Du développement intellectuel acquis en Amérique, sous différents degrés de latitude, par des peuple

CHAP. 9: > Of the intellectual development acquired in America, under different degrees of latitude, by peoples of the copper-colored or American species.

Chardin believes he has observed that the heat of the climate enervates the mind, dissipates the fire of the imagination, and renders man incapable of those long nights of work, of that strong application which give birth to fine works. Montesquieu likewise thinks that a hot climate produces dejection of the mind, destroys all curiosity, extinguishes all noble enterprise, all generous sentiment. He believes, moreover, that a temperate climate inspires inconstancy and consequently leaves no fixity to ideas, and that a cold climate attaches good sense to coarse fibers. These opinions, some of which go back to the highest antiquity, have been reproduced by writers of our time, and they are still very widespread in all the countries where our books have reached.

The intellectual faculties of a people can be affected in three ways: by the alteration of its physical organs, by the weakening or by the extinction of its moral affections, by the physical circumstances in the midst of which it is placed. All species of men do not have the brain equally developed; if the differences that exist between them had been produced by the differences that exist between climates; if the peoples of cold climates had the head better organized than the peoples of the same species from hot climates, one would conceive how the intellectual faculties of a people can be affected by the climate it inhabits. But I have nowhere encountered any fact from which one can reasonably infer that cold and heat produce such phenomena on man. The travelers and naturalists who have given us the description of the men of all climates have not observed that the inhabitants of cold countries had the head better formed than the men of the same species who inhabit hot countries. The peoples of Italy are not, in this respect, inferior to any people of Germany, and the Greeks are not more poorly organized than the Russians.

One could also believe that the heat of the climate is an obstacle to the development of intellectual faculties, if it were proven that it weakens or extinguishes the affections of man. It is not enough, in effect, for a people to do great things, that the individuals of whom it is composed be susceptible to receiving a considerable intellectual development. It is necessary, moreover, that they be excited to it by some desires, and that the strength of these desires be in proportion to the obstacles that are to be overcome. A well-organized people, but among whom there existed no strong will, would remain in an eternal mediocrity, like a people that would have very energetic passions, but that would not be susceptible to any intellectual development.Finally, one could believe that the human race is more perfectible in cold countries than in others, if the objects on which peoples exercise their intelligence were more susceptible to perfection under a cold climate than under a hot or temperate one. Indeed, it is evident that man's intellectual development is as subordinate to the things that surround him as it is to his physical constitution or his moral faculties. A nation surrounded by things that it could not possibly modify to its advantage would remain eternally stationary. A people, in general, can progress only by the progress it can induce in the things at its disposal: when these things are immutable, it ceases to study them, because such study is no longer of any use. The question, therefore, is to determine the circumstances in which men can exercise the most extensive influence on the objects that surround them. I will examine this question in another part of this work; for now, it is only a matter of expounding which parts of the globe are those where human intelligence first developed, and those where it has received the least development. Before seeking the causes that produced such or such a phenomenon, one must first ascertain that this phenomenon exists or has existed.

When one observes no difference in the organization of several peoples who belong to the same species, there is only one way to judge the intellectual force of each; it is to examine how that force is manifested, or what works it produces. It is true that one must account, in this calculation, for many contingent circumstances, such as the nature of the soil, the course of the waters, the nature of the language; one must account for religious opinions, the nature of the government, the action that nations exercise upon one another, and other less important facts, whose combination nevertheless exercises a great influence. It is easy to be mistaken in the evaluation of all these circumstances; but it is not a question here of arriving at a mathematical exactitude. Moreover, the same difficulties are encountered on both sides of the question; and not one objection can be made in favor of Montesquieu's opinion that cannot also be made against it. One must therefore examine the circumstances under which each species has most developed in each of the principal parts of the globe.

In expounding the intellectual development acquired by peoples of diverse species or varieties, under different degrees of latitude, I should perhaps expound their religions, their laws, and the forms of their governments; for each of these subjects is linked in large part to the development of the intellectual faculties. But there is none of them that is not also linked to the morals of each people: I will therefore speak of them when I expound the moral development of the diverse nations in different parts of the globe. The difficulty encountered here in properly classifying the subjects at hand is further proof that our divisions and classifications are but more or less imperfect methods, which we are obliged to employ to facilitate the operations of our mind.

