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 INFLUENCE OF THE FORM OF SOCIAL CHANGE 12;

is no means for any movement toward a new and better adjusted set of habits. The previous standards of action, the regulative principles, are gone. The mental condition of a people under such circumstances is apt to be an emotional one. The particu- lar form that the emotional attitudes will take will, however, vary indefinitely according to previous habits, temperament, the nature of the interrupting influences, etc.

The Malays, especially of the Malay peninsula, furnish an interesting study from this point of view. They are character- ized by a peculiarly emotional temperament, as is proved by their passion for gambling, dramatic performances of all kinds, cock and bull fighting, etc. We can trace these well-nigh universal characteristics of the Malays to certain peculiarities in their social evolution. Their normal development was interrupted at least twice within historic times by different foreign invaders, and twice did they have thrust upon them alien cus- toms and alien religions. 1 They have been Muhammadans since the fifteenth century, and beneath their Muhammadanism is a layer of Hinduism which goes back perhaps to the twelfth cen- tury. Many fragments of their native religion have, however, persisted in various forms, unabsorbed or unreconstructed by the foreign faiths. The customs of the invading races have been in large degree superposed on the conquered, merely checking and suppressing the native habits without supplying an organized channel of expression that would take up and utilize the old values and thus furnish the basis for real progress.

It is a matter of indifference to the present inquiry whether the Malays, if left to themselves, would ever have perfected their primitive social institutions, or whether their development would have been arrested, as it has been with most of the natural races. In either case the effect on themselves of these foreign elements would have been the same. Their organic forms of social control were not only crippled, but isolated from their normal setting, and hence brought to consciousness with no very definite demands for reconstruction, so that the crises ended in emotional states of mind instead of in rapid adjustments for

1 SKEAT, Malay Magic. The Macmillan Co., 1901.