feel themselves called upon to make. The reader must observe that,
however much one may "minimize," it remains at the last impossible to
evaporate the solid central fact that the "Negroid brain is somewhat
less developed than the European." In this fundamental indication all
the facts, so far as known, concur. But this is the very core of the
whole controversy. What more do we ask? What more do we need? We have
never been unduly prodigal of intensive adverbs; we have never asserted
that "other races are so naturally and essentially inferior in their
brain structure that they can never be expected to equal the white race
nor to be competent for self-government." For "who can so forecast the
years?" Not we, certainly, who are neither a prophet nor the son of a
prophet, nor a dealer in any such indefinitely remote futures. Our
contention was and is and will be that now and here, nay more, that
everywhere on the face of the earth and everywhen within recorded time,
the Negro has shown himself in every definable respect incomparably
inferior culturally to the Caucasian; hence it is concluded _prima
facie_, since culture is "mental expression," that the Negro is
mentally inferior to the Caucasian, and always has been so within
historic, and even far back prehistoric, time. It is this
historico-cultural argument that has been advanced to the forefront;
and against it, where is there found, in the preceding hostile summary
of anatomical facts, even the feeblest countervail? Indeed, the harmony
of history and anatomy seems perfect; if neither proves or necessitates
the other, yet indubitably each is about what might be expected from
the other. Not one scientific fact has ever yet been adduced to weaken
their mutual support.
It is precisely here, however, that another most important phase of the
matter comes to light. The ingenious humanitarian fancies that he can
turn the edge of the foregoing arguments completely. It was Theodor
Waitz who, in his "Anthropology" (London, 1863), suggested that the
relation between human culture and human faculty might be the inverse
of what was commonly conceived. Instead of the culture resulting from
the faculty, it might be the faculty that resulted from the culture.
Accordingly, we should not say that the Greek civilization with its
language, its art, its science, its philosophy, its eloquence, its
literature, its civil and military life, was the outgrowth of the Greek
genius, the native faculty of the Hellenic race, but rather that this
genius, this spiritual faculty, this unrivalled intellectual-artistic
endowment of the Greeks, was the continuous resultant at each moment in
the history of the race of the collective culture-experiences through
which, up to that moment, it had passed. We have tried conscientiously
to state this doctrine, that race endowment is the reaction from race
culture-experience, as forcibly and as plausibly as possible; but we
cannot hope to have redeemed it from patent absurdity. Surely there was
never a plainer case of the cart before the horse. No one denies or
forgets that training and discipline do quicken and sharpen the
intellectual faculties; they enable a man to make the most of himself,
to realize his possibilities, to develop himself to the utmost. The
power to solve a problem in algebra or geometry is the result, in part,
of the previous training in those subjects. Here is the very partial
and most familiar truth that lies hid away in Waitz's stupendous error.
But was the ability to understand algebra and geometry given by the
actual study of the same, given step by step? By no means. The
knowledge necessary to understand the successive propositions does
indeed grow thus step by step, but not the power. Open the book at the
middle; there you may find a theorem whose proof you readily
understand, because it implies very little previous knowledge. Newton
at first thought Euclid's Elements a "light book," because it offered
him no difficulty. But if you meet with some unfamiliar affirmation,
then comes the question, why? The answer is found in some theorem
already proved. Turn back to it; perhaps the proof involves some still
more fundamental property, and again you ask, why? Again you must recur
to some earlier theorem; and so on, until all your "whys" are answered
with all possible clearness in irreducible axioms or postulates. He who
has the mental ability will find this method of learning a theorem
entirely practicable, and it may sometimes be found highly instructive.
But it excludes all question of gradual growth of mental power through
the successive "stages of culture" itself.
Consider, again, this most frequent observation. A boy will distinguish
himself greatly in the high school, and perhaps in the first half of
his college course. He seizes with avidity upon the elementary notions
of mathematics, for instance; he revels in problems and "originals."
