a wholesome contempt is even more so.  Praising one’s self and dispraising an antagonist creates a confidence and a mental superiority in the way of confidence.  The vituperative recriminations of modern prize-fighters, the boastings of the Homeric heroes, and the bogan of the old Germans, like the back-talk of the small boy, were calculated to screw the courage up; and the Indians of America usually gave a dance before going on the war-path, in which by pantomime and boasting they magnified themselves and their past, and so stimulated their self-esteem that they felt invincible.  In race-prejudice we see the same tendency to exalt the self and the group at the expense of outsiders.  The alien group is belittled by attaching contempt to its peculiarities and habits—­its color, speech, dress, and all the signs of its personality.  This is not a laudable attitude, but it has been valuable to the group, because a bitter and contemptuous feeling is an aid to good fighting.

No race or nation has yet freed itself from this tendency to exalt and idealize itself.  It is very difficult for a member of western civilization to understand that the orientals regard us with a 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