The Basis of Social Relations: A Study in Ethnic PsychologyBrinton, Daniel G. (Daniel Garrison)
Science
The Basis of Social Relations: A Study in Ethnic Psychology
Brinton, Daniel G. (Daniel Garrison)
Ethnopsychology; Sociology
Nor is the individual who would direct his activities by the highest
motives at all compelled to increase his kind. The accessory demands
upon his time and powers which such an action usually entails, would
probably hinder him in his efforts. Darwin forcibly stated this in his
_Descent of Man_. He imagines a man who, not compelled by any deep
feeling, yet sacrifices his life for the good of others through the love
of glory. “His example would excite the same wish for glory in other men
and would strengthen by exercise the noble feeling of admiration. He
might thus do far more good to his tribe than by begetting offspring
with a tendency to inherit his own high character.”
If this is true of one governed by a motive confessedly not the highest,
how much more true of him or her whose soul is fired with a devotion to
the truth of science or to the welfare of the race!
_Feminism._—The physical contrast of the sexes belongs to all mammals,
to birds, and to most of the animal kingdom. The female is generally
smaller, lighter, with lines more graceful and delicate. This is true,
as a rule, in all races of men and held good for the earliest tribes
whose skeletons have been preserved. Yet the contrast in man is so far
from positive that the anatomist knows no criteria to establish the sex
from the bones except the more obtuse angle of the rami of the pubes in
the female; and even this is obliterated in some branches of the human
race, the Indo-Chinese, for example, where the rami meet in both sexes
at about the same angle (Hervé).
The tendency to “feminism” is not unusual in the white race as an
individual peculiarity; and is especially prominent as a racial trait in
the Asiatic or Mongolian branch of our species. They have sparse beards,
little hair on the body but much and strong on the head, and the
features of the sexes are similar. In many respects they display
feminine traits of character, being industrious, sedentary, and
peace-loving, receptive but not originative, ruled by emotion, and
easily brought under the influence of nervous impressions.
Women have much less variability than men; they are precocious, and
their growth more rapid, but the arrest of development arrives with them
sooner. They remain near the child type throughout their lives.
Mr. Havelock Ellis has argued that for this reason they are nearer the
future type of the species, and that the results of modern civilisation
are to render men more feminine in occupations, character, appearance,
and anatomy.
It would be more correct to say that as civilisation advances the
distinctions between the sexes erected by conditions of lower culture
tend to disappear, each sex gaining much from the other without
forfeiting that which is peculiarly its own.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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