But on approaching the steeper ascents, he finds his steps falter and
his senses reel. The subtler theories and processes more and more elude
his grasp; the more highly developed concepts become more and more
unmanageable. Let him be never so thoroughly familiar with the
mid-regions, the heights remain forever inaccessible. In such a case
the honest teacher and the honest student will both admit that further
pursuit would be well-nigh profitless; while something may still be
learned in a way, yet real mastery is out of the question, and original
work as impossible as flight to the moon. The limits of native power
have been reached, and all attempts to transcend them are idle.
In music, in plastic art, in literature, in all higher forms of mental
activity, even in the professions and in business, the same state of
case is present. The mere technique may indeed be learned step by step,
and it is by no means profitless or unimportant. But not all the
"stages of culture" conceivable could ever arm the most persistent
student with "faculty" to produce the Appassionata, or the Last
Judgement, or Hamlet, or even a Wall Street corner in stocks. On the
other hand, the inborn "faculty" speeds swiftly and easily through all
such preparatory "stages of culture," or even flanks them altogether,
boldly breaking new paths through unexplored regions. Nor needs it that
these preliminaries should have been traversed by the ancestors of the
richly endowed, who may have had no artistic or scientific experience
whatever. At every point, then, this Waitzian notion of "faculty," as
the efflux of culture, is seen to be an extreme distortion of the
truth.
The later disciples have slightly modified the earlier view, but retain
the essence. Thus it is said that "the mind of man manifests itself in
different ways in different groups." Psychologically and sociologically
the racial problem rests upon the explanation of these differences of
mental manifestation. Two lines of reasoning are open. The differences
depend either upon inherent differences of mental capacity or are due
to influences of environment, using the word in its broadest sense.
Either the savage represents a lower stage of mental development than
his civilized relative or he does not. The answer to the question
presented is not easy ... it is interesting to note that the trend of
authoritative opinion is distinctly in the direction of minimizing the
degree of difference of mental capacity between savage and civilized
man and regarding the mental gap as more apparent than real and due
rather to experience and training than to innate factors. To paraphrase
a recent writer, "it is rather a question of mental contents than of
mental capacities." Such is the latest statement of this school.
The most dangerous errors are those that contain a certain element of
truth. The present is a case in point. Let it be noted, then, that the
alternatives mentioned above are not alternatives at all; they are not
mutually exclusive, but quite consistent and perhaps always
co-existent. The "two lines of reasoning" do not intersect, but are
parallel. The "differences depend," not "either ... or," but _both_
"upon inherent differences of mental capacity" _and_ "are due to
influences of environment." The twain have undoubtedly acted and
reacted upon each other. The divine law, to him that hath shall be
given, from him that hath not shall be taken away, has found here the
widest application. The process of evolving a civilization or a human
type is a most complex one, and we by no means exclude or "minimize"
the objective factors when we frankly recognize the subjective ones.
Here lies the primal error of the prevalent humanitarianism. It
perceives that education is much; it rashly concludes that education
is all. But the homeliest wisdom knows far better.
_It is not all in training up
A child against its will:
To silver scour a pewter cup,--
It will be pewter still._
No, a thousand times no! Environment is not all nor nearly all--nay,
not nearly half. Says Lombroso: "The action of climate and circumstance
is very slight by the side of heredity" (_op. cit._, p. 88). Saith
Heraclitus, "Much learning does not teach to have mind"; saith Pindar,
"His art is true who by nature hath knowledge," and he scorns the crows
that have but learned. Let the outer impact be what it will, it is the
"inherent" qualities that determine the response. Sing out the natural
C; among a score of tuning-forks only one will reply. Nay more;
different constitutions may make exactly opposite replies: "the roar of
the lion scatters the sheep, but gathers the jackals"; the prayer of
Clarence but hardens the heart of the first murderer, though it softens
the soul of the second. All this, one would think, a child might
understand. Nature blazons it on every leaf and every star, and
proclaims it with a million tongues; but overhumane doctrinaires will
neither see nor hear anything that impugns their sacrosanct dogma, that
"all men are created equal". "The trend of authoritative opinion"
insists on "minimizing the degree of difference of mental capacity" and
regarding the mental gap as more apparent than real and due rather to
experience and training than to innate factors--whereat the current
philanthropy claps its hands and cries, "Eureka! Come, now! Let us
train and experience the Negro and close up the mental gap in a jiffy"!
