Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/374

370 by implication very nearly all that is included in our thought upon the matter, is that "all men, when normal, possess the same capacity for intelligence and the same ability to absorb culture and to become civilized"; in other words, that all men are essentially alike mentally and morally, when viewed in the large, notwithstanding physical and physiological differences. The culture of any group of men, it is assumed, may be adopted by, or forced upon any other group of men, without effecting any revolutionary change in the culture. It is tacitly thought that while the processes of evolution have given one race a white skin and another race a black skin, have made one race relatively resistant to tuberculosis and the other relatively susceptible, and so on, the minds of both are alike—have not diverged as their bodies have in the evolutionary series—and that the mental processes of one may become, by proper direction, the mental processes of the other.

On conventional ethical grounds, the hypothesis of human equality can not be assailed. The Christian world, particularly that part of it which really thinks, is essentially altruistic, and this altruism demands that all men be given the fullest and most equal opportunities to get the best out of life. But it is seldom realized that this is an ideal, not a working formula; that it is, further, an ethical ideal, not a scientific one. Out of this misconception of the ideal of human equality have sprung many grievous and oftentimes dangerous fallacies, chief among which are two: (1) that all men possess the same potentialities for culture; and (2) that a so-called "higher culture" may and ethically should be substituted for a so-called "lower culture" whenever opportunity presents itself.

As has been said, each of these ideas has a basis in ethical principles. But both are fallacious when scientifically considered. Each assumes too much, and each tries to make out of an ethical ideal the scientific working formula for the uplifting of backward peoples. Neither takes into account that culture and civilization are as much the products of evolution as a-white skin or a black skin.

Culture, in its broadest sense, is a phenomenon of race. Even in our more or less homogeneous western European and American culture, racial differences are to be observed; if this were not true, why should we take the trouble to call some people Germans and others Spaniards, some Danes and others Italians? Yet, despite these evident differences, western European and American culture is a definite, characteristic thing, and underlying it we recognize a common stock of traditions and general ideas which have come down through the ages "in the blood," so to speak. The white-skinned peoples of western Europe and America all have approximately the same origin, in that through the remote mixing of a few strains of blood the modern racial types were set; and since then the peoples of western Europe have given evidence of their biological kinship by displaying approximately similar reactions to similar