The Black Man's Place in South AfricaNielsen, Peter, active 1922-1937
History
The Black Man's Place in South Africa
Nielsen, Peter, active 1922-1937
Black people -- South Africa
If then we accept the conclusion that the effects of individual
experience are not cumulatively hereditary we shall cease to cavil at
the fact that there has been no anatomical or structural progress in the
human body or brain since the time when men first became social and
civilised beings, that is to say, since they first began to work
together with their heads and hands, and we shall see that that which
was to be expected has always happened, in that, from the earliest
historical times to the present day, human life has been as the rolling
and unrolling of a carpet. Cycles of civilisations, all essentially
similar, have been evolved, one after another, to endure for a while and
then to fade away, leaving the raw material of human kind as it was from
the beginning. There is no evidence of any advancement in physique,
intellect or moral character. The leaders of mankind were the
law-givers, whether they were witch doctors, priests, chiefs, prophets
or kings, and they all sought to establish their laws by claiming
supernatural delegation and authority. With writing came the codes, and
when we compare the statutes of Hammurabi, who flourished about 2,200
years B.C., with those compiled by his successors, Moses, Solon,
Justinian and Napoleon, we find in them all evidence of the same mental
appreciation and capacity in dealing with the social conditions and
problems of their respective periods. The greatest products of art are
still met with in the sculptured forms of ancient Greece, those images
of serene beauty which may be imitated but not excelled. The reasoning
powers of the ancient philosophers who, long before Christ was born,
debated the still unanswered riddles of existence, when we compare the
paucity of data on which they had to work with the wealth of knowledge
now available, must be ranked as high as the intellectual ability of our
foremost thinkers of to-day. In mechanical proficiency the world has
indeed advanced to an astonishing extent, but the perfection of our
modern machinery means only a gradual and very recent advance upon
earlier methods and does not denote a corresponding development in the
mind itself. The Greeks had no machinery to speak of, neither had the
English in the days of Shakespeare and Newton, but who can doubt that
the engineers of those times would have been equal to the task of
understanding and applying the principles of modern mechanics had the
necessary books been available to them? We do not assume that because
the modern Germans excel as chemists they are therefore blessed with
higher reasoning ability than were the contemporaries of Socrates and
Plato who had no knowledge of the science of chemistry. The conclusion
forced upon us after a sober and impartial survey of the facts of
history is that, although the intellectual output of the world is always
increasing, the intellect itself remains unaltered. Knowledge, we see,
is after all, only descriptive, never fundamental. We can describe the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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