RACE
There is a story about the British sailor who was asked to state what
he understood by a Dago. "Dagoes," he replied, "is anything wot isn't
our sort of chaps." In exactly the same way would an ancient Greek
have explained what he meant by a "barbarian." When it takes this
wholesale form we speak, not without reason, of race-prejudice. We
may well wonder in the meantime how far this prejudice answers to
something real. Race would certainly seem to be a fact that stares
one in the face.
Stroll down any London street: you cannot go wrong about that Hindu
student with features rather like ours but of a darker shade. The short
dapper man with eyes a little aslant is no less unmistakably a Japanese.
It takes but a slightly more practised eye to pick out the German waiter,
the French chauffeur, and the Italian vendor of ices. Lastly, when
you have made yourself really good at the game, you will be scarcely
more likely to confuse a small dark Welshman with a broad florid
Yorkshireman than a retriever with a mastiff.
Yes, but remember that you are judging by the gross impression, not
by the element of race or breed as distinguished from the rest. Here,
you say, come a couple of our American cousins. Perhaps it is their
speech that betrayeth them; or perhaps it is the general cut of their
jib. If you were to go into their actual pedigrees, you would find
that the one had a Scotch father and a mother from out of Dorset; whilst
the other was partly Scandinavian and partly Spanish with a tincture
of Jew. Yet to all intents and purposes they form one type. And, the
more deeply you go into it, the more mixed we all of us turn out to
be, when breed, and breed alone, is the subject of inquiry. Yet race,
in the only sense that the word has for an anthropologist, means
inherited breed, and nothing more or less--inherited breed, and all
that it covers, whether bodily or mental features.
For race, let it not be forgotten, presumably extends to mind as well
as to body. It is not merely skin-deep. Contrast the stoical Red Indian
with the vivacious Negro; or the phlegmatic Dutchman with the
passionate Italian. True, you say, but what about the influence of
their various climates, or again of their different ideals of
behaviour? Quite so. It is immensely difficult to separate the effects
of the various factors. Yet surely the race-factor counts for something
in the mental constitution. Any breeder of horses will tell you that
neither the climate of Newmarket, nor careful training, nor any
quantity of oats, nor anything else, will put racing mettle into
cart-horse stock.
In what follows, then, I shall try to show just what the problem about
the race-factor is, even if I have to trespass a little way into general
biology in order to do so.[2] And I shall not attempt to conceal the
difficulties relating to the race-problem. I know that the ordinary
reader is supposed to prefer that all the thinking should be done
beforehand, and merely the results submitted to him. But I cannot
believe that he would find it edifying to look at half-a-dozen books
upon the races of mankind, and find half-a-dozen accounts of their
relationships, having scarcely a single statement in common. Far
better face the fact that race still baffles us almost completely.
Yet, breed is there; and, in its own time and in its own way, breed
will out.
[Footnote 2: The reader is advised to consult also the more
comprehensive study on _Evolution_ by Professors Geddes and Thomson
in this series.]
Race or breed was a moment ago described as a factor in human nature.
But to break up human nature into factors is something that we can
do, or try to do, in thought only. In practice we can never succeed
in doing anything of the kind. A machine such as a watch we can take
to bits and then put together again. Even a chemical compound such
as water we can resolve into oxygen and hydrogen and then reproduce
out of its elements. But to dissect a living thing is to kill it once
and for all. Life, as was said in the first chapter, is something unique,
with the unique property of being able to evolve. As life evolves,
that is to say changes, by being handed on from certain forms to certain
other forms, a partial rigidity marks the process together with a
partial plasticity. There is a stiffening, so to speak, that keeps
the life-force up to a point true to its old direction; though, short
of that limit, it is free to take a new line of its own. Race, then,
stands for the stiffening in the evolutionary process. Just up to what
point it goes in any given case we probably can never quite tell. Yet,
if we could think our way anywhere near to that point in regard to
man, I doubt not that we should eventually succeed in forging a fresh
instrument for controlling the destinies of our species, an instrument
perhaps more powerful than education itself--I mean, eugenics, the
art of improving the human breed.
To see what race means when considered apart, let us first of all take
your individual self, and ask how you would proceed to separate your
inherited nature from the nature which you have acquired in the course
of living your life. It is not easy. Suppose, however, that you had
a twin brother born, if indeed that were possible, as like you as one
pea is like another. An accident in childhood, however, has caused
him to lose a leg. So he becomes a clerk, living a sedentary life in
an office. You, on the other hand, with your two lusty legs to help
you, become a postman, always on the run. Well, the two of you are
now very different men in looks and habits. He is pale and you are
brown. You play football and he sits at home reading. Nevertheless,
any friend who knows you both intimately will discover fifty little
things that bespeak in you the same underlying nature and bent. You
are both, for instance, slightly colour-blind, and both inclined to
fly into violent passions on occasion. That is your common inheritance
peeping out--if, at least, your friend has really managed to make
allowance for your common bringing-up, which might mainly account for
the passionateness, though hardly for the colour-blindness.
