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 128 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

further action. Applying the psychology of inhibition to situa- tions of this kind, we can see why mere repression results in emotionalism. While reconstruction of the old, and hence real progress, is a possibility in all such cases, it seems to be only the highest races that are practically able to meet new conditions and customs, and either adapt or adopt them. Most peoples, and a vast number of individuals in even the highest races, are helpless when they are deprived of their habitual or perhaps hereditary modes of activity and expression. The internal adjustments of the organism, deprived of their normal setting in overt action, are brought to consciousness. The attention is centered on them instead of on the ends with which they were originally organized, and for which they had their existence. They thus in themselves become interesting, and interest in organic adjustments, instead of in the ends they are meant to serve, is an attitude closely analogous to the emotional, if not identical with it. On the whole, then, we should say it is very disastrous for a people thus to come to consciousness of the more or less subjective elements that are normally organized with their overt social processes, unless they have an accompany- ing consciousness of how to reconstruct these processes.

The Malays and the Hebrews form an interesting contrast in this respect. Without pushing the comparison too far, we may say at least that as the tribal consciousness of the Hebrews was gradually dissolved because of the national calamities that befell them, the local rites that could, in consequence, no longer be performed in the primitive objective fashion, were gradually idealized and given a significance far beyond that which origi- nally belonged to them. When through disasters of foreign invasions they could no longer perform the ancestral rites at the tribal sanctuaries nor at Jerusalem, there were some who were able to point out that Jehovah might still be worshiped if they would but raise up altars to him in their hearts. 1 In other words, when the grounds for a detached emotional consciousness arose, there were forces already active among the Hebrews that made pos- sible a reconstruction on a higher level of what had proved both

1 ROBERTSON SMITH, Religion of the Semites.