Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/486

 47 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

man. Many of the alleged differences between Chinese and occi- dentals will be wiped out when East and West come to share in a common civilization. But it will be found, perhaps, that the occi- dental's love of excitement, speculation, sport, and fighting flows from his greater restlessness due to a thousand years less of schooling in industrialism than the Chinese have had. Again, those who imagine that by imparting to Hindoos or Cinghalese our theology the missionary endows them with our virtues and capacities certainly fail to appreciate how much these depend on certain elementary motor reactions.

Passing now from the differentia of peoples to the broad psychic differences that appear within a given population, we first set aside as foreign to our purpose the problems that engross the sex-psychologists, the child-study people, the alienists, and the criminalists. The mental varieties they deal with are at bottom anthropic, and their studies are prolongations of individual psy- chology. In every people, however, there are classes marked by divergent modes of thought and feeling. These class types of mind are of societal origin, and the delineation and explanation of them belong, I think, to Social Psychology. Every social popula- tion is distributed into a series of unlike subjective environments, their nature depending largely upon the constitution of the society. Each of these special horizons tends to form men into a class and create a mental type. Hence arise two problems: first, to deter- mine the characteristics proper to each class, recognizing, of course, that in fact these are often blurred and confused by modi- fying influences coming from other classes; second, to show how these characteristics are generated by the manner of life imposed on that class by its position in the social system. The married and the unmarried lead quite dissimilar lives, and no doubt some day we shall know the nature and causes of the psychic differences between the conjugal and the celibate. Already the disciples of Le Play, after distinguishing the communal family, the indi- vidualistic family, and the stem-family, have sought to differen- tiate the moral types that tend to arise within these several domes- tic groups. The contrasts of rural and urban types must ever be