In approaching the question of the parity or disparity of the mental
ability of the white and the lower races, we bring to it a fixed and
instinctive prejudice. No race views another race with that generosity
with which it views itself. It may even be said that the existence of
a social group depends on its taking an exaggerated view of its own
importance; and in a state of nature, at least, the same is true of
the individual. If self-preservation is the first law of nature, there
must be on the mental side an acute consciousness of self, and a habit
of regarding the self as of more importance than the world at large.
The value of this standpoint lies in the fact that, while a wholesome
fear of the enemy is important, a wholesome contempt is even more so.
Praising one's self and dispraising an antagonist creates a confidence
and a mental superiority in the way of confidence. The vituperative
recriminations of modern prize-fighters, the boastings of the Homeric
heroes, and the _bôgan_ of the old Germans, like the back-talk of the
small boy, were calculated to screw the courage up; and the Indians of
America usually gave a dance before going on the war-path, in which
by pantomime and boasting they magnified themselves and their past,
and so stimulated their self-esteem that they felt invincible. In
race-prejudice we see the same tendency to exalt the self and the
group at the expense of outsiders. The alien group is belittled by
attaching contempt to its peculiarities and habits--its color, speech,
dress, and all the signs of its personality. This is not a laudable
attitude, but it has been valuable to the group, because a bitter and
contemptuous feeling is an aid to good fighting.
No race or nation has yet freed itself from this tendency to exalt
and idealize itself. It is very difficult for a member of western
civilization to understand that the orientals regard us with a
contempt in comparison with which our contempt for them is feeble. Our
bloodiness, our newness, our lack of reverence, our land-greed, our
break-neck speed and lack of appreciation of leisure make Vandals
of us. On the other hand, we are very stupid about recognizing the
intelligence of orientals. We have been accustomed to think that there
is a great gulf between ourselves and other races; and this persists
in an undefinable way after scores of Japanese have taken high rank in
our schools, and after Hindus have repeatedly been among the wranglers
in mathematics at Cambridge. It is only when one of the far eastern
nations has come bodily to the front that we begin to ask ourselves
whether there is not an error in our reckoning.
The instinct to belittle outsiders is perhaps at the bottom of our
delusion that the white race has one order of mind and the black
and yellow races have another. But, while a prejudice--a matter of
instinct and emotion--may well be at the beginning of an error of this
kind, it could not sustain itself in the face of our logical habits
unless reinforced by an error of the judgment. And this error is found
in the fact that in a naïve way we assume that our steps in progress
from time to time are due to our mental superiority as a race over
other races, and to the mental superiority of one generation of
ourselves over the preceding.
In this we are confusing advance in culture with brain improvement. If
we should assume a certain grade of intelligence, fixed and invariable
in all individuals, races, and times--an unwarranted assumption,
of course--progress would still be possible, provided we assumed a
characteristically human grade of intelligence to begin with. 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.
If, then, we make due allowance for our instinctive tendency as a
white group to disparage outsiders, and, on the other hand, for our
tendency to confuse progress in culture and general intelligence with
biological modification of the brain, we shall have to reduce very
much our usual estimate of the difference in mental capacity between
ourselves and the lower races, if we do not eliminate it altogether;
and we shall perhaps have to abandon altogether the view that there
has been an increase in the mental capacity of the white race since
prehistoric times.
The first question arising in this connection is whether any of
the characteristic faculties of the human mind--perception, memory,
inhibition, abstraction--are absent or noticeably weak in the lower
races. If this is found to be true, we have reason to attribute the
superiority of the white race to biological causes; otherwise we
shall have to seek an explanation of white superiority in causes lying
outside the brain.
In examining this question we need not dwell on the acuteness of the
sense-perceptions, because these are not distinctively human. As a
matter of fact, they are usually better developed in animals and in
the lower races than in the civilized, because the lower mental life
is more perceptive than ratiocinative. The memory of the lower races
is also apparently quite as good as that of the higher. The memory of
the Australian native or the Eskimo is quite as good as that of our
"oldest inhabitant;" and probably no one would claim that the modern
scientist has a better memory than the bard of the Homeric period.
