l proficiency the world has
indeed advanced to an astonishing extent, but the perfection of our
modern machinery means only a gradual and very recent advance upon
earlier methods and does not denote a corresponding development in the
mind itself. The Greeks had no machinery to speak of, neither had the
English in the days of Shakespeare and Newton, but who can doubt that
the engineers of those times would have been equal to the task of
understanding and applying the principles of modern mechanics had the
necessary books been available to them? We do not assume that because
the modern Germans excel as chemists they are therefore blessed with
higher reasoning ability than were the contemporaries of Socrates and
Plato who had no knowledge of the science of chemistry. The conclusion
forced upon us after a sober and impartial survey of the facts of
history is that, although the intellectual output of the world is always
increasing, the intellect itself remains unaltered. Knowledge, we see,
is after all, only descriptive, never fundamental. We can describe the
appearance and condition of a process, but not the way of it, and though
knowledge has come in rich abundance, wisdom still lingers.

The foregoing argument shows that the alleged mental superiority of the
European cannot be due to constant use or education, so that it now
becomes necessary for those who maintain that it nevertheless exists to
prove, not only that the white man's intellectual capacity is now
superior but to prove also that from the beginning it has always been
stronger and better than that of the African Native, or, in other words,
those who believe that the white race has inherent mental superiority
must prove innate inferiority in the mental make-up of the Native.

There is a more or less indefinite notion abroad that the Bantu
languages, as compared with those of Europe, are but poor and
ineffective vehicles for the conveyance of abstract ideas, wherefore the
capacity to form and entertain such ideas may be taken to be innately
inferior in the Native brain. That the language of a people embodies, so
to speak, in objective form the intellectual progress made by it is
certainly true, and it will be well, therefore, to state briefly the
actual and potential value of the Native speech as compared with that of
the whites.

The living and the dead languages of the world have been classified by
philologists into three main types of linguistic morphology;