Sex and Society by William I. Thomas

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The number of things which can stimulate the human mind is somewhat
definite and limited. Among them, for example, is death. This happens
everywhere, and the death of a dear one may cause the living to
imagine ways of being reunited. The story of Orpheus and Eurydice may
thus arise spontaneously and perpetually, wherever death and affection
exist. Or, there may be a separation from home and friends, and the
mind runs back in distress and longing over the happy past, and the
state of consciousness aroused is as definite a fact among savages
as among the civilized. A beautiful passage in Homer represents Helen
looking out on the Greeks from the wall of Troy and saying:

And now behold I all the other glancing-eyed Achaians, whom
well I could discern and tell their names; but two captains
of the host can I not see, even Kastor tamer of horses and
Polydukes the skilful boxer, mine own brethren whom the same
mother bare. Either they came not in the company from lovely
Lakedaimon; or they came hither indeed in their seafaring
ships, but now will not enter into the battle of the warriors,
for fear of the many scornings and revilings that are
mine.[261]

When this passage is thus stripped of its technical excellence by a
prose translation, we may compare it with the following New Zealand
lament composed by a young woman who was captured on the island of
Tuhua and carried to a mountain from which she could see her home:

My regret is not to be expressed. Tears, like a spring, gush
from my eyes. I wonder whatever is Tu Kainku [her lover]
doing, he who deserted me. Now I climb upon the ridge of Mount
Parahaki, whence is clear the view of the island of Tuhua.
I see with regret the lofty Tanmo where dwells [the chief]
Tangiteruru. If I were there, the shark's tooth would hang
from my ear. How fine, how beautiful should I look!... But
enough of this; I must return to my rags and to my nothing at
all.[262]

The situation of the two women in this case is not identical, and it
would be possible to claim that the Greek and Maori passages differ
in tone and coloring; but it remains true that a captive woman of any
race will feel much the same as a captive woman of any other race when
her thoughts turn toward home, and that the poetry growing out of such
a situation will be everywhere of the same general pattern.

Similarly, to take an illustration from morals, we find that widely
different in complexion and detail as are the moral codes of lower and
higher groups, say the Hebrews and the African Kafirs, yet the general
patterns of morality are strikingly coincident. It is reported of
the Kafirs that "they possess laws which meet every crime which may
be committed." Theft is punished by restitution and fine; injuring
cattle, by death or fine; false witness, by a heavy fine; adultery,
by fine or death; rape, by fine or death; poisoning or witchcraft, by
death and confiscation of property; murder, by death or fine; treason
or desertion from the tribe, by death or confiscation.[263] The Kafirs
and Hebrews are not at the same level of culture, and we miss the more
abstract and monotheistic admonitions of the higher religion--"thou
shalt not covet; thou shalt worship no other gods before me"--but the
intelligence shown by the social mind in adjusting the individual to
society may fairly be called the same grade of intelligence in the two
cases.

When the environmental life of two groups is more alike and the
general cultural conditions more correspondent, the parallelism of
thought and practice becomes more striking. The recently discovered
Assyrian Code of Hammurabi (about 2500 B.C.) contains striking
correspondences with the Mosaic code; and while Semitic scholars
probably have good and sufficient reasons for holding that the Mosaic
Code was strongly influenced by the Assyrian, we may yet be very
confident that the two codes would have been of the same general
character if no influence whatever had passed from one to the other.

The institutions and practices of a people are a product of the mind;
and if the early and spontaneous products of mind are everywhere
of the same general pattern as the later manifestations, only less
developed, refined, and specialized, it may well be that failure to
progress equally is not due to essential unlikeness of mind, but to
conditions lying outside the mind.

