an home
from infancy, not only fed and clothed as an American, but loved as a
member of the family and trained as carefully and affectionately as
one's own child. The full conditions require that not only the child
himself, but everyone else, be ignorant of his parentage and race in
order that he be thought to be, and be treated as though he were, a
genuine member of his adopting home and people. What would be the
psychic characteristics of that child when grown to manhood? If he
should manifest psychic traits like those of his Japanese parents, if
he should think in the Japanese order, if he should have a tendency to
use prepositions as postpositions, if he should drop pronouns and
should use honorific words in their place, if he should be markedly
suspicious and inferential, if he should bow in making his salutations
rather than shake hands, if he should show marked preference for
sitting on the floor rather than on chairs, and for chopsticks to
knives and forks, and if developing powers as an artist he should
naturally paint Japanese pictures, Japanese landscapes, and Japanese
faces, finding himself unable to draw according to the canons of
Western art, if on developing poetic tastes he should find special
pleasure in seventeen syllable or thirty-one syllable exclamatory
poems, finding little interest in Longfellow or Shakespeare, if, in
short, he should develop a predilection for any distinctive Japanese
custom, habit of thought, method of speech, emotion or volition, it
would evidently be due to his intrinsic heredity. If in all these
matters, however, he should prove to be like an American, acquiring an
American education like any American boy, and if on being brought to
Japan, at, say, thirty years of age, still supposing himself to be an
American, he should have equal difficulty with any American in
mastering the language and adapting himself to and understanding the
Japanese people, then it would follow that his psychic characteristics
have been inherited socially and he is what he is, nationally, because
of his social heritage. Such a result would show that the psychic
traits differentiating races are social and not intrinsic.

We have limited our discussion to the advanced races because the
problem is then relatively simple, the material abundant, and the
issue clear. Much discussion in theology, psychology, and sociology is
futile because it concerns that practically mythical being, the
aboriginal man, abou