But now comes the great difficulty. Let us further suppose that you
two twins marry wives who are also twins born as like as two peas;
and each pair of you has a family. Which of the two batches of children
will tend on the whole to have the stronger legs? Your legs are strong
by use; your brother's are weak by disuse. But do use and disuse make
any difference to the race? That is the theoretical question which,
above all others, complicates and hampers our present-day attempts
to understand heredity.
In technical language, this is the problem of use-inheritance,
otherwise known as the inheritance of acquired characters. It is apt
to seem obvious to the plain man that the effects of use and disuse
are transmitted to offspring. So, too, thought Lamarck, who half a
century before Darwin propounded a theory of the origin of species
that was equally evolutionary in its way. Why does the giraffe have
so long a neck? Lamarck thought it was because the giraffe had acquired
a habit of stretching his neck out. Every time there was a bad season,
the giraffes must all stretch up as high as ever they could towards
the leafy tops of the trees; and the one that stretched up farthest
survived, and handed on the capacity for a like feat to his fortunate
descendants. Now Darwin himself was ready to allow that use and disuse
might have some influence on the offspring's inheritance; but he
thought that this influence was small as compared with the influence
of what, for want of a better term, he called spontaneous variation.
Certain of his followers, however, who call themselves Neo-Darwinians,
are ready to go one better. Led by the German biologist, Weismann,
they would thrust the Lamarckians, with their hypothesis of
use-inheritance, clean out of the field. Spontaneous variation, they
assert, is all that is needed to prepare the way for the selection
of the tall giraffe. It happened to be born that way. In other words,
its parents had it in them to breed it so. This is not a theory that
tells one anything positive. It is merely a caution to look away from
use and disuse to another explanation of variation that is not yet
forthcoming.
After all, the plain man must remember that the effects of use and
disuse, which he seems to see everywhere about him, are mixed up with
plenty of apparent instances to the contrary. He will smile, perhaps,
when I tell him that Weismann cut off the tails of endless mice, and,
breeding them together, found that tails invariably decorated the race
as before. I remember hearing Mr. Bernard Shaw comment on this
experiment. He was defending the Lamarckianism of Samuel Butler, who
declared that our heredity was a kind of race-memory, a lapsed
intelligence. "Why," said Mr. Shaw, "did the mice continue to grow
tails? Because they never wanted to have them cut off." But men-folk
are wont to shave off their beards because they want to have them off;
and, amongst people more conservative in their habits than ourselves,
such a custom may persist through numberless generations. Yet who ever
observed the slightest signs of beardlessness being produced in this
way? On the other hand, there are beardless as well as bearded races
in the world; and, by crossing them, you could, doubtless, soon produce
ups and downs in the razor-trade. Only, as Weismann's school would
say, the required variation is in this case spontaneous, that is, comes
entirely of its own accord.
Leaving the question of use-inheritance open, I pass on to say a word
about variation as considered in itself and apart from this doubtful
influence. Weismann holds, that organisms resulting from the union
of two cells are more variable than those produced out of a single
one. On this view, variation depends largely on the laws of the
interaction of the dissimilar characters brought together in
cell-union. But what are these laws? The best that can be said is that
we are getting to know a little more about them every day. Amongst
other lines of inquiry, the so-called Mendelian experiments promise
to clear up much that is at present dark.
The development of the individual that results from such cell-union
is no mere mixture or addition, but a process of selective organization.
To put it very absurdly, one does not find a pair of two-legged parents
having a child with legs as big as the two sets of legs together, or
with four legs, two of them of one shape and two of another. In other
words, of the possibilities contributed by the father and mother, some
are taken and some are left in the case of any one child. Further,
different children will represent different selections from amongst
the germinal elements. Mendelism, by the way, is especially concerned
to find out the law according to which the different types of
organization are distributed between the offspring. Each child,
meanwhile, is a unique individual, a living whole with an organization
of its very own. This means that its constituent elements form a system.
They stand to each other in relations of mutual support. In short,
life is possible because there is balance.
This general state of balance, however, is able to go along with a
lot of special balancings that seem largely independent of each other.
