e as
well as a negative significance. Every race, like every individual,
has the vices of its virtues. The question remains still to what
extent so-called racial characteristics are actually racial, that is,
biological, and to what extent they are the effect of environmental
conditions. The thesis of this paper, to state it again, is: (1) That
fundamental temperamental qualities, which are the basis of interest
and attention, act as selective agencies and as such determine what
elements in the cultural environment each race will select, in what
region it will seek and find its vocation, in the larger social
organization; (2) that, on the other hand, technique, science,
machinery, tools, habits, discipline and all the intellectual and
mechanical devices with which the civilized man lives and works,
remain relatively external to the inner core of significant attitudes
and values which constitute what many call the will of the group. This
racial will is, to be sure, largely social, that is modified by social
experience, but it rests ultimately upon a complex of inherited
characteristics, which are racial.

It follows from what has been said that the individual man is the
bearer of a double inheritance. As a member of a race, he transmits by
interbreeding a biological inheritance. As a member of society or a
social group, on the other hand, he transmits by communication a
social inheritance. The particular complex of inheritable characters,
which characterizes the individuals of a racial group constitutes the
racial temperament. The particular group of habits, accommodations,
sentiments, attitudes and ideals transmitted by communication and
education constitute a social tradition. Between this temperament and
this tradition there is, as has been generally recognized, a very
intimate relationship. My assumption is that temperament is the basis
of the _interests_; that as such it determines in the long run the
general run of attention, and this, eventually, determines the
selection in the case of an individual of his vocation, in the case of
the racial group of its culture. That is to say, temperament
determines what things the individual and the groups will be
interested in; what elements of the general culture, to which they
have access, they will assimilate; what, to state it in pedagogical
terms, they will learn.

It will be evident at once that where individuals of the same race and
hence the same temperament are asso