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THE BLACK MAN'S PLACE IN SOUTH AFRICA
BY
PETER NIELSEN.
JUTA & CO., LTD.,
CAPE TOWN. PORT ELIZABETH. UITENHAGE.
JOHANNESBURG.
1922
_To
MY MOTHER_.
PREFACE.
The reader has a right to ask what qualification the writer may have for
dealing with the subject upon which he offers his opinions.
The author of this book claims the qualifications of an observer who,
during many years, has studied the ways and thoughts of the Natives of
South Africa on the spot, not through interpreters, but at first hand,
through the medium of their own speech, which he professes to know as
well as the Natives themselves.
P.N.
THE BLACK MAN'S PLACE IN SOUTH AFRICA.
THE QUESTION STATED.
The white man has taken up the burden of ruling his dark-skinned fellows
throughout the world, and in South Africa he has so far carried that
burden alone, feeling well assured of his fitness for the task. He has
seen before him a feeble folk, strong only in their numbers and fit only
for service, a people unworthy of sharing with his own race the
privileges of social and political life, and it has seemed right
therefore in his sight that this people should continue to bend under
his dominant will. But to-day the white man is being disturbed by signs
of coming strength among the black and thriving masses; signs of the
awakening of a consciousness of racial manhood that is beginning to find
voice in a demand for those rights of citizenship which hitherto have
been so easily withheld. The white people are beginning to ask
themselves whether they shall sit still and wait till that voice becomes
clamant and insistent throughout the land or whether they shall begin
now to think out and provide means for dealing with those coming events
whose shadows are already falling athwart the immediate outlook. The
strong and solid feeling among the whites in the past against giving any
political rights to the blacks however civilised they might be is not so
strong or as solid as it was. The number is growing of those among the
ruling race who feel that the right of representation should here also
follow the burden of taxation, but while there are many who think thus,
those who try to think the matter out in all its bearings soon come to
apprehend the possibility that where once political equality has been
granted social equality may follow, and this apprehension makes the
thinking man pause to think again before he commits himself to a
definite and settled opinion.
Taking the civilisation of to-day to mean an ordered and advanced state
of society in which all men are equally bound and entitled to share the
burdens and privileges of the whole political and social life according
to their individual limitations we ask whether the African Natives are
capable of acquiring this civilisation, and whether, if it be proved
that their capacity for progress is equal to that of the Europeans, the
demand for full racial equality that must inevitably follow can in
fairness be denied. This I take to be the crux of the Native Question in
South Africa.
Before we attempt to answer this question it is necessary to find out,
if we can, in what ways the African differs from the European; for if it
be found that there are radical and inherent differences between the two
races of a kind that seem certain to remain unaltered by new influences
and changed environment then the whites will feel justified in denying
equality where nature herself has made it impossible, whereas if the
existing difference be proved to be only outwardly acquired and not
inwardly heritable then the coming demand for equality will stand
supported by natural right which may not be ignored. The question, then,
before us is this. Is the African Native equal to the European in mental
and moral capacity or is he not? We must have an answer to this
question, for we cannot assign to the Native his proper place in the
general scheme of our civilisation till we know exactly what manner of
man he is.
We of to-day are rightly proud of our freedom from the sour
superstitions and religious animosities of the past, but these
hindrances to progress and general happiness were only dispelled by the
light of scientific thought and clear reasoning. Let us then bring to
bear that same blessed light upon our present enquiry into the reasons,
real or fancied, for those prejudices of race and colour which we still
retain, for it is only by removing the misconceptions and false notions
that obscure our view that we can come to a clear understanding of the
many complex issues that make up the great Native problem of Africa.
BODILY DIFFERENCES.
"That which distinguishes man from the beast," said Beaumarchais, "is
drinking without being thirsty, and making love at all seasons," and he
spoke perhaps truer than he knew, for the fact that man is not bound by
seasons and is not in entire subjection to his environment is the
cardinal distinction between him and the brutes. This distinction was
won through man's possession of a thinking brain which caused or
coincided with an upright carriage whereby his two hands were set free
from the lowly service of mere locomotion to make fire and to fashion
the tools wherewith he was enabled to control his environment instead of
remaining like the animals entirely controlled by it. This wonderful
brain also made possible the communication and tradition of his
experiences and ideas through articulate speech by which means his
successors in each generation were able to keep and develop the slowly
spelt lessons of human life.
Are the African Natives as far removed from the beasts as the Europeans,
and do they share equally with the Europeans this great human
distinction of ability to think?
