dunbar12
Author: Unknown
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Essay XII

Of the Tendency of Moral Character to Diversify the Human Form

The mind itself is often the original seat of disorder which is transferred to the animal system. In the history of individuals, it is obvious to observe, that a distempered imagination, and irregular passions, frequently prey upon the body, waste its vigour, and even hasten its dissolution. Judging then from analogy, it seems not unreasonable to expect, that the passions, to which society is occasionally obnoxious, may be productive of similar effects upon the multitude, appear in exterior symptoms, impair the soundness of public health, and enervate the principle of animal life. What form of society is most open to this annoyance, is a problem which, perhaps, the history of the species is not able to resolve. But, in general, it may be pronounced of human life, that the vindictive, the envious, and unsocial passions are hostile to the possessor, while all the opposite emotions diffuse a kindlier influence over our animal frame.

“How miserable are the damned! said Saint Catherine of Genoa, “they are no longer capable of love.” So close is the social union, that if the fiercest tyrant that ever existed in human form was doomed to be himself the executioner of his bloody edicts, the victims of his tyranny would become the instruments of his punishment, and the torture inflicted would be more than he could endure. The little tyrant of Greece, whom the Hecuba of Euripides chased from the public theatre, all bathed in tears, retained, in defiance of himself, the sensibility of nature. And if the heart is thus liable to be subdued by fiction, how should it sustain, in similar circumstances, the actual presence of woe? To be callous to such impressions, is to be more or less than man; and, even where virtue is extinct, our organized system is liable to be affected by this powerful sympathy of minds.

Varieties of national character we observe imprinted on the physiognomy of nations. The several qualities of levity or vanity, dignity or pride, pusillanimity, fortitude, dulness, vivacity, ferocity, meekness, and a thousand nicer gradations of moral character, rise up in the visage, and mark the exterior of man. Individuals, it is allowed, are often found devoid of the characteristics that predominate in the family, in the tribe, or in the nation to which they belong, while they retain, nevertheless, all the usual marks of those characteristics. Hence, physiognomy is a delusive art; men are belied by appearances, till at last the genuine expression of the individual is interpreted, and declares the fallacy of more equivocal and general signs. These general signs, the accumulated effect, perhaps, of prevailing habit for generations, may become congenial to a race; and, being wrought into the organization, cannot be effaced at once by the absence of the causes which contribute to their formation. To correct, and to establish mental habit, is the prerogative of a moral agent; but the lineaments and proportions of the body are not variable with the gradations of intellectual improvement; and hence the mind is of often at variance with the forms which the countenance assumes, in consequence of its primaeval cast. When the most exalted genius of antiquity, by the exertion of this prerogative, had reformed and ennobled all the features of his character, a physiognomist, by the rules of art, judged of him from his constitutional propensities.

Some latitude, however, is allowed to man in this adjustment of things. He can often conceal or disguise his sentiments by the suppression of the natural sign; he can assume appearances, without the feelings to which they belong. In the exercise of this talent he displays consummate address; and artificial language, more at command, favours the deceit, and countervails the language of nature. Such artifices confer, if I may say so, a false and temporary physiognomy, that violated the connection of things, and belies the system of the mind. But so difficult and laborious is this effort of art, that the most dextrous dissemblers, aided by all the powers of words, often fail in the attempt. A Writer, profoundly versed in the human character, yet more disposed to heighten its blemishes than its perfections, has remarked, in one of the greatest statesmen of his time, this struggle between art and nature. “It is, indeed, true,” says Dean Swift of my Lord Somers, “that no man is more apt to take fire upon the least appearance of provocation, which temper he strives to subdue with the utmost violence upon himself; so that his breast has been seen to heave, and his eyes to sparkle with rage, in those very moments when his words, and the cadence of his voice, were in the humblest and softest manner. Perhaps that force upon his nature may cause that insatiable love of revenge which his detractors lay to his charge, who consequently reckon dissimulation among his chief perfections.” [History of the Four last Years of the Queen.]

