eral pattern.

Similarly, to take an illustration from morals, we find that widely
different in complexion and detail as are the moral codes of lower and
higher groups, say the Hebrews and the African Kafirs, yet the general
patterns of morality are strikingly coincident. It is reported of
the Kafirs that "they possess laws which meet every crime which may
be committed." Theft is punished by restitution and fine; injuring
cattle, by death or fine; false witness, by a heavy fine; adultery,
by fine or death; rape, by fine or death; poisoning or witchcraft, by
death and confiscation of property; murder, by death or fine; treason
or desertion from the tribe, by death or confiscation.[263] The Kafirs
and Hebrews are not at the same level of culture, and we miss the more
abstract and monotheistic admonitions of the higher religion--"thou
shalt not covet; thou shalt worship no other gods before me"--but the
intelligence shown by the social mind in adjusting the individual to
society may fairly be called the same grade of intelligence in the two
cases.

When the environmental life of two groups is more alike and the
general cultural conditions more correspondent, the parallelism of
thought and practice becomes more striking. The recently discovered
Assyrian Code of Hammurabi (about 2500 B.C.) contains striking
correspondences with the Mosaic code; and while Semitic scholars
probably have good and sufficient reasons for holding that the Mosaic
Code was strongly influenced by the Assyrian, we may yet be very
confident that the two codes would have been of the same general
character if no influence whatever had passed from one to the other.

The institutions and practices of a people are a product of the mind;
and if the early and spontaneous products of mind are everywhere
of the same general pattern as the later manifestations, only less
developed, refined, and specialized, it may well be that failure to
progress equally is not due to essential unlikeness of mind, but to
conditions lying outside the mind.

Another test of mental ability which deserves special notice is
mechanical ingenuity. Our white pre-eminence owes much to this
faculty, and the lower races are reckoned defective in it. But the
lower races do invent, and it is doubtful whether one invention is
ever much more difficult than another. On the psychological side,
an invention means that the mind sees a roundabout way of reaching
an end when it cannot be reache