It is important to remember this when we come a little later on to
consider the instincts. All sorts of lesser systems prevail within
the larger system represented by the individual organism. It is just
as if within the state with its central government there were a number
of county councils, municipal corporations, and so on, each of them
enjoying a certain measure of self-government on its own account. Thus
we can see in a very general way how it is that so much variation is
possible. The selective organization, which from amongst the germinal
elements precipitates ever so many and different forms of fresh life,
is so loose and elastic that a working arrangement between the parts
can be reached in all sorts of directions. The lesser systems are so
far self-governing that they can be trusted to get along in almost
any combination; though of course some combinations are naturally
stronger and more stable than the rest, and hence tend to outlast them,
or, as the phrase goes, to be preserved by natural selection.
It is time to take account of the principle of natural selection. We
have done with the subject of variation. Whether use and disuse have
helped to shape the fresh forms of life, or whether these are purely
spontaneous combinations that have come into being on what we are
pleased to call their own account, at any rate let us take them as
given. What happens now? At this point begins the work of natural
selection. Darwin's great achievement was to formulate this law;
though it is only fair to add that it was discovered by A.R. Wallace
at the same moment. Both of them get the first hint of it from Malthus.
This English clergyman, writing about half a century earlier, had shown
that the growth of population is apt very considerably to outstrip
the development of food-supply; whereupon natural checks such as
famine or war must, he argued, ruthlessly intervene so as to redress
the balance. Applying these considerations to the plant and animal
kingdoms at large, Darwin and Wallace perceived that, of the
multitudinous forms of life thrust out upon the world to get a
livelihood as best they could, a vast quantity must be weeded out.
Moreover, since they vary exceedingly in their type of organization,
it seemed reasonable to suppose that, of the competitors, those who
were innately fitted to make the best of the ever-changing
circumstances would outlive the rest. An appeal to the facts fully
bore out this hypothesis. It must not, indeed, be thought that all
the weeding out which goes on favours the fittest. Accidents will
always happen. On the whole, however, the type that is most at home
under the surrounding conditions, it may be because it is more complex,
or it may be because it is of simpler organization, survives the rest.
Now to survive is to survive to breed. If you live to eighty, and have
no children, you do not survive in the biological sense; whereas your
neighbour who died at forty may survive in a numerous progeny. Natural
selection is always in the last resort between individuals; because
individuals are alone competent to breed. At the same time, the reason
for the individual's survival may lie very largely outside him. Amongst
the bees, for instance, a non-working type of insect survives to breed
because the sterile workers do their duty by the hive. So, too, that
other social animal, man, carries on the race by means of some whom
others die childless in order to preserve. Nevertheless, breeding
being a strictly individual and personal affair, there is always a
risk lest a society, through spending its best too freely, end by
recruiting its numbers from those in whom the engrained capacity to
render social service is weakly developed. To rear a goodly family
must always be the first duty of unselfish people; for otherwise the
spirit of unselfishness can hardly be kept alive the world.
Enough about heredity as a condition of evolution. We return, with
a better chance of distinguishing them, to the consideration of the
special effects that it brings about. It was said just now that heredity
is the stiffening in human nature, a stiffening bound up with a more
or less considerable offset of plasticity. Now clearly it is in some
sense true that the child's whole nature, its modicum of plasticity
included, is handed on from its parents. Our business in this chapter,
however, is on the whole to put out of our thoughts this plastic side
of the inherited life-force. The more or less rigid, definite,
systematized characters--these form the hereditary factor, the race.
Now none of these are ever quite fixed. A certain measure of plasticity
has to be counted in as part of their very nature. Even in the bee,
with its highly definite instincts, there is a certain flexibility
bound up with each of these; so that, for instance, the inborn faculty
of building up the comb regularly is modified if the hive happens to
be of an awkward shape. Yet, as compared with what remains over, the
characters that we are able to distinguish as racial must show fixity.
Unfortunately, habits show fixity too. Yet habits belong to the plastic
side of our nature; for, in forming a habit, we are plastic at the
start, though hardly so once we have let ourselves go. Habits, then,
must be discounted in our search for the hereditary bias in our lives.
It is no use trying to disguise the difficulties attending an inquiry
into race.
* * * * *
These difficulties notwithstanding, in the rest of this chapter let
us consider a few of what are usually taken to be racial features of
man. As before, the treatment must be illustrative; we cannot work
through the list. Further, we must be content with a very rough division
into bodily and mental features. Just at this point we shall find it
very hard to say what is to be reckoned bodily and what mental. Leaving
these niceties to the philosophers, however, let us go ahead as best
we can.
