Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/58

 42 HENRY RUTGERS MARSHALL : a refined life in a highly civilised community, finds it all too easy to fall into the habits of loose morality of the semi, or wholly, barbaric races with whom he may find himself domiciled in the colonies. The European, who revolts against slavery at home, uses what is practically slave labour in Africa, when he finds himself powerful by its means. The frontiersman, who would have scorned to murder before his emigration, scarcely hesitates to kill the savage who happens in his way. Now it seems to me that apart from the assumed valid- ity of the parallelism with the lower forms of animal life which I have suggested, it becomes evident from the very examples just given, to which the reader will be able to add many others, that this lack of interrelation, of interdepend- ence, in itself involves an exaggeration of the tendency within us to act individually instead of racially ; and this emphasis of the individualistic influences will be likely to appear whenever the weak bonds of interdependence are broken, or where their relations of efficiency are altered : I think the reader will acknowledge that in the very nature of our exceedingly varied and complex civilisation such alterations and breaks as those to which I have just re- ferred by examples are exceedingly likely to occur. 3. But there are other reasons which would lead us to expect to find tendencies to the emphasis of individualistic influences in our lives. In the preceding articles I have noted that elemental rather than organic action will be likely to follow where (a) the stimulus to reaction which affects a given element is unusually powerful, and where (/8), on the other hand, the influences from the organism are not habitually called into play, in answer to the stimulus in question, with a force relatively equivalent. Now I think it must be clear to the reader that the very conditions that are essentially bound up with the growth in complication of our life as individuals in a social community tend to bring into prominence (a) the forceful presentation of unusual conditions which seem to demand immediate re- actions, but reactions on lines in relation to which our instincts have apparently no teaching to give. The racial, the social, influences on the other hand, it must be re- membered, are effective (/3) rather because they act through very many phases of life, than because they act forcefully in any specific instance, and for this reason clearly these racial influences must be expected to be slower in reaction