Another test of mental ability which deserves special notice is
mechanical ingenuity. Our white pre-eminence owes much to this
faculty, and the lower races are reckoned defective in it. But the
lower races do invent, and it is doubtful whether one invention is
ever much more difficult than another. On the psychological side,
an invention means that the mind sees a roundabout way of reaching
an end when it cannot be reached directly. It brings into play the
associative memory, and involves the recognition of analogies. There
is a certain likeness between the flying back of a bough in one's face
and the rebound of a bow, between a serpent's tooth and a poisoned
arrow, between floating timber and a raft or boat; and water, steam,
and electricity are like a horse in one respect--they will all make
wheels go around, and do work.

Now, the savage had this faculty of seeing analogies and doing things
in indirect ways. With the club, knife, and sword he struck more
effectively than with the fist; with hooks, traps, nets, and pitfalls
he understood how to seize game more surely than with the hands; in
the bow and arrow, spear, blow-gun, and spring-trap he devised motion
swifter than that of his own body; he protected himself with armor
imitated from the hides and scales of animals, and turned their
venom back on themselves. That the savage should have originated the
inventive process and carried it on systematically is, indeed, more
wonderful than that his civilized successors should continue the
process; for every beginning is difficult.

When occupations become specialized and one set of men has continually
to do with one and only one set of machinery and forces, the constant
play of attention over the limited field naturally results in
improvements and the introduction of new principles. Modern inventions
are magnificent and seem quite to overshadow the simpler devices
of primitive times; but when we consider the precedents, copies,
resources, and accumulated knowledge with which the modern
investigator works, and, on the other hand, the resourcelessness of
primitive man in materials, ideas, and in the inventive habit itself,
I confess that the bow and arrow seems to me the most wonderful
invention in the world.

Viewing the question from a different angle, we find another argument
for the homogeneous character of the human mind in the fact that the
patterns of interest of the civilized show no variation from those of
the savage. Not only the appetites and vanities remain essentially the
same, but, on the side of intellectual interest, the type of mental
reaction fixed in the savage by the food-quest has come down unaltered
to the man of science as well as to the man of the street. In
circumventing enemies and capturing game, both the attention and the
organic processes worked together in primitive man under great stress
and strain. Whenever, indeed, a strain is thrown on the attention, the
heart and organs of respiration are put under pressure also in their
effort to assist the attention in manipulating the problem; and these
organic fluctuations are felt as pleasure and pain. The strains thrown
on the attention of primitive man were connected with his struggle
for life; and not only in the actual encounter with men and animals
did emotion run high, but the memory and anticipation of conflict
reinstated the emotional conditions in those periods when he was
meditating future conflicts and preparing his bows and arrows, traps
and poisons. The problem of invention, the reflective and scientific
side of his life, was suffused with interest, because the manufacture
of the weapon was, psychologically speaking, a part of the fight.

This type of interest, originating in the hunt, remains dominant
in the mind down to the present time. Once constructed to take an
interest in the hunting problem, it takes an interest in any problem
whatever. Not only do hunting and fighting and all competitive
games--which are of precisely the same psychological pattern as the
hunt and fight--remain of perennial interest, but all the useful
occupations are interesting in just the degree that this pattern is
preserved. The man of science works at problems and uses his ingenuity
in making an engine in the laboratory in the same way that primitive
man used his mind in making a trap. So long as the problem is
present, the interest is sustained; and the interest ceases when
the problematical is removed. Consequently, all modern occupations
of the hunting pattern--scientific investigation, law, medicine,
the organization of business, trade speculation, and the arts and
crafts--are interesting as a game; while those occupations into which
the division of labor enters to the degree that the workman is not
attempting to control a problem, and in which the same acts are
repeated an indefinite number of times, lose interest and become
extremely irksome.

This means that the brain acts pleasurably on the principle it was
made up to act on in the most primitive times, and the rest is a
burden. There is no brain change, but the social changes have been
momentous; and the brain of each generation is brought into contact
with new traditions, inhibitions, copies, obligations, problems, so
that the run of attention and content of consciousness are different.
Social suggestion works marvels in the manipulation of the mind;
but the change is not in the brain as an organ; it is rather in the
character of the stimulations thrust on it by society.

