THE PLURALITY OF THE HUMAN RACE.
INTRODUCTION.
For a long period, in mediæval days, science was to most people what it was to Servetus, a simple paraphrase or glossary of a revealed text. In this was the truth, and if observation itself seemed sometimes contradictory, it was certain that there was some mistake; it was necessary to re-examine the contested question, and by dint of inquiring into the facts, they were altered so wisely, that in the end they always were found to agree.
All over the East, among the Semitic race,[1] that which above all other possesses respect for authority, science still lives. Without the law there is no science, and the Korán is what the books of the sons of Israel and the writings of the apostles were in the middle ages, the great, the only authority, to which everything was referred.[2]
If science has shone with a bright light in the East, this was due solely to the introduction of a more human philosophy, born among another race, and conveyed there by the works of Aristotle and the neo-Platonists. The East was inspired for an instant with these foreign doctrines, which it would have been incapable of originating itself. It revived for a century or two under their influence, but soon everything reverted to a former state of order; having shone in the barbarism of a pure theism, whence it would never have come out without the contact of a world extrinsic and superior to certain considerations, without the momentary education which it had thus received from it.
All the sciences are not in the same intimate relation with the texts called revealed; the mathesiological order is that in which the sciences have had, and could have, the least to suffer from religious influence; in the first place, mathematics, which, from their nature, would never have known how to yield; and, lastly, geology and anthropology, allied by intimate relations to the Divine tradition of the first chapter of Genesis. But see how geology, which we thought for so long a time was in agreement with it, grows more distant every day as new discoveries are multiplied. The pretended epochs see, day by day, that their artificial limits are disappearing, now that one finds reptiles in coal-fields and mammalia in Trias.
Anthropology in France seems, at last, to desire to free itself from the shameful yoke which has for so long paralysed its flight. In its turn it claims independence. But, we would declare this, that the principle of authority, defeated on so many points, has concentrated its highest efforts behind this last rampart, calling to its aid the pretence of morality and propriety. The question of the unity or the plurality of the human race, so far as relates to species, is only a scientific one; but others make of it a question of principle, as in the time of Galileo, when it was a matter of overturning the ideas of the old world, supported by a testimony which was not allowed to be doubted. So the struggle is a sharp one;[3] it is felt that it refers almost to a dogma, and not merely to an accessory fact. Science clashes there with religion, as is the case with geology, and as formerly with astronomy; but in no way is the shock so violent, in no way can its consequences be as great. Anthropology, more than any other science, ought to produce immense results.[4] Who does not see that the abyss becomes every day deeper under the belief of the past, and that science, at a given moment, will become the foundation of more perfect morality?
This antagonism is the first difficulty which we find at the threshold of anthropology. We should have wished to have entered upon our subject without being obliged, not absolutely to discuss it, but merely to show the disputed point in the question. Unfortunately, the example has been given us; we must follow it. Two schools are to be found in anthropology; one called that of the Polygenists, the other that of the Monogenists,[5] two words which came from America, and which we receive because they have the great advantage of being clear and precise, determining, by the opposing point of their doctrines, two distinct schools, the one recognising but one family in the human race, of which some members have alone preserved the primitive type—altered everywhere else; the other school recognising no direct relationship among the races of mankind. The Polygenistic school is comparatively modern; the founders of anthropology—the Blumenbachs and the Prichards—belonged to the other. Now, if they took their stand on an entirely philosophic or experimental point of view, we should be very badly received now-a-days if we were to reconsider the question upon a burning soil. It has not been so, however. Most Monogenists[6] have, up to the present time, done the universal wrong of invoking, in proof of their ideas, an authority which it is not allowable to discuss. Science is neither a special attribute of privileged castes, nor given to certain times in preference to others; it has never been obliged to wait for a revelation; it is universal, and all men, endowed with the same faculties, have always been able, in all countries and at all times, to carry it as far, when they have had the same means and the same occasions of observation; it is thus that psychology, based upon simple reflection, has not farther progressed in our days than at Athens or at Alexandria; from Plato to Descartes there is only the distance between one system and the other.
“Historians of that which is,” has said the illustrious chief of the philosophical school of France, Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, “we cannot fail, except when we cease to relate the truth.”[7] Now, truth in science cannot be governed except by two means, reasoning after the manner of mathematics, and observation, of which experiment is but a variety. Every idea à priori, every hypothesis is only good if we accept it with a strong determination of abandoning it if the facts are no longer explicable by its means. Without this, its influence is disastrous, let the origin of this previous idea be in ourselves or in others, whether it is our own or has been imposed upon us.[8]