(3) If such innate differences exist, what degree of permanence do they possess? Do they persist through thousands of years, in spite of vast changes of physical or cultural conditions? Or may they undergo considerable modification or complete transformation in the course of a few generations?
These are questions of fundamental importance. And they admit of no positive clean-cut answers at the present time. They offer vast fields for research, and only when prolonged research shall have been directed to them shall we be able to answer them positively.
In the past, since their importance could not be altogether overlooked, it has been usual to dispose of them by dogmatically asserting one extreme view and pouring scornful epithets upon the other extreme view. A principal task for science in its present stage is to define the questions clearly. It is not possible, perhaps, to keep them quite separate; for, if there are considerable differences of innate mental constitution, then their importance for national character must depend greatly upon their degree of permanence; and, again, there is the great difficulty of distinguishing between innate and acquired mental qualities in any individual and still more in groups.
Nevertheless, we may safely say that both extreme views in regard to race, the positive and the negative, are gross exaggerations, plausible only while we ignore one part of the evidence; the truth lies in between somewhere.
There can, I think, be no reasonable doubt that there are great differences between races, and that these may be, and in many cases have been, persistent through thousands of generations.
The recognition that the mind of the human infant is not a tabula rasa, but that its innate constitution comprises a number of instincts, specifically directed tendencies to thought, feeling, and action, prepares us to accept this view and gives us some basis for the definition of these differences. Whether all differences can be defined in such terms is a further problem. That they cannot be wholly defined in this way seems to be obvious, when we consider how quite specialised idiosyncrasies are transmitted in families through several generations, often with a leap across one generation, peculiarities of taste and feeling, of aesthetic endowment and temperament, abilities such as the musical, mathematical and artistic.
When we compare widely different peoples such as the Negro, the White, and the Yellow, the fact of profound differences cannot be overlooked. These differences cannot be ascribed to the action of environment upon each generation. Perhaps the only differences of this kind which at present are accurately measurable are those of the size and form of the brain. The negro brain is decidedly smaller than that of the white and yellow races. And there are small but distinct differences of sensory endowment which are highly significant. For, if there are racial differences in these most fundamental and racially oldest endowments, we may expect still greater differences in the later evolved powers of the mind; although these are much more difficult to detect and define.
Still, the negro race wherever found does present certain specific mental peculiarities roughly definable, especially the happy-go-lucky disposition, the unrestrained emotional violence and responsiveness, whether its representatives are found in tropic Africa, in the jungles of Papua, or in the highly civilised conditions of American cities.
The Semitic stock again is one which, though widely scattered, seems to present certain constant peculiarities. And among closely allied branches of the white race of similar culture, we can hardly refuse to recognise innate differences. Differences of temperament are, perhaps, the clearest and the most generally recognised, even between peoples of allied stock and similar civilisation. Who can question that Irishmen in general are very different from Englishmen in temperament, that they are less phlegmatic, more easily moved to joy, or sorrow, or enthusiasm, more easily touched by poetry, have a more varied and lively emotional experience? That this is an innate racial difference seems clear; for it can be accounted for in no other way, and it obtains in some degree between all communities of similar racial stocks, in spite of similarities or differences of history and of present conditions. For example, similar differences, roughly definable as the difference between the so-called Celtic temperament and the Anglo-Saxon, seem evidently to obtain between the Breton and the Norman, who represent in the main the same two stocks.
And, even in intellectual quality, there appear to be not only differences of degree, but also differences of kind, inexplicable save as racial differences. The logical deductive tendencies of the French intellect and the empirical inductive tendency of the English, seem to be rooted in race; though here of course tradition accumulates and accentuates such differences from generation to generation.