POWER IN CIVILIZATION 111 



amination of the mental faculties of members of 

 what he imagined to be the lower races, it came as a 

 kind of revelation to a large number of minds and 

 even to many minds scientifically trained to learn 

 that there existed no wide inborn interval of 

 superiority, intellectual or mental, between even 

 the foremost races of civilized men and the savage. 

 The efficiency which civilization possessed over 

 savagery rested, I asserted, on a basis quite other 

 than that which had been hitherto almost universally 

 assumed. 



It was in this connexion that I put on record at 

 the time a prediction which must now be referred 

 to. 1 I ventured then to assert that sooner or later 

 it would become clear in the actual stress of the 

 world, that the Western peoples in basing a claim 

 to supremacy on the assumption that they possessed 

 any inborn intellectual or other mental superiority 

 over the less advanced races of men, were building 

 on a false hope. All the promise of the intellect 

 in the past in this respect was destined, I foretold, 

 to end in disillusionment. Civilization rested, it 

 was asserted, not on the intellect or on the reasoning 

 processes of mind, but on the psychic inheritance 

 transmitted from generation to generation and 

 entirely independent of inborn heredity in the 



1 Social Evolution, chap. ix. p. 244 and following. 