The American continent today contains peoples of diverse species; but, to judge the influence of places and climates on the intellectual faculties on this continent, one must only compare peoples who belong to the same species, and who have received from others no influence good or bad. It is evident that one would obtain a false result if one compared the natives of Canada to the descendants of Europeans established in Mexico, or the natives of the banks of the Orinoco to the citizens of Philadelphia. To establish a just comparison, one must examine which peoples in America, at the time of the Europeans' arrival, had the most developed understanding.

At the moment when the Spanish conquered a large part of this continent, there existed only two peoples who had already made considerable progress in civilization, the Mexicans and the Peruvians. Both were located between the tropics, and the capital of the more civilized one was located at the equator. It is true that the elevation of the soil there tempered the ardor of the sun; but it is nevertheless not possible to class among cold climates countries where the heat is the same throughout the year, where consequently nature never rests, and where the temperature is high enough for them to produce the banana, sugar, cotton, cacao, and indigo. If countries located between the tropics, where produce grows that the most southern parts of Europe cannot produce, were not hot countries, it would be very difficult to determine what is meant by the words cold and heat.

If one compares the state of civilization that the peoples of central America had reached at the end of the fifteenth century to the state in which the most civilized peoples find themselves today, one will doubtless find that the former had not made great progress. But, if one compares the peoples of the two continents at the same periods; if, moreover, one pays attention to the fact that 15th-century Europeans had inherited, through the intermediary of the Greeks and Romans, the inventions and productions of the most anciently civilized peoples of Africa and Asia; that, for a period impossible to assign, but dating back well over three thousand years, they possessed iron and knew how to work it; that they also had, over the Americans, a multitude of domestic animals such as the horse, the ox, and others; that they possessed the grains on which the subsistence of a large part of the human race is founded, while the Americans possessed only maize; if, I say, one pays attention to all these circumstances and to the progress that Europeans have made in the last three centuries, one will judge that the climate of the torrid zone was no less favorable to the development of the intellectual faculties of the American species, than the northern climate had been to the intellectual development of the Russian population, then plunged in complete barbarism, and unknown to the most enlightened nations of the earth.

But it is a matter of comparing peoples of the same species, placed in different zones, and not peoples who belong to different species. What then was the civilization of the inhabitants of Mexico, of New Granada, of Peru and of the banks of the Mississippi, at the moment they were conquered by the Spanish? The destruction of the enlightened part of these two peoples was so complete that it is impossible to know today, in an exact manner, in what their knowledge consisted. The descendants of the men who escaped the destruction do not know, even by tradition, what were the arts, the government, the religion of their ancestors. They are, in this regard, according to M. de Humboldt, as ignorant as would be, in three centuries, the great-grand-nephews of our poorest and least educated laborers, if as a result of some great catastrophe that had made the entire enlightened part of the population disappear, and annihilated all the works that contain the repository of our knowledge, they themselves had been made slaves and subjected to a new religion [189]. There remains therefore, to know the intellectual development that the Americans had reached, only the monuments they have left, and the testimonies of their conquerors, testimonies of which one must always be wary.

At the time of the conquest or rather the destruction of the Mexicans and Peruvians, these peoples were already very advanced in the arts and in some sciences. They possessed considerable cities, great roads, aqueducts; they had knowledge of arithmetic and even of astronomy. They possessed the art of melting and separating metals; that of giving copper the temper of the hardest metal, and of making instruments or weapons from it; that of cutting precious stones; that of spinning and weaving cotton and wool; they knew how to cast statues in gold and silver. Finally, they were as advanced, with respect to government, as were then and as are today several peoples of Europe [190].

There still remain, in Peru and in Mexico, remarkable traces of the ancient civilization. In the maritime part of Peru, M. de Humboldt saw remnants of walls on which water was conducted for a distance of five to six thousand meters, from the foot of the Cordillera to the coasts. The conquerors of the sixteenth century destroyed these aqueducts; and this part of Peru, like Persia, has become a desert devoid of vegetation. Such is the civilization that the Europeans brought to peoples they were pleased to call barbarians [191]. The plateau of Puebla also offers vestiges of the most ancient Mexican civilization [192].

