Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/614

 596 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

tection, and training. Of course, this inherited interest in chil- dren is shared by the males of the group also, though not in the same degree, and there is reason to believe also that the interest of the male parent in children is acquired in a great degree indirectly and socially through his more potent desire to associate with the mother.

This interest and providence on the score of offspring has also a characteristic expression on the mental side. All sense- perceptions are colored and all judgments biased where the child is in question, and affection for it extends to the particular marks which distinguish it. Not only its physical features, but its dress and little shoes, its toys and everything it has touched, take on a peculiar aspect. This tendency of the attention and memory to seize on characteristic aspects, and to be obsessed by them to the exclusion or disparagement of contrasted aspects, is an important condition in the psychology of race-prejudice. It implies a set of conditions in which the attention is practiced in attaching peculiar values to signs of personality conditions dif- fering also from those arising in the reaction to environment on the food side.

Another origin of a sympathetic attitude toward those of our own kind is seen in connection with courtship. As a result of selection, doubtless, there is a peculiar organic response on the part of either sex to the presence and peculiarities of the other. Among birds the voice, plumage, odor, ornamentation, and movements of the male are in the wooing season powerful excitants to the female. These aspects of the male, which are the most conspicuous of his characteristics, are recognized as the marks of maleness by the female, and she is most deeply impressed, and is in fact won, by the male most conspicuously marked and displaying these marks most skilfully. And in the same way feminine traits and behavior exercise a powerful influ- ence on the male. It is of particular significance just here that the attention is able to single out particular marks of the per- sonality of the opposite sex, and that these marks become the car- riers of the whole fund of sexual suggestion. This interest in the characteristic features of the opposite sex has always domi-