

But surely, it will be said, we can tell an instinct when we come across it, so uniform as it is, and so independent of the rest of the system. Not at all. For one thing, the idea that an instinct is apiece of mechanism, as fixed as fate, is quite out of fashion. It is now known to be highly plastic in many cases, to vary considerably in individuals, and to involve conscious processes, thought, feeling and will, at any rate of an elementary kind. Again, how are you going to isolate an instinct? Those few automatic responses to stimulation that appear shortly after birth, as, for instance, sucking, may perhaps be recognized, since parental training and experience in general are out of the question here. But what about the instinct or group of instincts answering to sex? This is latent until a stage of life when experience is already in full swing. Indeed, psychologists are still busy discussing whether man has very few instincts or whether, on the contrary, he appears to have few because he really has so many that, in practice, they keep interfering with one another all the time. In support of the latter view, it has been recently suggested by Mr. McDougall that the best test of the instincts that we have is to be found in the specific emotions. He believes that every instinctive process consists of an afferent part or message, a central part, and an efferent part or discharge. At its two ends the process is highly plastic. Message and discharge, to which thought and will correspond, are modified in their type as experience matures. The central part, on the other hand, to which emotion answers on the side of consciousness, remains for ever much the same. To fear, to wonder, to be angry, or disgusted, to be puffed up, or cast down, or to be affected with tenderness—all these feelings, argues Mr. McDougall, and various more complicated emotions arising out of their combinations with each other, are common to all men, and bespeak in them deep-seated tendencies to react on stimulation in relatively particular and definite ways. And there is much, I think, to be said in favour of this contention.

Yet, granting this, do we thus reach a criterion whereby the different races of men are to be distinguished? Far from it. Nay, on the contrary, as judged simply by his emotions, man is very much alike everywhere, from China to Peru. They are all there in germ, though different customs and grades of culture tend to bring special types of feeling to the fore.

Indeed, a certain paradox is to be noted here. The Negro, one would naturally say, is in general more emotional than the white man. Yet some experiments conducted by Miss Kellor of Chicago on negresses and white women, by means of the test of the effects of emotion on respiration, brought out the former as decidedly the more stolid of the two. And, whatever be thought of the value of such methods of proof, certain it is that the observers of rude races incline to put down most of them as apathetic, when not tuned up to concert-pitch by a dance or other social event. It may well be, then, that it is not the hereditary temperament of the Negro, so much as the habit, which he shares with other peoples at the same level of culture, of living and acting in a crowd, that accounts for his apparent excitability. But after all, "mafficking" is not unknown in civilized countries. Thus the quest for a race-mark of a mental kind is barren once more.

What, then, you exclaim, is the outcome of this chapter of negatives? Is it driving at the universal equality and brotherhood of man? Or, on the contrary, does it hint at the need of a stern system of eugenics? I offer nothing in the way of a practical suggestion. I am merely trying to show that, considered anthropologically—that is to say, in terms of pure theory—race or breed remains something which we cannot at present isolate, though we believe it to be there. Practice, meanwhile, must wait on theory; mere prejudices, bad as they are, are hardly worse guides to action than premature exploitations of science.

As regards the universal brotherhood of man, the most that can be said is this: The old ideas about race as something hard and fast for all time are distinctly on the decline. Plasticity, or, in other words, the power of adaptation to environment, has to be admitted to a greater share in the moulding of mind, and even of body, than ever before. But how plasticity is related to race we do not yet know. It may be that use-inheritance somehow incorporates its effects in the offspring of the plastic parents. Or it may be simply that plasticity increases with inter-breeding on a wider basis. These problems have still to be solved.

As regards eugenics, there is no doubt that a vast and persistent elimination of lives goes on even in civilized countries. It has been calculated that, of every hundred English born alive, fifty do not survive to breed, and, of the remainder, half produce three-quarters of the next generation. But is the elimination selective? We can hardly doubt that it is to some extent. But what its results are—whether it mainly favours immunity from certain diseases, or the capacity for a sedentary life in a town atmosphere, or intelligence and capacity for social service—is largely matter of guesswork. How, then, can we say what is the type to breed from, even if we confine our attention to one country? If, on the other hand, we look farther afield, and study the results of race-mixture or "miscegenation," we but encounter fresh puzzles. That the half-breed is an unsatisfactory person may be true; and yet, until the conditions of his upbringing are somehow discounted, the race problem remains exactly where it was. Or, again, it may be true that miscegenation increases human fertility, as some hold; but, until it is shown that the increase of fertility does not merely result in flooding the world with inferior types, we are no