Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/376

370 appreciable extent our anatomical make-up, A Chinaman's skin will remain yellow, a Negro's skin will remain black, no matter what we may do to alter them, so long as the races remain pure. The only way we can modify the color of the skin or the facial angle or the texture of the hair in any great number of individuals is by crossing with another race. And the product of this crossing, should it become permanent, is a different race.

From the point of view of psychology, on the other hand, we have assumed that this principle is not true. We know that we can not change a Negro's physical characteristics, so as to make him like ourselves, by bringing him to live among us. But we believe we can change his mental characteristics. In other words, while we are certain that we can not change the Negro's facial angle, we are equally certain that we can change his mental angle and make it like our own; while we consider it absurd to think that we can do anything to make the Negro's physical skin become white, we believe firmly that we can make the psychical analogue of his skin exactly like our own.

But is this a fact? Racial psychology says no. Mental characteristics are as distinctly and as organically a part of a race as its physical characteristics, and for the same reason: both depend ultimately upon anatomical structure. Racial mental-set, racial ways of thinking, racial reactions to the influence of ideas, are as characteristic and as recognizable as racial skin-color and racial skull-conformation. This does not mean that mental characteristics and superficial anatomical characteristics necessarily bear any relationship to each other, as has sometimes been assumed; that is to say, the shape of the head, the weight of the brain, the cranial capacity, the length of the arms, the arrangement of the muscles in the calf of the leg, do not determine mental characteristics: physical and mental characteristics are, however, parallel expressions of the particular evolutionary process which has resulted in the formation of a race; each set of characters is the specific result, in different structures, of the evolutionary process. Ultimately, mental differences must depend upon anatomical and physiological differences; but these differences are differences in the structure of the brain itself. If we are to assume any relationship whatsoever between brain and mind (and such a relationship, whatever it may be, certainly exists), we must assume some anatomical and physiological differences in brains if we are to account for mental differences.

The more the races of men are studied, the more certain becomes the evidence to show that races have characteristic mental peculiarities, which would serve to distinguish species and varieties almost as well as physical characteristics. In practical life, in jurisprudence, in language itself, we empirically allow for these racial mental differences. But we have never taken the trouble to study them nor to understand their