Part 3

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."

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.

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.

"The essence of language," said Aristotle, "is that it should be clear and not mean." The raw Bantu material is ample for compliance with this demand, and the process of development will not be as protracted as in early Europe for it may be accomplished here, largely, by the simple means of translating the words already thought out and provided in the white man's language. In so far, then, as we attempt to measure the mentality of the Natives by their language we find that they cannot be relegated to a lower plane than that occupied by the uneducated peasantry of Europe of a few decades ago.

Most people are prepared to believe that the primary psychical processes are identical in all races, but many still profess to see a difference in favour of the white man in what they call the higher faculties of the mind. But the much-abused word "faculty" no longer bears the meaning given to it by Locke and his followers who propounded a limitless brood or set of faculties to correspond with every process discoverable by introspection as taking place in the mind. In modern psychology the word means simply a capacity for an ultimate, irreducible, or unanalysable mode of thinking of, or being conscious of, objects. Perception, for instance, is looked upon as the capacity for thinking of a thing immediately at hand, and memory as a capacity for thinking again of a certain material or abstract object. The mental power of abstraction is no longer considered as a sort of separate function of the mind but is regarded as the capacity for thinking of, say, whiteness as apart from any particular white patch. But the notion that the white man is endowed with a set of finer feelings and with special and higher powers of abstraction than is the African Native is so generally entertained that it will be convenient to make the necessary comparisons in, more or less, the commonly accepted terms.

Those who look upon the Native as being in every way a more primitive being than the European will naturally be disposed to believe that he is more a creature of instincts than a man of reason, and they will expect him to move in dependence upon certain fundamental intuitions where the European goes guided by reason alone. I have found no evidence whatever to support this supposition.

The elementry instinct of self-preservation is no stronger in the Native than in the white man. Suicide is not at all uncommon among the Bantu. I have seen many instances of Natives who have shown a calm and philosophical disregard of death where life has seemed no longer desirable. This pre-eminently human prerogative--for no animal can rise to the conscious and deliberate destruction of itself--has often been exercised, as I have seen, by Natives in their sound and sober senses so as to preclude entirely that suggestion of temporary insanity which is so commonly accepted at coroner's inquests in England and elsewhere.

The instinct of direction, the "bump of locality" as it is generally called, varies with the Natives as it does among the whites, and is no keener in the individual Native than in the individual white man. All the hunters and travellers I have met have confirmed the opinion I have myself formed from personal experience that by training his ordinary powers of observation and thereby developing his sense of locality and direction the average European is able, after a comparatively short time, to find his way in difficult country as well as the Natives, while some European hunters who have dispensed with Native guides and trackers have acquired the art of tracking game so well that they surpass even the local Natives themselves. "Veld-craft" is simply a matter of training the ordinary faculties of observation and memory for particular purposes, and the Native shows no such superiority in this respect as would naturally be expected from him if he were indeed better provided with animal instincts than the more civilised white man.

The sexual instincts of the Natives seem in no wise different from those of other people. The African male, like the European male, is generally more amative than the female who is always more philoprogenitive than the man. But the notion is common that the Native male is more bestial when sexually excited than the white man in similar case, and this is taken to account for the fact that he is so often found guilty of crimes of violence against females of his own colour, and sometimes even against European women.

It must be borne in mind that before the white man came the Natives, like the peasants in many European countries not long ago, conducted their courtship and love-making with a show of violence which seemed to them right and proper. The idea, indeed, that any self-respecting Native girl could yield herself to a lover without, at least, a semblance of physical resistance, leading to her more or less forcible capture by the man, would have seemed, and still seems, distinctly improper to the majority of Native women in their raw state. But since the European code was set up Native women have not been slow in making use of its protection, and, as I have seen, have not infrequently abused that protection by alleging rape or assault where their own action in simulating flight and resistance served, as they well knew it would, to stimulate passion and pursuit.

In considering crimes of violence against white women it must also be remembered that the Native "house-boy" who works in constant and close physical contact with his European mistress and her daughters is exposed to sexual excitation which very few European youths are called upon to withstand. But crimes of this kind are indeed common enough among the lower orders in Europe and America, and are particularly frequent among men who have to live for a long time in unnatural abstinence from natural intercourse with the opposite sex, and who then find themselves in new surroundings giving opportunities for the gratification of their natural desires, but without having at the same time the restraining influences of their home life to help them to overcome the temptations to which they are exposed. The seaports of Europe and America, and the Great War furnish too many sad examples of sexual ferocity by white men to allow us to think that they are in this respect inherently superior to the men of other races.