The belief, at, one time commonly held, that in morphological
development and physical appearance the Bantu stand nearer in the scale
of evolution to our common ape-like ancestors than do the white people
does not seem to be warranted by facts. Careful investigations by
trained observers all over the world have shown that the various simian
features discernible in the anatomy of modern man are found fairly
evenly distributed amongst advanced and backward races.
The so-called prognathism of the Bantu has been cited as a racial mark
denoting comparative nearness to the brutes, but when it is noted that
anthropologists differ among themselves as to what constitutes this
feature, whether it is to be measured from points above or below the
nose or both, and when we are informed in some text books that while the
negroes are prognathous, bushmen must be classed with Europeans as being
the opposite, that is, orthognathous,[1] and when, added to this, we
learn from other quarters that white women are, on the average, more
prognathous than white men,[2] then the significance of this
distinction, which in any case is not regarded as being relative to
cranical capacity, is seen to be more apparent than real.
Extreme hairiness of body, on the other hand, which might well be taken
as a simian or vestigial character, is seldom met with in the Bantu, but
is equally common among Europeans and Australian aboriginals and is
found particularly developed in the Ainu of Japan. The texture also of
the African's hair is less like that of the hair of the man-like apes
than is the hair of the European. The proportions of the limbs of the
Europeans seem, on the average, to be nearer to the supposed prototype
of man than those of the Bantu. The specifically human development of
the red lips is more pronounced in the African than in the European,[3]
and if there is anything in what has been called the "god-like erectness
of the human carriage" then it must be admitted that the Bantu women
exhibit a straightness of form which may well be envied by the ladies of
civilisation.
It is generally accepted that the African Natives have a bodily odour of
their own which is _sui generis_ in that it is supposed to be different
from that of other human races. Some early travellers have compared it
with the smell of the female crocodile, and many people believe it to be
a racial characteristic denoting a comparatively humble origin and
intended by nature as a signal or warning for the rest of human kind
against close physical contact with the African race. A recent student
of the Negro question in America gives it as his opinion that this odour
is "something which the Negroes will have difficulty in living down."[4]
To most Europeans this smell seems to be more or less unpleasant but it
must not be forgotten that it does not seem to affect the large numbers
of white men of all nationalities who have found and still find pleasure
in continued and intimate intercourse with African women. It would seem
as if highly "refined" Europeans are nowadays given to exaggerate the
sensation produced on their over delicate olfactory nerves by the
exhalations caused by perspiration through a healthy and porous skin. In
many of the so-called Ladies' Journals published in England and America
advertisements appear regularly vaunting chemical preparations for the
disguising of the odour of perspiration which, it is alleged, mars the
attractiveness of women. If this is so it would seem that the nostrils
of the modern European are rather too easily offended by the natural
smell of his kind. However this may be there is no evidence for
believing that the African's bodily smell is more animal-like than that
of any other race.
If there is one thing which the white man of South Africa is sure about
it is the comparative thickness of the "nigger skull," but this notion
also would appear to be one of the many which have no foundation in
fact.
The opinion of medical men, based upon actual observation and
measurement, is to the effect that there is no evidence to support the
contention that the Native skull is thicker than that of the
European.[5] That the thick, woolly hair of the Native may account for
his supposed comparative invulnerability to head injuries has not
occurred to the layman observer who is more often given to vehement
assertion than to careful enquiry.
The supposed arrest of the brain of the Bantu at the age of puberty
owing to the closing of the sutures of the skull at an earlier age than
happens with Europeans is another popular notion for which a sort of
pseudo-scientific authority may be quoted from encyclopædias and old
books of travel. The opinion of modern authorities on this subject is
that those who say that the closure of the sutures of the skull
determines brain growth would or should also say that the cart pulls the
horse, for, if the sutures of the Native skull close at a somewhat
earlier date in the average Native than in the average European then it
simply means that the Native reaches maturity slightly earlier than the
average white man.
The loss of mental alertness which is said by some to be peculiar to the
Natives at the time of puberty is very often met with in the European
youth or girl at that period of life. Competent observers have of late
years come to the conclusion that this supposed falling off in
intelligence, in so far as it may differ in degree from what has so
often been noticed in European boys and girls at that point of
development, is due to psychological and not to physiological causes. It
is realised that this lapse in mental power of concentration in European
youth in the stage of early adolescence is prevented by the force of
example and fear of parental and general reprobation coupled with
unbroken school-discipline, all of which factors are as yet seldom
present in the surroundings of the average Bantu boy or girl.
