290 PSYCHOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION. [PART II. 



hibiting a chief feature in the character of the uncultured man 

 his remarkable indolence. The cause is not exactly that,, in 

 the natural state, man is forced to make great efforts to support 

 himself, so that rest affords great enjoyment. The true cause we 

 apprehend to be that man by nature shuns every kind of 

 labour ; that he undertakes none which is not absolutely re- 

 quisite for his well being. Though his indolence may have 

 brought him to want, notwithstanding his experience may have 

 enabled him to foresee his fate, he concerns himself little about 

 the future, but he hopes for the best. Indolence and thought- 

 lessness, in an incredible degree, are characteristic of perfectly 

 uneducated human beings, and it requires but little knowledge 

 of the lower classes, even in Europe, to perceive that indolence 

 is enjoyment to man in the natural state, and not merely in 

 consequence of moral degeneracy. If we could for a short time 

 remove the motives of vanity and ambition from the civilized 

 world, even he who has the most lofty ideas of human nature, 

 would soon find that indolence is the ideal of most people. 



It is nothing but poetical fancy which endows the primitive 

 man with a desire for intellectual progress ; the habit of 

 indolence induces him to remain in his actual condition. 

 He never from internal impulse and without any external 

 agency, desires to become civilized, just as the lower classes in 

 Europe abandoned to themselves desire nothing of the kind so 

 long as their material interests are not suffering ; and yet they 

 have before their eyes the results of a higher civilization : hence 

 the comparatively slow progress of humanity. " The world 

 would look quite different," observed Hume, ' ' if man possessed 

 by nature a little more love for useful activity ; for his indolence 

 seems to keep him fixed for a long time at every stage of his 

 development." 



Peyroux de la Coudreniere 1 appears to have been the 

 first to promulgate the theory that the white race alone is 

 psychically active, and possesses by nature that peculiar desire 

 of knowledge which Aristotle ascribed to man generally, 

 and that consequently all higher culture of other races can 



1 " Mem. sur les sept especcs d' Homines," Paris, 1814. 



