CHAPTER V.
INTELLECTUAL AND PHILOLOGICAL VARIETIES.
From time immemorial, common sense has enlightened mankind upon the intellectual differences which make one nation differ from another, and one race from another. Almost all nations, in admitting that they are superior to their neighbours, acknowledge thereby a characteristic difference between themselves and those whom they thus place below their own level. An overweening sense of vanity may possibly cause deception in this case; but this belief is, at least, based on a veritable fact,—intellectual inequality. There are, indeed, sensible and manifest differences, which no one will deny, especially those who seek in the literary monuments of a race for the history of its ideas and its tendencies, and those who have mingled with other nations, and who have examined their manners, their customs and their religion. “It is sufficient to have seen the blacks,” says their most enthusiastic defender,165“to have lived some time with them, to feel that there is in them a humanity quite different to that of the white man.”166Some persons havewished to deceive themselves; they have wished to raise the Negro race to our own level, in the name of some sort of sentimental feeling, which, moreover, has always turned out to be a mistake. Many persons have been engaged upon them. Not being able to give them plastic equality, they had recourse to intelligence,—they wished to deceive themselves, like Desdemona, when she said,—
“I saw Othello’s visage in his mind.”167
“I saw Othello’s visage in his mind.”167
“I saw Othello’s visage in his mind.”167
“I saw Othello’s visage in his mind.”167
The Negro was declared to be our equal by the moral law, only with certain shades of distinction depending on some particular and transient circumstances which would soon disappear. It was announced that,in their turn, they would advance ideas, and would work at what is calledprogress, that is to say, “the increase of good on the earth.”168“In proportion as work makes vital energy to predominate in the head,” said M. Marcel de Serres in 1844, “these deeply coloured men,169with crisped, woolly, or short hair, will tend in a manifest manner towards the white race,—will march with them in the path of progress.”170And farther on, “This experiment has scarcely commenced, but it already shows sensible effects.” Unfortunately, the twenty years which have passed since these words were written, have not shown that they are true; and the challenge offered by an American has never yet been accepted, “Let anyone quote to me one single line written by a Negro which is worthy of being remembered.”171They are not more advanced now than at the time when Mohammed refused them the gift of prophecy.172And, as Dr. Hunt remarks, there is certainlyno means of civilising those who have been uncivilised for three thousand years, during which time they have been connected with the Egyptians, the Carthaginians, the Arabs, the Portuguese, the Dutch and the English.173If it be objected that they have always been slaves, we may say our Gallic and German ancestors were so also; but we ask,Why do they continue to be slaves?
The merit of first endeavouring to distinguish races of men by characteristics taken from without the physical world, by the quality of the manifestations of their intelligence, is, perhaps, due to Linnæus. With this spirit of laconism, which led him to group in one simple and easy formula the characteristic facts which he desired to impress on the mind of the reader as being important, he endeavoured to determine, in a few words, the various tendencies of different races, and it must be acknowledged that he has at times been happy in this kind of synoptic classification.174
In proportion as modern knowledge has made us penetrate more deeply into the minds of races,—since we are no longer contented with studying them superficially in the ordinary manifestations of life, which we may call “common-place,” and which belong to nearly all countries,—we perceive that insuperable limits separate one set of men from another with regard to intellectual affinity, so that here, as in the case of physical characteristics, each race is almost to be distinguished from its neighbours. “Profound and unchangeable differences,” said M. Paul de Remusat,175in 1854, “which would, perhaps, suffice of themselves to found definite and thoroughly limited classifications.”
It was in order to point out a new branch of anthropology, a new and fruitful branch,—that a work appeared which was destined to throw a bright light on the subject. It was necessary to explain these distinctions, and not merely to enunciate them. The merit in this matter belongs to M. Renan, who, in his treatise on the languages of the great Semitic family, has painted, from the most favourable characteristics, this humanity which is, morally, so different from our own, however like it may be in external form. The intellectual disparity of races is henceforward an undeniable fact.
