A little thought renders it evident that a feeble-minded person, an idiot, or an imbecile, is always one with a defective memory. He is unable to profit like the normal individual from experience. The truth that the higher faculties are more often absent in the feeble-minded than the lower is due entirely to the fact that they can be acquired only by people whose receptive powers are well developed. In effect and in fact the feeble-minded person is an instance of reversion to a prehuman mental state. Judged by the human standard, every monkey is an idiot. But the reversion is not complete, for, though the imbecile loses some part of his power of profiting by experience, he regains no part of the lost power of being guided by instinct. Therefore he is correspondingly helpless as compared with a lower animal.
Owing to the constitution of the human mind, some decay of the faculty of profiting by experience accompanies advancing age. But it need seldom be so great as it usually is, and never so great as it often is. Certain mental attitudes, certain systems of education, certain environments, leave the mind of the man almost as open as that of a little child; others inflict on it premature senility. An Aristotle or a Darwin learns to the last year of his long life; a Mohammedan or a Tibetan ecclesiastic is old before he has ceased to be young. Convinced that pestilence is due directly to the wrath of God, he scorns the notion that sanitation can be right or useful; believing that the earth is flat, no evidence will convince him that it is round; holding his sacred religion with a steadfast faith, he will murder the heretic rather than think out his propositions.
How the Minds of Men Differ
But habits of stupidity are not confined to particular regions of thought. Becoming almost as incapable of mental change as a beetle, a man may undergo an arrest of mental development which differs from that of the idiot only because it occurs later in life, is less complete, and is acquired, not innate. In his ordinary surroundings he appears a normal person; but placed among people of more open mind, his brute-like inability to learn suggests sharply the resemblance to the feeble-minded child. Let us sum up. Man has conquered the earth because he is pre-eminently the educable, the adaptive animal. His educability—indeed, his whole thinking capacity—depends on his memory. He has few instincts, a fact which increases his mental ductility; but one of the most important of his instincts is imitativeness, which impels him to copy not only such obvious things as the speech of his predecessors, but their mental attitudes as well. In this way not only the actual knowledge and beliefs but also the habits of thought of one generation are handed on to the next. Apart from a few instincts which are more active in the child than in the adult, and two or three others whose appearance is deferred till later life, the whole mental difference between the child and the adult lies in the fact that the former has a great memory in the sense that it is very capable of storing experience, whereas the latter has a great memory in the sense that it has already stored much experience. As parent to child, so one racial generation hands on its acquirements to the next, but with greater certainty; for the parent is not the only influence in the life of the child, who imitates many other people, sometimes more closely than the parent; whereas, since few individuals travel during youth, the young are seldom influenced by others than by members of their own race. Except in times of great change, therefore, racial generations resemble one another even more closely than parents and children.
Like individuals, races differ in their mental characteristics. The English have one set of characters, the Japanese another, and the Russians a third. The problem of the extent to which these characters are inborn or acquired is very important to the student of history. Accordingly as we believe they are the one or the other we are driven to accept one or other of two very different readings of the past.
Influences in a Child’s Life
Are races, then, brave or cowardly, energetic or slothful, enlightened or savage, and so forth, by nature or by training? Are the qualities that have enabled some races to flourish, while others are decadent, transmitted as instincts or handed on, as knowledge is? The reader has now materials of a kind not usually found in historical works on which to found a judgment. He must bear in mind that, while an American infant reared by cannibals would retain the bodily characteristics of his race mentally, he could not be other than a savage. He must remember also that some races have altered their mental characteristics very rapidly. Thus, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, immediately after the long Dark Ages, the British and several other European races suddenly became intellectually active and socially progressive. The Japanese supply a more modern, the Greeks and Romans more ancient, instances. The latter quite as suddenly sank into abysmal degradation. Innate mental characters, such as the instincts, usually change so slowly that not merely historical but geological time elapses before the alteration is perceptible. Again, the reader must note that, while the opinion that racial traits are inborn is nearly universal, most men act as if they knew them to be acquired; for nearly all men are careful in training their children, especially with respect to those traits that contribute to the formation of character.
Great Facts to Remember
Doubtless, races of men differ innately in mind as they do in body, but these differences can occur only within narrow limits. The instincts of all races are, of course, very similar, for all the instincts are essential to the preservation of life. But races may differ in strength of instinct, and more especially in powers of memory. Thus it is possible, or probable, that the English, for example, are more capable of profiting by experience than Australian blacks. Certainly, their brains are larger. On the other hand, the brain grows under the stimulus of use, and therefore the larger size of the English brain may be due to more arduous labour.
The Real Value of History