peasantry of Europe of a few decades ago.

Most people are prepared to believe that the primary psychical processes
are identical in all races, but many still profess to see a difference
in favour of the white man in what they call the higher faculties of the
mind. But the much-abused word "faculty" no longer bears the meaning
given to it by Locke and his followers who propounded a limitless brood
or set of faculties to correspond with every process discoverable by
introspection as taking place in the mind. In modern psychology the
word means simply a capacity for an ultimate, irreducible, or
unanalysable mode of thinking of, or being conscious of, objects.
Perception, for instance, is looked upon as the capacity for thinking of
a thing immediately at hand, and memory as a capacity for thinking again
of a certain material or abstract object. The mental power of
abstraction is no longer considered as a sort of separate function of
the mind but is regarded as the capacity for thinking of, say, whiteness
as apart from any particular white patch. But the notion that the white
man is endowed with a set of finer feelings and with special and higher
powers of abstraction than is the African Native is so generally
entertained that it will be convenient to make the necessary comparisons
in, more or less, the commonly accepted terms.

Those who look upon the Native as being in every way a more primitive
being than the European will naturally be disposed to believe that he is
more a creature of instincts than a man of reason, and they will expect
him to move in dependence upon certain fundamental intuitions where the
European goes guided by reason alone. I have found no evidence whatever
to support this supposition.

The elementry instinct of self-preservation is no stronger in the Native