Though the difficulty seems insurmountable, I am persuaded that the
most fruitful cause of racial misunderstandings and of defective
descriptions both of the West by Orientals, and of the East by
Occidentals, is a well-nigh universal misconception as to the nature
of man, and of society, and consequently of the laws determining their
development. In the East this error arises from and rests upon its
polytheism, and the accompanying theories of special national creation
and peculiar national sanctity. On these grounds alien races are
pronounced necessarily inferior. China's scorn for foreigners is due
to these ideas.

Although this pagan notion has been theoretically abandoned in the
West, it still dominates the thought not only of the multitudes, but
also of many who pride themselves on their high education and liberal
sentiments. They bring to the support of their national or racial
pride such modern sociological theories as lend themselves to this
view. Evolution and the survival of the fittest, degeneration and the
arrest of development, are appealed to as justifying the arrogance and
domineering spirit of Western nations.

But the most subtle and scholarly doctrine appealed to in support of
national pride is the biological conception of society. Popular
writers assume that society is a biological organism and that the laws
of its evolution are therefore biological. This assumption is not
strange, for until recent times the most advanced professional
sociologists have been dominated by the same misconception. Spencer,
for example, makes sociology a branch of biology. More recent
sociological writers, however, such as Professors Giddings and
Fairbanks, have taken special pains to assert the essentially psychic
character of society; they reject the biological conception, as