THE HUMAN RACES ARE INTELLECTUALLY UNEQUAL; MANKIND IS NOT CAPABLE OF
INFINITE PROGRESS
In order to appreciate the intellectual differences between races, we
ought first to ascertain the degree of stupidity to which mankind can
descend. We know already the highest point that it can reach, namely
civilization.
Most scientific observers up to now have been very prone to make out the
lowest types as worse than they really are.
Nearly all the early accounts of a savage tribe paint it in hideous
colours, far more hideous than the reality. They give it so little power
of reason and understanding, that it seems to be on a level with the
monkey and below the elephant. It is true that we find the contrary
opinion. If a captain is well received in an island, if he meets, as he
believes, with a kind and hospitable welcome, and succeeds in making a
few natives do a small amount of work with his sailors, then praises are
showered on the happy people. They are declared to be fit for anything
and capable of everything; and sometimes the enthusiasm bursts all
bounds, and swears it has found among them some higher intelligences.
We must appeal from both judgments—harsh and favourable alike. The fact
that certain Tahitians have helped to repair a whaler does not make
their nation capable of civilization. Because a man of Tonga-Tabu shows
goodwill to strangers, he is not necessarily open to ideas of progress.
Similarly, we are not entitled to degrade a native of a hitherto unknown
coast to the level of the brute, just because he receives his first
visitors with a flight of arrows, or because he is found eating raw
lizards and mud pies. Such a banquet does not certainly connote a very
high intelligence or very cultivated manners. But even in the most
hideous cannibal there is a spark of the divine fire, and to some extent
the flame of understanding can always be kindled in him. There are no
tribes so low that they do not pass some judgments, true or false, just
or unjust, on the things around them; the mere existence of such
judgments is enough to show that in every branch of mankind some ray of
intelligence is kept alive. It is this that makes the most degraded
savages accessible to the teachings of religion and distinguishes them
in a special manner, of which they are themselves conscious, from even
the most intelligent beasts.
Are however these moral possibilities, which lie at the back of every
man’s consciousness, capable of infinite extension? Do all men possess
in an equal degree an unlimited power of intellectual development? In
other words, has every human race the capacity for becoming equal to
every other? The question is ultimately concerned with the infinite
capacity for improvement possessed by the species as a whole, and with
the equality of races. I deny both points.
The idea of an infinite progress is very seductive to many modern
philosophers, and they support it by declaring that our civilization has
many merits and advantages which our differently trained ancestors did
not possess. They bring forward all the phenomena that distinguished our
modern societies. I have spoken of these already; but I am glad to be
able to go through them again.
We are told that our scientific opinions are truer than they were; that
our manners are, as a rule, kindly, and our morals better than those of
the Greeks and Romans. Especially with regard to political liberty, they
say, have we ideas and feelings, beliefs and tolerances, that prove our
superiority. There are even some hopeful theorists who maintain that our
institutions should lead us straight to that garden of the Hesperides
which was sought so long, and with such ill-success, since the time when
the ancient navigators reported that it was not in the Canaries....
A little more serious consideration of history will show what truth
there is in these high claims.
We are certainly more learned than the ancients. This is because we have
profited by their discoveries. If we have amassed more knowledge than
they, it is merely because we are their heirs and pupils, and have
continued their work. Does it follow that the discovery of steam-power
and the solution of a few mechanical problems have brought us on the way
to omniscience? At most, our success may lead us to explore all the
secrets of the material world. Before we achieve this conquest, there
are many things to do which have not even been begun, nay of which the
very existence is not yet suspected; but even when the victory is ours,
shall we have advanced a single step beyond the bare affirmation of
physical laws? We shall, I agree, have greatly increased our power of
influencing nature and harnessing her to our service. We shall have
found different ways of going round the world, or recognized definitely
that certain routes are impossible. We shall have learnt how to move
freely about in the air, and, by mounting a few miles nearer the limits
of the earth’s atmosphere, discovered or cleared up certain astronomical
or other problems; but nothing more. All this does not lead us to
infinity. Even if we had counted all the planetary systems that move
through space, should we be any nearer? Have we learnt a single thing
about the great mysteries that was unknown to the ancients? We have,
merely, so far as I can see, changed the previous methods of circling
the cave where the secret lies. We have not pierced its darkness one
inch further.
