But it is also visibly being verified in the case of the
upper classes, though not in the same manner.
The habits derived from the predatory and quasi-peaceable culture
are relatively ephemeral variants of certain underlying
propensities and mental characteristics of the race; which it
owes to the protracted discipline of the earlier,
proto-anthropoid cultural stage of peaceable, relatively
undifferentiated economic life carried on in contact with a
relatively simple and invariable material environment. When the
habits superinduced by the emulative method of life have ceased
to enjoy the section of existing economic exigencies, a process
of disintegration sets in whereby the habits of thought of more
recent growth and of a less generic character to some extent
yield the ground before the more ancient and more pervading
spiritual characteristics of the race.
In a sense, then, the new-woman movement marks a reversion to a
more generic type of human character, or to a less
differentiated expression of human nature. It is a type of human
nature which is to be characterized as proto-anthropoid, and, as
regards the substance if not the form of its dominant traits, it
belongs to a cultural stage that may be classed as possibly
sub-human.
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