Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/469

 THE PROVINCE OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 453

the lower races the attitude toward pain and pleasure, vanity, fear, anger, ornamentation, endurance, curiosity, apathy, sexual appetence, etc. It is not impossible, for example, that the arrested development of the negro at the period of puberty is due to the obsession of the mind by sexual feeling at this time, rather than to the closing of the sutures of the cranium.

Similar to the question of temperament in the individuals of a group is that of the degree to which the affective processes, as compared with the cognitive, are the medium of the stimulations promoting social change. Cognition is of less importance than emotion in some activities, notably those connected with art and reproduction, and it is even true that emotion and cognition are in certain conditions incompatible. In this general region lie such questions as the effect of rhythm on social life, particularly in bringing about co-operation in hunting, war, and work; the psychology of work and play; the bearing on social activity of ornament, dancing, painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and intoxi- cants ; and to what extent an organic attitude of sensitiveness to the opinion of others (an attitude of mind essential to the control of the individual by society) had its origin in courtship and to what extent in the food-activities.

A comparison of the educational systems of the lower and higher stages of culture will assist the social psychologist in determining to what extent the consciousness of a group and the group-peculiarities on the mental side are organic, and to what extent they are bound up with the nature of the knowledge and tradition transmitted from one generation to another. There cannot be a high state of mind in a society where the state of knowledge is low, and if a group has not accumulated a body of scientific knowledge, through specialized attention and specialized occupation, it cannot pass knowledge on. And doubtless the low mental condition of some groups is not due to lack of native intel- ligence, but to lack of the proper copies for imitation. The Chinese, for example, are a race of great mental power, but they have no logic, no mathematics to speak of, no science, no history in the scientific sense, no knowledge worth the name only pre- cedent, and rule, and precept. It is therefore unthinkable that the