But will some manufacturer or wholesale importer of "authoritative
opinions" kindly inform us what "mental gap" has ever been closed up by
"experience and training"?
Great, indeed, is the potence of "environment"; greater, by far, the
potence of heredity. Fortunately we are not left quite in the dark as
to their relative importance. In discussing "race suicide" an eminent
scholar, who is always sage and sagacious, save only when _celeri
saucius Africo_, declares: "That those who are intellectually the
best in each generation should leave the fewest descendants is a
serious thing; for all the recent work in anthropology teaches the
importance of heredity, and tends to prove Galton's theory that genius
is inherited." From a study of the one thousand most eminent men of
history, but for whom "the world would have made little progress in
learning, invention or wealth," Processor Cattell concludes that
"heredity, including in that term both stability and variability of
stock, is more potent than social tradition or physical environment."
From a study of European royal genealogies, it is deduced by Dr. F. A.
Woods, of Harvard, that "heredity has exercised in mental life a factor
not far from nine-tenths, while from the moral side something over
one-half."
Without placing implicit faith in such numerical estimates, and without
pausing to inquire how one might best "exercise a factor", the reader
will note the admitted dominance of heredity over all other forces. It
will be observed that the deductions of Dr. Woods refer to the "mental
life" and the "moral side" in general, and not merely to extraordinary
manifestations or "genius," as in "Galton's theory". Surely there is
little enough of the latter to be found in "all the royal families of
Europe", and quite sufficient of something else. Besides, it seems
clear that if genius be inherited, if marked deviations from the
average in this direction or in that be transmitted, then _a
fortiori_ must also the general average character be itself in
detail determined by inheritance. For every example of "inherited
genius" there lie close at hand, under common and immediate
observation, a thousand examples of inheritance of qualities physical,
mental, and moral that fall within the bounds of the normal. Such
qualities have beneath them a far solider substructure of age, a far
more settled and less mutable organic habit of centuries, than do the
new growths, the spontaneous mutations, that we call genius, or any
marked eccentricity. If, then, the latter be inherited, far more so the
former. And such is precisely the foundation on which the whole fabric
of the foregoing argument has been reared.
Let the reader observe that the question, the only real question,
regards the "mental gap" between the Negro and the Caucasian, for which
we dare not substitute "between savage and civilized man". This matter
is entirely another and entirely irrelevant. The "difference of mental
capacity" between the savage Greek and the civilized Egyptian was
indeed great, but was in favour of the savage youth and against the
civilized ancient. So, too, the savage Teuton fully equalled or
excelled in mental capacity his civilized Italian foeman. The defects
of these savages were cultural, not mental proper, and culture was
enough speedily to supply them. But where, we ask again, have real
"mental gaps" been filled up by culture? Where have racial
characteristics been transformed or abolished? Have equal opportunities
raised the 150,000 Negroes in Pennsylvania to the white level? Or the
100,000 in New York? Or those in New England? Or in Chatham, Ontario?
Or in Paris? When Greek culture led captive the Roman captor, did it
arm him with Greek genius? Did it close up the "mental gap"? When the
bow of Hellenic science fell into the hands of the Arab, was he quite
able to bend it?
We recall our anthropologic and ethnologic disputants to the ridge of
war, and ask, Do they really believe that the difference between the
Niger and the Euphrates was one of "experience and training"? If so,
pray tell us how many more years had the Sumerians lived seventy
centuries ago than the citizens of Dahomey up to now? Did the former
enjoy, like the latter, a contact for centuries with American
missionaries and European civilization? And whence came the "experience
and training" of Hammurabi and Sin-mubalit and their ancestors? Who
trained their trainers? If indeed "it is a question of mental contents
rather than of mental capacities," whence, we insist, came those
"mental contents"? Did they fall out of the sky into the empty skulls
of Nineveh? Why, then, did this meteoric shower powder Mesopotamia so
densely and sprinkle a dust so impalpable over the Sudan? "Mental
contents rather than mental capacities"? True, the word "capacities" is
unluckily chosen; "faculties" would have been better, but, even as it
stands, there was never a more manifest inversion of the truth. We have
taught for a score of years and every year we see more clearly that the
teacher is helpful mainly to the favoured few that do not need him. We
appeal to the whole tribe of teachers, from Dan to Beersheba--what one
has ever supplied "mental contents" in the absence of "mental
capacities"? This is preeminently the age of education. Its agencies
are all-embracing and bewildering in their complexity and universality.
