Negroes and Negro "Slavery:" the first an inferior race: the latter its normal condition.Van Evrie, John H.
History
Negroes and Negro "Slavery:" the first an inferior race: the latter its normal condition.
Van Evrie, John H.
African Americans; Slavery -- Justification; Slavery -- United States
In conclusion, it is scarcely necessary to repeat that there is a fixed,
uniform, and universal correspondence between structure and function, or
between organism and the purpose it is designed to fulfil. We do not
know nor need to know the cause of this or the nature of this unity. We
only know, and are only permitted to know, that it exists, and are not
bound to accept the dogma of the Materialists, that function is the
result of organism; nor that of their opponents, who still more falsely
imagine results without causes, or that there can be functions without,
organism. Truth, in this instance, lies between extremes:—functions or
faculties cannot exist without a given structure or organism, but they
are not a result of that organism. They exist together inseparably,
universally, eternally dependent on each other, but not a result of
either. To see there must be eyes; to hear, ears; to walk, the organism
of locomotion; to manifest a certain extent of intelligence there must
be a corresponding mental organism, but there is no such thing proper as
cause and effect, nothing but fact—the fact of mutual existence.
CHAPTER III.
THE HUMAN CREATION.
The human creation, like all other families or forms of being, is
composed of a genus, which includes some half dozen or more species. It
has been the fashion to call these permanent varieties, and almost every
writer on ethnology has made his own classification, or rather has
created what number he pleased of these “imaginary varieties.” Agassiz,
unquestionably the greatest of American naturalists, but unfortunately
not much of a physiologist, and therefore unprepared to deal with the
higher truths of ethnology, supposes several species of white men, and,
in regard to the subordinate races, would doubtless multiply them _ad
infinitum_. But at this time, or in the existing state of our knowledge,
the number actually known to exist cannot be assumed beyond that already
named. They are thus:—1st. The Caucasian. 2d. The Mongolian. 3d. The
Malay or Oceanic. 4th. The Aboriginal American. 5th. The Esquimaux; and
6th. The Negro or typical African.
The Caucasian can be confounded with no other, for though in some
localities, climate and perhaps other causes darken the skin, sometimes
with a deep olive tint, and extending, as with the Bedouins and the Jews
of the Malabar coast, to almost black, the flowing beard (more constant
than color), projecting forehead, oval features, erect posture and
lordly presence, stamp him the master man wherever found.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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