There is, however, a prevalent view, for the popularization of which
Herbert Spencer is largely responsible, that primitive man has feeble
powers of inhibition. Like the equally erroneous view that early
man is a free and unfettered creature, it arises from our habit of
assuming that, because his inhibitions and unfreedom do not correspond
with our own restraints, they do not exist. Sir John Lubbock pointed
out long ago that the savage is hedged about by conventions so minute
and so mandatory that he is actually the least free person in the
world. But, in spite of this, Spencer and others have insisted that
he is incapable of self-restraint, is carried away like a child by
the impulse of the moment, and is incapable of rejecting an immediate
gratification for a greater future one. Cases like the one mentioned
by Darwin of the Fuegian who struck and killed his little son when
the latter dropped a basket of fish into the water are cited without
regard to the fact that cases of sudden domestic violence and quick
repentance are common in any city today; and the failure of the
Australian blacks to throw back the small fry when seining is referred
to without pausing to consider that our practice of exterminating
game and denuding our forests shows an amazing lack of individual
self-restraint.
The truth is that the restraints exercised in a group depend largely
on the traditions, views, and teachings of the group, and, if we have
this in mind, the savage cannot be called deficient on the side of
inhibition. It is doubtful if modern society affords anything more
striking in the way of inhibition than is found in connection with
taboo, fetish, totemism, and ceremonial among the lower races. In the
great majority of the American Indian and Australian tribes a man
is strictly forbidden to kill or eat the animals whose name his clan
bears as a totem. The central Australian may not, in addition, eat
the flesh of any animal killed or even touched by persons standing
in certain relations of kinship to him. At certain times also he is
forbidden to eat the flesh of a number of animals and at all times he
must share all food secured with the tribal elders and some others.
A native of Queensland will put his mark on an unripe zamia fruit, and
may be sure that it will be untouched and that when it is ripe he has
only to go and get it. The Eskimos, though starving, will not molest
the sacred seal basking before their huts. Similarly in social
intercourse the inhibitions are numerous. To some of his sisters,
blood and tribal, the Australian may not speak at all; to others only
at certain distances, according to the degree of kinship. The west
African fetish acts as a police, and property protected by it is safer
than under civilized laws. Food and palm wine are placed beside the
path with a piece of fetish suspended near by, and no one will touch
them without leaving the proper payment. The garden of a native may be
a mile from the house, unfenced, and sometimes unvisited for weeks by
the owner; but it is immune from depredations if protected by fetish.
Our proverb says, "A hungry belly has no ears," and it must be
admitted that the inhibition of food impulses implies no small power
of restraint.
Altogether too much has been made of inhibition, anyway, as a sign of
mentality, for it is not even characteristic of the human species.
The well-trained dog inhibits in the presence of the most enticing
stimulations of the kitchen. And it is also true that one race, at
least--the American Indian--makes inhibition of the most conspicuous
feature in its system of education. From the time the ice is broken to
give him a cold plunge and begin the toughening process on the day of
his birth, until he dies with out a groan under torture the Indian
is schooled in the restraint of his impulses. He does not, indeed,
practice our identical restraints, because his traditions and the run
of his attention are different; but he has a capacity for controlling
impulse equal to our own.
Another serious charge against the intelligence of the lower races is
lack of the power of abstraction. They certainly do not deal largely
in abstraction, and their languages are poor in abstract terms. But
there is a great difference between the habit of thinking in abstract
terms and the ability to do so.
The degree to which abstraction is employed in the activities of
a group depends on the complexity of the activities and on the
complexity of consciousness in the group. When science, philosophy,
and logic, and systems of reckoning time, space, and number are
taught in the schools; when the attention is not so much engaged in
perceptual as in deliberate acts; and when thought is a profession,
then abstract modes of thought are forced on the mind. This does not
argue absence of the power of abstraction in the lower races, or even
a low grade of ability, but lack of practice. To one skilled in any
line an unpracticed person seems very stupid; and this is apparently
the reason why travelers report that the black and yellow races have
feeble powers of abstraction. It is generally admitted, however, that
the use of speech involves the power of abstraction, so that all races
have the power in some degree. When we come further to examine the
degree in which they possess it, we find that they compare favorably
with ourselves in any test which involves a fair comparison.
