ch
one's own group is the center of everything and all others are scaled
and rated with reference to it. Folkways correspond to it to cover both
the inner and the outer relation. Each group nourishes its own pride and
vanity, boasts itself superior, exalts its own divinities, and looks
with contempt on outsiders. Each group thinks its own folkways the only
right ones, and if it observes that other groups have other folkways,
these excite its scorn. Opprobrious epithets are derived from these
differences. "Pig-eater," "cow-eater," "uncircumcised," "jabberers," are
epithets of contempt and abomination.

2. Sympathetic Contacts versus Categoric Contacts[125]

Let us now consider what takes place when two men, mere strangers to one
another, come together. The motive of classification, which I have
considered in another chapter, leads each of them at once to recognize
the approaching object first as living, then as human. The shape and
dress carry the categorizing process yet farther, so that they are
placed in groups, as of this or that tribe or social class, and as these
determinations are made they arouse the appropriate sympathies or
hatreds such as by experience have become associated with the several
categories. Be it observed that these judgments are spontaneous,
instinctive, and unnoticed. They are made so by immemorial education in
the art of contact which man has inherited from the life of the
ancestral beasts and men; they have most likely been in some measure
affirmed by selection, for these determinations as to the nature of the
neighbor were in the lower stages of existence in brute and man of
critical importance, the creatures lived or died according as they
determined well or ill, swiftly or slowly. If we observe what takes
place in our own minds at such meetings we will see that the action in
its immediateness is like that of the eyelids when the eye is
threatened. As we say, it is done before we know it.

With this view as to the conditions of human contact, particularly of
what occurs when men first meet one another, let us glance at what takes
place in near intercourse. We have seen that at the beginning of any
acquaintance the fellow-being is inevitably dealt with in the categoric
way. He is taken as a member of a group, which group is denoted to us by
a few convenient signs; as our acquaintance with a particular person
advances, this category tends to become qualified. Its bounds are pushed
this wa