Again, admitting that we are in certain directions more enlightened, yet
we must have lost all trace of many things that were familiar to our
remote ancestors. Can we doubt that at the time of Abraham far more was
known about primeval history than we know to-day? How many of our
discoveries, made by chance or with great labour, are merely
re-discoveries of forgotten knowledge! Further, how inferior we are in
many respects to those who have lived before us! As I said above, in a
different connexion, can one compare even our most splendid works to the
marvels still to be seen in Egypt, India, Greece, and America? And these
bear witness to the vanished magnificence of many other buildings, which
have been destroyed far less by the heavy hand of time than by the
senseless ravages of man. What are our arts, compared with those of
Athens? What are our thinkers, compared with those of Alexandria and
India? What are our poets, by the side of Valmiki, Kalidasa, Homer, and
Pindar?
Our work is, in fact, different from theirs. We have turned our minds to
other inquiries and other ends than those pursued by the earlier
civilized groups of mankind. But while tilling our new field, we have
not been able to keep fertile the lands already cultivated. We have
advanced on one flank, but have given ground on the other. It is a poor
compensation; and far from proving our progress, it merely means that we
have changed our position. For a real advance to have been made, we
should at least have preserved in their integrity the chief intellectual
treasures of the earlier societies, and set up, in addition, certain
great and firmly based conclusions at which the ancients had aimed as
well as ourselves. Our arts and sciences, using theirs as the
starting-point, should have discovered some new and profound truths
about life and death, the genesis of living creatures, and the basic
principles of the universe. On all these questions, modern science, as
we imagine, has lost the visionary gleam that played round the dawn of
antiquity, and its own efforts have merely brought it to the humiliating
confession, “I seek and do not find.” There has been no real progress in
the intellectual conquests of man. Our power of criticism is certainly
better than that of our forefathers. This is a considerable gain, but it
stands alone; and, after all, criticism merely means _classification_,
not _discovery_.
As for our so-called new ideas on politics, we may allow ourselves to be
more disrespectful to them than to our sciences.
The same fertility in theorizing, on which we so pride ourselves, was to
be found at Athens after the death of Pericles. Anyone may be convinced
of this by reading again the comedies of Aristophanes, and allowing for
satirical exaggeration; they were recommended by Plato himself as a
guide to the public life of the city of Athene. We have always despised
such comparisons, since we persuaded ourselves that a fundamental
difference between our present social order and the ancient Greek State
was created by slavery. It made for a more far-reaching demagogy, I
admit; but that is all. People spoke of slaves in the same way as one
speaks to-day of workmen and the lower classes; and, further, how very
advanced the Athenians must have been, when they tried to please their
servile population after the battle of Arginusæ!
Let us now turn to Rome. If you open the letters of Cicero, you will
find the Roman orator a moderate Tory of to-day. His republic is exactly
like our constitutional societies, in all that relates to the language
of parties and Parliamentary squabbles. There too, in the lower depths,
seethed a population of degraded slaves, with revolt ever in their
hearts, and sometimes in their fists also. We will leave this mob on one
side; and we can do it the more readily as the law did not recognize
their civil existence. They did not count in politics, and their
influence was limited to times of uproar. Even then, they merely carried
out the commands of the revolutionaries of free birth.
Regarding, then, the slaves as of no account, does not the Forum offer
us all the constituents of a modern social State? The populace,
demanding bread and games, free doles and the right to enjoy them; the
middle class, which succeeded in its aim of monopolizing the public
services; the patriciate, always being transformed and giving ground,
always losing its rights, until even its defenders agreed, as their one
means of defence, to refuse all privileges and merely claim liberty for
all;—have we not here an exact correspondence with our own time?
Does anyone believe that of the opinions we hear expressed to-day,
however various they may be, there is a single one, or any shade of one,
that was not known at Rome? I spoke above of the letters written from
the Tusculan Villa: they contain the thoughts of a Conservative with
progressive leanings. As against Sulla, Pompeius and Cicero were
Liberals. They were not liberal enough for Cæsar, and were too much so
for Cato. Later, under the Principate, we find a moderate Royalist in
Pliny the Younger, though one who loved tranquillity. He was against
excessive liberty for the people, and excessive power for the Emperor.