The outward ethnic differentiæ of the Bantu are admittedly palpable and
patent to everyone, but in the opinion of competent observers there is
nothing in the anatomy of the black man to make him a lower beast than
the man with the white skin. It is now seen that there is no apparent
relation between complexion or skull shape and intelligence, but while
this is so there appears to be a correlation between the size of the
brain and the number of cells and fibres of which it is made up,
although this correlation is so weak as to be difficult of
demonstration.[6]
The capacity of the normal human cranium varies from 1,000 cubic
centimetres to 1,800 cubic centimetres, the mean capacity of female
crania being 10 per cent. less than the mean of male crania. On this
basis skulls are classified in the text books as being _microcephalic_
when below 1,350 cubic centimetres, such as those of the extinct
Tasmanians, Bushmen, Andamanese, Melanesians, Veddahs, and the Hill-men
of India; _mesocephalic_, those from 1,350 to 1,450 cubic centimetres,
comprising Negroes, Malays, American Indians, and Polynesians; and
_megacephalic_, above 1,450 cubic centimetres, including Eskimos,
Europeans, Mongolians, Burmese and Japanese. The mean capacity among
Europeans is fixed at 1,500 cubic centimetres, and the average weight of
the brain at 1,300 grams.
These figures show that the skull capacity of the average European is
larger than that of the average Negro, and as it seems plausible that
the greater the central nervous system, the higher will be the faculty
of the race, and the greater its aptitude for mental achievements, the
conclusion that the European is superior in this respect seems on the
face of it to be well grounded. There are, however, certain relevant
facts which qualify this inference, and these must be briefly
considered.
The anthropologist Manouvrier measured thirty-five skulls of eminent
white men and found them to be of an average capacity of 1,665 cubic
centimetres as compared to 1,560 cubic centimetres general average
derived from 110 ordinary individuals. On the other hand he found that
the cranial capacity of forty-five murderers was 1,580 cubic
centimetres, also superior to the general average. Professor Franz Boas,
in discussing this experiment, says that most of the brain weights
constituting the general series are obtained in anatomical institutes,
and the individuals who find their way there are poorly developed on
account of malnutrition and of life under unfavourable circumstances,
while the eminent men represent a much better nourished class. As poor
nourishment reduces the weight and size of the whole body, it will also
reduce the size and weight of the brain.[7] Dr. Arthur Keith when
dealing with the so-called Piltdown skull in his book "The Antiquity of
Man" says to the same effect that the size of brain is a very imperfect
index of mental ability in that we know that certain elements enter into
the formation of the brain which take no direct part in our mental
activity, so that a person who has been blessed with a great robust body
and strong, massive limbs requires a greater outfit of mere tracts and
nerve cells for the purposes of mere animal administration than the
smaller person with trunk and limbs of a moderate size.[8]
It seems fair, therefore, to assume that the brain-weights of big men of
the Zulu, the Xosa and the Fingo tribes will be considerably above those
of European women, but to conclude from this that the capacity of the
big black man is higher than that of the average white woman would
hardly be possible to-day. I would say here that I do not accept the
suggestion, recently advanced, that the mental faculty of woman is
qualitatively different from that of man. I hold that there is no
difference of any kind between the intellectual powers of the male and
female human being. The comparative lack of mental achievement on the
part of women in the past I believe to have been due to a natural, and,
as I think, wholesome feminine disinclination to take up intellectual
studies and scientific pursuits that until recently have been deemed the
prerogative of men, and not to any innate inferiority of the female
brain.
According to Professor Sollas, whose high authority cannot be disputed,
the size of the brain when looked at broadly seems to be connected with
the taxinomic rank of the race, but when we come to details the
connection between cranial capacity and mental endowment becomes less
obvious. The Eskimo, for instance, who is of short stature, has a
cranial capacity of 1,550 cubic centimetres, thus surpassing some of the
most civilised peoples of Europe, and yet no one of this race has so far
startled the world with any kind of mental achievement. "The result,"
says Professor Sollas, "of numerous investigations carried out during
the last quarter of a century is to show that, within certain limits, no
discoverable relation exists between the magnitude of the brain--or even
its gross anatomy--and intellectual power," and he illustrates this
statement by a list giving the cranial capacities and brain-weights of a
number of famous men which shows that though Bismarck had a skull
capacity of 1,965 cubic centimetres, Liebniz, who attained to the
highest flights of genius, had a cranium measuring only 1,422 cubic
centimetres.