The maternal instinct is manifested in the same manner and degree in the women of both people. I have often asked Native women whether it would be possible for any mother among them to distinguish her own new-born baby from a supposed "changeling" of the same sex and of the same general appearance, and the answer has always been negative. The Native and the white woman alike would continue to cherish the substituted child exactly as they would have cherished the issue of their own bodies. The desire to bear children is the same in all normally constituted women irrespective of colour or race, and there is no sign of any special instinct for identification in the Native woman, such as the sense of smell, which is found in all the higher animals.

There are some students who think that most of the emotions of man are but the survivals of instinctive habit. Be this as it may, the sexual attraction which is commonly called love certainly seems to be essentially instinctive whereas friendship and parental and filial devotion, when continued throughout life, seem to be emotions that depend largely upon association and conscious intelligence. Every natural mother will sacrifice herself for her offspring while it is young but the tender feeling which continues in her breast towards the child after it has grown up is sustained by association, or, where the child is continually absent, by conscious intelligence in the form of considerations of conventional approbation which in time merge into a habit or a sense of duty which is hardly recognised as such. Many white people think that although the average Native mother is capable of the greatest devotion for her young children she is incapable of the love which a white mother feels for her children even after they have ceased to depend upon her care. This, I think, is wrong. I have seen many instances of elderly Native women who have cherished their grown up children to the last with every sign of motherly affection.

Joy and sorrow, love and hatred, hope and fear, these are the fundamental emotions of human kind. Can any difference be detected between these feelings in the two races?

No one who knows him will say that the Native's capacity for the "joy of life unquestioned" is less than that of the average white man. Most Natives are born lovers of song and music, and attain easily to technical proficiency in the art of harmony. The æsthetic sense is present in the average Native as it is in the average European and in both is easily overlooked when not stimulated and developed by education and culture. That the Natives, as a whole, feel the sorrows of life and death as keenly as do the people of other races will be readily admitted by all who know them well, although their way of showing their sorrow may differ from those prescribed by the canons of conduct of other communities. It is assumed by many that love, "the grand passion," has been brought to a finer point, as it were, among the white people than anywhere else, and it may well be that monogamy is conducive to the growth of a higher and purer form of sexual reciprocity than is possible under the polygamous system of the Natives and other peoples. The monogamous marriage, though based on sexual attraction in the first instance, tends to become, as the man and the woman grow older, a union of souls, so to speak, more or less independent of the sexual element itself. The close and continued association of one man and one woman of compatible temperaments no doubt brings about a state of mutual intimacy, dependence and devotion which can hardly be possible in a polygamous household. But on the other hand may fairly be cited the frequent instances, familiar to all, of widows and widowers among Europeans who, despite their repeated and quite honest protestations of undying and undivided love for the first "one and only" mate, nevertheless find speedy consolation in a second marriage in which undying and whole-hearted love for the second "one and only" spouse is again declared and accepted in all sincerity. The phenomenon of "falling in love," as it is commonly called, is not peculiar to white people. I have known many cases where the love-sick Native swain has travelled hundreds of miles and suffered great hardships in order to reach or recover the one woman of his choice though other women, no less desirable, were ready to be had for the asking at his home. The converse is even more commonly seen. Native women are remarkably like white women. They look upon marriage as their proper and natural function in life, but they are not all of them willing to marry according to parental instructions; there is the same proportion of self-willed damsels among them as among the whites, who by obdurately refusing to enter into the marriages arranged for them cause pain and trouble to their well-meaning parents.

Jealousy, especially from the female side, is an ever-present source of trouble and unhappiness among the Natives. The length to which a jealous Native wife will go in winning back the affections of an errant husband is often extraordinary, though the ways and means she adopts differ but little from those practised by the superstitious and credulous peasantry in Europe less than a hundred years ago.