His views were positivist; he thought little of the vanished splendours
of the age of the Fabii, and preferred the prosaic administration of a
Trajan. Not everyone agreed with him. Many feared another insurrection
like that of Spartacus, and thought that the Emperor could not make too
despotic a use of his power. On the other hand, some of the provincials
asked for, and obtained, what we should call constitutional guarantees;
while Socialist opinions found so highly placed a representative as the
Gallic Emperor Gaius Junius Postumus, who set down, among his subjects
for declamation, _Dives et pauper inimici_, “The rich and the poor are
natural enemies.”
In fact, every man who had any claim to share in the enlightenment of
the time strongly asserted the equality of the human race, the right of
all men to have their part in the good things of this world, the obvious
necessity of the Græco-Roman civilization, its perfection and
refinement, its certainty of a future progress even beyond its present
state, and, to crown all, its existence for ever. These ideas were not
merely the pride and consolation of the pagans; they inspired also the
firm hopes of the first and most illustrious Fathers of the Church, of
whose views Tertullian was the self-constituted interpreter.[99]
Finally—to complete the picture with a last striking trait—the most
numerous party of all was formed by the indifferent, the people who were
too weak or timid, too sceptical or contemptuous, to find truth in the
midst of all the divergent theories that passed kaleidoscopically before
their eyes; who loved order when it existed, and (so far as they could)
endured disorder when it came; who were always wondering at the progress
of material comforts unknown to their fathers, and who, without wishing
to think too much of the other side, consoled themselves by repeating
over and over again, “Wonderful are the works of to-day!”
There would be more reason to believe that we have made improvements in
political science, if we had invented some machinery that was unknown,
in its essentials, before our time. Such a glory is not ours. Limited
monarchies, for example, have been familiar to every age, and curious
instances can be seen among certain American tribes, which in other
respects have remained savage. Democratic and aristocratic republics of
all kinds, balanced in the most various ways, have existed in the New as
well as the Old World. Tlaxcala is just as good an example as Athens,
Sparta, and Mecca before Mohammed’s time. Even if it were shown that we
had ourselves made some secondary improvements in the art of government,
would this be enough to justify such a sweeping assertion as that the
human race is capable of unlimited progress? Let us be as modest as that
wisest of kings, when he said, “There is nothing new under the
sun.”[100]
We come now to the question of manners. Ours are said to be gentler than
those of the other great human societies; but this is very doubtful.
There are some rhetoricians to-day who would like to abolish war between
nations. They have taken this theory from Seneca. Certain wise men of
the East had also, on this subject, views that are precisely similar to
those of the Moravian brotherhood. But even if the friends of universal
peace succeeded in making Europe disgusted with the idea of war, they
would still have to bring about a permanent change in the passions of
mankind. Neither Seneca nor the Brahmans obtained such a victory. It is
doubtful whether we are to succeed where they failed; especially as we
may still see in our fields and our streets the bloody traces left by
our so-called “humanity.”
I agree that our principles are pure and elevated. Does our practice
correspond to them?
Before we congratulate ourselves on our achievements, let us wait till
our modern countries can boast of two centuries of peace, as could Roman
Italy,[101] the example of which has unfortunately not been followed by
later ages; for since the beginning of modern civilization fifty years
have never passed without massacres.
The capacity for infinite progress is, thus, not shown by the present
state of our civilization. Man has been able to learn some things, but
has forgotten many others. He has not added one sense to his senses, one
limb to his limbs, one faculty to his soul. He has merely explored
another region of the circle in which he is confined, and even the
comparison of his destiny with that of many kinds of birds and insects
does not always inspire very consoling thoughts as to his happiness in
this life.
The bees, the ants, and the termites have found for themselves, from the
day of their creation, the kind of life that suited them. The last two,
in their communities, have invented a way of building their houses,
laying in their provisions, and looking after their eggs, which in the
opinion of naturalists could be neither altered nor improved.[102] Such
as it is, it has always been sufficient for the small wants of the
creatures who use it. Similarly the bees—with their monarchical
government, which admits of the deposition of the sovereign but not of a
social revolution—have never for a single day turned aside from the
manner of life that is most suitable to their needs. Metaphysicians were
allowed for a long time to call animals machines, and to assign the
cause of their movements to God, who was the “soul of the brutes,”
_anima brutorum_. Now that the habits of these so-called automata are
studied in a more careful way, we have not merely given up this
contemptuous theory; we have even recognized that instinct has a
capacity that raises it almost to the dignity of reason.
