Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/455

Rh traits. We are all aware how apt the Orientals who attend our universities are to acquire our intellectual habits, and how superficial an impression our pedagogical systems leave on their character. "Scratch a Russian and you will find a Tartar." Very little is yet known of the relation of national temperament to conditions of food, climate, ancestry, etc., but striking differences exist, and it is important to recognize that the form and spirit of the art, literature, ethics and politics of different races are to be regarded as an expression of the temperament even more than of the intelligence of the people. There is, too, an interesting parallelism between lower forms of social organization, lower organic forms of life, and the child, in the fact that they are all controlled largely by mandatory stimuli. Great popular movements and national upheavals, like the French Revolution and the Protestant Reformation, are always temperamental rather than intellectual expressions, and we are correct in calling these movements instinctive. The substitution of action based on knowledge for action based on feeling is made possible in the individual and in society by the development of higher centers of control and the power of choice through inhibition and legislation. The fact that such a substitution is one of the professed aims both of pedagogy and of sociology gives peculiar interest to the examination of the forms of control which have dominated different types of society, and the determination of the conditions and forces leading from one form of control to another.

The animal in the protozoan period is played on solely by the forces of external nature. In societies, especially in human society, another set of stimuli is introduced, and the nature of reaction on stimuli in general is modified. Language and memory give every member of the group opportunity to play upon the nature of every other member of the group. The individual is no longer a harp played upon by natural forces, but in a far greater degree by social forces: words, ideas and sentiments are substituted for light, gravity and acid. In this way we first get the great problem of association clearly before