Oh for an external race-mark about which there could be no mistake!
That has always been a dream of the anthropologist; but it is a dream
that shows no signs of coming true. All sorts of tests of this kind
have been suggested. Cranium, cranial sutures, frontal process, nasal
bones, eye, chin, jaws, wisdom teeth, hair, humerus, pelvis, the
heart-line across the hand, calf, tibia, heel, colour, and even
smell--all these external signs, as well as many more, have been
thought, separately or together, to afford the crucial test of a man's
pedigree. Clearly I cannot here cross-examine the entire crowd of
claimants, were I even competent to do so. I shall, therefore, say
a few words about two, and two only, namely, head-form and colour.
I believe that, if the plain man were to ask himself how, in walking
down a London street, he distinguished one racial type from another,
he would find that he chiefly went by colour. In a general way he knows
how to make allowance for sunburn and get down to the native complexion
underneath. But, if he went off presently to a museum and tried to
apply his test to the pre-historic men on view there, it would fail
for the simple reason that long ago they left their skins behind them.
He would have to get to work, therefore, on their bony parts, and
doubtless would attack the skulls for choice. By considering head-form
and colour, then, we may help to cover a certain amount of the ground,
vast as it is. For remember that anthropology in this department draws
no line between ancient and modern, or between savage and civilized,
but tries to tackle every sort of man that comes within its reach.
Head-shape is really a far more complicated thing to arrive at for
purposes of comparison than one might suppose. Since no part of the
skull maintains a stable position in regard to the rest, there can
be no fixed standard of measurement, but at most a judgment of likeness
or unlikeness founded on an averaging of the total proportions. Thus
it comes about that, in the last resort, the impression of a good expert
is worth in these matters a great deal more than rows of figures.
Moreover, rows of figures in their turn take a lot of understanding.
Besides, they are not always easy to get. This is especially the case
if you are measuring a live subject. Perhaps he is armed with a club,
and may take amiss the use of an instrument that has to be poked into
his ears, or what not. So, for one reason or another, we have often
to put up with that very unsatisfactory single-figure description of
the head-form which is known as the cranial index. You take the greatest
length and greatest breadth of the skull, and write down the result
obtained by dividing the former into the latter when multiplied by
100. Medium-headed people have an index of anything between 75 and
80. Below that figure men rank as long-headed, above it as round-headed.
This test, however, as I have hinted, will not by itself carry us far.
On the other hand, I believe that a good judge of head-form in all
its aspects taken together will generally be able to make a pretty
shrewd guess as to the people amongst whom the owner of a given skull
is to be placed.
Unfortunately, to say people is not to say race. It may be that a given
people tend to have a characteristic head-form, not so much because
they are of common breed, as because they are subjected after birth,
or at any rate, after conception, to one and the same environment.
Thus some careful observations made recently by Professor Boas on
American immigrants from various parts of Europe seem to show that
the new environment does in some unexplained way modify the head-form
to a remarkable extent. For example, amongst the East European Jews
the head of the European-born is shorter and wider than that of the
American-born, the difference being even more marked in the second
generation of the American-born. At the same time, other European
nationalities exhibit changes of other kinds, all these changes,
however, being in the direction of a convergence towards one and the
same American type. How are we to explain these facts, supposing them
to be corroborated by more extensive studies? It would seem that we
must at any rate allow for a considerable plasticity in the head-form,
whereby it is capable of undergoing decisive alteration under the
influences of environment; not, of course, at any moment during life,
but during those early days when the growth of the head is especially
rapid. The further question whether such an acquired character can
be transmitted we need not raise again. Before passing on, however,
let this one word to the wise be uttered. If the skull can be so affected,
then what about the brain inside it? If the hereditarily long-headed
can change under suitable conditions, then what about the hereditarily
short-witted?
It remains to say a word about the types of pre-historic men as judged
by their bony remains and especially by their skulls. Naturally the
subject bristles with uncertainties.
By itself stands the so-called Pithecanthropus (Ape-man) of Java, a
regular "missing link." The top of the skull, several teeth, and a
thigh-bone, found at a certain distance from each other, are all that
we have of it or him. Dr. Dubois, their discoverer, has made out a
fairly strong case for supposing that the geological stratum in which
the remains occurred is Pliocene--that is to say, belongs to the
Tertiary epoch, to which man has not yet been traced back with any
strong probability. It must remain, however, highly doubtful whether
this is a proto-human being, or merely an ape of a type related to
the gibbon. The intermediate character is shown especially in the head
form. If an ape, Pithecanthropus had an enormous brain; if a man, he
must have verged on what we should consider idiocy.
