Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/453

 RACE AND MARRIAGE 439

petus were augmented until it should carry large numbers of individuals beyond the general level, and, if this impetus lasted, into the actual working life. Contact with higher culture forms found among more advanced races may furnish this stimulus if those forms are within practical reaching distance of the present racial capacity. Groups too far advanced in culture may not be the best civilizers of the backward races. With apologies to Mr. Kidd it may be contended that the European races are the less fitted to furnish models for the tropical peoples exactly because they are too highly civilized. If race improvement is sought through cross-breeding the diversity of types may be so great as to neutralize other advantages. Most of the great civilizations have, in their earlier history, been developed by peoples of relatively unmixed blood, but complexity of culture has usually been attained after a composite stock has come into being.

II

The concept of a race as, in the widest sense, both a physical and a psychic unit implies group choices and group standards. When a choice, whether one of adaptation or one of conscious volition, becomes instinctive it is embedded in the ethnic sense. In this manner instinctive prejudices and preferences become hereditary. Herein lies the power of custom. That to which the group has not accommodated itself comes to be regarded as not good and as a thing to be avoided. That which has been found by experience to be beneficent or pleasurable, whether such ex- perience be one of sensation or observation, is stamped with the group approval. ^^ Even ideals of beauty are affected by the needs of the situation. The process of accommodation to environ- ment produces certain standards to which esthetic tastes in the end conform. Men's ideals of beauty are usually found in the best type of what they themselves are and what they find most useful. For this reason traits which especially characterize a group are often artificially exaggerated for purposes of oma-

" See Professor Sumner's very stimulating book, Folkways, pp. 2-4, and passim.