The child begins as a savage, and after we have brought to bear
all the influence of home, school, and church to socialize him, we
speak as though his nature had changed organically, and institute a
parallelism between the child and the race, assuming that the child's
brain passes in a recapitulatory way through phases of development
corresponding to epochs in the history of the race. I have no
doubt myself that this theory of recapitulation is largely a
misapprehension. A stream of social influence is turned loose on the
child; and if the attention to him is incessant and wise, and the
copies he has are good and stimulating, he is molded nearer to the
heart's desire. Sometimes he escapes, and becomes a criminal, tramp,
sport, or artist; and even if made into an impeccable and model
citizen, he periodically breaks away from the network of social habit
and goes a-fishing.

The fundamental explanation of the difference in the mental life
of two groups is not that the capacity of the brain to do work is
different, but that the attention is not in the two cases stimulated
and engaged along the same lines. Wherever society furnishes copies
and stimulations of a certain kind, a body of knowledge and a
technique, practically all its members are able to work on the plan
and scale in vogue there, and members of an alien race who become
acquainted in a real sense with the system can work under it. But
when society does not furnish the stimulations, or when it has
preconceptions which tend to inhibit the run of attention in given
lines, then the individual shows no intelligence in these lines. This
may be illustrated in the fields of scientific and artistic interest.
Among the Hebrews a religious inhibition--"thou shalt not make unto
thee any graven image"--was sufficient to prevent anything like the
sculpture of the Greeks; and the doctrine of the resurrection of the
body in the early Christian church, and the teaching that man was
made in the image of God, formed an almost insuperable obstacle to the
study of human anatomy.

The Mohammedan attitude toward scientific interest is represented by
the following extracts from a letter from an oriental official to a
western inquirer, printed by Sir Austen Henry Layard:

_My Illustrious Friend and Joy of my Liver:_

The thing which you ask of me is both difficult and useless.
Although I have passed all my days in this place, I have
neither counted the houses nor inquired into the number of the
inhabitants; and as to what one person loads on his mules and
the other stows away in the bottom of his ship, that is no
business of mine. But above all, as to the previous history
of this city, God only knows the amount of dirt and confusion
that the infidels may have eaten before the coming of the
sword of Islam. It were unprofitable for us to inquire into
it.... Listen, O my son! There is no wisdom equal to the
belief in God! He created the world, and shall we liken
ourselves unto him in seeking to penetrate into the mysteries
of his creation? Shall we say, Behold this star spinneth round
that star, and this other star with a tail goeth and cometh
in so many years? Let it go! He from whose hand it came will
guide and direct it.... Thou art learned in the things I care
not for, and as for that which thou hast seen, I spit upon it.
Will much knowledge create thee a double belly, or wilt thou
seek paradise with thine eyes?...

The meek in spirit, IMAUM ALI ZADI.[264]

The works of Sir Henry Maine, who gained by his long residence in
India a profound insight into the oriental character, frequently point
out that the eastern pride in conservatisms is quite as real as the
western pride in progress:

Vast populations, some of them with a civilization
considerable but peculiar, detest that which in the language
of the West would be called reform. The entire Mohammedan
world detests it. The multitudes of colored men who swarm in
the great continent of Africa detest it, and it is detested by
that large part of mankind which we are accustomed to leave on
one side as barbarous or savage. The millions upon millions of
men who fill the Chinese Empire loathe it and (what is more)
despise it.... There are few things more remarkable, and in
their way more instructive, than the stubborn incredulity
and disdain which a man belonging to the cultivated part of
Chinese society opposes to the vaunts of western civilization
which he frequently hears.... There is in India a minority,
educated at the feet of English politicians and in books
saturated with English political ideas, which has learned to
repeat their language; but it is doubtful whether even these,
if they had a voice in the matter, would allow a finger to be
laid on the very subjects with which European legislation is
beginning to concern itself--social and religious usage. There
is not, however, the shadow of a doubt that the enormous mass
of the Indian population hates and dreads change.[265]

To the fact that the enthusiasm for change is comparatively
rare must be added the fact that it is extremely modern. It is
known but to a small part of mankind, and to that part but for
a short period during a history of incalculable length.[266]

The oriental attitude does not argue a lack of brain power, but a
prepossession hostile to scientific inquiry. The society represented
does not interest its members in what, from the western standpoint, is
knowledge.

