RACIAL MENTAL DIFFERENCES 291 



practically certain to be erroneous. Perhaps the most 

 extreme instances of this fallacious method of reasoning is 

 furnished by those travellers who conclude that the inability 

 of savages to count is due to an innate lack of mathematical 

 ability instead of to a mere lack of mathematical knowledge. 

 As well might they conclude, because a man has no know- 

 ledge of Hebrew, that, therefore, he is innately incapable of 

 acquiring it. The considerable success of aboriginal children 

 in Australian schools affords a fit commentary. 



464. It is often maintained that, since (as in the case 

 already discussed of individuals) nature has caused, in 

 different environments, the various races of mankind to 

 differ as regards their innate physical characters, it is highly 

 likely that it has caused them to differ as regards their innate 

 mental characters also. But here crops up again that old 

 and fertile source of error, the idea that the human mind is 

 a bundle of " faculties " and " proclivities " as rigidly fixed as 

 to the degree and direction of their growth as the various 

 structures of a physical organ. The mind is not the 

 homologue of an organ ; it is the correlate of the functional 

 activity of an organ, the cerebrum an organ, which, like 

 other organs, is limited as to its growth, but which is distin- 

 guished from all others except perhaps the hand by the enormous 

 range and diversity of its functioning. We may compare the 

 human mind, therefore, not to a material thing like the hand, 

 but rather to all the movements of which the hand is capable. 

 The whole "purpose," if I may use the term, of the evolution 

 of the human mind has been to enable a race which lives in 

 a very complex environment to make suitable adjustments 

 " under circumstances novel alike to the experience of the 

 individual and to that of the species." The brains of various 

 races differ in size and shape, and may differ structurally in 

 many other respects, not as yet observed by us ; and these 

 differences have possibly or probably for their concomitants 

 mental differences of more or less importance, but it is very 

 doubtful that these latter are of the kind commonly sup- 

 posed. The mind of every man, not a microcephalic idiot, is 

 as we have seen, much more entirely a product of his own 

 individual past than his body. 



465. I have written in vain if the reader is still unconvinced 

 that the whole trend of man's mental evolution has been 

 towards the creation of a great memory and of great powers 

 of utilizing the contents of memory of an immense faculty 

 for recalling past events and objects, and so, by means of 

 association, comparison, discrimination, abstraction, induction, 



