Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/272

258 mass and structure. It will also include inquiries concerning the time taken in completing mental evolution, and the time during which adult mental power lasts; as well as certain most general traits of mental action, such as the greater or less persistence of emotions and of intellectual processes. The connection between the general mental type and the general social type should also be here dealt with.

In the second division may be conveniently placed apart, inquiries concerning the relative mental natures of the sexes in each race. Under it will come such questions as these: What differences of mental mass and mental complexity, if any, existing between males and females, are common to all races? Do such differences vary in degree, or in kind, or in both? Are there reasons for thinking that they are liable to change by increase or decrease? What relations do they bear in each case to the habits of life, the domestic arrangements, and the social arrangements? This division should also include in its scope the sentiments of the sexes toward one another, considered as varying quantitatively and qualitatively; as well as their respective sentiments toward offspring, similarly varying.

For the third division of inquiries may be reserved the more special mental traits distinguishing different types of men. One class of such specialties results from differences of proportion among faculties possessed in common; and another class results from the presence in some races of faculties that are almost or quite absent from others. Each difference in each of these groups, when established by comparison, has to be studied in connection with the stage of mental evolution reached, and has to be studied in connection with the habits of life and the social development, regarding it as related to these both as cause and consequence.

Such being the outlines of these several divisions, let us now consider in detail the subdivisions contained within each.

I.—Under the head of general mental evolution we may begin with the trait of—

1. Mental Mass.—Daily experiences show us that human beings differ in volume of mental manifestation. Some there are whose intelligence, high though it may be, produces little impression on those around; while there are some who, when uttering even commonplaces, do it so as to affect listeners in a disproportionate degree. Comparison of two such makes it manifest that, generally, the difference is due to the natural language of the emotions. Behind the intellectual quickness of the one there is not felt any power of character; while the other betrays a momentum capable of bearing down opposition—a potentiality of emotion that has something formidable about it. Obviously the varieties of mankind differ much in respect of this trait. Apart from kind of feeling, they are unlike in amount of feeling. The dominant races overrun the inferior races mainly in virtue of the