The religious or moral system of a people being the highest manifestations of its intellectual tendencies, we see that the study of religions enters quite naturally into anthropology; it is a part of this comparable study of the human mind, unfortunately too much neglected, but which begins to take a place worthy of its importance in the world of science.176We do not wish to discuss theological or religious questions, the anthropologistought to leave them to others. His duty is to endeavour to put himself outside the narrow circle in which nature has placed him; to forget, as much as possible, his inclinations and personal sentiments; to look around him; to put the world in one view, and to endeavour to be the sole spectator of the same. Then a curious phenomenon will strike his gaze,—the chains of mountains and the rivers which separate the various races of mankind, will also separate different religions. Like the sea which breaks on the shore, every belief has seen its disciples, armed with the sword, or with the pacific weapons of persuasion, stop at certain limits, over which they are not permitted to pass. Of course, we only speak here of true proselytism, of real progress in religion in its form and spirit. Humboldt and Bonpland saw, one day, in the Cordilleras, a savage crowd dancing and brandishing the war-hatchet round an altar where a Franciscan was elevating the Host. Such neophytes are only called Christians in theAnnales de la Propagation de la Foi,—they are not converts in the opinion of the anthropologist.
Pure monotheism seems always to have been the religion of the Semitic race. Most European nations, on the contrary, have professed from antiquity, a polytheism or a pantheism, more or less disguised, more or less acknowledged. In fact, by the side of those nations of Asia and Europe, where civilisation and religious ideas appear to have simultaneously been developed, although in different directions, we find other people who have neither religious ideas, nor gods, nor any kind of worship.177
Three vast regions of the earth, inhabited by people still in a savage state, appear to have remained, up to the present day, free from religious beliefs; these are Central Africa, Australia, and the country around the North Pole,—that is to say, thethree parts of the world which are most difficult to explore,—the only parts which have even not yet been thoroughly examined. And this is one consequence of this want of exploration; it supposes a sort of sequestration from the rest of the world, which has not even succumbed to civilisation by this contact and imitation of which we have already spoken. Let us admit that relations were established by these people with their neighbours; they would soon have imported from the foreigner conceptions which would even then have never taken a form, on account of the small portion of intellect which nature had given to them.
Referring to the inhabitants of Australia, Latham acknowledges that the general opinion is, in fact, that they have not yet commenced to shape the rudest elements of areligion,178“an opinion,” he says, “which causes the idea that their intellects are too sluggish even for the maintenance of superstition.” It is certainly true that, in the American expedition under Captain Gray, it was thought that some religious ideas could be perceived among them; but it appears from the same account that the song which constituted all this apparent religion, had been brought from far by strangers, and adopted by the natives,—doubtless, by other Australians, who had already been influenced by the Christian ideas of the white men, or the Buddhist principles of the Malays.
To relate the history of the introduction of an idea among a people is, in reality, to declare and prove that this idea did not exist there before, which is sufficient for us if we can be assured of the fact. The testimony of missionaries179is, besides, consonant with that which we have just said; and we may remark on the importance of assertions coming from men whose whole study is to discover, in the people whom they desire to convert, ideas analogous to those which they endeavourto propagate. “They have no idea of a Divine Being,” says one of these men; “they appear to have no comprehension of the things they commit to memory,—I mean especially as regards religious subjects.” “What can we do,” says another, “with a nation whose language possesses no terms corresponding tojusticeorsin, and to whose mind the ideas expressed by these words are completely strange and inexplicable?”
As to Central Africa, we confine ourselves to relating a few facts relative to this want of religious belief, gathered from different points in the periphery of the vast triangle, almost unexplored and unknown, which is described by lines joining together Senegal, Zanzibar, and the Cape.
