diversity, varying both in the relative force of the several instinctive proclivities and in the scheme of coordination, coalescence or interference that prevails among them. This diversity of native character is noticeable among all peoples, though some of the peoples of the lower cultures show a notable approach to uniformity of type, both physical and spiritual. The diversity is particularly marked among the civilised peoples, and perhaps m a peculiar degree among the peoples of Europe and her colonies. The extreme diversity of native character, both physical and spiritual, noticeable in these communities is in all probability due to their being made up of a mixture of racial stocks. In point of pedigree, all individuals in the peoples of the Western culture are hybrids, and the greater number of individuals are a mixture of more than two racial stocks. The proportions in which the several transmissible traits that go to make up the racial type enter into the composition of these hybrid individuals will accordingly vary endlessly.
The number of possible permutations will therefore be extremely large; so that the resulting range of variation in the hybrids that so result from the crossing of these different racial stocks will be sufficiently large, even when it plays within such limits as to leave the generic human type intact. From time to time the variation may even exceed these limits of human normality and give a variant in which the relative emphasis on the several constituent instinctive elements is distributed after a scheme so far from the generically human type as to throw the given variant out of touch with the common run of humanity and mark him as of unsound mind or as disserviceable for the purposes of the community in which he occurs, or even as disserviceable for life in any society.
Yet, even through these hybrid populations there runs a generically human type of spiritual endowment prevalent as a general average of human nature throughout, and suitable to the continued life of mankind in society.
Disserviceably wide departures from this generically human and serviceable type of spiritual endowment will tend constantly to be selectively eliminated from the race, even where the variation arises from hybridism.
The like will hold true in a more radical fashion as applied to any variants that may arise through a Mendelian mutation.
So that the numerous racial types now existing represent only such mutants as lie within the limits of tolerance imposed by the situation under which any given mutant type has emerged and survived. A surviving mutant type is necessarily suited more or less closely to the circumstances under which it emerged and first made good its survival, and it is presumably less suited to any other situation. With a change in the situation, therefore, such as may come with the migration of a given racial stock from one habitat to another, or with an equivalent shifting growth of culture or change of climate, the requirements of survival are likely to change. Indeed, so grave are the alterations that may in this way supervene in the current requirements for survival, that any given racial stock may dwindle and decay for no other reason than that the growth of its culture has come to subject the stock to methods of life widely different from those under which its type of man originated and made good its fitness to survive. So, in the mixture of races that make up the population of the Western nations a competitive struggle for survival has apparently always been going on among the several racial stocks that enter into the hybrid mass, with varying fortunes according as the shifting cultural demands and opportunities have favoured now one, now another type of man. These cul- tural conditions of survival in the racial struggle for existence have varied in the course of centuries, and with grave consequences for the life-history of the race and of its culture; and they are perhaps changing more substantially and rapidly in the immediate present than at any previous time within the historical period. So that, for instance, the continued biological success of any given one of these stocks in the European racial mixture has within a moderate Period Of time shifted from the ground of fighting capacity, and even in a measure from the ground of climatic fitness, to that of spiritual fitness to survive under the conditions imposed by a new cultural situation, by a scheme of institutions that is insensibly but incessantly changing as it runs.9 These unremitting changes and adaptations that go forward in the scheme of institutions, legal and customary, unremittingly induce new habits of work and of thought in the community, and so they continually instill new principles of conduct; with the outcome that the same range of instinctive dispositions innate in the population will work out to a different effect as regards the demands of race survival. To all appearance, what counts first in this connection toward the selective survival of the several European racial stocks is their relative fitness to meet the material requirements of life, - their economic fitness to live under the new cultural limitations and with the new training which this altered cultural situation gives. But the fortunes of the Western civilisation as a cultural scheme, apart from the biological survival or success of any given racial constituent in the Western peoples, is likewise bound up with the viability of European mankind under these institutional changes, and dependent on the spiritual fitness of inherited human nature successfully and enduringly to carry on the altered scheme of life so imposed on these peoples by the growth of their own culture. Such limitations imposed on cultural growth by native proclivities ill suited to civilised life are sufficiently visible in several directions and in all the nations of Christendom.
What is known of heredity goes to say that the various racial types of man are stable; so that during the life-history of any given racial stock, it is held, no heritable modification of its typical make-up, whether spiritual or physical, is to be looked for. The typical human endowment of instincts, as well as the typical make-up of the race in the physical respect, has according to this current view been transmitted intact from the beginning of humanity, - that is to say from whatever point in the mutational development of the race it is seen fit to date humanity, - except so far as subsequent mutations have given rise to new racial stocks, to and by which this human endowment of native proclivities has been transmitted in a typically modified form. On the other hand the habitual elements of human life change unremittingly and cumulatively, resulting in a continued proliferous growth of institutions. Changes in the institutional structure are continually taking place in response to the altered discipline of life under changing cultural conditions, but human nature remains specifically the same.
The ways and means, material and immaterial, by which the native proclivities work out their ends, therefore, are forever in process of change, being conditioned by the changes cumulatively going forward in the institutional fabric of habitual elements that governs the scheme of life.
But there is no warrant for assuming that each or any of these successive changes in the scheme of institutions affords successively readier, surer or more facile ways and means for the instinctive proclivities to work out their ends, or that the phase of habituation in force at any given point in this sequence of change is more suitable to the untroubled functioning of these instincts than any phase that has gone before. Indeed, the presumption is the other way. On grounds of selective survival it is reasonably to be presumed that any given racial type that has endured the test of selective elimination, including the complement of instinctive dispositions by virtue of which it has endured the test, will on its first emergence have been passably suited to the circumstances, material and cultural, under which the type emerged as a mutant and made good its survival; and in so far as the subsequent growth of institutions has altered the available scope and method of instinctive action it is therefore to be presumed that any such subsequent change in the scheme of institutions will in some degree hinder or divert the free play of its instinctive proclivities and will thereby hinder the direct and unsophisticated working-out of the instinctive dispositions native to this given racial type.
What is known of the earlier phases of culture in the life-history of the existing races and peoples goes to say that the initial phase in the life of any given racial type, the phase of culture which prevailed in its environment when it emerged, and under which the stock first proved its fitness to survive, was presumably some form of savagery. Therefore the fitness of any given type of human nature for life after the manner and under the conditions imposed by any later phase in the growth of culture is a matter of less and less secure presumption the farther the sequence of institutional change has departed from that form of savagery which marked the initial stage in the life-history of the given
