contempt in comparison with which our contempt for them is feeble. Our
bloodiness, our newness, our lack of reverence, our land-greed, our
break-neck speed and lack of appreciation of leisure make Vandals
of us. On the other hand, we are very stupid about recognizing the
intelligence of orientals. We have been accustomed to think that there
is a great gulf between ourselves and other races; and this persists
in an undefinable way after scores of Japanese have taken high rank in
our schools, and after Hindus have repeatedly been among the wranglers
in mathematics at Cambridge. It is only when one of the far eastern
nations has come bodily to the front that we begin to ask ourselves
whether there is not an error in our reckoning.

The instinct to belittle outsiders is perhaps at the bottom of our
delusion that the white race has one order of mind and the black
and yellow races have another. But, while a prejudice--a matter of
instinct and emotion--may well be at the beginning of an error of this
kind, it could not sustain itself in the face of our logical habits
unless reinforced by an error of the judgment. And this error is found
in the fact that in a naive way we assume that our steps in progress
from time to time are due to our mental superiority as a race over
other races, and to the mental superiority of one generation of
ourselves over the preceding.

In this we are confusing advance in culture with brain improvement. If
we should assume a certain grade of intelligence, fixed and invariable
in all individuals, races, and times--an unwarranted assumption,
of course--progress would still be possible, provided we assumed a
characteristically human grade of intelligence to begin with. With
associative memory, abstraction, and speech men are able to compare
the present with the past, to deliberate and discuss, to invent, to
abandon old processes for new, to focus attention on special problems,
to encourage specialization, and to transmit to the younger generation
a more intelligent standpoint and a more advanced starting-point.
Culture is the accumulation of the results of activity, and culture
could go on improving for a certain time even if there were a
retrogression in intelligence. If all the chemists in class A
should stop work tomorrow, the chemists in class B would still make
discoveries. These would influence manufacture, and progress would
result. If a worker in any specialty acquaints himself with the
result