Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/377

Rh nature from a scientific point of view, and almost nothing is known about their potentialities.

Taking as a fact these mental differences, let us for a moment consider the possibility of their modification. It has been pointed out that mental differences must ultimately depend upon material anatomical differences in brain-structure; if we deny this, we instantly remove racial psychology from the field of science to that of metaphysics, and controvert all the observed data of physiological psychology; there must be some structural differences between the brain of a Negro and that of a white man, though such differences are admittedly very hard to detect by present methods. We know that it is impossible for us to modify anatomical structures at will; we can undoubtedly change them (within narrow limits, by selection of characters already present and the accentuation of these), but we can not make any two differing anatomical characters become exactly alike. Why, then, should we assume that we can modify at will the mental processes of a race, since these mental processes are expressions of a certain definite anatomical and physiological organization, which we know can not be altered save by the crossing of bloods or by the laborious and infinitely slow processes of evolution?

Yet, north and south, we wish to do this very thing, and to do it in its extreme form. For we are not merely trying to change the direction of the Negro's peculiar mental characteristics, and to improve them by selection among the elements already present—we are trying, on the contrary, to deprive the Negro of his own racial mental characteristics, and to substitute our own in their place, at the same time keeping him anatomically a Negro. That this is an impossibility follows after the former argument.

It will undoubtedly be said, by way of refutation, that the Negroes of the southern states have advanced and advanced considerably since they have been in this country. This is unreservedly true. But it is often forgotten that they have advanced as Negroes, not as anything else. They have adopted the form of our civilization and to a certain extent (due principally to the influence of language), the mould of our thought. But however much the form of the civilization and the mould of the thought resemble our own, the substance of both is different. The Negro has received much from us, and has profited greatly therefrom; but all that he has received he has modified in accordance with his racial mental-set, and his psychical reactions to the influences of our civilization are entirety different from our own, and will necessarily remain so as long as the Negro is a Negro. No matter how much we educate him, no matter how much we better his position in society, he will remain a Negro psychically as long as he remains a Negro physically. We may cause him to absorb the full, rich store of our cultural elements, but by the time these elements have gone through the channels