the east African's character. 



325 



bigotry of the old. He has " beaten lands" and seas. For 

 centuries he has been in direct intercourse with the more 

 advanced people of the eastern coast, and though few 

 have seen an European, there are not many who have 

 not cast eyes upon an Arab. Still he has stopped short 

 at the threshold of progress ; he shows no signs of de- 

 velopment ; no higher and more varied orders of intel- 

 lect are called into being. Even the simple truths of 

 El Islam have failed to fix the thoughts of men who 

 can think, but who, absorbed in providing for their 

 bodily wants, hate the trouble of thinking. His mind, 

 limited to the objects seen, heard, and felt, will not, 

 and apparently cannot, escape from the circle of sense, 

 nor will it occupy itself with aught but the present. 

 Thus he is cut off from the pleasures of memory, and 

 the world of fancy is altogether unknown to him. 

 Perhaps the automaton which we call spiritual suffers 

 from the inferiority of the mechanism by which it 

 acts. 



The East African is, like other barbarians, a strange 

 mixture of good and evil : by the nature of barbarous 

 society, however, the good element has not, whilst the 

 evil has, been carefully cultured. 



As a rule, the civilised or highest type of man owns 

 the sway of intellect, of reason ; the semi-civilised — as 

 are still the great nations of the East — are guided by 

 sentiment and propensity in a degree incomprehensible 

 to more advanced races; and the barbarian is the slave 

 of impulse, passion, and instinct, faintly modified by 

 sentiment, but ignorant of intellectual discipline. He 

 appears, therefore, to the civilised man a paralogic 

 being, — a mere mass of contradictions; his ways are 

 not our ways, his reason is not our reason. He deduces 

 effects from causes which we ignore ; he compasses his 



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