The proverb is a form of abstraction practiced by all races, and
is perhaps the best test of the natural bent of the mind in this
direction, because, like ballad poetry, and slang, proverbial sayings
do not originate with the educated class, but are of popular origin.
At the same time, proverbs compare favorably with the _mots_ of
literature, and many proverbs have, in fact, drifted into literature
and become connected with the names of great writers. Indeed, the
saying that there is nothing new under the sun applies with such force
and fidelity to literature that, if we should strip Hesiod and Homer
and Chaucer of such phrases as "The half is greater than the whole,"
"It is a wise son that knows his own father" (which Shakespeare quotes
the other end about), and "To make a virtue of necessity," and if we
should further eliminate from literature the motives and sentiments
also in ballad poetry and in popular thought, little would remain but
form.
If we assume, then, that the popular mind--let us say the peasant
mind--in the white race is as capable of abstraction as the mind of
the higher classes, but not so specialized in this direction--and
no one can doubt this in view of the academic record of country-bred
boys--the following comparison of our proverbs with those of the
Africans of the Guinea coast (the latter reported by the late Sir A.B.
Ellis[259]) is significant:
_African._ Stone in the water-hole does not feel the cold.
_English._ Habit is second nature.
_A._ One tree does not make a forest.
_E._ One swallow does not make a summer.
_A._ "I nearly killed the bird." No one can eat nearly in a stew.
_E._ First catch your hare.
_A._ Full-belly child says to hungry-belly child, "Keep good cheer."
_E._ We can all endure the misfortunes of others.
_A._ Distant firewood is good firewood.
_E._ Distance lends enchantment to the view.
_A._ Ashes fly back in the face of him who throws them.
_E._ Curses come home to roost.
_A._ If the boy says he wants to tie the water with a string, ask
him whether he means the water in the pot or the water in
the lagoon.
_E._ Answer a fool according to his folly.
_A._ Cowries are men.
_E._ Money makes the man.
_A._ Cocoanut is not good for bird to eat.
_E._ Sour grapes.
_A._ He runs away from the sword and hides himself in the scabbard.
_E._ Out of the frying-pan into the fire.
_A._ A fool of Ika and an idiot of Iluka meet together to make
friends.
_E._ Birds of a feather flock together.
_A._ The ground-pig [bandicoot] said: "I do not feel so angry with
the man who killed me as with the man who dashed me on the
ground afterward."
_E._ Adding insult to injury.
_A._ Quick loving a woman means quick not loving a woman.
_E._ Married in haste we repent at leisure.
_A._ Three elders cannot all fail to pronounce the word _ekulu_
[an antelope]: one may say _ekúlu_, another _ekulú_, but
the third will say _ekulu_.
_E._ In a multitude of counselors there is safety.
_A._ If the stomach is not strong, do not eat cockroaches.
_E._ Milk for babes.
_A._ No one should draw water from the spring in order to supply
the river.
_E._ Robbing Peter to pay Paul.
_A._ The elephant makes a dust and the buffalo makes a dust, but
the dust of the buffalo is lost in the dust of the
elephant.
_E._ _Duo cum faciunt idem non est idem._
_A._ Ear, hear the other before you decide.
_E._ _Audi alteram partem._
On the side of number we have another test of the power of
abstraction; and while the lower races show lack of practice in this,
they show no lack of power. It is true that tribes have been found
with no names for numbers beyond two, three, or five; but these are
isolated groups, like the Veddahs and Bushmen, who have no trade or
commerce, and lead a miserable existence, with little or nothing to
count. The directions of attention and the simplicity or complexity
of mental processes depend on the character of the external situation
which the mind has to manipulate. If the activities are simple, the
mind is simple, and if the activities were nil, the mind would be nil.
The mind is nothing but a means of manipulating the outside world.