The most numerous and most civilized population of America, after that of Mexico and that of Peru, was the one that was placed between the two. The inhabitants of Bogota, in New Granada, subsisted principally on the products of their agriculture. The ownership of land was established among them, guaranteed by laws, and transmitted from fathers to children. They lived in cities that can be called large, compared to the villages of other peoples. They were decently clothed, and their houses were comfortable. They had a regular government, charged with the pursuit and punishment of crimes. This government maintained itself by the taxes it collected from the inhabitants [193].

In Florida and on the banks of the Mississippi, the population had already made much progress in the arts, at least as far as we can judge by the distinctions of rank established among them, by the prerogatives that their chiefs enjoyed. The population of Cuba and that of some other islands situated between the tropics also appeared very advanced. But these peoples having been completely destroyed by the conquerors, it is difficult to determine to what point their intelligence had developed [194].

The peoples who inhabit the northeastern part of equatorial America, the Spanish Main and the banks of the Orinoco, are today in an almost entirely savage state. Some, like the Maquitains and the Makos, have fixed dwellings, devote themselves to agriculture, live on the fruits they cultivate, and have intelligence and gentle morals; but they are the smallest number [195].

The Guaranis, who inhabit the mouth of the Orinoco and who belong to a once numerous nation, could never be subjugated by the Spanish. They found refuge in the trees located at the mouth of the river on islands that are completely flooded during the six months of the rainy season, and which, during the other six months, are covered by the tide twice a day [196]. To form their dwellings there, they stretch mats from one trunk to another at a great height; they cover a part of them with clay, in order to be able to light the fire required for household cares; and there, they establish their families, in the midst of a cloud of insects that has protected them from the Spanish soldiers and missionaries [197]. The Guaranis, says M. de Humboldt, owe their physical independence, and perhaps also their moral independence, to the shifting and peaty soil they tread with a light foot, and to their dwelling in the trees; an aerial republic where religious enthusiasm will never lead an American stylite [198].

This people has no other industry than fishing, the making of hammocks and the instruments necessary for them to catch fish. It frequents the Spanish villages that are to the north and south of the Orinoco, where it goes to exchange a part of the products of its industry for other products that it needs. Having fish in abundance, being able to exchange what they do not consume for other produce, and being sheltered from oppression, they are one of the most cheerful peoples of this continent, and do not disturb the order among their neighbors who call themselves civilized. This population is far superior to that which, in China, lives on the rivers. It is even superior to the Indians of the same race whom the Spanish have reduced to villages; since the latter are neither more intelligent, nor more moral, nor better provided with the things necessary for life.

The Guarani nation, one of the most widespread in South America at the time of the conquest, was divided into a multitude of tribes. The principal occupation of each of them was agriculture: they cultivated maize, beans, pumpkins, mani or mandubi (exachides), potatoes, and mandiocas (manioc or camanioc). When the harvest was done, they deposited it in a common granary; this was the basis of their subsistence. The tribes that were situated near the rivers devoted themselves to fishing; others to hunting; but they devoted themselves to one or the other of these occupations only when they had no more time to give to the cultivation of the land [199].

Other peoples of the banks of the Orinoco had more or less the same way of life.

"At sunrise," says Depons, "all the Otomac Indians capable of working went to their respective captains who designated those among them who were to go, that day, fishing or seeking turtles, or hunting wild boar, according to the season. A certain number was also destined, at the time of sowing or harvest, for the labors of the fields, the fruits of which were deposited in public granaries, to be distributed by the chief. The same Indians never went to work two days in a row [200]."

The Caribs also devoted themselves to agriculture. When European establishments were formed in their country, they served as intermediaries for the Dutch and the Spanish to conduct trade. They gathered, on the instruction of the former, the balms, resins, gums, oils, and woods that could enter into commerce; they received in exchange European merchandise, and went to resell it in the Spanish colonies [201].

A missionary, having advanced, in the last century, into the territory of the independent Indians, as far as the country of Moqui, crossed by the Yaguesila river, was astonished to find there an Indian city with two large squares, houses of several stories, and streets well aligned and parallel to one another [202].

