the anthropologists now seem disposed to do, that the
average native intelligence in the races is about the same, we may
still expect to find in different races certain special traits and
tendencies which rest on biological rather than cultural differences.
For example, over and above all differences of language, custom or
historic tradition, it is to be presumed that Teuton and Latin, the
Negro and the Jew--to compare the most primitive with the most
sophisticated of peoples--have certain racial aptitudes, certain
innate and characteristic differences of temperament which manifest
themselves especially in the objects of attention, in tastes and in
talents. Is the Jewish intellectual, for example, a manifestation of
an original and peculiar endowment of the Jewish race or is he rather
a product of traditional interest and emphasis characteristic of
Jewish people--a characteristic which may be explained as an
accommodation to the long-continued urban environment of the race?[2]
Is the Negro's undoubted interest in music and taste for bright
colors, commonly attributed to the race, to be regarded as an inherent
and racial trait or is it merely the characteristic of primitive
people? Is Catholicism to be regarded as the natural manifestation of
the Latin temperament as it has been said that Protestantism is of the
Teutonic?

Here are differences in the character of the cultural life which can
scarcely be measured quantitatively in terms of gross intellectual
capacity. Historical causes do not, it seems, adequately account for
them. So far as this is true we are perhaps warranted in regarding
them as modifications of transmitted tradition due to innate traits of
the people who have produced them. Granted that civilization, as we
find it, is due to the development of communication and the
possibility of mutual exchange of cultural materials, still every
special culture is the result of a selection and every people borrows
from the whole fund of cultural materials not merely that which it can
use but which, because of certain organic characteristics, it finds
stimulating and interesting.

The question then resolves itself into this: How far do racial
characteristics and innate biological interests determine the extent
to which one racial group can and will take over and assimilate the
characteristic features of an alien civilization? How far will it
merely take over the cultural forms, giving them a different content
or a