The Chinese afford a fine example of a people of great natural ability
letting their intelligence run to waste from lack of a scientific
standpoint. As indicated above, they are not defective in brain
weight, and their application to study is long continued and very
severe; but their attention is directed to matters which cannot
possibly make them wise from the occidental standpoint. They learn
no mathematics and no science, but spend years in copying the poetry
of the T'ang Dynasty, in order to learn the Chinese characters, and
in the end cannot write the language correctly, because many modern
characters are not represented in this ancient poetry. Their attention
to Chinese history is great, as befits their reverence for the past;
but they do not organize their knowledge, they have no adequate
textbooks or apparatus for study, and they make no clear distinction
between fact and fiction. In general, they learn only rules and no
principles, and rely on memory without the aid of reason, with the
result that the man who stops studying often forgets everything, and
the professional student is amazingly ignorant in the line of his own
work:

Multitudes of Chinese scholars know next to nothing about
matters directly in the line of their studies, and in regard
to which we should consider ignorance positively disgraceful.
A venerable teacher remarked to the writer with a charming
naivete that he had never understood the allusions in the
Trimetrical Classic (which stands at the very threshold of
Chinese study) until at the age of sixty he had an opportunity
to read a Universal History prepared by a missionary, in which
for the first time Chinese history was made accessible to
him.[267]

Add to this that the whole of their higher learning, corresponding
to our university system, consists in writing essays and always more
essays on the Chinese classics, and "it is impossible," as Mr.
Smith points out, "not to marvel at the measure of success which
has attended the use of such materials in China."[268] But when this
people is in possession of the technique of the western world--a
logic, general ideas, and experimentation--we cannot reasonably doubt
that they will be able to work the western system as their cousins,
the Japanese, are doing, and perhaps they, too, may better the
instruction.

White effectiveness is probably due to a superior technique acting
in connection with a superior body of knowledge and sentiment. Of two
groups having equal mental endowment, one may outstrip the other by
the mere dominance of incident. It is a notorious fact that the course
of human history has been largely without prevision or direction.
Things have drifted and forces have arisen. Under these conditions
an unusual incident--the emergence of a great mind or a forcible
personality, or the operation of influences as subtle as those which
determine fashions in dress--may establish social habits and duties
which will give a distinct character to the modes of attention
and mental life of the group. The most significant fact for Aryan
development is the emergence among the Greeks of a number of eminent
men who developed logic, the experimental method, and philosophic
interest, and fixed in their group the habit of looking behind the
incident for the general law. Mediaeval attention was diverted from
these lines by a religious movement, and the race lost for a time the
key to progress and got clean away from the Greek copies; but it found
them again and took a fresh start with the revival of Greek learning.
It is quite possible to make a fetish of classical learning; but Sir
Henry Maine's remark, that nothing moves in the modern world that is
not Greek in its origin, is quite just.