Also standing somewhat by itself is the Heidelberg man. All that we
have of him is a well-preserved lower jaw with its teeth. It was found
more than eighty feet below the surface of the soil, in company with
animal remains that make it possible to fix its position in the scale
of pre-historic periods with some accuracy. Judged by this test, it
is as old as the oldest of the unmistakable drift implements, the
so-called Chellean (from Chelles in the department of Seine-et-Marne
in France). The jaw by itself would suggest a gorilla, being both
chinless and immensely powerful. The teeth, however, are human beyond
question, and can be matched, or perhaps even in respect to certain
marks of primitiveness out-matched, amongst ancient skulls of the
Neanderthal order, if not also amongst modern ones from Australia.
We may next consider the Neanderthal group of skulls, so named after
the first of that type found in 1856 in the Neanderthal valley close
to Dusseldorf in the Rhine basin. A narrow head, with low and retreating
forehead, and a thick projecting brow-ridge, yet with at least twice
the brain capacity of any gorilla, set the learned world disputing
whether this was an ape, a normal man, or an idiot. It was unfortunate
that there were no proofs to hand of the age of these relics. After
a while, however, similar specimens began to come in. Thus in 1866
the jaw of a woman, displaying a tendency to chinlessness combined
with great strength, was found in the Cave of La Naulette in Belgium,
associated with more or less dateable remains of the mammoth, woolly
rhinoceros and reindeer. A few years earlier, though its importance
was not appreciated at the moment, there had been discovered, near
Forbes' quarry at Gibraltar, the famous Gibraltar skull, now to be
seen in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Any
visitor will notice at the first glance that this is no man of to-day.
There are the narrow head, low crown, and prominent brow-ridge as
before, supplemented by the most extraordinary eye-holes that were
ever seen, vast circles widely separated from each other. And other
peculiar features will reveal themselves on a close inspection; for
instance, the horseshoe form in which, ape-fashion, the teeth are
arranged, and the muzzle-like shape of the face due to the absence
of the depressions that in our own case run down on each side from
just outside the nostrils towards the corners of the mouth.
And now at the present time we have twenty or more individuals of this
Neanderthal type to compare. The latest discoveries are perhaps the
most interesting, because in two and perhaps other cases the man has
been properly buried. Thus at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, in the French
department of Correze, a skeleton, which in its head-form closely
recalls the Gibraltar example, was found in a pit dug in the floor
of a low grotto. It lay on its back, head to the west, with one arm
bent towards the head, the other outstretched, and the legs drawn up.
Some bison bones lay in the grave as if a food-offering had been made.
Hard by were flint implements of a well-marked Mousterian type. In
the shelter of Le Moustier itself a similar burial was discovered.
The body lay on its right side, with the right arm bent so as to support
the head upon a carefully arranged pillow of flints; whilst the left
arm was stretched out, so that the hand might be near a magnificent
oval stone-weapon chipped on both faces, evidently laid there by design.
So much for these men of the Neanderthal type, denizens of the
mid-palaeolithic world at the very latest. Ape-like they doubtless
are in their head-form up to a certain point, though almost all their
separate features occur here and there amongst modern Australian
natives. And yet they were men enough, had brains enough, to believe
in a life after death. There is something to think about in that.
Without going outside Europe, we have, however, to reckon with at least
two other types of very early head-form.
In one of the caves of Mentone known as La Grotte des Enfants two
skeletons from a low stratum were of a primitive type, but unlike the
Neanderthal, and have been thought to show affinities to the modern
negro. As, however, no other Proto-Negroes are indisputably
forthcoming either from Europe or from any other part of the world,
there is little at present to be made out about this interesting racial
type.
In the layer immediately above the negroid remains, however, as well
as in other caves at Mentone, were the bones of individuals of quite
another order, one being positively a giant. They are known as the
Cro-Magnon race, after a group of them discovered in a rock shelter
of that name on the banks of the Vezere. These particular people can
be shown to be Aurignacian--that is to say, to have lived just after
the Mousterian men of the Neanderthal head-form. If, however, as has
been already suggested, the Galley Hill individual, who shows
affinities to the Cro-Magnon type, really goes back to the drift-period,
then we can believe that from very early times there co-existed in
Europe at least two varieties; and these so distinct, that some
authorities would trace the original divergence between them right
back to the times before man and the apes had parted company, linking
the Neanderthal race with the gorilla and the Cro-Magnon race with
the orang. The Cro-Magnon head-form is refined and highly developed.
