Without more
trouble than is needed to stay awake the result which your imagination
is always aiming at is reeled off on the screen. The shadowy idea
becomes vivid; your hazy notion, let us say, of the Ku Klux Klan,
thanks to Mr. Griffiths, takes vivid shape when you see the Birth of a
Nation. Historically it may be the wrong shape, morally it may be a
pernicious shape, but it is a shape, and I doubt whether anyone who
has seen the film and does not know more about the Ku Klux Klan than
Mr. Griffiths, will ever hear the name again without seeing those
white horsemen.
5
And so when we speak of the mind of a group of people, of the French
mind, the militarist mind, the bolshevik mind, we are liable to
serious confusion unless we agree to separate the instinctive
equipment from the stereotypes, the patterns, and the formulae which
play so decisive a part in building up the mental world to which the
native character is adapted and responds. Failure to make this
distinction accounts for oceans of loose talk about collective minds,
national souls, and race psychology. To be sure a stereotype may be so
consistently and authoritatively transmitted in each generation from
parent to child that it seems almost like a biological fact. In some
respects, we may indeed have become, as Mr. Wallas says, [Footnote:
Graham Wallas, _Our Social Heritage_, p. 17.] biologically
parasitic upon our social heritage.
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