The real variable is the individual, not the race. In the
beginning--perhaps as the result of a mutation or series of
mutations--a type of brain developed which has remained relatively
fixed in all times and among all races. This brain will never have
any faculty in addition to what it now possesses, because as a type of
structure it is as fixed as the species itself, and is indeed a mark
of species. It is not apparent either that we are greatly in need of
another faculty, or that we could make use of it even if by a chance
mutation it should emerge, since with the power of abstraction we are
able to do any class of work we know anything about. Moreover, the
brain is less likely to make a leap now than in earlier time, both
because the conditions of nature are more fixed or more nearly
controlled by man, and hence the urgency of adjustment to sharp
variations in external conditions is removed, and because the struggle
for existence has been mitigated so that the unfit survive along with
the fit. Indeed, the rapid increase in idiocy and insanity shown by
statistics indicates that the brain is deteriorating slightly, _on the
average_, as compared with earlier times.[269]

Nature is not producing a better average brain than in the time of
Aristotle and the Greeks. If we have more than the wisdom of our
ancestors, our advantage lies in our specialization, our superior body
of knowledge, and our superior technique for its transmission. At the
same time, the individual brain is unstable, fluctuating in normal
persons between 1,100 and 1,500 grams in weight, while the extremes
of variation are represented, on the one side, by the imbecile with
300 grams, and the man of genius with 2,000 on the other. It is
therefore perfectly true that by artificial selection--Mr. Galton's
"eugenism"--a larger average brain could be created, and also a higher
average of natural intelligence, whether this be absolutely dependent
on brain weight or not. But it is hardly to be expected that a stable
brain above the capacity of those of the first rank now and in the
past will result, since the mutations of nature are more radical than
the breeding process of man, and she probably ran the whole gamut.
"Great men lived before Agamemnon," and individual variations will
continue to occur, but not on a different pattern; and what has been
true in the past will happen again in the future, that the group which
by hook or by crook comes into possession of the best technique and
the best copies will make the best show of intelligence and march at
the head of civilization.

III

The foregoing examination of the relation of the mental faculty of the
lower races to the higher places us in a position to examine to better
advantage the other question of the relation of the intelligence of
woman to that of man.

The differences in mental expression between the lower and the higher
races can be expressed for the most part in terms of attention and
practice. The differences in run of attention and practice are in this
case due to the development of different habits by groups occupying
different habitats, and consequently having no copies in common.
Woman, on the other hand, exists in the white man's world of practical
and scientific activity, but is excluded from full participation in
it. Certain organic conditions and historical incidents have, in fact,
inclosed her in habits which she neither can nor will fracture, and
have also set up in the mind of man an attitude toward her which
renders her almost as alien to man's interests and practices as if she
were spatially separated from them.

One of the most important facts which stand out in a comparison of
the physical traits of men and women is that man is a more specialized
instrument for motion, quicker on his feet, with a longer reach, and
fitted for bursts of energy; while woman has a greater fund of stored
energy and is consequently more fitted for endurance. The development
of intelligence and motion have gone along side by side in all animal
forms. Through motion chances and experiences are multiplied, the
whole equilibrium characterizing the stationary form is upset, and the
organs of sense and the intelligence are developed to take note of and
manipulate the outside world. Amid the recurrent dangers incident to
a world peopled with moving and predacious forms, two attitudes may be
assumed--that of fighting, and that of fleeing or hiding. As between
the two, concealment and evasion became more characteristic of the
female, especially among mammals, where the young are particularly
helpless and need protection for a long period. She remained,
therefore, more stationary, and at the same time acquired more
cunning, than the male.

In mankind especially, the fact that woman had to rely on cunning
and the protection of man rather than on swift motion, while man had
a freer range of motion and adopted a fighting technique, was the
starting-point of a differentiation in the habits and interests,
which had a profound effect on the consciousness of each. Man's most
immediate, most fascinating, and most remunerative occupation was
the pursuit of animal life. The pursuit of this stimulated him to
the invention of devices for killing and capture; and this aptitude
for invention was later extended to the invention of tools and of
mechanical devices in general, and finally developed into a settled
habit of scientific interest. The scientific imagination which
characterizes man in contrast with women is not a distinctive male
trait, but represents a constructive habit of attention associated
with freer movement and the pursuit of evasive animal forms. The
problem of control was more difficult, and the means of securing it
became more indirect, mediated, reflective, and inventive; that is,
more intelligent.

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