In the bee-kingdom, we see the queens a prey to the anger of their
subjects; this implies either a spirit of mutiny in the latter, or the
inability of the former to fulfil their lawful obligations. We see too
the termites sparing their conquered enemies, and then making them
prisoners, and employing them in the public service by giving them the
care of the young. What are we to conclude from such facts as these?
Our modern States are certainly more complicated, and satisfy our needs
in larger measure: but when I see the savage wandering on his way,
fierce, sullen, idle, and dirty, lazily dragging his feet along his
uncultivated ground, carrying the pointed stick that is his only weapon,
and followed by the wife whom he has bound to him by a marriage-ceremony
consisting solely in an empty and ferocious violence;[103] when I see
the wife carrying her child, whom she will kill with her own hands if he
falls ill, or even if he worries her;[104] when I see this miserable
group under the pressure of hunger, suddenly stop, in its search for
food, before a hill peopled by intelligent ants, gape at it in wonder,
put their feet through it, seize the eggs and devour them, and then
withdraw sadly into the hollow of a rock,—when I see all this, I ask
myself whether the insects that have just perished are not more highly
gifted than the stupid family of the destroyer, and whether the instinct
of the animals, restricted as it is to a small circle of wants, does not
really make them happier than the faculty of reason which has left our
poor humanity naked on the earth, and a thousand times more exposed than
any other species to the sufferings caused by the united agency of air,
sun, rain, and snow. Man, in his wretchedness, has never succeeded in
inventing a way of providing the whole race with clothes or in putting
them beyond the reach of hunger and thirst. It is true that the
knowledge possessed by the lowest savage is more extensive than that of
any animal; but the animals know what is useful to them, and we do not.
They hold fast to what knowledge they have, but we often cannot keep
what we have ourselves discovered. They are always, in normal seasons,
sure of satisfying their needs by their instincts. But there are
numerous tribes of men that from the beginning of their history have
never been able to rise above a stinted and precarious existence. So far
as material well-being goes, we are no better than the animals; our
horizon is wider than theirs, but, like theirs, it is still cramped and
bounded.
I have hardly insisted enough on this unfortunate tendency of mankind to
lose on one side what it gains on the other. Yet this is the great fact
that condemns us to wander through our intellectual domains without ever
succeeding, in spite of their narrow limits, in holding them all at the
same time. If this fatal law did not exist, it might well happen that at
some date in the dim future, when man had gathered together all the
wisdom of all the ages, knowing what he had power to know and possessing
all that was within his reach, he might at last have learnt how to apply
his wealth, and live in the midst of nature, at peace with his kind and
no longer at grips with misery; and having gained tranquillity after all
his struggles, he might find his ultimate rest, if not in a state of
absolute perfection, at any rate in the midst of joy and abundance.
Such happiness, with all its limitations, is not even possible for us,
since man unlearns as fast as he learns; he cannot gain intellectually
and morally without losing physically, and he does not hold any of his
conquests strongly enough to be certain of keeping them always.
We moderns believe that our civilization will never perish, because we
have discovered printing, steam, and gunpowder. Has printing, which is
no less known to the inhabitants of Tonkin and Annam[105] than in
Europe, managed to give them even a tolerable civilization? They have
books, and many of them—books which are sold far cheaper than ours. How
is it that these peoples are so weak and degraded, so near the point
where civilized man, strengthless, cowardly, and corrupted, is inferior
in intellectual power to any barbarian who may seize the opportunity to
crush him?[106] The reason is, that printing is merely a means and not
an end. If you use it to disseminate healthy and vigorous ideas, it will
serve a most fruitful purpose and help to maintain civilization. If, on
the other hand, the intellectual life of a people is so debased that no
one any longer prints such works of philosophy, history, and literature,
as can give strong nourishment to a nation’s genius; if the degraded
press merely serves to multiply the unhealthy and poisonous compilations
of enervated minds, if its theology is the work of sectaries, its
politics of libellers, its poetry of libertines,—then how and why should
the printing-press be the saviour of civilization?
Because copies of the great masterpieces can be easily multiplied, it is
supposed that printing helps to preserve them; and that in times of
intellectual barrenness, when they have no other competitors, printing
can at least make them accessible to the nobler minds of the age. This
is of course true. Yet if a man is to trouble himself about an ancient
book at all, or gain any improvement from it, he must already have the
precious gift of an enlightened mind. In evil times, when public virtue
has left the earth, ancient writings are of little account, and no one
cares to disturb the silence of the libraries. A man must be already
worth something before he thinks of entering these august portals; but
in such times no one is worth anything....