Dealing more particularly with the assumed relation between highly
specialised mental faculties and the anatomy of the brain, as apart from
its mere size, the same author cites the case of Dr. Georg Sauerwein,
who was master of forty or fifty languages, and whose brain after his
death at the age of 74 in December, 1904, was dissected by Dr. L. Stieda
with the idea that, since it is known that the motor centre for speech
is situated in what is called Broca's area, some connection between
great linguistic powers and the size or complication of the frontal lobe
might be found in this highly specialised brain, but the examination
revealed nothing that could be correlated with Sauerwein's exceptional
gift.[9]
Professor R.R. Marett in his handbook on Anthropology says, in
discussing the subject of race, "You will see it stated that the size of
the brain cavity will serve to mark off one race from another. This is
extremely doubtful, to put it mildly. No doubt the average European
shows some advantage in this respect as compared, say, with the Bushmen.
But then you have to write off so much for their respective types of
body, a bigger body going in general with a bigger head, that in the end
you find yourself comparing mere abstractions. Again, the European may
be the first to cry off on the ground that comparisons are odious; for
some specimens of Neanderthal man, in sheer size of brain cavity, are
said to give points to any of our modern poets and politicians.... Nor,
if the brain itself be examined after death, and the form and number of
its convolutions compared, is this criterion of hereditary brain-power
any more satisfactory. It might be possible in this way to detect the
difference between an idiot and a person of normal intelligence, but not
the difference between a fool and a genius."[10]
In his book, "The Human Body," Dr. Keith, in dealing with racial
characters, begs his readers to break away from the common habit of
speaking and thinking of various races as high and low. "High and low,"
he says, "refers to civilisation; it does not refer to the human
body."[11]
The foregoing authoritative opinions serve to show that the Bantu, as
compared with other races, labour under no apparent physiological
disabilities to hinder them in the process of mental development. Let us
now consider in the light of modern psychology upon first-hand and
reliable evidence the allegation of mental inferiority that is
constantly brought against these people.
THE MIND OF THE NATIVE.
The white man has conquered the earth and all its dark-skinned people,
and when he thinks of his continued success in the struggle for
supremacy he feels that he has a right to be proud of himself and his
race. He looks upon the black man as the fool of the human family who
has failed in every way, whereas he, the lord of creation, has achieved
the impossible, and this comparison which is so favourable to himself
naturally leads him to set up achievement as the sole test of ability.
If asked why the African Native has never accomplished anything at all
comparable with the feats of the European or the Asiatic the average
white man will answer, without hesitation, that it is because the Native
has always lacked the necessary capacity.
The average white man has a more or less vague notion that his own proud
position at the top of human society is the result of the continuous and
assiduous use of the brain by his forefathers in the struggle for
existence under the rigorous conditions of a northern climate during
thousands of generations by which constant exercise the mental faculty
of his race grew and increased till it became, in course of time, a
heritable intellectual endowment, whereas the Natives of Africa by
failing always to make use of whatever brain power they might have been
blessed with in the beginning have suffered a continuous loss of mental
capacity.
The idea that the evolution of the human intellect is a perpetually
progressive process by means of the constant use of the brain in the
pursuits of increasing civilisation towards the eventual attainment of
god-like perfection is one that appeals strongly to the popular fancy,
and its corollary, that those who fail during long periods to make full
use of their mental equipment in the ways of advancing civilisation must
gradually lose a part, if not the whole, of their original talents, is
commonly accepted as being warranted by the teaching of modern science.
But science, as a body, does not support the view that bodily characters
and modifications acquired by an individual during his lifetime are
transmissible to his offspring; in other words, science does not, as a
body, accept the theory that the effects of use and disuse in the parent
are inherited by his children. Modern science does not, indeed,
definitely foreclose discussion of the subject, but what it says is that
the empirical issue is doubtful with a considerable balance against the
supposed inheritance of acquired characters.
Very recently evidence has, indeed, been adduced to prove that
"Initiative in animal evolution comes by stimulation, excitation and
response in new conditions, and is followed by repetition of these
phenomena until they result in structural modifications, transmitted and
directed by selection and the law of genetics." The student who tenders
this evidence is Dr. Walter Kidd[12] who claims that his observations of
the growth of the hair of the harness-horse prove that the prolonged
friction caused by the harness produces heritable effects in the pattern
of the hairy coat of this animal. It is admitted by this observer that
such momentary and acute stimuli as are involved in the mutilation of
the human body by boring holes in the ears, knocking out teeth, and by
circumcision, which practices have been followed by so-called savages
during long ages, seldom, if ever, lead to inherited characters, but he
maintains that the effect of prolonged friction by the collar on the
hair on the under side of the neck of the harness-horse has produced
marks or patterns in the same place on certain young foals born by these
horses.