Everything is taught and everything is studied in the most
thoroughgoing fashion, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop on the
wall. If it be merely or mainly a question of "experience and training"
and "mental contents," surely we have distanced our ancestors
immensely;--we are altogether "out of sight". Genius should run riot on
our streets. Homers, Platos and Euclids, Caesars, Shakesperes and
Newtons, Goethes and Kants, Pascals, Dantes and Titians, should be as
plenty as blackberries. And yet such is not very notably the case.
There is still some room at the top. The supply of abilities of the
very highest order is nowhere markedly in excess of the demand.
Will anyone contend that "experience and training" and subcranial
injection of "mental contents" have ever been able to close up the
"mental gap" between individuals of the same race, or even of the same
family? Why, then, imagine that they may close up the far wider gap
between individuals of different races--between the races themselves?
This doctrine of the all-sufficiency of "experience and training" and
"mental contents" assumes, in fact, the proportions of an overgrown
ironical joke and would grace the vacuous columns of _Judge_ far better
than the sober-minded pages of Anthropology. As a child we have
sometimes wondered why the eagle should so far outfly the
turkey-gobbler; it seems the mystery is now clearly resolved--the
eagle has doubtless had more "experience and training".
We sometimes see it attempted to strengthen the plea for the essential
equality of the Negro by reference to the Japanese, who are declared
not inferior, though "they would have been called an inferior, a
hopelessly submerged race, half a century ago. But they have made a
sudden change. This has been no slow Darwinian development, but a _per
saltum_ evolution of a new intellectual type--if we may not rather call
it a spring blossoming out of ages of winter. There is now every
appearance that a similar efflorescence is coming with the negro
race--only they have begun with utter ignorance and slavery, and have
more to learn, and find less encouragement". Now, in this notion of
"efflorescence" there is an element of truth. There _are_ bloom-periods
in the life of the race, as of trees and of men. We speak of the
Periclean, the Augustan, the Elizabethan age. "For greater dooms do
greater doles obtain,"[19] was said in the ancient mystery. "Spirits
are not finely touch'd but to fine issues". Extraordinary junctures and
crises in the life of the individual and of the race may rouse
slumbering powers into vehement activity. But that such admitted facts
will bear the weight of inference thrown upon them, we must stoutly
deny. The thorn and the thistle may indeed bloom and fructify, but they
will not bear grapes or figs. They will bring forth fruit after their
kind. Greeks were Greeks before Marathon or Salamis, before even Homer
or Agamemnon. Witness the outburst of Arabic genius after Mohammed! Yet
Bagdad and Granada could never become like unto Athens or Alexandria.
But why multiply illustrations? Efflorescence is one thing,
transmutation is another. "We seem to see such a paroxysmal impulse now
taking possession of the negro race in this country"! We gravely doubt
this "sudden start upward"; we strongly suspect things are not what
they seem. We label all such statements "important, _if true_".[20]
[19] Hippolytus, _Philosophoumena_, V. 8.
[20] That they are a total inversion of the truth is proved
elaborately in Chapter Five.
The illustration from the Orient will not serve its purpose. We by no
means admit that Japan does yet "take a front rank among the strong and
intellectual nations of the world". One swallow does not make it
spring. We are used to parallels between Sophocles and Ibsen. A Harvard
junior declared Demosthenes to be the Edward Everett of Greece. But in
any case it is not true that "they have made a sudden change". It was
only gross ignorance that would have called them "hopelessly submerged
half a century ago". They were then, even as they are now and as they
were hundreds of years before, an artistic, ingenious, enterprising
people, with a well-developed culture--language, literature, religion,
social and civic and military life.[21] Contact with Western
civilization has indeed aroused them and spurred their ambition, and
turned their ancient powers into modern channels; but we can by no
means say it has really augmented those powers or begotten any new
ones. It is far from clear that this contact will prove ultimately
beneficial. The Oriental grain is not improved to every eye by a cheap
veneering of Occidental science and commercialism. We have read of a
boy who was gilded from head to foot, to represent an angel at a church
festival. The experiment was eminently successful: it turned him not
only into an apparent angel, but also into a real one. A similar result
may be anticipated as the ultimate issue of all attempts, however
well-meant, to engraft alien civilization upon the really backward
races of mankind. They will finally be civilized off the face of the
earth, or at least from all regions habitable and healthful for the
civilizing race.