Number, time, and space conceptions and systems become more complex
and accurate, not as the human mind grows in capacity, but as
activities become more varied and call for more extended and accurate
systems of notation and measurement. Trade and commerce, machinery
and manufacture, and all the processes of civilization involve
specialization in the apprehension of series as such. Under these
conditions the number technique becomes elaborate and requires time
and instruction for its mastery. The advance which mathematics has
made within a brief historical time is strikingly illustrated by the
words with which the celebrated mathematician, Sir Henry Savile, who
died in 1662, closed his career as a professor at Oxford:
By the grace of God, gentlemen hearers, I have performed
my promise. I have redeemed my pledge. I have explained,
according to my ability, the definitions, postulates, axioms,
and the first eight propositions of the _Elements_ of Euclid.
Here, sinking under the weight of years, I lay down my art and
my instruments.[260]
From the standpoint of modern mathematics, Sir Henry Savile and the
Bushman are both woefully backward; and in both cases the backwardness
is not a matter of mental incapacity, but of the state of the science.
In respect, then, to brain structure and the more important mental
faculties we find that no race is radically unlike the others. Still,
it might happen that the mental activities and products of two groups
were so different as to place them in different classes. But precisely
the contrary is true. There is in force a principle called the law of
parallelism in development, according to which any group takes much
the same steps in development as any other. The group may be belated,
indeed, and not reach certain stages, but the ground patterns of
life are the same in the lower races and in the higher. Mechanical
inventions, textile industries, rude painting, poetry, sculpture, and
song, marriage and family life, organization under leaders, belief
in spirits, a mythology, and some form of church and state exist
universally. At one time students of mankind, when they found a myth
in Hawaii corresponding to the Greek story of Orpheus and Eurydice, or
an Aztec poem of tender longing in absence, or a story of the deluge,
were wont to conjecture how these could have been carried over from
Greek or Elizabethan or Hebraic sources, or whether they did not
afford evidence of a time when all branches of the human race dwelt
together with a common fund of sentiment and tradition. But this
standpoint has been abandoned, and it is recognized that the human
mind and the outside world are essentially alike the world over; that
the mind everywhere acts on the same principles; and that, ignoring
the local, incidental, and eccentric, we find similar laws of growth
among all peoples.
The number of things which can stimulate the human mind is somewhat
definite and limited. Among them, for example, is death. This happens
everywhere, and the death of a dear one may cause the living to
imagine ways of being reunited. The story of Orpheus and Eurydice may
thus arise spontaneously and perpetually, wherever death and affection
exist. Or, there may be a separation from home and friends, and the
mind runs back in distress and longing over the happy past, and the
state of consciousness aroused is as definite a fact among savages
as among the civilized. A beautiful passage in Homer represents Helen
looking out on the Greeks from the wall of Troy and saying:
And now behold I all the other glancing-eyed Achaians, whom
well I could discern and tell their names; but two captains
of the host can I not see, even Kastor tamer of horses and
Polydukes the skilful boxer, mine own brethren whom the same
mother bare. Either they came not in the company from lovely
Lakedaimon; or they came hither indeed in their seafaring
ships, but now will not enter into the battle of the warriors,
for fear of the many scornings and revilings that are
mine.[261]
When this passage is thus stripped of its technical excellence by a
prose translation, we may compare it with the following New Zealand
lament composed by a young woman who was captured on the island of
Tuhua and carried to a mountain from which she could see her home:
My regret is not to be expressed. Tears, like a spring, gush
from my eyes. I wonder whatever is Tu Kainku [her lover]
doing, he who deserted me. Now I climb upon the ridge of Mount
Parahaki, whence is clear the view of the island of Tuhua.
I see with regret the lofty Tanmo where dwells [the chief]
Tangiteruru. If I were there, the shark's tooth would hang
from my ear. How fine, how beautiful should I look!... But
enough of this; I must return to my rags and to my nothing at
all.[262]
The situation of the two women in this case is not identical, and it
would be possible to claim that the Greek and Maori passages differ
in tone and coloring; but it remains true that a captive woman of any
race will feel much the same as a captive woman of any other race when
her thoughts turn toward home, and that the poetry growing out of such
a situation will be everywhere of the same general pattern.