These observations must, of course, be submitted to strict examination
before science will pronounce its opinion. Meanwhile I may be allowed
to cite what Dr. Kidd calls an "undesigned experiment," which to my mind
goes far to prove that the effects of prolonged friction on the human
body during many generations is not heritable. The custom followed by
many Bantu tribes of producing in their women an elongation of the
genital parts by constant manipulation must have been practiced during
very many generations, certainly much longer than the comparatively
recent harnessing of horses in England, for we know how tenaciously
primitive people cling to their old customs, generation after
generation, for thousands of years, and yet no instance has ever been
noticed by these people, who are very observant in these matters, of any
sign of such an inherited characteristic in any of their female
children.
The ordinary layman, though he may feel strongly interested in the
problems of heredity and evolution, has seldom the leisure or the
opportunity for the careful study of biological data, and he must
therefore leave these to the specialists in scientific enquiry, but he
is by no means precluded from using his own common-sense in drawing
conclusions from the ordinary plain facts of life observable around him.
It is when we come to consider this most important question in its
bearing upon the mental side of the human being that the ordinary layman
feels himself to be no less competent to form an opinion than the
trained man of science.
Is it possible, then, we ask, for the parent whose intellect has been
developed through training in his lifetime to transmit to his children
any portion of this acquired increment of mental capacity, or, putting
the question in more concrete terms, is it possible for a parent to
transmit to his offspring any part of that power to increase the size
and quality of the brain which may be assumed to have resulted in his
own case from mental exercise? The question must not be misunderstood.
We do not ask whether clever parents do as a rule have clever children;
what we want to know is whether the successive sharpening of the wits of
generations of people does, or does not, eventually result in
establishing a real and cumulative asset of mental capacity.
Seeing that universal education has only come about within the latter
part of the last century it must be clear that the vast majority of the
present generation of educated Europeans are descended from people who
never had any of that education which so many people nowadays regard as
essential to the development and growth of the intellectual powers. But
although education has only recently become, in various degrees, common
to all white people, the light of learning has always been kept burning,
however dimly at times, in certain places and circles, and it may,
perhaps, be possible to find people to-day who are the descendants of
those favoured few who have enjoyed, during many unbroken generations,
the privilege of liberal education. Now let us assume that there are at
present a small number of such people in the forefront of the
intellectual activity of the day, and then let us ask ourselves whether
these leaders of thought who can claim long lineal descent from learned
ancestors show any mental capacity over and above that which is
displayed by those commoners who are also in the foremost ranks of
thought and science, but who cannot lay claim to such continuous
ancestral training.
If we admit the existence of two such separate classes to-day then the
answer must surely be that there is no mental difference discernible
between them. But I think we may safely conclude that there has been
very little of the kind of descent here presumed. It would be well-nigh
impossible to find people who could prove an unbroken lineage of
educated forbears going back more than four hundred years. During the
middle ages the monks of the Church were the chief and almost sole
depositories of education and learning, and as they were bound by their
vows to life-long celibacy there could be no transmission from them to
posterity of any of that increased capacity of brain which we are
supposing as having been acquired by each individual through his own
mental exertion. We know, of course, that there were frequent lapses
from the unnatural restraint imposed on these men so that some of them
may have propagated their kind, but such illegitimate offspring was not
likely to remain within the circle of learning and therefore could not
perpetuate the line. We of to-day know full well that the son of the
common labourer whose forefathers had no education can, with equality
of opportunity, achieve as much and travel as far in any field of mental
activity as can the scion of the oldest of our most favoured families.
There does not seem to have been any augmentation of human brain power
since written records of events were begun. Indeed it would seem rather
as if there had been in many places a decrease in intellectual capacity,
as when we compare the fellahin of modern Egypt with their great
ancestors whom they resemble so closely in physical appearance that
there can be little doubt about the purity of their descent. The same
may be said about the modern descendants of the people who created "the
glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome." And when we
consider the period of the Renaissance we cannot say that civilised man
of to-day is superior to those people who after centuries of stagnation
and general illiteracy were yet able to seize and develop the
long-forgotten wisdom and philosophy of antiquity.
To go still further back and to venture beyond the historical horizon
into the dim past when prehistoric man roamed over Europe is a task
manifestly beyond the powers of the ordinary layman, and here we must,
perforce, trust ourselves to the guidance of those students whose
training and special learning entitle them to speak with authority.
