he manipulation of the mind;
but the change is not in the brain as an organ; it is rather in the
character of the stimulations thrust on it by society.

The child begins as a savage, and after we have brought to bear
all the influence of home, school, and church to socialize him, we
speak as though his nature had changed organically, and institute a
parallelism between the child and the race, assuming that the child's
brain passes in a recapitulatory way through phases of development
corresponding to epochs in the history of the race. I have no
doubt myself that this theory of recapitulation is largely a
misapprehension. A stream of social influence is turned loose on the
child; and if the attention to him is incessant and wise, and the
copies he has are good and stimulating, he is molded nearer to the
heart's desire. Sometimes he escapes, and becomes a criminal, tramp,
sport, or artist; and even if made into an impeccable and model
citizen, he periodically breaks away from the network of social habit
and goes a-fishing.

The fundamental explanation of the difference in the mental life
of two groups is not that the capacity of the brain to do work is
different, but that the attention is not in the two cases stimulated
and engaged along the same lines. Wherever society furnishes copies
and stimulations of a certain kind, a body of knowledge and a
technique, practically all its members are able to work on the plan
and scale in vogue there, and members of an alien race who become
acquainted in a real sense with the system can work under it. But
when society does not furnish the stimulations, or when it has
preconceptions which tend to inhibit the run of attention in given
lines, then the individual shows no intelligence in these lines. This
may be illustrated in the fields of scientific and artistic interest.
Among the Hebrews a religious inhibition--"thou shalt not make unto
thee any graven image"--was sufficient to prevent anything like the
sculpture of the Greeks; and the doctrine of the resurrection of the
body in the early Christian church, and the teaching that man was
made in the image of God, formed an almost insuperable obstacle to the
study of human anatomy.

The Mohammedan attitude toward scientific interest is represented by
the following extracts from a letter from an oriental official to a
western inquirer, printed by Sir Austen Henry Layard:

_My Illustrious Friend and Joy of my Liver:_

The t