Similarly, to take an illustration from morals, we find that widely
different in complexion and detail as are the moral codes of lower and
higher groups, say the Hebrews and the African Kafirs, yet the general
patterns of morality are strikingly coincident. It is reported of
the Kafirs that "they possess laws which meet every crime which may
be committed." Theft is punished by restitution and fine; injuring
cattle, by death or fine; false witness, by a heavy fine; adultery,
by fine or death; rape, by fine or death; poisoning or witchcraft, by
death and confiscation of property; murder, by death or fine; treason
or desertion from the tribe, by death or confiscation.[263] The Kafirs
and Hebrews are not at the same level of culture, and we miss the more
abstract and monotheistic admonitions of the higher religion--"thou
shalt not covet; thou shalt worship no other gods before me"--but the
intelligence shown by the social mind in adjusting the individual to
society may fairly be called the same grade of intelligence in the two
cases.
When the environmental life of two groups is more alike and the
general cultural conditions more correspondent, the parallelism of
thought and practice becomes more striking. The recently discovered
Assyrian Code of Hammurabi (about 2500 B.C.) contains striking
correspondences with the Mosaic code; and while Semitic scholars
probably have good and sufficient reasons for holding that the Mosaic
Code was strongly influenced by the Assyrian, we may yet be very
confident that the two codes would have been of the same general
character if no influence whatever had passed from one to the other.
The institutions and practices of a people are a product of the mind;
and if the early and spontaneous products of mind are everywhere
of the same general pattern as the later manifestations, only less
developed, refined, and specialized, it may well be that failure to
progress equally is not due to essential unlikeness of mind, but to
conditions lying outside the mind.
Another test of mental ability which deserves special notice is
mechanical ingenuity. Our white pre-eminence owes much to this
faculty, and the lower races are reckoned defective in it. But the
lower races do invent, and it is doubtful whether one invention is
ever much more difficult than another. On the psychological side,
an invention means that the mind sees a roundabout way of reaching
an end when it cannot be reached directly. It brings into play the
associative memory, and involves the recognition of analogies. There
is a certain likeness between the flying back of a bough in one's face
and the rebound of a bow, between a serpent's tooth and a poisoned
arrow, between floating timber and a raft or boat; and water, steam,
and electricity are like a horse in one respect--they will all make
wheels go around, and do work.
Now, the savage had this faculty of seeing analogies and doing things
in indirect ways. With the club, knife, and sword he struck more
effectively than with the fist; with hooks, traps, nets, and pitfalls
he understood how to seize game more surely than with the hands; in
the bow and arrow, spear, blow-gun, and spring-trap he devised motion
swifter than that of his own body; he protected himself with armor
imitated from the hides and scales of animals, and turned their
venom back on themselves. That the savage should have originated the
inventive process and carried it on systematically is, indeed, more
wonderful than that his civilized successors should continue the
process; for every beginning is difficult.
When occupations become specialized and one set of men has continually
to do with one and only one set of machinery and forces, the constant
play of attention over the limited field naturally results in
improvements and the introduction of new principles. Modern inventions
are magnificent and seem quite to overshadow the simpler devices
of primitive times; but when we consider the precedents, copies,
resources, and accumulated knowledge with which the modern
investigator works, and, on the other hand, the resourcelessness of
primitive man in materials, ideas, and in the inventive habit itself,
I confess that the bow and arrow seems to me the most wonderful
invention in the world.
Viewing the question from a different angle, we find another argument
for the homogeneous character of the human mind in the fact that the
patterns of interest of the civilized show no variation from those of
the savage. Not only the appetites and vanities remain essentially the
same, but, on the side of intellectual interest, the type of mental
reaction fixed in the savage by the food-quest has come down unaltered
to the man of science as well as to the man of the street. In
circumventing enemies and capturing game, both the attention and the
organic processes worked together in primitive man under great stress
and strain. Whenever, indeed, a strain is thrown on the attention, the
heart and organs of respiration are put under pressure also in their
effort to assist the attention in manipulating the problem; and these
organic fluctuations are felt as pleasure and pain. The strains thrown
on the attention of primitive man were connected with his struggle
for life; and not only in the actual encounter with men and animals
did emotion run high, but the memory and anticipation of conflict
reinstated the emotional conditions in those periods when he was
meditating future conflicts and preparing his bows and arrows, traps
and poisons. The problem of invention, the reflective and scientific
side of his life, was suffused with interest, because the manufacture
of the weapon was, psychologically speaking, a part of the fight.