Further, the length of life assured by Gutenberg’s discovery to the
achievements of the human mind is greatly exaggerated. With the
exception of a few works which are from time to time reprinted, all
books are dying to-day, as manuscripts died in the old days. Scientific
works especially, which are published in editions of a few hundred
copies, soon disappear from the common stock. They can still be found,
though with difficulty, in large collections. The intellectual treasures
of antiquity were in exactly the same case; and, I repeat, learning will
not save a people which has fallen into its dotage.
What have become of the thousands of admirable books published since the
first printing-press was set up? Most of them have been forgotten. Many
of those that are still spoken of have no longer any readers, while the
very names of the authors who were in demand fifty years ago are
gradually fading from memory.
In the attempt to heighten the influence of printing, too little stress
has been laid on the great diffusion of manuscripts that preceded it. At
the time of the Roman Empire, opportunities for education were very
general, and books must have been very common indeed, if we look at the
extraordinary number of out-at-elbows grammarians, whose poverty,
licentiousness, and passionate search for enjoyment live for us in the
_Satyricon_ of Petronius. They swarmed even in the smallest towns, and
may be compared to the novelists, lawyers, and journalists of our own
age. Even when the decadence was complete, anyone who wanted books could
get them. Virgil was read everywhere. The peasants who heard his praises
took him for a dangerous enchanter. The monks copied him. They copied
also Pliny, Dioscorides, Plato, Aristotle, even Catullus and Martial.
From the great number of mediæval manuscripts that remain after so much
war and pillage, after the burning of so many castles and abbeys, we may
guess that far more copies than one thinks were made of contemporary
works, literary, scientific, and philosophical. We exaggerate the real
services done by printing to science, poetry, morality, and
civilization; it would be better if we merely touched lightly on these
merits and spoke more of the way in which the invention of printing is
continually helping all kinds of religious and political interests.
Printing, I say again, is a marvellous tool; but when head and hand
fail, a tool cannot work by itself.
Gunpowder has no more power than printing to save a society that is in
danger of death. The knowledge of how to make it will certainly never be
forgotten. I doubt, however, whether the half-civilized peoples who use
it to-day as much as we do ourselves, ever look upon it from any other
point of view than that of destruction.
As for steam-power and the various industrial discoveries, they too,
like printing, are most excellent means, but not ends in themselves. I
may add that some processes which began as scientific discoveries ended
as matters of routine, when the intellectual movement that gave them
birth had stopped for ever, and the theoretical secrets at the back of
the processes had been lost. Finally, material well-being has never been
anything but an excrescence on civilization; no one has ever heard of a
society that persisted solely through its knowledge of how to travel
quickly and make fine clothes.
All the civilizations before our own have thought, as we do, that they
were set firmly on the rock of time by their unforgettable discoveries.
They all believed in their immortality. The Incas and their families,
who travelled swiftly in their palanquins on the excellent roads,
fifteen hundred miles long, that still link Cuzco to Quito, were
certainly convinced that their conquests would last for ever. Time, with
one blow of his wing, has hurled their empire, like so many others, into
the uttermost abyss. These kings of Peru also had their sciences, their
machinery, their powerful engines, at the work of which we still stand
amazed without being able to guess their construction. They too knew the
secret of carrying enormous masses from place to place. They built
fortresses by piling, one upon the other, blocks of stone thirty-eight
feet long and eighteen wide, such as may be seen in the ruins of
Tihuanaco, to which these gigantic building-materials must have been
brought from a distance of many miles. Do we know the means used by the
engineers of this vanished people to solve such a problem? No more than
we know how the vast Cyclopean walls were constructed, the ruins of
which, in many parts of Southern Europe, still defy the ravages of time.
We must not confuse the causes of a civilization with its results. The
causes disappear, and the results are forgotten, when the spirit that
gave them birth has departed. If they persist, it is because of a new
spirit that takes hold of them, and often succeeds in giving quite a new
direction to their activities. The human mind is always in motion. It
runs from one point to another, but cannot be in all places at once. It
exalts what it embraces, and forgets what it has abandoned. Held
prisoner for ever within a circle whose bounds it may not overstep, it
never manages to cultivate one part of its domain without leaving the
others fallow. It is always at the same time superior and inferior to
its forbears. Mankind never goes beyond itself, and so is not capable of
infinite progress.