The so-called Piltdown skull which was discovered in 1912 is accepted as
representing the most ancient of human remains yet found in England, its
age being estimated at somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 years. In
discussing the size and arrangement of the lobes and convolutions of the
brain which this cranium must have contained, Dr. Arthur Keith, who is
admittedly the highest authority on the subject to-day, makes the
following statement: "Unfortunately our knowledge of the brain, greatly
as it has increased of late years, has not yet reached the point at
which we can say after close examination of all the features of a brain
that its owner has reached this or that status. The statement which
Huxley made about the ancient human skull from the cave of Engis still
holds good of the brain: 'It might have belonged to a philosopher or
might have contained the thoughtless mind of a savage.' That is only
one side of our problem, there is another. Huxley's statement refers to
the average brain, which is equal to the needs of both the philosopher
and the savage. It does not in any way invalidate the truth that a small
brain with a simple pattern of convolutions is a less capable organ than
the large brain with a complex pattern. If then we find a fairly large
brain in the Piltdown man, with an arrangement and development of
convolutions not very unlike those of a modern man, we shall be
justified in drawing the conclusion that, so far as potential mental
ability is concerned, he has reached the modern standard. We must always
keep in mind that accomplishments and inventions which seem so simple to
us were new and unsolved problems to the pioneers who worked their way
up from a simian to a human estate."
In his concluding remarks upon this important find, Dr. Keith iterates
his opinion: "Although our knowledge of the human brain is
limited--there are large areas to which we can assign no definite
function--we may rest assured that a brain which was shaped in a mould
so similar to our own was one which responded to the outside world as
ours does. Piltdown man saw, heard, felt, thought and dreamt much as we
still do. If the eoliths found in the same bed of gravel were his
handiwork, then we can also say he had made a great stride towards that
state which has culminated in the inventive civilisation of the modern
western world."[13]
Professor Herbert Donaldson of the University of Chicago, gives it as
his opinion that "In comparing remote times with the present, or in our
own age, races which have reached distinction with those which have
remained obscure, it is by no means clear that the grade of civilisation
attained is associated with a corresponding enlargement in the nervous
system, or with an increase in the mental capabilities of the best
representatives of those communities."[14]
Now while the ordinary man is unable to pronounce judgment upon expert
opinion he is quite capable of understanding the main arguments upon
which the foregoing conclusions are based. We all realise the truth of
the old saying "Il n'y a que le premier pas qui coûte." We all
appreciate the tremendous difficulty of taking the first step in the way
of discovery and invention. We know that to be the first to step forward
in an utterly new direction or venture; to be the first to work out,
without any guidance or previous education, the first principles,
however simple, in the doing, or thinking out of anything new, requires
a mental audacity and astuteness that predicate a brain capacity as
great as that which enables modern man to apply and develop the
accumulated knowledge available in the text-books of to-day. Dr. Alfred
Russell Wallace held strongly to this opinion. He could see no proof of
continuously increasing intellectual power; he thought that where the
greatest advance in intellect is supposed to have been made this might
be wholly due to the cumulative effect of successive acquisitions of
knowledge handed down from age to age by written or printed books; that
Euclid and Archimedes were probably the equals of any of our greatest
mathematicians of to-day; and that we are entitled to believe that the
higher intellectual and moral nature of man has been approximately
stationary during the whole period of human history. This great and
intrepid thinker states his view with characteristic incisiveness thus:
"Many writers thoughtlessly speak of the hereditary effects of strength
or skill due to any mechanical work or special art being continued
generation after generation in the same family, as amongst the castes of
India. But of any progressive improvement there is no evidence whatever.
Those children who had a natural aptitude for the work would, of course,
form the successors of their parents, and there is no proof of anything
hereditary except as regards this innate aptitude. Many people are
alarmed at the statement that the effects of education and training are
not hereditary, and think that if that were really the case there would
be no hope for improvement of the race; but close consideration will
show them that if the results of our education in the widest sense, in
the home, in the shop, in the nation, and in the world at large, had
really been hereditary, even in the slightest degree, then indeed there
would be little hope for humanity, and there is no clearer proof of this
than the fact that we have not _all_ been made much worse--the wonder
being that any fragment of morality, or humanity, or the love of truth
or justice for their own sakes still exists among us."[15]
I think the majority of thoughtful people will agree that these words
express their own observations. Every day we see how children have to be
taught to act and behave. We see continually how parents have to put
pressure on their children to make them accept and apply those moral
principles and mental valuations which have guided their lives and the
lives of thousands of generations before them. We know only too well
that children do not inherit the moral standards of right and wrong of
their parents, and that to establish these principles in the young is a
matter of protracted and often painful inculcation. The proved maxim
that honesty is the best policy is still being literally hammered into
the children of to-day who seem to find it no easier to follow the
better way than did the children of the past. If mental modifications
acquired by the parents were in any degree transmissible to the
offspring then there would be no need for this constant repetition of
the same process in every new generation.
