Behind both the racial fixation and the typological thinking was a third habit of mind: we find ourselves face-to-face once more with our natural essentialism, reconstructed now at the heart of scientific theory. Since the late eighteenth century, the conviction has grown and spread that all of us carry within us something derived from the race to which we belong that explains our mental and physical potential. That something, that racial essence, was inherited biologically, transmitted through procreation.
