RACIAL MENTAL CHANGES 427 



adopt the easy view that the mass of these differences are innate 

 in the same sense that physical differences are innate. 



703. Man is a very slow breeding animal. Innate changes of 

 importance cannot occur in his race at all swiftly in the course of 

 a few centuries except under excessively stringent selection ; and, 

 owing to the strong tendency to retrogression thereby created, such 

 changes can only be maintained afterwards by selection almost as 

 stringent and continued over a very long period. But, in the 

 absence of all recognisable selection, some races have changed 

 their mental characteristics with great rapidity. Thus the Greeks 

 and Romans, separating quickly from the surrounding barbarians, 

 displayed, for a few centuries, extraordinary intellectual qualities, 

 and then sank, quite as suddenly, into abysmal degradation. At 

 the Renaissance and the Reformation, after more than a thousand 

 years of stagnation, various European nations began to display 

 qualities comparable to those of the great Pagans. Their material 

 and intellectual progress has continued to the present day ; but 

 even now, when we are able to watch contemporaries, we are 

 unable to detect any form of stringent selection save that by 

 disease. The Japanese furnish a very striking modern instance. 

 Another similar instance is afforded by the fact that, in a single 

 generation, the ferocious cannibals of New Zealand have become 

 progressive and law-abiding. Nothing apparently prevents them 

 taking an equal place with the whites as citizens of a progressive 

 and civilised state except their physical inability to withstand 

 imported disease. 



704. Every race that has changed its religion has immediately 

 undergone a great moral and intellectual change. The inhabitants 

 of Syria and North Africa are examples. At first they were 

 Pagans and shared to some extent the Greek and Roman character- 

 istics ; next they became typical Christians of the Dark Ages ; 

 lastly they became typical Mohammedans, fierce, turbulent, 

 fanatical, stagnant. Races of diverse origin, which follow a given 

 religion, resemble one another more closely in mental characteristics 

 than sections of the same race which follow diverse religions. 

 Thus all Mohammedan nationalities have mental peculiarities 

 which separate them sharply from Christians on the one hand and 

 Pagans on the other. Mohammedan Greeks mentally resemble 

 their co-religionists more nearly than their compatriots. The 

 Teutonic Catholics of Ireland are quite indistinguishable from the 

 Celtic Catholics, but they differ sharply from Protestant Teutons. 

 Catholic negroes are typical Catholics of the more ignorant type ; 