The earliest indubitable man hitherto discovered was fully evolved when
first met with, he was _homo sapiens_. By means of his human
intelligence this frail, unspecialized being became in a sense the very
lord of creation, for instead of remaining, like the animals, entirely
subject to his surroundings he subjected his surroundings to himself. By
means of this intelligence man was enabled to break away from the
absolute rule of the law of natural selection which punishes with
extinction all those types that fail in fitness for survival in the
struggle for existence, so that, unlike the animals that die out when
their particular structure does not fit in with their environment, man
by means of his thinking brain was able to equip himself with parts of
his environment, and thus to become its master. The process of evolution
ceased to affect directly this creature who had a brain that could
think, and ever since that brain was given to him man has remained
unmoved and stationary above and apart from all other living things. All
this is implied in the command, "Be ye fruitful and multiply and
replenish the earth and subdue it."
But though man became almost emancipated from the direct servitude of
natural selection, he still is, and always will be, subject to the law
of heredity. Man is made up of a group of innate characters inherited
from a very mixed ancestry, these characters, being innate, are
transmissible to his offspring, but such characters as are acquired by
the parent through the direct influence of education or other
environment, not being innate are not transmissible to his children. But
in so far as a new development of latent and innate characters, through
the influence of the environment, may help or hinder certain types in
propagating themselves, the race may, perhaps, be modified through such
influence by the process of gradual elimination of the types that lack
the characters that prove to be of survival value in a particular
locality. This we may suppose might happen where a number of Europeans,
composed half of blondes and half of brunettes, come to live in a
tropical country, if it be proved that the comparative darkness of the
brunettes afford them better protection against inimical light and heat
than the fair skin of the blondes, so that the former would on the
average, enjoy better health and live longer, and therefore have more
children than the latter, whereby, in course of time, the appearance of
these people would be modified in respect of the general complexion of
their skin. This, it is easy to see, would not mean the acquisition of a
new and heritable means of protection, but only a development in each
individual of an already present innate character that happened to be
well fitted for survival in a certain climatic zone.
In order, therefore, to obtain any direct modification of the race in
the way of mental improvement the physical effect of education must be
such as to ensure longer life and with it, the concomitant chance of
greater fertility for those who are educated against those who are not,
so that the latter would tend to die out while the former would continue
to increase their numbers. In other words, education must prove to be
of survival value. Seeing that where education has increased most the
birth-rate has tended to decrease it seems clear that we cannot regard
continuous mental training as a favourable factor in the competition of
propagation of human varieties.
If then we accept the conclusion that the effects of individual
experience are not cumulatively hereditary we shall cease to cavil at
the fact that there has been no anatomical or structural progress in the
human body or brain since the time when men first became social and
civilised beings, that is to say, since they first began to work
together with their heads and hands, and we shall see that that which
was to be expected has always happened, in that, from the earliest
historical times to the present day, human life has been as the rolling
and unrolling of a carpet. Cycles of civilisations, all essentially
similar, have been evolved, one after another, to endure for a while and
then to fade away, leaving the raw material of human kind as it was from
the beginning. There is no evidence of any advancement in physique,
intellect or moral character. The leaders of mankind were the
law-givers, whether they were witch doctors, priests, chiefs, prophets
or kings, and they all sought to establish their laws by claiming
supernatural delegation and authority. With writing came the codes, and
when we compare the statutes of Hammurabi, who flourished about 2,200
years B.C., with those compiled by his successors, Moses, Solon,
Justinian and Napoleon, we find in them all evidence of the same mental
appreciation and capacity in dealing with the social conditions and
problems of their respective periods. The greatest products of art are
still met with in the sculptured forms of ancient Greece, those images
of serene beauty which may be imitated but not excelled. The reasoning
powers of the ancient philosophers who, long before Christ was born,
debated the still unanswered riddles of existence, when we compare the
paucity of data on which they had to work with the wealth of knowledge
now available, must be ranked as high as the intellectual ability of our
foremost thinkers of to-day. In mechanical proficiency the world has
indeed advanced to an astonishing extent, but the perfection of our
modern machinery means only a gradual and very recent advance upon
earlier methods and does not denote a corresponding development in the
mind itself. The Greeks had no machinery to speak of, neither had the
English in the days of Shakespeare and Newton, but who can doubt that
the engineers of those times would have been equal to the task of
understanding and applying the principles of modern mechanics had the
necessary books been available to them? We do not assume that because
the modern Germans excel as chemists they are therefore blessed with
higher reasoning ability than were the contemporaries of Socrates and
Plato who had no knowledge of the science of chemistry. The conclusion
forced upon us after a sober and impartial survey of the facts of
history is that, although the intellectual output of the world is always
increasing, the intellect itself remains unaltered. Knowledge, we see,
is after all, only descriptive, never fundamental. We can describe the
appearance and condition of a process, but not the way of it, and though
knowledge has come in rich abundance, wisdom still lingers.