“In order to know people’s real sentiments,” says an adept [Chesterfield’s Letters, vol. i.

p. 357] in the science of deceit, “I trust much more to my eyes than to my ears; for they say whatever they have a mind I should hear; but they can seldom help looking, what they have no intention that I should know.”

To form false combinations is not only difficult, but the execution probably is always imperfect; and hence the great master in expression, whether orators, or actors on the stage, must endeavour to feel all the emotions they would display to advantage. That becoming attitude, that arrangement of feature they would assume, is found attainable only by the medium of
corresponding sentiment. Thus the connections of things is maintained, and we are not deceived unless by attributing a solidity and permanency to sentiments which have so unsubstantial and perishing an existence. This illusion of imagination, practised on themselves, and by which alone they compass their ends, may even sway the moral character. In often personating the hero, there is acquired a cast of heroism; and in personating mean wretches, there is danger of actual debasement; for sentiments find an easy ingress through the imagination into the heart, and the occasional sentiments of the actor may become the habitual principles of the man. Thus, the profligate or libertine, long acted, abates the love of decorum; and he who can sustain the enthusiasm of any virtue, though in a borrowed character, has probably appropriated to himself some share of its real energy. It is this mode of proceeding which discriminates the actor of genius from the inferior mimic, whose talents are exhausted in the transcript of visible signs, regardless of their foundation in the human mind. In the one case, the representation is just and natural; in the other, aukward and inanimated; and, by such criterion, a sagacious observer will distinguish real excellence from mechanical imitation in the fictitious drama, as in the drama of the world, candour from affectation, and the truth of character from dissimulation and imposture.

In the interpretation of natural signs, there is an obvious distinction to be made between such as imply immediate feeling, and the moral general, which, without reference to the present state of the mind, intimate its habitual and predominant temper. As, for instance, an occasional start of good-humour differs from the propensity which constitutes a good-humoured man, so differ their respective signs. But as frequent returns of the emotion declare the propensity, so frequent returns of the corresponding sign tend ultimately to the establishment of a fixed and permanent criterion in the corporeal texture. The particular signs, where no artifice is used, are never equivocal; and compose the first elements of language. But, as has been before observed, between the general signs and the temper, a repugnancy may often subsist. In the one case, the evidence is explicit; in the other, it is only presumptive. The former constitution was expedient or necessary for the purposes of social intercourse; but it was neither necessary nor expedient, that the character of the mind should be legible in the countenance, and in the full view of every beholder.

Upon the whole, it may be concluded, that the mental qualities and the corresponding signs are not necessarily coincident, or the result of one physical arrangement, but stand rather in the relation of cause and effect; the latter growing out of the former, in consequence of those mysterious laws which pervade the system of man. Thus moral sentiment diversifies the outward form; and though the varieties which indicate national character, may often be equally consistent with health and vigour; yet, in certain circumstances of society, there is reason to believe, that the predominant feelings of our nature become highly injurious to the animal oeconomy.

Let us suppose a tribe of mankind reduced to a situation the most humiliating and
calamitous; cramped in their intellectual exertions by an illiberal discipline; prone to the sentiments they must learn to dissemble, and averse from other sentiments they are obliged to counterfeit; at perpetual variance with fortune; and led, by the rigour of its persecutions, to cherish the odious, the rancorous, the vindictive, to the exclusion of all the gentler passions.

Under such circumstances, it were contrary to the whole analogy of nature, if the bodily constitution remained sound and untouched. Nor is the picture we have drawn copied from imagination, and assumed merely on the prerogative of hypothesis. The original is, perhaps, to be contemplated in the history of the antient world; among the bondmen of Judea, the helots of Sparta, the subjects of domestic tyranny among the Romans. The condition of those tribes was indeed sufficiently wretched: yet such as, in some respects, might almost excite envy, when compared with that severer destiny, to which the maxims of modern policy have condemned, in another hemisphere, a large proportion of the species.

