Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of SexThomas, William Isaac
Science
Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of Sex
Thomas, William Isaac
Sex; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
In this we are confusing advance in culture with brain improvement. If
we should assume a certain grade of intelligence, fixed and invariable
in all individuals, races, and times--an unwarranted assumption,
of course--progress would still be possible, provided we assumed a
characteristically human grade of intelligence to begin with. With
associative memory, abstraction, and speech men are able to compare
the present with the past, to deliberate and discuss, to invent, to
abandon old processes for new, to focus attention on special problems,
to encourage specialization, and to transmit to the younger generation
a more intelligent standpoint and a more advanced starting-point.
Culture is the accumulation of the results of activity, and culture
could go on improving for a certain time even if there were a
retrogression in intelligence. If all the chemists in class A
should stop work tomorrow, the chemists in class B would still make
discoveries. These would influence manufacture, and progress would
result. If a worker in any specialty acquaints himself with the
results of his predecessors and contemporaries and _works_, he will
add some results to the sum of knowledge in his line. And if a race
preserves by record or tradition the memory of what past generations
have done, and adds a little, progress is secured whether the brain
improves or stands still. In the same way, the fact that one race has
advanced farther in culture than another does not necessarily imply a
different order of brain, but may be due to the fact that in the one
case social arrangements have not taken the shape affording the most
favorable conditions for the operation of the mind.
If, then, we make due allowance for our instinctive tendency as a
white group to disparage outsiders, and, on the other hand, for our
tendency to confuse progress in culture and general intelligence with
biological modification of the brain, we shall have to reduce very
much our usual estimate of the difference in mental capacity between
ourselves and the lower races, if we do not eliminate it altogether;
and we shall perhaps have to abandon altogether the view that there
has been an increase in the mental capacity of the white race since
prehistoric times.
The first question arising in this connection is whether any of
the characteristic faculties of the human mind--perception, memory,
inhibition, abstraction--are absent or noticeably weak in the lower
races. If this is found to be true, we have reason to attribute the
superiority of the white race to biological causes; otherwise we
shall have to seek an explanation of white superiority in causes lying
outside the brain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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