The forehead is high, and the chin shapely, whilst neither the
brow-ridge nor the lower jaw protrudes as in the Neanderthal type.
Whether this race survives in modern Europe is, as was said in the
last chapter, highly uncertain. In certain respects--for instance,
in a certain shortness of face--these people present exceptional
features; though some think they can still find men of this type in
the Dordogne district. Perhaps the chances are, however, considering
how skulls of the neolithic period prove to be anything but uniform,
and suggest crossings between different stocks, that we may claim
kinship to some extent with the more good-looking of the two main types
of palaeolithic man--always supposing that head-form can be taken as
a guide. But can it? The Pygmies of the Congo region have medium heads;
the Bushmen of South Africa, usually regarded as akin in race, have
long heads. The American Indians, generally supposed to be all, or
nearly all, of one racial type, show considerable differences of
head-form; and so on. It need not be repeated that any race-mark is
liable to deceive.
* * * * *
We have sufficiently considered the use to which the particular
race-mark of head-form has been put in the attempted classification
of the very early men who have left their bones behind them. Let us
now turn to another race-mark, namely colour; because, though it may
really be less satisfactory than others, for instance hair, that is
the one to which ordinary people naturally turn when they seek to
classify by races the present inhabitants of the earth.
When Linnaeus in pre-Darwinian days distinguished four varieties of
man, the white European, the red American, the yellow Asiatic, and
the black African, he did not dream of providing the basis of anything
more than an artificial classification. He probably would have agreed
with Buffon in saying that in every case it was one and the same kind
of man, only dyed differently by the different climates. But the
Darwinian is searching for a natural classification. He wants to
distinguish men according to their actual descent. Now race and descent
mean for him the same thing. Hence a race-mark, if one is to be found,
must stand for, by co-existing with, the whole mass of properties that
form the inheritance. Can colour serve for a race-mark in this profound
sense? That is the only question here.
First of all, what is the use of being coloured one way or the other?
Does it make any difference? Is it something, like the heart-line of
the hand, that may go along with useful qualities, but in itself seems
to be a meaningless accident? Well, as some unfortunate people will
be able to tell you, colour is still a formidable handicap in the
struggle for existence. Not to consider the colour-prejudice in other
aspects, there is no gainsaying the part it plays in sexual selection
at this hour. The lower animals appear to be guided in the choice of
a mate by externals of a striking and obvious sort. And men and women
to this day marry more with their eyes than with their heads.
The coloration of man, however, though it may have come to subserve
the purposes of mating, does not seem in its origin to have been like
the bright coloration of the male bird. It was not something wholly
useless save as a means of sexual attraction, though in such a capacity
useful because a mark of vital vigour. Colour almost certainly
developed in strict relation to climate. Right away in the back ages
we must place what Bagehot has called the race-making epoch, when the
chief bodily differences, including differences of colour, arose
amongst men. In those days, we may suppose, natural selection acted
largely on the body, because mind had not yet become the prime condition
of survival. The rest is a question of pre-historic geography. Within
the tropics, the habitat of the man-like apes, and presumably of the
earliest men, a black skin protects against sunlight. A white skin,
on the other hand--though this is more doubtful--perhaps economizes
sun-heat in colder latitudes. Brown, yellow and the so-called red are
intermediate tints suitable to intermediate regions. It is not hard
to plot out in the pre-historic map of the world geographical provinces,
or "areas of characterization," where races of different shades
corresponding to differences in the climate might develop, in an
isolation more or less complete, such as must tend to reinforce the
process of differentiation.
Let it not be forgotten, however, that individual plasticity plays
its part too in the determination of human colour. The Anglo-Indian
planter is apt to return from a long sojourn in the East with his skin
charged with a dark pigment which no amount of Pears' soap will remove
during the rest of his life. It would be interesting to conduct
experiments, on the lines of those of Professor Boas already mentioned,
with the object of discovering in what degree the same capacity for
amassing protective pigment declares itself in children of European
parentage born in the tropics or transplanted thither during infancy.
Correspondingly, the tendency of dark stocks to bleach in cold
countries needs to be studied. In the background, too, lurks the
question whether such effects of individual plasticity can be
transmitted to offspring, and become part of the inheritance.