The foregoing argument shows that the alleged mental superiority of the
European cannot be due to constant use or education, so that it now
becomes necessary for those who maintain that it nevertheless exists to
prove, not only that the white man's intellectual capacity is now
superior but to prove also that from the beginning it has always been
stronger and better than that of the African Native, or, in other words,
those who believe that the white race has inherent mental superiority
must prove innate inferiority in the mental make-up of the Native.
There is a more or less indefinite notion abroad that the Bantu
languages, as compared with those of Europe, are but poor and
ineffective vehicles for the conveyance of abstract ideas, wherefore the
capacity to form and entertain such ideas may be taken to be innately
inferior in the Native brain. That the language of a people embodies, so
to speak, in objective form the intellectual progress made by it is
certainly true, and it will be well, therefore, to state briefly the
actual and potential value of the Native speech as compared with that of
the whites.
The living and the dead languages of the world have been classified by
philologists into three main types of linguistic morphology; the
isolating, like Chinese; the agglutinative, like Turkish and Bantu, and
the inflective, like Latin. It was customary not long ago to look upon
these three types as steps in a process of historical development, the
isolating representing the most primitive form of speech at which it was
possible to arrive, the agglutinative coming next in order as a type
evolved from the isolating, and the inflective as the latest and
so-called highest type of all. But since the matter has been carefully
studied it has been admitted that there is no satisfactory evidence for
believing in any evolution of linguistic types. English is now
considered to be an isolating language in the making while Chinese is
cited by authoritative European scholars as being a language which with
the simplest possible means at its disposal can express the most
technical or philosophical ideas with absolute freedom from ambiguity
and with admirable conciseness and direction.[16]
While I do not pretend to philological authority I do claim the ability
to make a sound comparison between the main Bantu languages which I know
and those European languages with which I happen to be familiar, and I
have no hesitation in saying that though the Bantu types are not at
present as fully developed in point of simplicity and preciseness as are
the main languages of Europe they are, nevertheless, by reason of their
peculiar genius, capable of being rapidly developed into as perfect a
means for the expression of human thought as any of the European types
of speech; they are astonishingly rich in verbs which make it easy to
express motion and action clearly and vividly; the impersonal, or
abstract article "it" is used exactly as in European languages, and the
particular prefix provided in some of the Bantu types for the class of
nouns which represent abstract conceptions makes it possible to increase
the vocabularies in that direction _ad infinitum_. The Bantu types are
not so-called holophrastic forms of primitive speech in which the
compounding of expressions is said to take the place of the conveyance
of ideas, nor are they made up of onomatopoetic, or interjectional
expressions, if indeed such languages exist anywhere outside the heads
of the half-informed. They are languages equal in potential capacity to
any included in the main Indo-European group. Even now in their
comparatively undeveloped state these languages are capable of
expressing the subtleties of early philosophical speculation. I would
not, for instance, feel daunted if I were set the task of translating
into any of these main types, say, the dialectics of Socrates. To do
this I would first reduce the more complex terms to such simple and
common Anglo-Saxon words as when built together would give the same
meaning, and then translate these into their Bantu equivalents. The
substitution of Anglo-Saxon words for those of modern English would, no
doubt, involve a good deal of repetition but the sense would be
adequately rendered. I would proceed in the same way as the early
teachers and writers who had to build up the language they used as they
went along. The English indeed, have not built up their world-wide
speech with their own materials but have, with characteristic
acquisitiveness taken the combinations they wanted, ready made, mainly
from Greek, Latin and French. How far and how well a Native would
understand my presentation of metaphysical speculation would depend upon
the degree of familiarity he might have acquired, through Missionary
teaching or otherwise, with abstract notions in general. In my opinion
the average "raw" Native would understand as well and as much as the
average uneducated European peasant. Both would probably find my
disquisition "sad stuff"; both would require time for that repetition of
the words which is necessary to familiarise the mind with the
unaccustomed ideas they represent; in both cases one would have to "give
them the words that the ideas may come." A single illustration will show
my meaning. When the first Missionaries rendered the word "soul" into
Zulu by the word signifying "breath" in that language they simply
followed the example of their predecessors of antiquity who employed the
Latin _spiritus_, which also means "breath," for the same purpose,
namely, to convey to their hearers the idea of a breath-like or
ethereal something housed in, but separable from, the human body.