880 SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 



environment the temperate, a niggardly environment the laborious, 

 a capricious environment the forelooking? Will not the restless 

 survive under nomadism, the bold under militancy, the supple 

 under slavery, the calculating in an era of commerce, the thrifty 

 in an epoch of capitalism? Since intellectual gains are indefinitely 

 communicable, men do not survive according to their predisposition 

 to have or not have a certain advantageous idea or belief. But 

 modes of response to stimulus are not so generalized by imitation. 

 Men change their thoughts but not their elementary reactions, and, 

 since according to these reactions they survive or perish, it is pos- 

 sible for motor and emotional differences to arise between peoples 

 one in blood but unlike in social history. 



Let the social psychologist account for the cultural differences 

 between peoples and for the moral differences that hinge on some 

 cultural element. Only the simple undecomposable reactions in- 

 volving no conceptual element, would fall to the race-psychologist. 

 Of course, it is not easy to tell which characteristics are elementary. 

 Once we thought the laziness of the anemic Georgia Cracker came 

 from a wrong ideal of life. Now we charge it to the hook-worm 

 and administer thymol instead of the proverbs of Poor Richard. 

 The Negro is not simply a black Anglo-Saxon deficient in school- 

 ing, but a being who in strength of appetites and in power to 

 control them differs considerably from the white man. Many of 

 the alleged differences between Chinese and Occidentals will be 

 wiped out when East and West come to share in a common civiliz- 

 ation. But it will be found perhaps that the Occidental's love of 

 excitement, speculation, sport, and fighting flows from his greater 

 restlessness, due to a thousand years less of schooling in industrial- 

 ism than the Chinese have had. Again, those who imagine that by 

 imparting to Hindoos or Cinghalese our theology, the missionary 

 endows them with our virtues and capacities, certainly fail to 

 appreciate how much these depend on certain elementary motor 

 reactions. 



Passing now from the differentiae of peoples to the broad psychic 

 differences that appear within a given population, we first set aside 

 as foreign to our purpose the problems that engross the sex-psych- 

 ologists, the child-study people, the alienists, and the criminalists. 

 The mental varieties they deal with are at bottom anthropic, and 

 their studies are prolongations of individual psychology. In every 

 people, however, there are classes marked by divergent modes of 

 thought and feeling. These class-types of mind are of societal 

 origin, and the delineation and explanation of them belong, I think, 

 to social psychology. Every social population is distributed into 

 a series of unlike subjective environments, their^ nature depending 



