VI SOCIAL HEREDITY WHY is it that you have grown up to be an American? Why is it that the mere accident of being born, we will say in the state of Massachusetts, and being bred in that state, has made of you an American and not a Chinaman or an Indian? Aside from the physical characters of yellow or red skin, round head and straight hair, what constitute the differences between Americans and Chinamen or Indians are their differences in culture, customs, usages, ideals, art and literature. In the plastic years when you were growing up you were formed and molded by the suggestions and impressions that flooded you from all sides. Your developing consciousness found already established certain standards, usages, ways of doing and thinking. Some of these you were more or less at liberty to select and pick and choose, others you had to observe so and so and never otherwise. Your plastic mind was bent this way or that within the limits of its inherent adaptability so that now when you are mature you have come to think any standards, usages, or customs which are different from the ones you are familiar with and which your social class is used to, are strange and unusual, even wrong or immoral. You think the Chinaman is queer, but he also thinks you are queer. And he is quite as justified in his opinion of you as you are in your opinion of him. The essential difference of your diverse points of view is that your life experiences have been different. The social medium which a child enters at birth, in which he lives, moves and has his being, is fundamental in determining his thought and action. The individual from childhood to ripest old age is more or less receptive to the social environment consisting of the standards, usages, and customs which the group has evolved out of its collective experience. "Rarely can the maturest minds so far succeed in emancipating themselves. from this medium as to undertake independent reflection, while complete emancipation is impossible, for all the organs and modes of thought, all the organs for constructing thoughts, have been molded or at least thoroughly imbued by it."'1 "The individual simply plays the part of the prism which receives the rays, dissolves them according to fixed laws and lets them pass out again in a predetermined direction and with a predetermined color." 2 We forget that the interpretation the child puts upon external things is never entirely naïve or original. It is a mistake to assume that each civilized individual's conduct of life is a purely logical process. The content of the human mind is largely determined by the social usages and conventions of class and age, which in turn refract impression and determine the final form assumed by the interpretation. There are "experiences thousands of years old which have been inherited for generations as completed intuitions; destinies historic, and prehistoric, with their effects upon mental character and inclination, with their forms of thought and mode of reasoning; 1 Gumplowicz, op. cit., p. 157. 2 Ibid. 3 Chapin, Education and the Mores, p. 70. 4 sympathies, prejudices and prepossessions deeply seated. and concentrated in the mind of the 'free' individual like countless rays in a focus. They live in him as thought, though the crowd imagines that whether right or wrong, praiseworthy or blameworthy, it is he that cherishes them." It is this mental precipitate of generations long gone that is condensed in the mind of one person and comprises the mental furniture which we acquire in the course of our life's experience. It is active in determining our explanations of our actions and always modifies our interpretation of the conduct of others. Professor Cooley speaks of this social atmosphere into which we are born, including its organization into literature, art, and institutions, as the outside or visible structure of thought. Although the symbols, the traditions, and the institutions are projected from the mind, yet from the very instant of their projection, they react, controlling, stimulating, developing, and fix certain thoughts at the expense of others to which no awakening suggestion comes. Thus all is one growth. The "individual is a member not alone of a family, a class, a state, but of a larger whole reaching back to prehistoric man whose thought has gone to make it up."5 In this social medium the individual lives as in an element, from which he draws the materials of his growth and to which he contributes whatever constructive thought he may express. The individual mind becomes a blank when separated from the stream of collective experience, but immersed in the great currents of men and ideas the individual grows, drawing from the common experience the material for its own life. This has led Professor Cooley to say, "The growth of the individual mind 4 Gumplowicz, op. cit., p. 158. 5 Cooley, Social Organization, p. 64, is not a separate growth, but rather a differentiation within the general mind." It has led Professor Gumplowicz to say, "The great error of individualistic psychology is the supposition that man thinks. . . . The whole belief in the freedom of human action is rooted in the idea that man's conduct is the fruit of his thoughts and that his thoughts are exclusively his own. This is an error. He is not self-made mentally any more than he is physically. His mind and thoughts are the product of his social medium, of the social element whence he arose, in which he lives."6 If this social element into which we are born determines in large measure the course of our mental development, it is important to understand the process by which it has been formed and to know its limitations. Men inherited from their brute ancestors certain instincts. But as life in society became increasingly complex, new situations arose which could not be met by instinctive reactions. Dispositions to perform a certain reaction to stimulus, dispositions which had been inherited, not acquired in the life of the individual, were obviously ill-adapted to direct the proper sort of reaction to a unique situation. Indeed, new experiences crowded upon one another with such rapidity that the temporary compromise of habit had often to supplant the more conservative guide,-instinct. Every moment brings necessities which must often be satisfied at once. Early men experienced need, and it was followed at once by a blundering effort to satisfy it. For example, mere instinct could not be depended upon to solve the problem of a warlike expedition. By trial and failure, new ways were devised; they were often clumsy and blundering 6 Gumplowicz, op. cit., pp. 156, 160. |