[21] Day teaches day. Until very recently our meagre information
touching Japanese brain weight did not extend beyond the 130
examples reported by Doenitz (1874), Taguchi (1881), Suzuki
(1892), of which the average was about 1,350 grams. Now, however,
in the _Medical Journal_, Tokio, XXII, Nos. 1, 2, 8, 1903, and
in_ Neurologia_, I, No. 5, 1903, Prof. K. Taguchi publishes
measurements of 597 subjects; 421 males, 176 females. Of these,
374 adult males yielded an average of 1,367 grams, between the
extremes 1,063 and 1,790; 150 adult females, an average of 1,214
grams, ranging from 961 to 1,432. Per centimetre of stature the
brain weight of the Japanese is almost exactly the same as that
of the Germans (Bischoff, Marchand), Russians (Giltscnenko),
Czechs (Matiegka), of the same height. "To recapitulate, the
brain of the Japanese grows more slowly during infancy and early
youth than it does in the European. In the adult the brain-weight
compares favorably with that of Europeans of similar stature, and
it may be shown to be superior in this respect to other races of
the same general stature." (E. A. Spitzka in _Science_, Sept. 18,
1903, p. 371-373).
Even then if the Japanese should outstrip all rivals, it would in
no degree shake the arguments or conclusions of this volume, nor
ground the least hope for the African; for neither historically
nor (still less) anatomically is there any parallelism between
the two races.
It seems to be of interest, however, and the dictate of fairness, to
recall that, according to a very high and recent, though perhaps not
infallible, authority (Professor Ripley), the roots of the great
European race-tree are two:[22] the broad-headed Kelt from Asia and the
long-headed Teuton from Africa. If so, then this latter stock, though
now the fairest among the sons of men,
_Then, sad relief, from the bleak shore that hears
The German Ocean roar, deep blooming, strong,
And yellow-haired the blue-eyed Saxon came--_
was once the very darkest! What combined agencies, as of climate and
selection, have wrought out this marvellous depigmentation, we need not
here inquire. Suffice it that, on the one hand, this fact, if it be a
fact,--_non nobis est componere tantas lites_--would seem to ground the
bare possibility that even now such combined agencies might in the same
lapse of time bring about a similar transfiguration of the West
African. And this we readily grant--if the physiologic nature of the
Negro be as plastic now as it was a hundred thousand years ago--which
we cannot disprove, but which we have no right to assume. Be this as it
may, we have never denied this or any other abstract possibility of
negritic evolution. We merely maintain that probability is the guide of
life, and that there is no appreciable probability of any such
evolution.
[22] To be sure, Prof. Ripley speaks repeatedly of three races
(see Pop. Sc. Mon. LI, p. 202): Teutonic, Alpine, Mediterranean;
but both the first and the last are long-faced and long-headed,
and he regards the two as having a common origin, "a dolichocephalic
Africanoid type in the stone age" (LII, p. 314). "It is highly
probable that the Teutonic race of northern Europe is merely a
variety of this primitive, long-headed type of the stone age,
both its distinctive blondness and its remarkable stature having
been acquired in the relative isolation of Scandinavia through
the modifying influences of environment, and of natural
selection" (LII, p. 312), "The European races" are thought, "as
intermediate between the extreme primary types of the Asiatic and
the negro races respectively" (LII, p. 306).--But the Chinese are
long-heads.--Sharply opposed to Ripley's and commanding wider
scientific assent, is the view of Lapouge, set forth in
_L'Aryen_.