ulcation
includes education in its broadest sense; but since that term implies in
general usage a certain, let us say protective, attitude taken by the
educator (as toward the young), the broader and more colorless
designation is chosen. Acculturation is the process by which one group
or people learns from another, whether the culture or civilization be
gotten by imitation or by inculcation. As there must be contact,
acculturation is sometimes ascribed to "contagion."

4. Temperament, Tradition, and Nationality[78]

The temperament of the Negro, as I conceive it, consists in a few
elementary but distinctive characteristics, determined by physical
organizations and transmitted biologically. These characteristics
manifest themselves in a genial, sunny, and social disposition, in an
interest and attachment to external, physical things rather than to
subjective states and objects of introspection, in a disposition for
expression rather than enterprise and action.

The changes which have taken place in the manifestations of this
temperament have been actuated by an inherent and natural impulse,
characteristic of all living beings, to persist and maintain itself in a
changed environment. Such changes have occurred as are likely to take
place in any organism in its struggle to live and to use its environment
to further and complete its own existence.

The result has been that this racial temperament has selected out of the
mass of cultural materials to which it had access, such technical,
mechanical, and intellectual devices as met its needs at a particular
period of its existence. It has clothed and enriched itself with such
new customs, habits, and cultural forms as it was able, or permitted to
use. It has put into these relatively external things, moreover, such
concrete meanings as its changing experience and its unchanging racial
individuality demanded. Everywhere and always it has been interested
rather in expression than in action; interested in life itself rather
than in its reconstruction or reformation. The Negro is, by natural
disposition, neither an intellectual nor an idealist, like the Jew; nor
a brooding introspective, like the East Indian; nor a pioneer and
frontiersman, like the Anglo-Saxon. He is primarily an artist, loving
life for its own sake. His _metier_ is expression rather than action. He
is, so to speak, the lady among the races.

In reviewing the fortunes of the Negro's temperament as it is ma