This geographical limitation of science is indeed a remarkable fact, the importance of which our familiarity with the scientific mood and our insularity of mind constantly tend to obscure.... We should not forget that millions of human beings have no interest in the scientific mood at all, and seem by constitution to have no capacity for it.... Some individuals among these nonscientific peoples may, and do, assimilate the science of the West. But experience seems to show that such acquisition is at best a mere accomplishment, and leaves the racial structure and composition of their minds unaffected.... The nonscientific peoples take up science as they put on Western clothes. One may change one’s clothes, but there is no changing the skin. The fact is that the scientific mood arises from a peculiar attitude of the mind to the world found amongst certain peoples of the globe; and without this attitude science will always appear a curiosity or an irrelevance.[68] The author assumes that the disposition to think rationally and to cultivate abstract and scientific thought is a racial attribute. Perhaps a more accurate statement of the matter would take account of the fact that even within the comparatively limited area where science is in vogue, there are large numbers of people who still—even while using the language of science—think in the more elementary forms of folk-thought. This seems to be true wherever large masses of the population are still illiterate, or where, for any reason, even when able to read, they habitually think in terms of the spoken language, rather than in the language of the printed page. Literacy itself is very largely a product of modern city life. Books and reading which used to be, and to a certain extent are yet, a luxury in the country, become a necessity in the city. The Negroes migrating in such large numbers from the West Indies to the United States are bringing with them habits of thought which have largely disappeared among the Negro population native to this country. The obeah men of the West Indies have many clients in the United States, and a recent issue of the _New York Age_ announced that the Negro quarter around 135th Street, New York, was overrun with fortune tellers and witch doctors, many or most of them from the West Indies. Within a few years, however, most of these superstitions will have disappeared, or at any rate will have assumed those more conventional forms with which we are familiar and have learned to tolerate. This is certainly true of the city population.