One more remark upon the subject of colour. Now-a-days civilized
peoples, as well as many of the ruder races that the former govern,
wear clothes. In other words they have dodged the sun, by developing,
with the aid of mind, a complex society that includes the makers of
white drill suits and solar helmets. But, under such conditions, the
colour of one's skin becomes more or less of a luxury. Protective
pigment, at any rate now-a-days, counts for little as compared with
capacity for social service. Colour, in short, is rapidly losing its
vital function. Will it therefore tend to disappear? In the long run,
it would seem--perhaps only in the very long run--it will become
dissociated from that general fitness to survive under particular
climatic conditions of which it was once the innate mark. Be this as
it may, race-prejudice, that is so largely founded on sheer
considerations of colour, is bound to decay, if and when the races
of darker colour succeed in displaying, on the average, such qualities
of mind as will enable them to compete with the whites on equal terms,
in a world which is coming more and more to include all climates.
* * * * *
Thus we are led on to discuss race in its mental aspect. Here, more
than ever, we are all at sea, for want of a proper criterion. What
is to be the test of mind? Indeed, mind and plasticity are almost the
same thing. Race, therefore, as being the stiffening in the evolution
of life, might seem by its very nature opposed to mind as a limiting
or obstructing force. Are we, then, going to return to the old
pre-scientific notion of soul as something alien to body, and thereby
simply clogged, thwarted and dragged down? That would never do. Body
and soul are, for the working purposes of science, to be conceived
as in perfect accord, as co-helpers in the work of life, and as such
subject to a common development. Heredity, then, must be assumed to
apply to both equally. In proportion as there is plastic mind there
will be plastic body.
Unfortunately, the most plastic part of body is likewise the hardest
to observe, at any rate whilst it is alive, namely, the brain. No
certain criterion of heredity, then, is likely to be available from
this quarter. You will see it stated, for instance, that the size of
the brain cavity will serve to mark off one race from another. This
is extremely doubtful, to put it mildly. No doubt the average European
shows some advantage in this respect as compared, say, with the Bushman.
But then you have to write off so much for their respective types of
body, a bigger body going in general with a bigger head, that in the
end you find yourself comparing mere abstractions. Again, the European
may be the first to cry off on the ground that comparisons are odious;
for some specimens of Neanderthal man in sheer size of the brain cavity
are said to give points to any of our modern poets and politicians.
Clearly, then, something is wrong with this test. Nor, if the brain
itself be examined after death, and the form and number of its
convolutions compared, is this criterion of hereditary brain-power
any more satisfactory. It might be possible in this way to detect the
difference between an idiot and a person of normal intelligence, but
not the difference between a fool and a genius.
We cross the uncertain line that divides the bodily from the mental
when we subject the same problem of hereditary mental endowment to
the methods of what is known as experimental psychology. Thus acuteness
of sight, hearing, taste, smell and feeling are measured by various
ingenious devices. Seeing what stories travellers bring back with them
about the hawk-like vision of hunting races, one might suppose that
such comparisons would be all in their favour. The Cambridge Expedition
to Torres Straits, however, of which Dr. Haddon was the leader,
included several well-trained psychologists, who devoted special
attention to this subject; and their results show that the sensory
powers of these rude folk were on the average much the same as those
of Europeans. It is the hunter's experience only that enables him to
sight the game at an immense distance. There are a great many more
complicated tests of the same type designed to estimate the force of
memory, attention, association, reasoning and other faculties that
most people would regard as purely mental; whilst another set of such
tests deals with reaction to stimulus, co-ordination between hand and
eye, fatigue, tremor, and, most ingenious perhaps of all, emotional
excitement as shown through the respiration--phenomena which are, as
it were, mental and bodily at once and together. Unfortunately,
psychology cannot distinguish in such cases between the effects of
heredity and those of individual experience, whether it take the form
of high culture or of a dissipated life. Indeed, the purely temporary
condition of body and mind is apt to influence the results. A man has
been up late, let us say, or has been for a long walk, or has missed
a meal; obviously his reaction-times, his record for memory, and so
on, will show a difference for the worse. Or, again, the subject may
confront the experiment in very various moods. At one moment he may
be full of vanity, anxious to show what superior qualities he
possesses; whilst at another time he will be bored. Not to labour the
point further, these methods, whatever they may become in the future,
are at present unable to afford any criterion whatever of the mental
ability that goes with race. They are fertile in statistics; but an
interpretation of these statistics that furthers our purpose is still
to seek.
But surely, it will be said, we can tell an instinct when we come across
it, so uniform as it is, and so independent of the rest of the system.