There exist, doubtless, between the tropics, peoples who are still very low on the scale of civilization; but it is doubtful whether these peoples and those of whom I have just spoken, were never able to rise higher, or whether they have descended to the state in which they find themselves, through some great catastrophe, as a result of European invasions, or of internal invasions. M. de Humboldt believed he saw, while ascending the Orinoco, in figures engraved on rocks, proofs that this solitude was once the abode of a nation that had reached a certain degree of knowledge. They attest, he says, to the vicissitudes that the fate of peoples undergoes, just as the form of languages belongs to the most durable monuments of the history of men [203].

"The northeastern part of equatorial America," says the same traveler elsewhere, "the Spanish Main and the banks of the Orinoco resemble, with respect to the multiplicity of peoples who inhabit them, the gorges of the Caucasus, the mountains of the Hindu Kush, the northern extremity of Asia, beyond the Tunguses, and the Tatars stationed at the mouth of the Lena.

"The barbarism that reigns in these diverse regions is perhaps less due to a primitive absence of all civilization than to the effects of a long brutalization. Most of the hordes that we designate by the name of savages probably descend from nations formerly more advanced in culture. And how to distinguish the prolonged infancy of the human species (if indeed it exists anywhere) from that state of moral degradation in which isolation, misery, forced migrations, or the rigors of the climate, efface even the traces of civilization?" [204]

It seems difficult to conceive, indeed, that alongside peoples as advanced in civilization as the Mexicans and Peruvians were, there were found peoples of the same species who had not yet emerged from the savage state. Such a phenomenon seems at first more extraordinary than the decadence of which M. de Humboldt believes he has recognized the proofs. Several causes that existed neither for the inhabitants of Peru, nor for those of Mexico, could however, as will be seen later, prolong the barbarism of the peoples who lived on the lowest-lying lands. The state of abjection and the profound ignorance into which the Indians who remained subject to the Spanish government were plunged have, moreover, placed them far below the Indians who remained independent at the mouth or on the banks of the Orinoco.> “The Peruvians, all the Peruvians without exception,” says Raynal, “are an example of that profound debasement into which tyranny can plunge men; they have fallen into a stupid and universal indifference” [205]. “The forgetting of the arts has been carried so far,” says a Spanish author, “that the civilized Indians could not make an arrow, fit a stone to it, or place feathers on it to direct its flight. Still less could they make a bow with just proportions. Thus, what is but a game for the independent savages, is an impossible thing for the successors of the Indians who were the most industrious [206].”

In Mexico, the natives were relegated by the conquerors to the least fertile lands. More indolent still from their political situation than from character, they live only from day to day, and, considering them as a mass, they all present a picture of misery [207]. In the churches, they show themselves only covered in rags that fulfill the vow of modesty far less, says Depons, than fig leaves would; often even entirely naked, they remain lying down or squatting during divine service [208]. The destitution in which they find themselves is such that the effects of famine are felt in almost all the equinoctial regions. In South America, in the province of New Andalusia, I have seen, says M. de Humboldt, villages whose inhabitants, forced by famine, disperse from time to time into the uncultivated regions, to seek food there among the wild plants [209]. It is not rare to see them eat ants, lizards, millipedes or scolopendras that they pull from the earth, fern roots, gum, and especially clay earth. Such is the state to which the conquest has reduced a once-flourishing nation [210].

The state of the Indians whom the conquerors and Spanish monks have civilized in their own way could thus serve to explain to us the state of the independent Indians: one could conceive that the latter had descended very low on the scale of civilization, without having reached the point to which the Indians are reduced; that the Guaranis who go to sell their fish in the Spanish villages would draw from it an ever-greater attachment to their independence, and that they would be deaf to the exhortations of the missionaries who seek to convert them. But we will find elsewhere, in the nature of the soil and in other physical circumstances, the causes that have kept these latter peoples in the state of barbarism in which they find themselves [211].

The heat of the equinoctial regions had not, therefore, been an obstacle in America to the development of the intellectual faculties of a part of the population; since the Mexicans, the Peruvians, and some other peoples had already made much progress in the arts, in the sciences, and especially in government, before the Spanish conquests. If there exist today, in the same regions, peoples to whom we give the name of savages, for the reason that they reject our domination and our religious beliefs, it is at least doubtful whether some of these peoples were not plunged into the state in which they find themselves as a result of an invasion. Finally, these same peoples had already taken the most difficult step to emerge from barbarism, since they drew from agriculture their principal means of existence, and since among them it was extremely rare to encounter hordes of hunters [212].

