PROVINCE OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 865 



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low and high, and has an important bearing on educational theory 

 and the race-questions. 



Another extension of individual psychology to the region of 

 social phenomena lies in the comparison of the states of conscious- 

 ness of different races, classes, and social epochs, with a view to 

 determining what mental differences exist, and to what extent they 

 are due to biological as over against social causes. This involves, 

 of course, a comparative study of mental traits. 



The study of memory, sense-perceptions, and power of attention 

 among different races and classes will assist in determining the 

 degree to which differences of this character are innate, on the one 

 hand, or due to the habitual direction of the attention and conse- 

 quent practice, on the other. The study of mental traits must 

 always be made with reference to the condition of activities pre- 

 vailing, and the study is consequently both sociological and psych- 

 ological. 



The degree to which the power of abstraction is developed in 

 different groups is another fruitful line of interest. The prevailing 

 opinion is that the lower races are weak in the power of abstraction, 

 and certainly their languages are poor in abstract terms. But a 

 people whose activities are simple cannot have a complex mental 

 life. Abstraction is much used in a group only when deliberative 

 as over against perceptual activities engage the attention, and 

 where the manipulation of complex activities involves numerous 

 steps between the stimulus and the response, and a distinction 

 between the general and the particular. The life of the savage and 

 of the lower classes is of an immediate kind, with little mental play 

 between the stimulation and the act, and consequently little occasion 

 to employ abstraction. All races do possess language, however, 

 which involves the use of abstraction; all have systems of number, 

 time, and space; many of them have a rich repertory of proverbs; 

 and all show logical power. The question which social psychology 

 has to work out is to what degree apparent lack of power of ab- 

 straction is due to lack of activities and stimulations which force 

 the attention to employ abstract processes and give it practice in 

 handling series. Deficiency in logical power among groups in lower 

 stages of culture is also obviously largely dependent on the fact that 

 the general body of knowledge and tradition, on which logical dis- 

 cussion depends, is deficient. So far as this view holds, it means 

 that what have sometimes been regarded as biological differences 

 separating social groups are not really so, and that characteristic 

 expressions of mind are dependent on social environment. 



The degree to which the power of inhibition is developed in the 

 lower races as compared with the higher leads again to the employ- 

 ment of psychological methods and ethnological materials. The 



