Rizal devoted himself particularly to the analysis of the sentiments with which the white and the colored races mutually regard each other. No one was so well qualified as he to study this question, which is of such importance to folk-psychology, for he was of himself of a colored race, had lived among his fellow-countrymen at his own home as well as among the whites, those of mixed bloods, and other classes at Manila, and had besides come to know Hong-Kong, Japan, Europe, and the United States and that in a thorough way and not as a mere tourist. His extensive acquaintance with languages opened for him the ethnological writings of all civilized nations, and his penetrating intellect prevented him from remaining content with the surface of things. It should be said, however, that Rizal concerned himself wholly with the relations between the white and the colored peoples of the Pacific because, as he explained, he knew nothing of the psychology of other colored races.
He said that as a boy he was deeply sensible that the Spaniards treated him with contemptuous disregard for the sole reason that he was a Filipino. From the moment when he discovered this attitude of theirs he endeavored to find out what right the Spaniards and the other whites generally had to look down upon people who think as they think, study [[361]]the same things they study, and have the same mental capacity they possess, simply because these people have a brown skin and stiff, straight hair.
Europeans regard themselves as the sovereign masters of the earth, the only supporters of progress and culture and the sole legitimate species of the genus Homo sapiens, while they proclaim that all other races are inferior by refusing to acknowledge their capability of acquiring European culture, so that, according to the European view, the colored races are varieties of the genus Homo brutus. Rizal then asked himself, Are these views just? He began asking this question when he was a school-boy and at the same time began to answer it by observing his white fellow-students closely while he studied his own mental processes and emotions in order to make comparisons.
He soon remarked that in school, at least, no difference could be detected between the intellectual level of the whites and Filipinos. There were lazy and industrious, moral and immoral, dull and intelligent boys among the whites as well as among the Filipino scholars. Soon this study of race spurred him to exert himself to the utmost in his school studies, and a kind of race rivalry took possession of him. He was overjoyed whenever he succeeded in solving a difficult problem that baffled his white companions. But he did not regard these events as personal successes so much as triumphs of his own collective people. Thus it was in school that he first became convinced that whites go through the same intellectual operations as Filipinos and—ceteris paribus—progress in the same way and to the same extent. From this observation he came to the conclusion that whites and Filipinos have the same intellectual endowment.
In consequence of this conclusion there manifested itself in Rizal, as he himself avowed, a sort of national self-exaltation. He began to believe that the Tagalogs must stand higher intellectually than the Spaniards (the only whites he had known [[362]]up to that time) and he used to like to tell how he came to this fallacious conclusion. In the first place, he said, in his school the whites received instruction in their own language while the Filipinos had to worry with strange idioms in order to receive instruction which was given in it alone. The Filipinos, therefore, must be better endowed intellectually than the Spaniards, he inferred, since they not only kept up with the Spaniards in their studies but even surpassed them, although handicapped by a different language. Still another observation caused him to disbelieve in the superiority of the European intelligence. He noticed that the Spaniards believed that the Filipinos looked up to them as beings of a superior nation and made of a finer clay than themselves. But Rizal knew very well that the respectfulness the Filipinos manifested toward the Spaniards did not proceed from self-depreciation but was simply dictated by fear and self-interest.
By fear because they saw in the Spaniard their lord and master who oppressed them arbitrarily even with good intentions; by self-interest because they had observed that his pride of race lays the European open to flattery and that they could get large concessions from him by a little subserviency. The Filipinos do not therefore have any real respect for the European but cringe and bow to him from interested motives alone. Behind his back they laugh at him, ridicule his presumption, and regard themselves as in reality the shrewder of the two races. Because the Spaniards never divined the real sentiment of the Filipinos toward themselves, young Rizal felt justified in regarding them as inferior in intelligence to his own countrymen. But in later years he found it necessary to change this false impression of his youth, especially as he had found by his own personal experience how easy it is to draw mistaken conclusions about people of a different race from one’s own. “Whenever,” he used to say, “I came upon condemnation of my people by Europeans either in conversation or in books I recalled these foolish ideas of my youth, my [[363]]indignation cooled, and I could smile and quote the French proverb, ‘Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.’ ”
Dr. Rizal’s sojourn in Spain opened to him a new world. His intellectual horizon began to widen with his new experiences. New ideas thronged in upon him. He came from a land which was the very home of bigotry, where the Spanish friar, the Spanish official, and the Spanish soldier governed with absolute sway. But in Madrid he found the exact opposite of this repression. Free-thinkers and atheists spoke freely in disparaging terms of religion and the church; the authority of the Government he found to be at a minimum, while he not only saw Liberals contending with the Clerical Party but he beheld with astonishment Republicans and Carlists openly promoting the development of their political ideas.
Still greater was the influence upon him of his residence in France, Germany, and England. In those countries he enlarged his scientific information, or it would be better, perhaps, to say that there the spirit of modern philology was revealed to him and there he learned the meaning of the word “ethnology.”
The personal influence of the late Dr. Rost of London was most marked in the philological training of Dr. Rizal. His teachings and the study of the works of W. von Humboldt, Jacquet, and Professor H. Kern opened a new world for the Filipino scholar. He formed a plan to write a work upon the Tagalog verb, which he afterward modified, and while an exile in Dapitan in Mindanao he began to write a Tagalog grammar in English and at the same time prepared an essay upon the allied elements in the Tagalog and Visayan languages. The former work he intended to dedicate to Professor Kern, in the name of the Malay race; the latter he wished to inscribe to the memory of Dr. Rost. It was not granted to him to complete the manuscript of either, for he was interrupted in the midst of his work to be dragged about [[364]]from tribunal to tribunal until his final sentence and death by public execution.