Of all the nations of antiquity, the Athenians treated slaves with most humanity; the Spartans with the least. If, in the treatment of women, the Spartans have appeared worthy of such superior praise; in this other branch of public manners, they are far inferior to the rival state. The most wanton debasement of slaves entered into the avowed plan of their civil discipline. The helots were even compelled to commit vice, in order to inspire an abhorrence of it in the Spartan youth; to besot themselves with intoxicating liquors, in order to afford a lesson of moderation to the free citizen. But how shocking is that policy which sported with humanity in one form, to give it dignity in another; and authorised a breach of morality, with a view to enforce its precepts! It is equalled perhaps only by the policy of some modern states, who are said to encourage or connive at the corruption of their priests, with a view to check the influence which superstition is apt to give to that order of men over the minds of people.

The Cryptia, or ambuscade, by which the dark and insidious murder of the helots was
authorised by law, casts a dismal shade on the whole fabric of Spartan jurisprudence. It implies a degree of barbarity to which, it must be owned, there is no parallel, even in the black code, or in the present regulations of any European state. There is, however, ground to believe, that so shocking an institution was suggested on a general revolt of the slaves, by the apprehension of public danger, but disgraced not the system of Lycurgus, nor the purer ages of the Spartan commonwealth. In general, the condition of antient slaves was less unhappy. The Chronia of the Greeks, the Saturnalia of the Romans, could even invert the distinction of ranks. Slaves, on these festivals, were served by their masters; and all ranks of men were reminded, by an admirable establishment, of that primitive equality which was supposed to have subsisted in the reign of Saturn, and the golden age. Some intervals of freedom were thus permitted; some short respite to the wretched. But the negro tribes are unacquainted with any such indulgences. And, without taxing their American masters with an inhumanity beyond the nations of antiquity, we may observe peculiar circumstances in their destiny that enhance its rigour. Their masters, without being more inhuman by nature, are in practice more unjust. Antient slaves found a refuge in the sympathy of their masters, which the negroes do not so easily excite. Their features and complexion, regarded as natural badges of inferiority, seem to mark them out for servitude; and, furnished an occasion for unreasonable contempt, or antipathy approaching to hatred, extinguish that fellow-feeling with their sufferings, by which their grievances would often be lightened, and the hand of the oppressor disarmed.

Hatred, envy, and revenge grow up naturally under such sufferings. But the love of
liberty, the most stubborn principle of the heart, is at length eradicated. Self-reverence is gone; and emancipation itself cannot restore them to the honours of human nature. In time, they view themselves almost in the light in which they are viewed by their rulers; and it is thus they finally acquiesce in their destiny, and cease even to think like free men, after having long ceased to be free.

If then the unfortunate natives of Africa, the subjects of our dishonourable and odious commerce, do, in reality, degenerate in the various regions to which they are transferred, and, far from multiplying, cannot even keep up the number of the stock without perpetual recruits, it is not improbable that the insolence of tyranny, and the violence offered to the stubborn passions and feelings of nature, contribute as largely to that degeneracy in their frame, as the smart of the rod, or malignity of climate, or the labours they are forced to endure.

The reduction of the negro tribes to perpetual servitude was contended for in the fifteenth century, on this notable ground, “that they had the colour of the damned.” This ground can only be occupied in an ignorant and superstitious age. But the arguments, by which the same conduct is still attempted to be vindicated, though more subtle and refined, are equally repugnant to reason, to humanity, and to sound policy. Those arguments have accordingly been refuted, from all these considerations, by some of the most respectable writers in our own and other nations; by Hume, by Smith, by Montesquieu; and, in a manner the most decisive and animated, by an Author, [Hist. Phil. et Polit. tome iv. p. 161, et suiv.] who unites, to the warmest zeal for the rights of mankind, a comprehensive knowledge of their interests; and who has adorned a work, abounding in various and useful information for all nations, with all the lights of philosophy, and all the splendor of eloquence. But the conviction of men of science is not the conviction of the crowd, and has often but little weight with the rulers of nations; to whom alone it belongs, by prohibiting the importation of slaves under the severest penalties, to annihilate for ever a traffic which throws so great a stain on the political oeconomy of modern ages.

The late resolution of the Quakers in Pennsylvania to emancipate their negro slaves, seems to evidence a degree of pure and disinterested virtue in that people, beyond the example of the most virtuous communities of antient times.