An American missionary,180who lived four years amongst the Mpongwes, one of the most important nations of Central Africa, the Mandingos, and the Grebos, and who knew their language perfectly, declares that they had neither religion, nor priests, nor idolatry, nor any religious assemblies whatsoever. Dr. Livingstone says the same thing concerning the Bechuanas.181The Austrian missionaries, established upon the distant banks of the White Nile, have met with the same want of religion, the same void182in the mind. In fact, among the Caffres, the name which they give to the Divine Being, as among the Hottentots, is undeniable evidence that they formerly had no idea of anything similar. This name isTixo, and its history is too curious not to be related; it is composed of two words which, together, signify the “wounded knee.” It was, they say, the name of a doctor or sorcerer, well known among the Hottentots and Namaquas, on account of some wound which he had received on his knee. Having been held in great estimation for his extraordinary power during his life, the Wounded Knee continued to be invoked even after his death, as being able to comfort and protect; and consequently his name became the term which best represented, to the minds of his countrymen, their confused idea of the missionaries’ God!
As to the Esquimaux, since 1612, Whitebourne wrote that they had no knowledge of God, and lived without any form of civil government. And we can add to this distant testimony the following lines from the journal of Sir John Ross, who lived for a long time in the midst of them. “Did they comprehend anything of all that I attempted to explain, explaining the simplest things in the simplest manner that I could devise? I could not conjecture. Should I have gained more had I better understood their language? I havemuch reasonto doubt. That they have a moral law of some extent ‘written in the heart,’ I could not doubt, as numerous traits of their conduct show, but beyond this, I could satisfy myself of nothing; nor did these efforts, and many more, enable me to conjecture aught worth recording. Respecting their opinions on the essential points from which I might have presumed on a religion, I was obliged at present to abandon the attempt, and I was inclined to despair.”183
This extract is so much the more important for our thesis, since we perceive in every word the chagrin of a man who did not find in the hearts of others a fraternal echo to his dearest sentiments. It is, in truth, a difficulty peculiar to the study of questions of this nature. We must, therefore, be very careful in discussing the value of any testimony which may be brought forward, and to distrust those minds which begin by declaringà priorithe universality of beliefs, hopes, and fears among mankind, as a natural consequence of the primitive unity of the human species. We must always examine most minutely the accounts of travellers to which we are obliged to refer. Thus, for example, it is evident that the older the evidence, the better it is; but at the same time, the farther it goes back, the less chance there is that it emanates from an independent and impartial mind, free from all prejudice.
Happily, the exaggeration of these ideas must often suffice to put us on our guard against them, like the candid Jesuit, whose zealous but hazy faith thought it had discovered traces of St. Thomas’s preaching in Brazil.184In an otherwise goodnotice of the Esquimaux,185Dr. King says, “that these people have preserved, like many other uncivilised races, a vague remembrance of the creation and of the deluge, and that they believe in future rewards and punishments.” In his religious zeal, Dr. King forgets that if the Esquimaux had been able to bring a confused tradition of even the deluge and the creation from the valley of the Euphrates, it was impossible it could have been the same with a belief in future rewards and punishments, seeing that the Jews themselves never possessed this belief before their contact with Assyrian civilisation. We may read in Dr. Brecher’s excellent work186the whole history of the development of this belief in the immortality of the soul. If the German doctor wishes piously to prove that the Jews ought, morally, to have always believed in this immortality, at all events, his zeal has been able to invent real proofs, which in fact, are wanting. The famousscheol, which is mentioned so often in old Hebrew books, appears to be merely the kingdom of thedead, and not that ofsouls, like hell, Tartarus, the Elysian fields, and Paradise; thescheolis but an ideal representation of the tomb. Even at the time when the Jews had generally adopted the ideas of their neighbours, during the Talmudic period, the belief in the immortality of the soul, if it existed, was neither completely clear nor well reasoned, since they refused all participation in a future life to those who denied the resurrection and the last judgment, “which was equivalent to entire annihilation.”187To believe this, is certainly not to believe in the immortality of the soul, since they regarded eternal life not as a necessary consequence, but as a recompense forgood principles, and having faith in them. Such an inconsistency is the clearest possible proof that, even at this period, these ideas had not undergone the change which brought them to the actual point of clearness. They werealso not yet completely freed from the ancient belief which the Sadducees, besides, had not abandoned; they were the faithful preservers of the ancient faith, and the pure tradition of the sons of Israel. “They have the theory that the soul dies with the body,” wrote Josephus,188“and consider that they ought to keep nothing but the law.”