This type of interest, originating in the hunt, remains dominant
in the mind down to the present time. Once constructed to take an
interest in the hunting problem, it takes an interest in any problem
whatever. Not only do hunting and fighting and all competitive
games--which are of precisely the same psychological pattern as the
hunt and fight--remain of perennial interest, but all the useful
occupations are interesting in just the degree that this pattern is
preserved. The man of science works at problems and uses his ingenuity
in making an engine in the laboratory in the same way that primitive
man used his mind in making a trap. So long as the problem is
present, the interest is sustained; and the interest ceases when
the problematical is removed. Consequently, all modern occupations
of the hunting pattern--scientific investigation, law, medicine,
the organization of business, trade speculation, and the arts and
crafts--are interesting as a game; while those occupations into which
the division of labor enters to the degree that the workman is not
attempting to control a problem, and in which the same acts are
repeated an indefinite number of times, lose interest and become
extremely irksome.
This means that the brain acts pleasurably on the principle it was
made up to act on in the most primitive times, and the rest is a
burden. There is no brain change, but the social changes have been
momentous; and the brain of each generation is brought into contact
with new traditions, inhibitions, copies, obligations, problems, so
that the run of attention and content of consciousness are different.
Social suggestion works marvels in the manipulation of the mind;
but the change is not in the brain as an organ; it is rather in the
character of the stimulations thrust on it by society.
The child begins as a savage, and after we have brought to bear
all the influence of home, school, and church to socialize him, we
speak as though his nature had changed organically, and institute a
parallelism between the child and the race, assuming that the child's
brain passes in a recapitulatory way through phases of development
corresponding to epochs in the history of the race. I have no
doubt myself that this theory of recapitulation is largely a
misapprehension. A stream of social influence is turned loose on the
child; and if the attention to him is incessant and wise, and the
copies he has are good and stimulating, he is molded nearer to the
heart's desire. Sometimes he escapes, and becomes a criminal, tramp,
sport, or artist; and even if made into an impeccable and model
citizen, he periodically breaks away from the network of social habit
and goes a-fishing.
The fundamental explanation of the difference in the mental life
of two groups is not that the capacity of the brain to do work is
different, but that the attention is not in the two cases stimulated
and engaged along the same lines. Wherever society furnishes copies
and stimulations of a certain kind, a body of knowledge and a
technique, practically all its members are able to work on the plan
and scale in vogue there, and members of an alien race who become
acquainted in a real sense with the system can work under it. But
when society does not furnish the stimulations, or when it has
preconceptions which tend to inhibit the run of attention in given
lines, then the individual shows no intelligence in these lines. This
may be illustrated in the fields of scientific and artistic interest.
Among the Hebrews a religious inhibition--"thou shalt not make unto
thee any graven image"--was sufficient to prevent anything like the
sculpture of the Greeks; and the doctrine of the resurrection of the
body in the early Christian church, and the teaching that man was
made in the image of God, formed an almost insuperable obstacle to the
study of human anatomy.
The Mohammedan attitude toward scientific interest is represented by
the following extracts from a letter from an oriental official to a
western inquirer, printed by Sir Austen Henry Layard:
_My Illustrious Friend and Joy of my Liver:_
The thing which you ask of me is both difficult and useless.
Although I have passed all my days in this place, I have
neither counted the houses nor inquired into the number of the
inhabitants; and as to what one person loads on his mules and
the other stows away in the bottom of his ship, that is no
business of mine. But above all, as to the previous history
of this city, God only knows the amount of dirt and confusion
that the infidels may have eaten before the coming of the
sword of Islam. It were unprofitable for us to inquire into
it.... Listen, O my son! There is no wisdom equal to the
belief in God! He created the world, and shall we liken
ourselves unto him in seeking to penetrate into the mysteries
of his creation? Shall we say, Behold this star spinneth round
that star, and this other star with a tail goeth and cometh
in so many years? Let it go! He from whose hand it came will
guide and direct it.... Thou art learned in the things I care
not for, and as for that which thou hast seen, I spit upon it.
Will much knowledge create thee a double belly, or wilt thou
seek paradise with thine eyes?...