420 NATURE AND NURTURE 



are different. I do not love the same old people, the same wife, the 

 same children, the same fireside, the same friends. Yet I might 

 well have fitted his niche had I been reared to it. 



692. It is evident, therefore, that while human bodies can grow 

 in only one way, human minds may grow in any one of a thousand 

 ways. As already noted, if the child of refined and educated 

 English parents were reared from birth by African cannibals, then 

 in body, when grown, he would resemble his progenitors more 

 than his trainers. Does anyone believe that the same would be 

 true of his mind? All Anglo-Indians know the disastrous effects 

 of too much association with natives on the plastic minds of white 

 children. They become unfitted for the environment of the 

 average Englishman. Even when an adult young Englishman 

 migrates to the United States or the colonies and returns after 

 twenty years, we perceive marked mental differences between him 

 and his stay-at-home contemporaries. Indeed, he seems to us 

 to have become quite similar to the people with whom he has 

 dwelt, though, doubtless, Americans or colonists, whose observa- 

 tion is sharpened by familiarity can detect differences. The 

 English child we imagined as reared by African savages would 

 certainly display no hint of the language and general knowledge 

 of his parents, no tincture of their moral, social, religious, and 

 political ideals and aspirations. He would ruthlessly murder and 

 enjoyingly eat the stranger. He would harry the stranger's 

 property and annex the stranger's wives by the wool of their heads 

 whenever practical. He would treat his own wives as beasts of 

 burden, and perhaps thrash them as a matter of routine. His 

 aesthetic ideals would be satisfied by a little paint, some beads, 

 and plenty of grease ; his moral ideas by a homicidal devotion to 

 the tribal chief. His god would be the tribal fetish, to whom he 

 would offer human sacrifices. He would go naked and unashamed. 

 The common-sense of mankind has universally recognised this 

 radical difference between man's mind and body. We allow our 

 children to train their own bodies, being satisfied that they will 

 develop physically well enough under the influence of sufficient 

 food and the exercise to which the instinct of play impels them ; 

 but to the training of their minds we devote the most anxious 

 care. We mould them, and we know we mould them. No one 

 fears that his child will be made short or dark by association 

 with short or dark companions ; but everyone dreads that 

 his child may become silly or bad if his associates are silly or 

 bad. Clearly, then, the mind of the individual is 'shaped' by 