We must be pardoned for insisting so much upon this point; but it is of importance as regards our thesis to show that the belief in the immortality of the soul, and in a divinity, is not universal on the globe, that one general characteristic of humanity could not be formed from it, and that we ought even less to rely upon the existence of such ideas in order to establish a human kingdom. We have only spoken of people who are either entirely savage, or of Jewish opinions, which have long been lost in the past. Even in our own time, there are two hundred million Buddhists on the earth, who have reached a marvellous point of civilisation, who ignore, in the most absolute manner, the notion of another life and that of a divinity. Eugène Burnouf, whose ability no one will deny, has already said it; M. Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, after much hesitation, which will remain as the seal of a firmly established conviction, has decided in the same way, in the last edition ofBouddha et sa Religion.189We quote his own words:—“There is not the slightest trace of a belief in God in all Buddhism; and to suppose that it admits the absorption of the human soul into a divine or infinite soul, is a gratuitous supposition which cannot even enter into the ideas of the Buddhist. In order to believe that man can lose himself in the God to which he is reunited, this God must first bebelieved inas a necessary commencement. But we can scarcely say that the Buddhist does not believe in Him. He ignores God in such a complete manner, that he does not even care about denying His existence; he does not care about trying to abolish Him; he neither mentions such a being in order to explain the origin or the anterior existence of man, his present life, nor for the purpose of conjecturinghis future state, and his eventual freedom. The Buddhist has no acquaintance whatsoever with a God, and, quite given up to his own heroic sorrows and sympathies, he has never cast his eyes so far or so high.” And the author adds the following lines, which have a direct bearing on anthropology, and which are like the sum of all we have just brought forward:—“The human mind has scarcely been observed but in the races to which we ourselves belong. These races deserve, certainly, a high place in our studies; but if they are the most important, they do not stand alone. Ought not the others to be noticed, although they are said to be so inferior? If they do not enter into the hastily drawn outline, must they be disfigured by submitting them to over-strict theories? Is it not a better plan to acknowledge that old systems are faulty, and that they are not comprehensive enough ineverythingwhich they undertake to explain?”190
The question of intellectual differences, like, indeed, all the other points in anthropological study, has largely exercised the inventive genius of monogenists, for it must be owned that all the efforts of imagination proceed from them. It is not more difficult to admit the development of one or twenty human species upon our planet, than the development of a single moss or sea-weed; they are phenomena of the same order, and equally beyond the actual limits of our knowledge; but this first step taken, anthropology opens itself to the polygenist as simple and easy; he follows, without any trouble, all phenomena, from cause to effect,—everything enters into one general order,—everything is marvellously simple, in spite of apparent complication. It is not the same with the monogenist; ruled continually by his theory, he goes on almost painfully, and at every step some new obstacle is raised to impede his progress. If he thinks he has conquered physical differences, psychological varieties start up; then will arise families of different tongues, quite as radically distinct and as difficult to explain; and yet it is in vain that the obstacle seemsso great and insurmountable, itmustbe overcome, itmustbe passed in the name of an admitted principle, cost what it may so to do. Thus it is that monogenists have sometimes arrived at the most curious, but at the same time most unfortunate, results.
