Intelligible historical association. If the Bantu and Bushmen are so

sharply differentiated in all respects, the reason is simply that the

former are relatively recent arrivals in southern Africa. The two

peoples developed in complete isolation from each other; their present

propinquity is too recent for the slow process of cultural and racial

assimilation to have set in very powerfully. As we go back in time, we

shall have to assume that relatively scanty populations occupied large

territories for untold generations and that contact with other masses of

population was not as insistent and prolonged as it later became. The

geographical and historical isolation that brought about race

differentiations was naturally favorable also to far-reaching variations

In language and culture. The very fact that races and cultures which are

brought into historical contact tend to assimilate in the long run,

while neighboring languages assimilate each other only casually and in

superficial respects[191], indicates that there is no profound causal

relation between the development of language and the specific

development of race and of culture.

[Footnote 189: The Fijians, for instance, while of Papuan (negroid)

race, are Polynesian rather than Melanesian in their cultural and

linguistic affinities.]

[Footnote 190: Though even here there is some significant overlapping.

The southernmost Eskimo of Alaska were assimilated in culture to their

Tlingit neighbors. In northeastern Siberia, too, there is no sharp

cultural line between the Eskimo and the Chukchi.]

[Footnote 191: The supersession of one language by another is of course

not truly a matter of linguistic assimilation.]

But surely, the wary reader will object, there must be some relation

between language and culture, and between language and at least that

intangible aspect of race that we call "temperament". Is it not

inconceivable that the particular collective qualities of mind that have

fashioned a culture are not precisely the same as were responsible for

the growth of a particular linguistic morphology? This question takes us

into the heart of the most difficult problems of social psychology. It

is doubtful if any one has yet attained to sufficient clarity on the

nature of the historical process and on the ultimate psychological

factors involved in linguistic and cultural drifts to answer it

intelligently. I can only very briefly set forth my own views, or rather

my general attitude. It would be very difficult to prove that

"temperament", the general emotional disposition of a people[192], is

basically responsible for the slant and drift of a culture, however much

it may manifest itself in an individual's handling of the elements of

that culture. But granted that temperament has a certain value for the

shaping of culture, difficult though it be to say just how, it does not

follow that it has the same value for the shaping of language. It is

impossible to show that the form of a language has the slightest

connection with national temperament. Its line of variation, its drift,

runs inexorably in the channel ordained for it by its historic

antecedents; it is as regardless of the feelings and sentiments of its

speakers as is the course of a river of the atmospheric humors of the

landscape. I am convinced that it is futile to look in linguistic

structure for differences corresponding to the temperamental variations

which are supposed to be correlated with race. In this connection it is

well to remember that the emotional aspect of our psychic life is but

meagerly expressed in the build of language[193].

[Footnote 192: "Temperament" is a difficult term to work with. A great

deal of what is loosely charged to national "temperament" is really

nothing but customary behavior, the effect of traditional ideals of

conduct. In a culture, for instance, that does not look kindly upon

demonstrativeness, the natural tendency to the display of emotion

becomes more than normally inhibited. It would be quite misleading to

argue from the customary inhibition, a cultural fact, to the native

temperament. But ordinarily we can get at human conduct only as it is

culturally modified. Temperament in the raw is a highly elusive thing.]

[Footnote 193: See pages 39, 40.]

[Transcriber's note: Footnote 193 refers to the paragraph beginning on

line 1256.]

Language and our thought-grooves are inextricably interwoven, are, in a

sense, one and the same. As there is nothing to show that there are

significant racial differences in the fundamental conformation of

thought, it follows that the infinite variability of linguistic form,

another name for the infinite variability of the actual process of

thought, cannot be an index of such significant racial differences. This