41. Psychological Tests on the Sense Faculties
This factor of experience enters even into what appear to be the simplest mental operations, the sensory ones. The scant data available from experimental tests indicate that a variety of dark skinned or uncivilized peoples, including Oceanic and African Negroids, Negritos, Ainus, and American Indians, on the whole slightly surpass civilized whites in keenness of vision and fineness of touch discrimination, whereas the whites are somewhat superior in acuity of hearing and sensitiveness to pain. Yet what do these results of measurements mean?
Vision is tested for its distance ability. The farther off one can distinguish objects or marks, the higher one’s rating. Civilized man reads—normally—at 14 inches. He works with sharp knives, with machines that are exact; he is surrounded by things made with such exact machines; he handles thin paper and filmy fabrics. His women sew and embroider with the sharpest of needles, the finest of thread. Everything about us tends toward close accuracy and away from the haziness of distant observation. The savage, on the other hand, the half-civilized person even, inspects the horizon, watches for game or its dim tracks, tries to peer to the bottom of streams for fish. He does not read, his needles are blunt, his thread is cord, his carving without precision even though decorative, the lines he makes are free-hand and far-apart. He is trained, as it were, for the usual vision tests. If the psychologist reversed his experiment and sought the degree of power to see fine differences at close range, it is possible that the savage might prove inferior because untrained by his experience. Such tests seem not to have been made. Until they are, and again show uncivilized man superior, there is no real proof that innate racial differences of serious moment exist.
The whole act of vision in fact involves more than we ordinarily think. After all, seeing is done with the mind as well as with the eye. There is the retinal image, but there is also the interpretation of this image. A sailor descries the distant shore, whereas the landsman sees only a haze on the horizon. To the city dweller a horse and a cow a mile off are indistinguishable. Not so to the rancher. There is something almost imperceptible about the profile of the feeding end of the animal, about its movement, that promptly and surely classes it. At still longer ranges, where the individual animals have wholly faded from sight, a herd of cattle may perhaps be told from one of horses, by the plainsman, through the different clouds of dust which they kick up, or the rate of motion of the cloud. An hour later when the herd is reached and proves to be as said, the astonished traveler from the metropolis is likely to credit his guide’s eyes with an intrinsic power greater than his field glasses—forgetting the influence of experience and training.
In keenness of hearing, on the contrary, one should expect the civilized white to come out ahead, as in fact he does; not because he is Caucasian but because he is civilized and because the instruments of experimentation, be they tuning forks or ticking watches or balls dropped on metal plates, are implements of civilization. Make the test the howl of a distant wolf, or the snapping of a twig as the boughs bend in the wind, and the college student’s hearing might prove duller than that of the Indian or Ainu. There is a story of a woodsman on a busy thoroughfare, amid the roar of traffic and multifarious noise of a great city, hearing a cricket chirp, which was actually discovered in a near-by open cellar. Extolled for his miraculous keenness of audition, the man in the fur cap dropped a small coin on the pavement: at the clink, passers-by across the street stopped and looked around.
As to the pain sense, an introspective, interpretative element necessarily enters into experiments. What constitutes pain? When the trial becomes disagreeable? When it hurts? When it is excruciating? The savage may physiologically feel with his nerve ends precisely as we do. But being reared to a life of chronic slight discomforts, he is likely to think nothing of the sensation until it hurts sharply; whereas we signal as soon as we are sure that the experience is becoming perceptibly unpleasant.
In short, until there shall have been more numerous, balanced, and searching tests made, it must be considered that nothing positive has been established as to the respective sensory faculties of the several human races. The experiments performed are tests not so much of race as of the average experience and habits of groups of different culture.