And if we wished to form sentiment from science, we should ask, which is the most reasonable, the most worthy, and the most consoling,—whether to believe that we alone are perfect, and that nine-tenths of our brethren who cover the globe are disinherited; or to consider all these varied existences which we see around us as forming equal, if not similar, species, pursuing, each in its own way, a destiny, different, indeed, but not degraded,—not degenerated,—in certain points even better arranged than our own. “God,” said Niebuhr, “has marked on each race of men their destination with the characteristic which best suits them” and the philosopher had already learnt by history that when civilisation has been suddenly introduced from without among a savage nation,191the consequence is an immediate physical degeneracy, that is to say, the destruction of the people which has wandered from its usual mode of life. The historian thus proclaimed a physiological law, which most monogenists are glad to forget,—that all degeneracy ends necessarily in death; it kills itself, and always at the tenth generation, if not at the first. No group of human beings, after two or three generations of unmixed existence, can be considered as degraded or degenerated, not more than we should admit that a young girl, attacked with cretinism in its greatest degree, had the characteristics of the Esquimaux or the Mongolian race.192
We can see, even in a humanitarian point of view,—the point of view in which we refuse to place ourselves,—that the polygenists have the advantage. The mind is not offended, and cannot be so, to see certain creatures possess some particular faculty to the exclusion of others. Does notharmony obtain an absolute value from a necessary inequality of parts, whilst she herself restores to each part an equal value, in making them all co-operate towards the same end, the sameaction, in which are distributed great and minor parts,—some brilliant, some humble, some concealed?193
That fine North American race, which is so much admired by all who have lived among them, will be no longer, according to Dr. Martius,194the worthy descendant of the first murderer, a collection of maniacs and insane folks, brought to that state by misery and the reprobation of God. We only see in them men endowed like ourselves, but more in harmony with the nature which animates them, having, of course, their imperfections like ourselves, but giving us also an example of great qualities, firmness, courage, patience, and an intense love of liberty. Whites and blacks may be slaves, but the American has never served a master.195The Negro himself has his advantages; and we could not, perhaps, struggle with him about affective or hateful faculties. M. de Gobineau seems to us to be strangely mistaken in the portrait which he has attempted to draw of the black man; he has made his racehideous; it is only inferiorin relation to ourselves; it is equal to some, and superior to others, not partaking, indeed, of all the advantages of the Iranian or Semitic races, but able to display other qualities which belong particularly to itself.
In the place of this spectacle, which is thus presented to our view, of degraded beings covering half the earth, we simply see, for our part, intelligence developing itself in each race, following certain directions and tendencies at the expense of others. These special tendencies are sometimes very remarkable. In his intercourse with the Esquimaux, Sir John Ross, whose observing mind we have several times had occasion to notice, found that they were nearly all good geographers. He put into their hands a pencil and paper (of the use of which they were certainly ignorant), and they drew with great correctness the bays, rivers, islands, and lakes of their country, as well as the exact spots where they had encamped at some former emigration. This is a curious contrast with most of the African and Arab peoples, who seem to have but a very vague idea of distance or time; indeed, the difficulty of finding out routes among the inhabitants of Soudan, which we have ourselves experienced, has become almost proverbial.196Without going so far as all that, our neighbours, the Semites, differ from ourselves in the manner and quality of their mind to an extraordinary degree; on the one side is the Aryan, an analyst, a pantheist, given to the plastic or perspective reproduction of everything which surrounds him; on the other, the Semite, a sensualist, a monotheist, an iconoclast. If it is radically impossible for the Semite to follow us in the depths of metaphysics, his language even being opposed to all philosophic demonstration; in our turn, perhaps, we are less religious,—that is to say, less solemnly struck by the universe. The thought of demonstrating God, and proving this thought, will never come to the Semite as it did to Bossuet, Fénélon, andNewton.197The Semite feels God, if we may so express it; and, as if absorbed and astounded by this personified creative force, whose shadow presses on him, he does not understand the arts of reproduction, although among all the people who excel in it.
