Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/485

 PRESENT PROBLEMS OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 469

connected with them become congenital. Yet, considering how differently the peoples have been winnowed and selected by their respective environments, occupations, and histories, I see no rea- son why there should not arise between them differences in motor and emotional response to stimulus.

Even now in the same stock, nay, even in the same family, we find congenital differences in the strength of sex-appetite, jeal- ousy, self-control, the taste for liquor, the craving for excite- ment, the migratory impulse, the capacity for regular labor, the spirit of enterprise, the power to postpone gratification differences which defy eradication by example or instruction. If such diversities declare themselves zuithin a people, why not between peoples? Will not a destructive environment select the sensual, a bountiful environment the temperate, a niggardly environment the laborious, a capricious environment the fore- looking ? Will not the restless survive under nomadism, the bold under militancy, the supple under slavery, the calculating in an era of commerce, the thrifty in an epoch of capitalism? Since intellectual gains are indefinitely communicable, men do not sur- vive according to their predisposition to have or not to have a certain advantageous idea or belief. But modes of response to stimulus are not so generalized by imitation. Men change their thoughts, but not their elementary reactions, and, since according to these reactions they survive or perish, it is possible for motor and emotional differences to arise between peoples one in blood, but unlike in social history.

Let the social psychologist account for the cultural differences between peoples and for the moral differences that hinge on some cultural element. Only the simple undecomposable reactions involving no conceptual element would fall to the race-psycholo- gist. Of course, it is not easy to tell which characteristics are elementary. Once we thought the laziness of the anaemic Georgia cracker came from a wrong ideal of life. Now we charge it to the hook-worm and administer thymol instead of the proverbs of Poor Richard. The negro is not simply a black Anglo-Saxon deficient in schooling, but a being who in strength of appetites and in power to control them differs considerably from the white