With
associative memory, abstraction, and speech men are able to compare
the present with the past, to deliberate and discuss, to invent, to
abandon old processes for new, to focus attention on special problems,
to encourage specialization, and to transmit to the younger generation
a more intelligent standpoint and a more advanced starting-point.
Culture is the accumulation of the results of activity, and culture
could go on improving for a certain time even if there were a
retrogression in intelligence. If all the chemists in class A
should stop work tomorrow, the chemists in class B would still make
discoveries. These would influence manufacture, and progress would
result. If a worker in any specialty acquaints himself with the
results of his predecessors and contemporaries and _works_, he will
add some results to the sum of knowledge in his line. And if a race
preserves by record or tradition the memory of what past generations
have done, and adds a little, progress is secured whether the brain
improves or stands still. In the same way, the fact that one race has
advanced farther in culture than another does not necessarily imply a
different order of brain, but may be due to the fact that in the one
case social arrangements have not taken the shape affording the most
favorable conditions for the operation of the mind.
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