The works of Sir Henry Maine, who gained by his long residence in
India a profound insight into the oriental character, frequently point
out that the eastern pride in conservatisms is quite as real as the
western pride in progress:
Vast populations, some of them with a civilization
considerable but peculiar, detest that which in the language
of the West would be called reform. The entire Mohammedan
world detests it. The multitudes of colored men who swarm in
the great continent of Africa detest it, and it is detested by
that large part of mankind which we are accustomed to leave on
one side as barbarous or savage. The millions upon millions of
men who fill the Chinese Empire loathe it and (what is more)
despise it.... There are few things more remarkable, and in
their way more instructive, than the stubborn incredulity
and disdain which a man belonging to the cultivated part of
Chinese society opposes to the vaunts of western civilization
which he frequently hears.... There is in India a minority,
educated at the feet of English politicians and in books
saturated with English political ideas, which has learned to
repeat their language; but it is doubtful whether even these,
if they had a voice in the matter, would allow a finger to be
laid on the very subjects with which European legislation is
beginning to concern itself--social and religious usage. There
is not, however, the shadow of a doubt that the enormous mass
of the Indian population hates and dreads change.[265]
To the fact that the enthusiasm for change is comparatively
rare must be added the fact that it is extremely modern. It is
known but to a small part of mankind, and to that part but for
a short period during a history of incalculable length.[266]
The oriental attitude does not argue a lack of brain power, but a
prepossession hostile to scientific inquiry. The society represented
does not interest its members in what, from the western standpoint, is
knowledge.
The Chinese afford a fine example of a people of great natural ability
letting their intelligence run to waste from lack of a scientific
standpoint. As indicated above, they are not defective in brain
weight, and their application to study is long continued and very
severe; but their attention is directed to matters which cannot
possibly make them wise from the occidental standpoint. They learn
no mathematics and no science, but spend years in copying the poetry
of the T'ang Dynasty, in order to learn the Chinese characters, and
in the end cannot write the language correctly, because many modern
characters are not represented in this ancient poetry. Their attention
to Chinese history is great, as befits their reverence for the past;
but they do not organize their knowledge, they have no adequate
textbooks or apparatus for study, and they make no clear distinction
between fact and fiction. In general, they learn only rules and no
principles, and rely on memory without the aid of reason, with the
result that the man who stops studying often forgets everything, and
the professional student is amazingly ignorant in the line of his own
work:
Multitudes of Chinese scholars know next to nothing about
matters directly in the line of their studies, and in regard
to which we should consider ignorance positively disgraceful.
A venerable teacher remarked to the writer with a charming
naïveté that he had never understood the allusions in the
Trimetrical Classic (which stands at the very threshold of
Chinese study) until at the age of sixty he had an opportunity
to read a Universal History prepared by a missionary, in which
for the first time Chinese history was made accessible to
him.[267]
Add to this that the whole of their higher learning, corresponding
to our university system, consists in writing essays and always more
essays on the Chinese classics, and "it is impossible," as Mr.
Smith points out, "not to marvel at the measure of success which
has attended the use of such materials in China."[268] But when this
people is in possession of the technique of the western world--a
logic, general ideas, and experimentation--we cannot reasonably doubt
that they will be able to work the western system as their cousins,
the Japanese, are doing, and perhaps they, too, may better the
instruction.
White effectiveness is probably due to a superior technique acting
in connection with a superior body of knowledge and sentiment. Of two
groups having equal mental endowment, one may outstrip the other by
the mere dominance of incident. It is a notorious fact that the course
of human history has been largely without prevision or direction.
Things have drifted and forces have arisen. Under these conditions
an unusual incident--the emergence of a great mind or a forcible
personality, or the operation of influences as subtle as those which
determine fashions in dress--may establish social habits and duties
which will give a distinct character to the modes of attention
and mental life of the group. The most significant fact for Aryan
development is the emergence among the Greeks of a number of eminent
men who developed logic, the experimental method, and philosophic
interest, and fixed in their group the habit of looking behind the
incident for the general law. Mediaeval attention was diverted from
these lines by a religious movement, and the race lost for a time the
key to progress and got clean away from the Greek copies; but it found
them again and took a fresh start with the revival of Greek learning.
It is quite possible to make a fetish of classical learning; but Sir
Henry Maine's remark, that nothing moves in the modern world that is
not Greek in its origin, is quite just.
The real variable is the individual, not the race. In the
beginning--perhaps as the result of a mutation or series of
mutations--a type of brain developed which has remained relatively
fixed in all times and among all races. This brain will never have
any faculty in addition to what it now possesses, because as a type of
structure it is as fixed as the species itself, and is indeed a mark
of species. It is not apparent either that we are greatly in need of
another faculty, or that we could make use of it even if by a chance
mutation it should emerge, since with the power of abstraction we are
able to do any class of work we know anything about. Moreover, the
brain is less likely to make a leap now than in earlier time, both
because the conditions of nature are more fixed or more nearly
controlled by man, and hence the urgency of adjustment to sharp
variations in external conditions is removed, and because the struggle
for existence has been mitigated so that the unfit survive along with
the fit. Indeed, the rapid increase in idiocy and insanity shown by
statistics indicates that the brain is deteriorating slightly, _on the
average_, as compared with earlier times.[269]
Nature is not producing a better average brain than in the time of
Aristotle and the Greeks. If we have more than the wisdom of our
ancestors, our advantage lies in our specialization, our superior body
of knowledge, and our superior technique for its transmission. At the
same time, the individual brain is unstable, fluctuating in normal
persons between 1,100 and 1,500 grams in weight, while the extremes
of variation are represented, on the one side, by the imbecile with
300 grams, and the man of genius with 2,000 on the other. It is
therefore perfectly true that by artificial selection--Mr. Galton's
"eugenism"--a larger average brain could be created, and also a higher
average of natural intelligence, whether this be absolutely dependent
on brain weight or not. But it is hardly to be expected that a stable
brain above the capacity of those of the first rank now and in the
past will result, since the mutations of nature are more radical than
the breeding process of man, and she probably ran the whole gamut.
"Great men lived before Agamemnon," and individual variations will
continue to occur, but not on a different pattern; and what has been
true in the past will happen again in the future, that the group which
by hook or by crook comes into possession of the best technique and
the best copies will make the best show of intelligence and march at
the head of civilization.