s of his predecessors and contemporaries and _works_, he will
add some results to the sum of knowledge in his line. And if a race
preserves by record or tradition the memory of what past generations
have done, and adds a little, progress is secured whether the brain
improves or stands still. In the same way, the fact that one race has
advanced farther in culture than another does not necessarily imply a
different order of brain, but may be due to the fact that in the one
case social arrangements have not taken the shape affording the most
favorable conditions for the operation of the mind.

If, then, we make due allowance for our instinctive tendency as a
white group to disparage outsiders, and, on the other hand, for our
tendency to confuse progress in culture and general intelligence with
biological modification of the brain, we shall have to reduce very
much our usual estimate of the difference in mental capacity between
ourselves and the lower races, if we do not eliminate it altogether;
and we shall perhaps have to abandon altogether the view that there
has been an increase in the mental capacity of the white race since
prehistoric times.

The first question arising in this connection is whether any of
the characteristic faculties of the human mind--perception, memory,
inhibition, abstraction--are absent or noticeably weak in the lower
races. If this is found to be true, we have reason to attribute the
superiority of the white race to biological causes; otherwise we
shall have to seek an explanation of white superiority in causes lying
outside the brain.

In examining this question we need not dwell on the acuteness of the
sense-perceptions, because these are not distinctively human. As a
matter of fact, they are usually better developed in animals and in
the lower races than in the civilized, because the lower mental life
is more perceptive than ratiocinative. The memory of the lower races
is also apparently quite as good as that of the higher. The memory of
the Australian native or the Eskimo is quite as good as that of our
"oldest inhabitant;" and probably no one would claim that the modern
scientist has a better memory than the bard of the Homeric period.

There is, however, a prevalent view, for the popularization of which
Herbert Spencer is largely responsible, that primitive man has feeble
powers of inhibition. Like the equally erroneous view that early
man is a free and unfettered creature, it arises fr