lleason and Instincts 



6205 



In speaking of the civilization of the New Zealanders I am desirous 

 to be understood as not intending to imply more than the facts will 

 warrant. It is yet a question, I believe, whether the civilization of 

 New Zealand and Polynesia (not to name other sites of the s])ecies of 

 civilization under mention) is likely to be permanent, — whether, in 

 other words, it has in it the capacity of self-sustentation. At present 

 the impression seems to be that, except under circumstances pro- 

 viding a continued supply, and for some time to come, of external 

 teaching, example and influence, the degree of cultivation attained is 

 not likely to be maintained. It appears that up to a certain point 

 instruction is with the utmost ease received, retained and assimilated 

 by the learner, but that there is a point at which development of this 

 sort stops. The masters say," speaking of some of these islanders 

 (Walpole's ' Four Years in the Pacific') that in all the early parts of 

 their education they are exceedingly quick, but not in the higher 

 branches ; that they have excellent memories, and learn by rote with 

 wonderful rapidity, but will not exercise their thinking faculties." 

 Some of these scholars were full-grown men, others little children. 

 This fact appears to me to be exceedingly interesting ; and it seems 

 to be, so far, observable in all or nearly all newly-civihzed savages. 

 It is as though there were a barrier, which they could not pass, at this 

 point of their intellectual improvement. And there is another cir- 

 cumstance of not less interest in connection with these people and the 

 question of the probable permanence of their newly-induced culture ; 

 I mean that there is an only too-obvious infirmity or instability of will 

 among them. Singularly impressionable, equally ready and able to 

 forsake their own customs or usages, and rapidly to acquire new ideas 

 and new habits, they yet require to be kept as it were " in leading- 

 strings and must remain so until a generation of more solidity of will 

 arises." (' Quarterly Review,' December, 1853). I termed the two facts 

 just noticed interesting, and indeed I think they are. 1 hardly know 

 how to state the inference they seem to me not so much to justif}-^ as 

 to require, in such a manner as not to be offensive to the sticklers for 

 the prerogatives and supremacy of the human race in contrast with 

 the brute races. But it does seem as though the savage, — the uncul- 

 tivated, uncivilized human being, —by his incapacity to exercise fully, 

 if at all, his higher intellectual faculties, and by the comparative 

 feebleness or instability of his will, not only justifies our position as 

 to the comparative predominance, in certain particulars, of his 

 instinctive powers and propensities— for the latter, it is at once appa- 

 nut, can only be developed in inverse proportion to the intelligence 



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