Once you grasped the Mendelian picture, though, you could see an alternative to the idea of a racial essence. There need be no underlying single something that explained why Negroes were Negroes or Caucasians Caucasian. Their shared appearance could be the product of genes for appearance that they had in common. And those genes need play no role in fixing your tastes in poetry or your philosophical ideas. The prejudices that Arnold and Taine represented no longer had a foundation in the sciences. There was no longer a theory to support the racial fixation.