While no one will deny the African Native a capacity for feeling anger equal to that of the white man when provoked by insult and injury there are many who believe that he is constitutionally incapable of sustaining that feeling of hatred which in the European so often leads to premeditated and prepared revenge. This notion is, no doubt, derivable from the fact that a Native seldom shows any open vindictiveness against a European employer by whom he has been insulted or unjustly punished, but this fact may, I think, be otherwise accounted for. The white man's prestige, backed up as it is by the established powers of law and order, makes the attempt at revenge by a Native a difficult and risky undertaking and, furthermore, there is to be considered the spirit of traditional submissiveness which at all times and in all places marks the attitude of the slave or serf towards his master. One has only to remember the many accounts of abject resignation by the peasants of France and the moujiks of Russia before the revolutions that changed the order of the past in those countries. No such considerations affect the Native where his anger and hatred are directed against one or more of his own colour. The records of the South African courts are replete with instances of cattle-maiming, arson, poisoning and other crimes proved to have been motived solely by feelings of revenge.

Courage and fear are feelings that depend upon conditions that seem to be fairly evenly distributed all over the world, and where the virtue of courage in the form of pugnacity is comparatively lacking, as amongst the bulk of the population of India, other forms thereof are met with, such as that wonderful contempt of a painful death by burning which was so often displayed by the widows of that country in following their ancient custom of suttee. The average white man feels assured that no race can be compared in bravery with his own, and that within that race no nation can be found equal in courage to the one to which he belongs. This is a form of elemental patriotism common to all communities, but those who have shared the dangers of flood and field with African Natives often testify to acts of sublime courage by Native soldiers, hunters and miners in the face of real and appreciated danger under circumstances which show that the Natives as a whole are no less capable than the white people of conquering instinctive fear and of sacrificing the individual self when great demands are made. I am not speaking now of what is commonly called mob-courage. Natives have been known to go through fire and water alone as well as white men.

Is there any difference of kind or degree in the moral sense of the two races? In the prevailing view of authoritative students morality is emotional and not intellectual in its origin, and the warrant of right doing is attributed not to some hypothetical objective standard, but to the whisperings of an inner conscience, an innate subjective mental state, independent of environment and education. Differences, undoubtedly, exist as to the acts or omissions which are approved or disapproved by the moral feeling in the two races respectively, but the feeling is the same. The feelings which prompt a Native woman to condemn barrenness in other women is the same as that which makes the average European lady look upon immodesty as a sign of immorality. The difference is objective, not subjective; it is in the outlook but not in the inner sense. That immorality is rife amongst Natives no one who knows them well will deny, but neither can putanism amongst the whites be denied. Before the white man came the very robust moral sense of the Natives made them put down theft and, sometimes, adultery, with a thoroughness which is apparently impossible amongst the most civilised white people to-day. Now that Western civilisation is spreading over the land the difference in the moral outlook of the two peoples tends to decrease; with the savage vices go the savage virtues, and soon there will be no difference at all.

Having found no difference between the senses, instincts and inner feelings of the two races we come now to consider the oft-alleged difference in what is popularly called pure intellect in favour of the white man. Is there such a thing as pure intellect or pure rationality? Obviously there is not. The thought that we call abstract is fashioned in the same way as the thought that is formed by the recognition of similarities between concrete objects. The abstract thought has its source like all other forms of thought in the organic and emotional structure of the individual, and it is, indeed, only by pointing to instances that we can define what we mean by an abstract idea. But many people still think that the white race is gifted with a special faculty for thinking about general attributes as apart from the particular objects in which the abstracted attributes may be concretely perceived. There is no foundation in fact for this presumption. The Natives have no difficulty in finding words wherewith to abstract the general essence from a plurality of facts or instances; their vocabulary is as apt and as extensive for this purpose as that which suffices for the mental or spiritual needs of the bulk of European people, indeed, the capacity for abstracting the general nature and character from the particular experience or emotion into pithy expressions by way of simile or metaphor that admirably convey the perceived generalisation is as highly evolved in the Native as in any other human variety.

I think that the magistrates, native commissioners, police officers, missionaries, farmers, miners, and traders in South Africa who have had first-hand experience of dealing with raw Natives will agree with me that in sound reasoning ability, as applied to matters with which he is familiar, the Native is no whit below the white man. It would be easy for me to give hundreds of instances that have come under my own observation of arguments stated and deductions made by Natives who were innocent of all European education that would show a capacity for mental analysis and clear ratiocination equal to that of the educated European, but I have to consider the reader's patience and will therefore confine myself to a few illustrations taken at random from a number that were written down by me at the time of observation. I may say here that my translation into English has been made with the most scrupulous regard to exactness so as to avoid the possibility of importing into the words used a fuller meaning than that which was actually present in the speaker's own mind.