The love of civil liberty is surely a generous passion; yet it is capable of being combined with the love of domination: and it may perhaps be affirmed, that the toleration of domestic slavery, among the Greeks and Romans, tended to inspire an additional ardour in the cause of freedom. The severities inflicted on their slaves heightened the dread of their own eventual sufferings. Tyrants at home, they became more jealous of tyranny in their civil rulers, and even impatient under the controul of legal dominion. They contemplated political through the medium of domestic servitude, and because in reality more tenacious of civil liberty, by persisting in a conduct that rendered them more unworthy of it. Perhaps the same cause has been productive of similar effects in some of the colonies of America. Yet the noblest passion in the human breast is more naturally cherished by the love of justice and humanity. And t is reserved for some happier age to abolish, throughout the new hemisphere, an institution, which has polluted the history of the freest governments in the antient world.

In some of the Spanish provinces, where the negroes are less employed in field work than in domestic service, their condition is somewhat elevated; but it is by the depression of another part of our species still more wretched. Submission is more or less humiliating, from the consideration of the persons to whom it is paid. A child is not degraded by submission to a parent; nor a subject, by allegiance to his lawful prince. But to be exposed to the insults of a race of slaves, is the lowest form of debasement. Yet such has been the fortune of the native Indians in those very countries where their ancestors sustained the character of flourishing and happy nations. Among the inhabitants of the Spanish colonies, they rank below the negroes; who, elevated by this distinction, treat them with insolence and scorn. And it is the insidious policy of the Spaniards, to sow the seeds of discord and animosity between the two races, who will one day perhaps lay aside their mutual rancour, in order to retaliate their common miseries on their imperious masters.

The American features and complexion, scarce less offensive to the Europeans than the African, allowed equal scope to their antipathies; while these antipathies were heightened and inflamed by the jealousy entertained of the vanquished. And though the condition of the Indians is improved by the more recent regulations of the Spanish policy, had it been possible for their ancestors at the conquest to have predicted so long a series of calamity, it might well have inspired, throughout the empires of Peru and Mexico, such a desperate resolution, as was actually executed at that aera by an Indian tribe in the island of Saint Domingo, who unanimously interdicted themselves the commerce of sex, that they might not entail their miseries on a posterity. Thus the Indians in those regions has suffered extinction, not degradation: and who would hesitate to prefer the first, when such alternatives alone are presented by fortune?

But the pen drops from my hand, in reciting the enormities acted by European in the new hemisphere. Nor should I have entered so far into the detail, were I not called upon by my subject to contemplate life from its highest to its lowest gradation, and to illustrate those moral situations, which are so capable of producing degeneracy in the human frame. And such consequences may be allowed to follow from the intimate union of mind and body, without favouring those systems of materialism, which, however fashionable in the philosophy of the present age, seem to confound the most important distinctions of our being. The body, as has been observed, may prosper while the mind is debased. The mind may flourish, while the body is losing its perfection. Yet the shocks which are felt in the transition from a free and happy state to that of slavery and dejection, may prove, to the last degree, injurious to the organization of man. It is not so much any debasement or elevation of the mental powers, that we have supposed destructive, as unnatural restraint, as the revolt of the spirit, and the intenseness of inward emotion. The limit of this influence over a people, we pretend not to fix with precision; yet that the contagion of the mind, in a variety of ways, affects the whole animal oeconomy, is established by the history of individuals, of tribes, and of nations. And as the condition of a slave is by far the most wretched in the lot of man, so its tendency is apparently the most destructive.

Of this, the history of the negro tribes furnishes an immense variety of the most melancholy examples. And it is sufficiently attested, that great numbers of the native Indians of America, when thy found they were treated as slaves by the Spaniards, have died of vexation, or destroyed themselves in the frenzy of despair. Under the rigour then of such discipline, we may expect the decline of the animal system, if not the total extinction of the degraded race.

But the perfection of the animal is not the perfection of the man; neither do their
infirmities necessarily correspond. It is, therefore, of more importance to enquire how far moral and civil culture affect the system of the mind, and consequently create original and essential differences in the temper and genius of posterity: a question which, promising some farther openings into the theory of the human character, deserves to be considered in a separate Essay.