In fact, history itself will teach us that these tendencies are so much accused and so general, that they are found everywhere; in one place rising even above conquest, in another, modifying itself to imported religions. When a religion, in accordance with the genius of the men to whom it has been addressed from the cradle, passes from this race to another, it is necessarily modified. Pure monotheism, born in the east, has only conquered the west and the Iranian race by transforming itself to their pleasure. The Persians accepted Islam; but they have not been able to renounce this necessity for plastic reproduction, which is one of the characteristics of the Iranian family: a schism became formed, which authorised all the arts, and left in entire freedom that natural tendency which could not be smothered. Far more than the monsters in Isaiah’s dream, the lions of the Alhambra were a terrible prophesy. Those who see them may read in their huge figures the vitality of a conquered nation, whose love of the living form invaded even the palace of the conquerors, and which were soon to make them fly. The race which flourished at Athens and at Rome only accepted Christianity, which also came from the east, by despoiling it of its original character; and this religion would, at the present day, be incapable of making proselytes in that east where it first took its rise. The preaching of Mohammed was, as M. Renan has remarked, but a reaction of pure monotheism against degenerated Christianity, concealing but badly its polytheistic tendencies.
In truth, the psychological study of the human race is a new science, which has been examined into on some points, but not in all. To desire to sketch it would be to fall into the alternative either of doing what others have done perfectly, or to fall into error for want of necessary materials. We can onlyquote, as having been well studied,—first, the Iranian race, by all our moralists and philosophers; secondly, the Semitic race, by M. Renan; and thirdly, the American race, by Humboldt and Bonpland,198by d’Orbigny,199Morton,200and Coombe.201
II. The study of languages is connected, on the one hand, to the physiology of the human race, but more immediately still to the study of the varieties of the human mind, of which they are in some measure the organ. They can by this means assist also in classifying mankind into natural groups. But where the study of languages affects more especially the anthropologist,202is when it touches on the origin of the varieties of language, and of the primitive state (either intellectual or social) of the speaking man: when it endeavours to fathom the past each day farther back,—each day nearer to theorigin. Thus bound together, the two sciences ought to have the same destiny; philology has had its monogenists and its polygenists. The first have been obliged to give way, overpowered by the number and the superiority of their opponents. They are done for; and the field remains free to the latter, who affirm, through their studies, the multiplied origin of human language, leaving the consequences to be deduced, or deducing them themselves.203
One sole declaration will suffice us, that of the history ofSemitic idioms. “If the planets, whose physical nature seems to be analogous to that of the earth,” says M. Renan,204“are peopled with beings organised like ourselves, we may presume that the history and the language of those planets does not differ more from our own than does the history and language of the Chinese.” It is impossible to establish by a clearer and more striking image the individuality of the different families of language, not one of which owes its origin to its neighbours, and which have, probably, never been in one another’s presence, except when they had already been formed, bringing with them their own characteristics, their fundamental and profound type, as unalterable by contact as is the physical type of the men who spoke them. These, in presence of others, may have been able to alter their traditions, their remembrances, their words, but these were never more than simpleloans; we may be certain that these men were strangers one to the other on the day when they uttered their first words in their cradles.
We must limit ourselves merely to recording the result, which is, that each system of language is absolutely irreducible to others, both by its basis and its form; all born in human thought, it is true, but this thought following at each point a particular path, so that each of these systems, as M. Renan has said, only abuts on the others by the community of the aim it is intended to reach.
Certain families of languages do not differ solely by their constitution, they show special phonetic or physiological qualities;205that is to say, we can observe, in two different languages, varieties of the same order which is explained among animals, by the words barking, braying, cooing, etc. This is particularly the case with the strange language spoken by the clear-complexioned race of South Africa, probably much more widely diffused in former times than at present. It resembles no other known language, and consists in acluckingwhich has, they say, nothing analogous to it among any other nation onthe earth. The English have characterised it by the names ofsighing, orclucking, and also especiallyclick language.206Here is a new difference,—a radical difference in relation to so many others, which decidedly forms, from these Bosjesmans, a people whom it is impossible to ally, it does not signify how, or under what aspect, to any other of the divisions of the great human family.