III. MENTALITY AND CITY LIFE
The reason the modern man is a more rational animal than his more primitive ancestor is possibly because he lives in a city, where most of the interests and values of life have been rationalized, reduced to measurable units, and even made objects of barter and sale. In the city—and particularly in great cities—the external conditions of existence are so evidently contrived to meet man’s clearly recognized needs that the least intellectual of peoples are inevitably led to think in deterministic and mechanistic terms.
The embodiment of rational thought is the tool, the machine, in which all the parts are manifestly designed to achieve a perfectly intelligible end. The primitive man lives in a vastly different world, where all the forces about him are mysterious and uncontrollable, and where nature seems as wild, as romantic, and as unpredictable as his own changing moods. The primitive man has almost no machinery, and relatively few tools.
The mentality of the modern man, on the other hand, is based upon the machine and upon the application of science to all the interests of life—to education, to advertising, and, presently, perhaps, to politics. The culture of the modern man is characteristically urban, as distinguished from the folk culture, which rests on personal relations and direct participation in the common life of the family, the tribe, and the village community.
In fact, if we define them strictly, as Lévy-Bruhl seems to do, we may say that reason and reflective thinking were born in the city. They came, if not into existence, at least into vogue, in Athens, in the time of Socrates and the Sophists. The Sophists were, in fact, a distinctly urban phenomenon, and we owe to Socrates—who was one of them—the first clear recognition of conceptional, as distinguished from perceptional, knowledge. We owe to Plato, Socrates’ disciple, the definition of the most fundamental tool of modern scientific thought, namely, the concept, i.e., the Platonic idea.
Magic may be regarded, therefore, as an index, in a rough way, not merely of the mentality, but of the general cultural level of races, peoples, and classes. It is even possible that a more thoroughgoing analysis of the mental processes involved in magic and rational thought will permit us to measure the mentalities of social groups with as much precision, at least, as we now measure and grade—with the aid of the Binet-Simon tests—the intelligence of individuals. At least we should know in this case what we were measuring, namely, the extent and degree to which a given group or class had acquired the ability and the habit of thinking in rational rather than magical terms.
With a more precise conception of the nature of magic and of the mechanisms of pre-logical thinking, we shall, no doubt, be able not merely to compare and perhaps measure with a certain degree of accuracy and objectivity the mentality and cultural levels of different cultural groups, but we shall be able also to describe the process by which races and peoples make the transition from one cultural level to another. This transition, which Thorndyke has described in his history of magic, is everywhere in progress. These changes in a contemporary and living society are open and accessible to investigation, now that history has enabled us to see them, as they can never see them later, when they have become history.
In a recent paper in the American Journal of Sociology, Professor U. G. Weatherly has called attention to the advantages of the West Indies as a sociological laboratory.
Islands are peculiarly interesting sociologically, provided, of course, that they are inhabited. For one thing, they are physically defined. The island community is, for this reason, invariably isolated, geographically and socially, and because the means of communication are known, the extent of isolation can be reduced to relatively measurable terms.
This isolation tends to give to each separate island community an individuality that one rarely finds elsewhere. Because islands are geographically limited and isolated, the influence of climate and physiographic characteristics, as well as of economic organization, in defining cultural traits, can be estimated and assessed with greater accuracy than elsewhere. Until one has visited some of the Lesser Antilles, he is not likely to understand or appreciate Frederick A. Ober’s rather drastic summary of their history—“Discovered by the Spaniards, appropriated by the Dutch, Danish, or English, and finally abandoned to the semi-barbarous blacks from Africa, this has been the usual succession in the islands.”[[67]]
The rather bitter note of this statement probably reflects the tone of the white planters, whose position in the islands has gradually declined since the emancipation of the slaves.
It directs attention, however, to what is, from the point of view of the student of human nature and of society, the most interesting and unique feature of the islands, namely, the racial situation. As Professor Weatherly has said, “Perhaps nowhere else is there a better opportunity for securing definite evidence bearing on the opposing theories of race and contact as factors in cultural growth.” Every island, in fact, is a separate racial melting-pot in which the mingled cultures and races of Europe, Africa, and Asia seem to be gradually, very gradually, simmering down to a single cultural, and eventually, also, to a single racial, blend.