[Gaspar de San Agustin, O.S.A., wrote the following letter regarding the Filipinos. This letter has been widely discussed pro and con by various writers, because of the views expressed therein. Many manuscript copies of it exist in various collections, archives, and libraries. The present translation is made from an early manuscript copy, belonging to Mr. E. E. Ayer, of Chicago. In footnotes we give the variant readings of the MS. conserved in the Museo-Biblioteca de Ultramar, Madrid (pressmark “6–5a; caja 17; 21–4a”), that MS. being indicated in our notes by the letter M.; and of the letter as published in Delgado’s[1] Historia (pp. 273–296, where it shows marks of having been edited by either Delgado or his editor), that publication being indicated by the letter D. Sinibaldo de Mas presents many of the essential parts of the letter in his Informe de las Islas Filipinas en 1842, i, “Poblacion,” pp. 63–132. He says: “In order to give an idea of their physical and moral qualities, I am going to insert some paragraphs from a letter of Father Gaspar de San Augustin of the year 1725,[2] suppressing many Latin citations from the holy fathers which weigh that letter down, and adding some observations from my own harvest, when I think them opportune.” We shall use most of these observations in the annotations herewith presented. Sir John Bowring gives, on pp. 125–139 of his Visit to the Philippine Isles (London, 1859) some excerpts taken from Mas’s Informe, but he has sadly mixed San Agustin’s and Mas’s matter, and has ascribed some of the latter’s observations to San Agustin, besides making other errors.[3]]
Letter from fray Gaspar de San Agustin to a friend in España who asked him as to the nature and characteristics [genio] of the Indian natives of these Philipinas Islands.[4]
My Dear Sir:
Although your command has so great weight with me, the undertaking of performing it satisfactorily is so difficult that I doubt my ability to fulfil what you ask. It would be more easy for me, I believe, to define the formal object of logic; to give the square of a circle; to find the mathematical [side[5]] of the double of the cube and sphere, or to find a fixed rule for the measurement of the degrees of longitude of the terrestrial sphere; than to define the nature of the Indians, and their customs and vices. This is a memorandum-book in which I have employed myself for forty years, and I shall only say: Quadraginta annis proximus fui generationi huic, et dixi semper hi errant corde;[6] and I believe that Solomon himself would place this point of knowledge after the four things impossible to his understanding which he gives in chapter XXX, verse 18 of Proverbs. Only can they tell the One who knows them by pointing to the sky and saying, Ipse cognovit figmentum nostrum.[7] But in order that you may not say to me that I am thus ridding myself of the burden of the difficulty,[8] without making any effort or showing any obedience, I shall relate briefly what I have observed, for it would be impossible to write everything, if one were to use all the paper that is found in China.
2. The knowledge of men has been considered by the most erudite persons as a difficult thing. Dificile est, noscere hominem animal varium et versipelle.[9] Man is a changeable theater of transformations. The inconstancies of his ages resemble the variation of the year. A great knowledge of man did that blind man of the eighth chapter of St. Mark have who said, with miraculous sight, that he saw men as trees: Video homines velut arbores ambulantes.[10] For the tree in the four seasons of the year has its changes as has man in his four ages; and thus said the English poet Oven:
“Ver viridem flavamque æstas, me fervida canam
Autumnus calvam, frigida fecit hyems.”[11]
“For this is the inconstancy of man in his [various] ages: green in his childhood; fiery in the age of his virility; white in old age; and bald in his decrepitude.” But his greatest change is in his customs, for he is a continual Proteus, and an inconstant Vertumnus.[12] Thus does Martial paint his friend:
“Dificilis, facilis, jucundus, acerbus est idem;
Nec tecum possum vivere, nec sine te.”[13]