Not at all. For one thing, the idea that an instinct is apiece of
mechanism, as fixed as fate, is quite out of fashion. It is now known
to be highly plastic in many cases, to vary considerably in individuals,
and to involve conscious processes, thought, feeling and will, at any
rate of an elementary kind. Again, how are you going to isolate an
instinct? Those few automatic responses to stimulation that appear
shortly after birth, as, for instance, sucking, may perhaps be
recognized, since parental training and experience in general are out
of the question here. But what about the instinct or group of instincts
answering to sex? This is latent until a stage of life when experience
is already in full swing. Indeed, psychologists are still busy
discussing whether man has very few instincts or whether, on the
contrary, he appears to have few because he really has so many that,
in practice, they keep interfering with one another all the time. In
support of the latter view, it has been recently suggested by Mr.
McDougall that the best test of the instincts that we have is to be
found in the specific emotions. He believes that every instinctive
process consists of an afferent part or message, a central part, and
an efferent part or discharge. At its two ends the process is highly
plastic. Message and discharge, to which thought and will correspond,
are modified in their type as experience matures. The central part,
on the other hand, to which emotion answers on the side of consciousness,
remains for ever much the same. To fear, to wonder, to be angry, or
disgusted, to be puffed up, or cast down, or to be affected with
tenderness--all these feelings, argues Mr. McDougall, and various more
complicated emotions arising out of their combinations with each other,
are common to all men, and bespeak in them deep-seated tendencies to
react on stimulation in relatively particular and definite ways. And
there is much, I think, to be said in favour of this contention.
Yet, granting this, do we thus reach a criterion whereby the different
races of men are to be distinguished? Far from it. Nay, on the contrary,
as judged simply by his emotions, man is very much alike everywhere,
from China to Peru. They are all there in germ, though different customs
and grades of culture tend to bring special types of feeling to the
fore.
Indeed, a certain paradox is to be noted here. The Negro, one would
naturally say, is in general more emotional than the white man. Yet
some experiments conducted by Miss Kellor of Chicago on negresses and
white women, by means of the test of the effects of emotion on
respiration, brought out the former as decidedly the more stolid of
the two. And, whatever be thought of the value of such methods of proof,
certain it is that the observers of rude races incline to put down
most of them as apathetic, when not tuned up to concert-pitch by a
dance or other social event. It may well be, then, that it is not the
hereditary temperament of the Negro, so much as the habit, which he
shares with other peoples at the same level of culture, of living and
acting in a crowd, that accounts for his apparent excitability. But
after all, "mafficking" is not unknown in civilized countries. Thus
the quest for a race-mark of a mental kind is barren once more.
* * * * *
What, then, you exclaim, is the outcome of this chapter of negatives?
Is it driving at the universal equality and brotherhood of man? Or,
on the contrary, does it hint at the need of a stern system of eugenics?
I offer nothing in the way of a practical suggestion. I am merely trying
to show that, considered anthropologically--that is to say, in terms
of pure theory--race or breed remains something which we cannot at
present isolate, though we believe it to be there. Practice, meanwhile,
must wait on theory; mere prejudices, bad as they are, are hardly worse
guides to action than premature exploitations of science.
As regards the universal brotherhood of man, the most that can be said
is this: The old ideas about race as something hard and fast for all
time are distinctly on the decline. Plasticity, or, in other words,
the power of adaptation to environment, has to be admitted to a greater
share in the moulding of mind, and even of body, than ever before.
But how plasticity is related to race we do not yet know. It may be
that use-inheritance somehow incorporates its effects in the offspring
of the plastic parents. Or it may be simply that plasticity increases
with inter-breeding on a wider basis. These problems have still to
be solved.
As regards eugenics, there is no doubt that a vast and persistent
elimination of lives goes on even in civilized countries. It has been
calculated that, of every hundred English born alive, fifty do not
survive to breed, and, of the remainder, half produce three-quarters
of the next generation. But is the elimination selective? We can hardly
doubt that it is to some extent. But what its results are--whether
it mainly favours immunity from certain diseases, or the capacity for
a sedentary life in a town atmosphere, or intelligence and capacity
for social service--is largely matter of guesswork. How, then, can
we say what is the type to breed from, even if we confine our attention
to one country? If, on the other hand, we look farther afield, and
study the results of race-mixture or "miscegenation," we but encounter
fresh puzzles. That the half-breed is an unsatisfactory person may
be true; and yet, until the conditions of his upbringing are somehow
discounted, the race problem remains exactly where it was. Or, again,
it may be true that miscegenation increases human fertility, as some
hold; but, until it is shown that the increase of fertility does not
merely result in flooding the world with inferior types, we are no
nearer to a solution.
If, then, there is a practical moral to this chapter, it is merely
this: to encourage anthropologists to press forward with their study
of race; and in the meantime to do nothing rash.