224 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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 of theirs he endeavored to find out what moral right the Spaniards, 

 and the whites generally, had to look down upon people who think as 

 they do, study the same things they study, and have the same mental 

 capacities they possess, simply because these people have a brown skin 

 and stiff straight hair. 



Europeans regard themselves as the sovereign masters of the earth, 

 the only supporters of progress and culture and the sole legitimate 

 species of the genus Homo sapiens, while they proclaim that all other 

 races are inferior, by refusing to acknowledge their capability of ac- 

 quiring European culture, so that, according to the European view, 

 the colored races are varieties of the genus Homo brutus. Kizal then 

 asked himself, Are these views just? He began asking this question 

 when he was a school boy and at the same time began to answer it by 

 observing his white fellow students closely while he studied his own 

 mental processes and emotions in order to make comparisons. He 

 soon remarked that, in school at least, no difference could be detected 

 between the intellectual level of the whites and Filipinos. There were 

 lazy and industrious, moral and immoral, dull and intelligent boys 

 among the whites as well as among the Filipino scholars. Soon this 

 study of race spurred him to exert himself to the utmost in his school 

 studies and a kind of race rivalry took possession of him. He was over- 

 joyed whenever he succeeded in solving a difficult problem which baffled 

 his white companions. But he did not regard these events as personal 

 successes so much as triumphs of his own collective people. Thus it 

 was in school that he first became convinced that whites go through 

 the same intellectual operations as Filipinos and — ceteris paribus — 

 progress in the same way and to the same extent. From this observa- 

 tion he came to the conclusion that both whites and Filipinos have the 

 same natural intellectual endowment. 



In consequence of this conclusion there manifested itself in Bizal, 

 as he himself avowed, a sort of national self-exaltation. He began to 

 believe that the Tagals must stand higher intellectually than the Span- 

 iards (the only whites he had known up to that time), and he used to 

 like to tell how he came to this fallacious conclusion. In the first place, 

 lie said, in his school the whites received instruction in their own lan- 

 guage while the Filipinos had to worry with a strange idiom in order 

 to receive instruction which was given in it alone. The Filipinos there- 

 fore must be better endowed intellectually than the Spaniards, he 

 inferred, since they not only kept up with the latter in their studies but 

 even surpassed them, although handicapped by a different language. 

 Still another observation caused him to disbelieve in the superiority of 

 the European intelligence. He noticed that the Spaniards believed that 

 the Filipinos looked up to them as beings of a superior nature and 

 made of a finer clay than themselves. But Kizal knew very well that 



