The inequality of human races

by comte de Arthur Gobineau

The nature of my investigations keeps me on a lower and more prosaic level; I wish to arrive at results that are a little more within the range of practical experience. The restricted angle of my vision forbids me to consider, as Guizot does, the measure of prosperity enjoyed by human societies, or to contemplate, with von Humboldt, the high peaks on which a few great minds sit in solitary splendour; my inquiries concern merely the amount of power, material as well as moral, that has been developed among the mass of a people. It has made me uneasy, I confess, to see two of the most famous men of the century losing themselves in by-ways; and if I am to trust myself to follow a different road from theirs, I must survey my ground, and go back as far as possible for my premises, in order to reach my goal without stumbling. I must ask the reader to follow me with patience and attention through the winding paths in which I have to walk, and I will try to illuminate, as far as I can, the inherent obscurity of my subject.

There is no tribe so degraded that we cannot discover in it the instinct to satisfy both its material and its moral needs. The first and most obvious difference between races lies in the various ways in which the two sides of this instinct are balanced. Among the most primitive peoples they are never of equal intensity. In some, the sense of the physical need is uppermost, in others, the tendency to contemplation. Thus the brutish hordes of the yellow race seem to be dominated by the needs of the body, though they are not quite without gleams of a spiritual world. On the other hand to most of the negro tribes that have reached the same stage of development, action is less than thought, and the imagination gives a higher value to the things unseen than those that can be handled. From the point of view of civilization, I do not regard this as a reason for placing the negroes on a higher level; for the experience of centuries shows that they are no more capable of being civilized than the others. Ages have passed without their doing anything to improve their condition; they are all equally powerless to mingle act and idea in sufficient strength to burst their prison walls and emerge from their degradation. But even in the lowest stages of human progress I always find this twofold stream of instinct, in which now one, now the other current predominates; and I will try to trace its path as I go up the scale of civilization.

Above the Samoyedes, as above some of the Polynesian negroes, come the tribes that are not quite content with a hut made of branches or with force as the only social relation, but desire something better. These tribes are raised one step above absolute barbarism. If they belong to those races to whom action is more than thought, we shall see them improving their tools, their arms, and their ornaments, setting up a government in which the warriors are more important than the priests, developing ideas of exchange, and already showing a fair aptitude for commerce. Their wars will still be cruel, but will tend more and more to become mere pillaging expeditions; in fact, material comfort and physical enjoyment will be the main aim of the people. I find this picture realized in many of the Mongolian tribes; also, in a higher form, among the Quichuas and Aymaras of Peru. The opposite condition, involving a greater detachment from mere bodily needs, will be found among the Dahomeys of West Africa, and the Kaffirs.

I now continue the journey upwards, and leave the groups in which the social system is not strong enough to impose itself over a large population, even after a fusion of blood. I pass to those in which the racial elements are so strong that they grip fast everything that comes within their reach, and draw it into themselves; they found over immense tracts of territory a supreme dominion resting on a basis of ideas and actions that are more or less perfectly co-ordinated. For the first time we have reached what can be called a civilization. The same internal differences that I brought out in the first two stages appear in the third; they are in fact far more marked than before, as it is only in this third stage that their effects are of any real importance. From the moment when an assemblage of men, which began as a mere tribe, has so widened the horizon of its social relations as to merit the name of a people, we see one of the two currents of instinct, the material and the intellectual, flowing with greater force than before, according as the separate groups, now fused together, were originally borne along by one or the other. Thus, different results will follow, and different qualities of a nation will come to the surface, according as the power of thought or that of action is dominant. We may use here the Hindu symbolism, and represent what I call the “intellectual current” by Prakriti, the female principle, and the “material current” by Purusha, the male principle. There is, of course, no blame or praise attaching to either of these phrases; they merely imply that the one principle is fertilized by the other.[^[40]]

Further, we can see, at some periods of a people’s existence, a strong oscillation between the two principles, one of which alternately prevails over the other. These changes depend on the mingling of blood that inevitably takes place at various times. Their consequences are very important, and sensibly alter the character of the civilization by impairing its stability.

I can thus divide peoples into two classes, as they come predominantly under the action of one or other of these currents; though the division is, of course, in no way absolute. At the head of the “male” category I put the Chinese; the Hindus being the prototype of the opposite class.

After the Chinese come most of the peoples of ancient Italy, the Romans of the Early Republic, and the Germanic tribes. In the opposite camp are ranged the nations of Egypt and Assyria. They take their place behind the men of Hindustan.

When we follow the nations down the ages, we find that the civilization of nearly all of them has been modified by their oscillation between the two principles. The peoples of Northern China were at first almost entirely materialistic. By a gradual fusion with tribes of different blood, especially those in the Yunnan, their outlook became less purely utilitarian. The reason why this development has been arrested, or at least has been very slow, for centuries past, is because the “male” constituents of the population are far greater in quantity than the slight “female” element in its blood.

In Northern Europe the materialistic strain, contributed by the best of the Germanic tribes, has been continually strengthened by the influx of Celts and Slavs. But as the white peoples drifted more and more towards the south, the male influences gradually lost their force and were absorbed by an excess of female elements, which finally triumphed. We must allow some exceptions to this, for example in Piedmont and Northern Spain.

Passing now to the other division, we see that the Hindus have in a high degree the feeling of the supernatural, that they are more given to meditation than to action. As their earliest conquests brought them mainly into contact with races organized along the same lines as themselves, the male principle could not be sufficiently developed among them. In such an environment their civilization was not able to advance on the material side as it had on the intellectual. We may contrast the ancient Romans, who were naturally materialistic, and only ceased to be so after a complete fusion with Greeks, Africans, and Orientals had changed their original nature and given them a totally new temperament. The internal development of the Greeks resembled that of the Hindus.