The plurality of the human race

by G. Pouchet

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 seems so great and insurmountable, it must be overcome, it must be 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,[191] the 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 not harmony 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 same action, 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,[194] the 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.[195] The 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 race hideous; it is only inferior in 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.[196] Without 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, and Newton.[197] The 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 only quote, 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,[198] by d’Orbigny,[199] Morton,[200] and 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,[202] is 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 the origin. 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 of Semitic 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 simple loans; 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.