SECTION 22.OBSER VA TION. 277 



and moods. 1 An analysis of pleasure-pain furnishes analogous 

 conclusions. 



139. (C) Environment Ignored. Another aspect of our 

 problem needs also to be considered here. If one substance, 

 as shown in (A), may be so intimately joined to another that 

 the two appear as one unless painstakingly examined, another 

 substance may depend on some factor in its immediate en- 

 vironment e.g., many diseases are traceable to parasites 

 and we may gloss over this factor, and seek to explain the 

 behaviour of the substance without regard to its surroundings. 

 Many illustrations of this oversight may be found in the realm 

 of specio-psychics. We explain French style, Italian art, German 

 scholarship, and English colonising skill by certain alleged in- 

 dwelling powers in the individuals belonging to these four 

 peoples, without fully inquiring whether perhaps all four qualities 

 are not produced by the respective environment geographical, 

 intellectual, moral, and economic. We read of a Shakespeare 

 and a Goethe, and we endeavour by their means to explain 

 their environment, without asking ourselves how far the con- 

 trary may hold true, and they be best explained by their 

 surroundings. We are dissatisfied with those around us, and 

 we decide that supermen are needed, when what is required 

 is perhaps a super-civilisation. We see men struggling success- 

 fully against their environment, and we insist that man is wholly 

 free to do as he listeth ; or we perceive men gravely deterior- 

 ated by their environment, and we bring in a plea of "not 

 guilty", and relieve the individual of every effort, when the 

 responsibility should be perhaps divided between individual and 

 environment. We observe Negroes in Africa dancing round fe- 

 tishes, and we forthwith consider them as more beasts than men, 

 when with Western nurture these Negroes might have graduated 

 in a European university, and some of them even have oc- 

 cupied university chairs. We notice women confined to their 

 homes and interested in balls and dresses chiefly, and we un- 

 hesitatingly decide that woman's place is the home, when, per- 

 haps, under reversed circumstances, men and women might ex- 

 change places. We encounter two men who differ widely in 

 intellectual leanings, and we declare that the difference lies 

 primordially in their innate intellectual aptitudes, when education, 

 opportunity, comfort, and many other causes, may enter as more 

 or less decisive factors. The enormous powers of home and 

 school education, of social traditions and institutions, of position 

 in the social scale, are frequently not even suspected, let alone 

 seriously weighed, whereas no enquiry relating to man should 

 consider them otherwise than as momentous. The environment 

 as a primary factor is thus habitually overlooked. 



1 See G. Spiller, "The Problem of the Emotions", in American Journal of 

 Psychology, vol. XV. 



