w because he really has so many that,
in practice, they keep interfering with one another all the time. In
support of the latter view, it has been recently suggested by Mr.
McDougall that the best test of the instincts that we have is to be
found in the specific emotions. He believes that every instinctive
process consists of an afferent part or message, a central part, and
an efferent part or discharge. At its two ends the process is highly
plastic. Message and discharge, to which thought and will correspond,
are modified in their type as experience matures. The central part,
on the other hand, to which emotion answers on the side of consciousness,
remains for ever much the same. To fear, to wonder, to be angry, or
disgusted, to be puffed up, or cast down, or to be affected with
tenderness--all these feelings, argues Mr. McDougall, and various more
complicated emotions arising out of their combinations with each other,
are common to all men, and bespeak in them deep-seated tendencies to
react on stimulation in relatively particular and definite ways. And
there is much, I think, to be said in favour of this contention.

Yet, granting this, do we thus reach a criterion whereby the different
races of men are to be distinguished? Far from it. Nay, on the contrary,
as judged simply by his emotions, man is very much alike everywhere,
from China to Peru. They are all there in germ, though different customs
and grades of culture tend to bring special types of feeling to the
fore.

Indeed, a certain paradox is to be noted here. The Negro, one would
naturally say, is in general more emotional than the white man. Yet
some experiments conducted by Miss Kellor of Chicago on negresses and
white women, by means of the test of the effects of emotion on
respiration, brought out the former as decidedly the more stolid of
the two. And, whatever be thought of the value of such methods of proof,
certain it is that the observers of rude races incline to put down
most of them as apathetic, when not tuned up to concert-pitch by a
dance or other social event. It may well be, then, that it is not the
hereditary temperament of the Negro, so much as the habit, which he
shares with other peoples at the same level of culture, of living and
acting in a crowd, that accounts for his apparent excitability. But
after all, "mafficking" is not unknown in civilized countries. Thus
the quest for a race-mark of a mental kind is barren once more.

*