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 we
may 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.

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 constitutes 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 group will be
interested in; what elements of the general culture, to which they have
access, they will assimilate; what, to state it pedagogically, they will
learn.

It will be evident at once that where individuals of the same race and
hence the same temperament are associated, the temperamental interests
will tend to reinforce one another, and the attention of members of the
group will be more completely focused upon the specific objects and
values that correspond to the racial temperament. In this way racial
qualities become the basis for nationalities, a nationalistic group
being merely a cultural and, eventually, a political society founded on
the basis of racial inheritances.

On the other hand, when racial segregation is broken up and members of a
racial group are dispersed, the opposite effect will take place. This
explains the phenomena which have frequently been the subject of comment
and observation, that the racial characteristics manifest themselves in
an ext