Sociology based upon ethnography / by Charles Letourneau ; translated by Henry M. Trollope.

  • Charles Letourneau
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sociology based upon ethnography / by Charles Letourneau ; translated by Henry M. Trollope. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    612/646 page 594
    normal course of its evolution the human kind passes through a succession of phases which we may rightly call the ages of humanity. Each one of these phases is characterised hy a number of wants which govern and lead individuals and the ethnical groups, and these wants are less elevated in proportion as civilisation is less advanced. No doubt all these wants, all these principal aptitudes, exist in all races of men, hut in very different propor- tions. In this respect the different human races may class them- selves together according to periods of time, and according to the countries in which they live. They are more especially nutritive, sensitive, affective, or intellectual. We may say at once that a very small minority of the human population deserve to be classed in this last-named division. Such is the general law, hut we should strangely abuse ourselves if we expected to find it hold good always and everywhere; that every individual man, and all the human groups of men, necessarily evolve in a progressive scale merely by raising themselves more or less high. Ketrogression is quite possible. We have given abundant evidence to show that the human races are very unequal, that they may he set in order in a long series; hut it may also very well happen that individuals, or even small groups, belonging to a superior race should undergo a degeneration which will degrade them to the level of the most inferior races. In ^lexico, in South America, in the Fiji islands, Europeans have returned to savagery and even to cannibalism. Cook has seen, in the Malay peninsula, Portuguese reduced hy the Malays themselves to the condition of a servile caste of people. To find other examples we need only look underneath the de- ceitful varnish of our civilised societies. No doubt that on its good sides our civilisation is prodigiously superior to that of primitive societies; hut the greater part of those signs of progress which blind our eyes is the work of exceptional individuals,— men who have been innovators, and generally to their own prejudice. The innovator’s calling is often a dangerous one. It is not the less true that among the dregs of our modern societies there are thousands and thousands of persons who in
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