In heading toward temperate or cold climates, will we find peoples of the same species whose intellectual faculties have received more development? The natives of Brazil and those of Uruguay or Paraguay, placed between the twentieth and thirtieth degree of southern latitude, were part of the Guarani nation, and had perhaps surpassed those of whom I have just spoken. The art of agriculture, though in its infancy, furnished them their principal means of existence. They had already converted the land into private properties, and they drew from hunting or fishing what the soil could not furnish them [213]. These peoples, attached to the land by cultivation, were more easily enslaved than those who had not yet arrived at the same degree of civilization [214].

The numerous peoples who live from the thirty-sixth degree of southern latitude to the Strait of Magellan, toward the fifty-fifth degree, have always been completely foreign to agriculture. Those among them who inhabit the banks of rivers or the sea draw the principal part of their subsistence from fishing; those who live in the interior of the lands live particularly on the products of their hunts [215]. However, since the Europeans transported oxen, horses, and mules to America; since these animals have multiplied excessively in the American steppes, and a great number have even become wild, several tribes of Indians have formed herds of them, and adopted the way of life of the Tartars. As skilled as the Arabs at riding their horses, they rapidly traverse plains interspersed with mountains; they carry off the herds of the Spanish, and plunder travelers [216]. Those whose territory is closest to the territory of Magellan, such as the Patagonians, also wander in the savannas of America like the barbarians of central Asia; but it is from hunting that they draw the greater part of their subsistence [217]. Their clothes consist of the skins of the animals they have killed, in which they wrap themselves [218]; their tents are formed of cow or buffalo hides, fixed on four stakes; and, when they travel, they load them on their dogs, like the peoples of boreal Asia [219].

Of all the men who inhabit South America, there are none whose intellectual faculties are less developed than those who live on the Strait of Magellan or on Tierra del Fuego. Placed under a more rigorous climate than that of Norway, they know only how to clothe themselves by throwing a sealskin over their shoulders [220]. Their huts consist of a few stakes planted in the ground, inclined toward one another at their tops and forming a kind of cone, on which they throw, on the windward side, some branches or a little hay [221]. With no other industry than that which is necessary for them to make their fishing implements, they give their food no preparation and devour raw fish and rotten meat. The foods on which they nourish themselves and the filth in which they live cause them to exhale a horrible stench [222].

Their lack of intellectual development is manifested not only by the crude manner in which their clothing, their implements, and their huts are made, and by the lack of preparation of their food; it is manifested above all by a complete absence of astonishment and curiosity; their stupidity is such that it has struck all the travelers who have visited them [223]. One cannot say, however, that it is the heat of the climate that extinguishes all curiosity in them, since snow falls there in the finest season of the year; since the natives can never do without fire there, and since Europeans have died of cold there in the middle of summer [224].

At the other extremity of the American continent, one finds peoples who live almost solely on the products of fishing; these are the Eskimos. These peoples, although placed at a very high latitude, are a little less stupid than the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego. Their clothes, made of sealskins, wild beasts, and sometimes even the skins of land and aquatic birds, are well sewn, and shelter them from the inclemency of the climate [225]. The huts, dug underground, crudely made, and into which one can enter only by crawling on one's belly, are however more suitable for sheltering the inhabitants from the cold [226]. Finally, these peoples fabricate with much skill the implements they need to subsist. Several circumstances can explain the superiority they have over the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego; they are not separated from the continent by a strait that isolates them from the rest of the globe; it is less difficult for them to provide for their subsistence, the land they inhabit being less devoid of animals; they are consequently obliged to acquire a greater number of ideas, since they have to engage in more varied exercises, and since they have a little more time to practice or to reflect; I will not add that they belong to a different species, because this circumstance seems to me here to be without influence.

Some of the peoples who inhabit the northern part of America, from the sixty-eighth degree to around the forty-eighth, are perhaps a little more advanced than the Eskimos; but they are much less so than those who inhabit from the forty-eighth degree to around the thirty-sixth. The former live by hunting and fishing; but they are entirely foreign to agriculture. The men pursue animals, or set traps for them; they kill fish with spears; the women go fishing with nets. The peoples closer to the south also have the resource of fishing and hunting, but, at the same time, they cultivate the land; and the closer they get to the hot countries, the more considerable is the portion of food that agriculture furnishes them, compared to what they draw from hunting and fishing.

