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.
Great changes are taking place, with the introduction of modern methods of education, in our own insular possessions. Mr. Axel Holst, of the National Bank of the Danish West Indies, who has been a close and assiduous student of Negro folklore in the Virgin Islands, says that the effect of the American system of education will within a few years totally change the mental habits of the natives of St. Thomas. Since the younger generation have begun to read books, they are not so interested as they were in the Nansi stories, which correspond to the Bre’r Rabbit stories of the States. Since the introduction of American rule, newspapers have come into vogue, and the young men have taken to political discussion.
The changes in the “mentality” of the Negro population are, Mr. Holst says, going on visibly, and at a surprising rate. These changes, if they are actually taking place, should be made the subject of further investigation. Such study should enable us to determine, among other things, more precisely than we have been able to determine hitherto, the rôle which cultural contacts, social heritages, and racial temperament play in the whole cultural process.
It is evident that we are not to assume, as otherwise we might, that there is no area of the experience in which primitive or preliterate people think realistically and rationally. On the other hand, in contrasting primitive mentality with that of civilized man, we need not assume—except for the sake of the contrast—that the thinking of civilized man is always and everywhere either rational or scientific. As a matter of fact, there are still wide areas of our experience that have not as yet been fully rationalized, notably the fields of medicine and religion. In medicine, at least—if we are to believe a recent medical critic of what, in imitation of Lévy-Bruhl, we might call “medical mentality”—the majority of practitioners still think of diseases as morbid entities instead of convenient labels for groups of symptoms.
The following paragraph from a recent writer states the matter from the point of view of a critic of “medical mentality.”
It is not to be thought that any educated medical man indeed believes “a disease” to be a material thing, although the phraseology in current use lends colour to such supposition. Nevertheless, in hospital jargon, “diseases” are “morbid entities,” and medical students fondly believe that these “entities” somehow exist in rebus Naturae and were discovered by their teachers, much as was America by Columbus.... In fact, for these gentlemen “diseases” are Platonic realities; universals ante rem. This unavowed belief, which might be condoned were it frankly admitted, is an inheritance from Galen, and carries with it the corollary that our notions concerning this, that, or the other “diseases” are either absolutely right or absolutely wrong, and are not merely matters of mental convenience.
But if the practitioners think of diseases in pre-logical terms what can we expect of the layman, whose medical education has been largely confined to the reading of patent medical advertisements? What has been said suggests a problem which may be perhaps stated in this way: How far is the existence of magic and magical mode of thought a measure of the mentality of a racial or cultural group in which it is found to persist? How far is what Ballie calls “the scientific mood” an effect of the urban environment?
Robert E. Park