The numerous peoples who were spread throughout this part of America at the arrival of the Europeans cultivated the land in common, and deposited the products in public storehouses, in the same manner as several of the peoples who lived between the tropics; and, although this mode of cultivation is very unfavorable to the progress of civilization, it gave them the means to make immense provisions. In the wars that took place between these peoples, one of the first concerns of the victors, as among the Romans, was to ravage the harvests of the vanquished or to burn their storehouses, in the hope of starving them. The Europeans, who took sides sometimes with one and sometimes with the other, always assisted them in this kind of destruction:

“We were occupied for five or six days,” says a French officer who, in the seventeenth century, found himself in one of these wars, “cutting the Indian corn with our swords in the fields. From there, we passed to the two small villages of Thegaronhiers and Danoncaritaouis, two or three leagues distant from the preceding one. We performed the same exploits there [227].”

Charlevoix relates that soldiers, after having already done much ravaging, still discovered storehouses dug into the earth, according to the custom of the savages, which were so full of grain that one could have fed the entire colony (of Canada) for two years. The Indians who occupied the territory situated between Canada and the Gulf of Mexico appear to have been a little more advanced [228].

The northwest coasts of America present a remarkable phenomenon: that of a population whose industry and intellectual faculties have received considerable development, amidst peoples who have remained or descended into the crudest state of barbarism. The Tchinkitanés, placed between the fiftieth and fifty-fifth degree of northern latitude, some of whom have even risen to the sixtieth degree, on the banks of the Cook River, are a people who are distinguished from all those of the same race who inhabit the American continent [229]. With no other help than that of fire and the tools they have formed with stone, the bones of quadrupeds, fish bones, and the rough skins of cetaceans, they manage to construct two-story houses, fifty feet long, thirty-five deep, and fourteen high; they form planks twenty-five feet long, four feet wide, and two and a half inches thick; they execute sculptures in wood, by means of which they represent men, birds, or other animals; they paint the exterior of their houses, and adorn the interior with pictures; they spin and weave the hair of animals, and use their fabrics to make cloaks; they carve serpentine and give it the polish of marble; they fabricate flutes and a musical instrument that has some resemblance to the harp. This people puts order into the trade it conducts with the Europeans, and is neither noisy nor importunate. It is dressed in the European style; and, in its exchanges, clothes, weapons, and vessels proper for the preparation of its food are the goods to which it gives preference [230].

But, on the same coasts, whether one rises toward the north or descends toward the south, one finds peoples who are almost as miserable and as stupid as those who inhabit Tierra del Fuego, peoples whose dwellings offer the most disgusting aspect, and who nourish themselves on the crudest foods [231].

To what causes must the superiority of intelligence of the Tchinkitanés be attributed? The scholar who published the voyages of Captain Marchand thought that this people descends from Mexicans who took refuge on these coasts at the time of the Spanish invasion. M. de Humboldt does not believe that fugitives could have traversed the immense distance of thirty degrees of latitude to seek refuge on sterile coasts. But might there not have existed, in America, other civilized nations closer to the north, who would have perished even before the Mexican nation had succumbed? The numerous fortifications discovered in the most favorable latitudes of North America give this opinion much probability [232].

When violent events, such as invasions and conquests, do not disturb the order that nature follows in all her creations, civilization spreads only gradually over the surface of the earth. If a center of light is formed somewhere, and if the peoples are not separated by uninhabitable deserts or by inaccessible mountains, one does not pass suddenly from a brilliant day to profound darkness. All that surrounds the place where the center was formed is at first illuminated by it; the light weakens as one moves away, and finally one arrives at a point where it can no longer reach. It is not only in considering peoples as a mass that one perceives this gradation; one also observes it in each particular state; among all peoples, one finds centers of light of greater or lesser size, whose effect diminishes as one moves away. Now, what was the climate in America under which the first center of light was formed? that under which the intellectual faculties of man received their first developments? It was between the tropics, under the torrid zone: civilization seems to have spread from there into temperate and easily cultivated places; but it never arrived in the cold countries; one finds in the most northern part of America no monument that attests to an ancient civilization [233].