uneducated Native people.

I have lived amongst the Bantu for nearly thirty years and I have
studied them closely, and I have come to the conclusion that there is no
Native mind distinct from the common human mind. The mind of the Native
is the mind of all mankind; it is not separate or different from the
mind of the European or the Asiatic any more than the mind of the
English is different from that of the Scotch or Irish people. The
English way of speaking differs from that of the French, but there is no
reason for thinking that the mind of the two people differs in any way
whatever. The languages of the world are many but the mind of the world
is one.

There are, I know, some white men who talk knowingly about a Native mind
which they allege to be unlike their own, a mind of whose strange
anfractuosities they profess a special knowledge, but these people must
not be taken seriously. They are always half-educated men, suffering,
as Cardinal Newman said, from that haziness of intellectual vision which
is so common among all those who have not had a really good education.
These people pretend to a knowledge which is impossible, seeing that we
can only know and understand the minds of other people by assuming that
they are like our own so that if we postulate a Native mind different
from our own it must of necessity remain unknowable by us, for what is
psychology but the power of understanding others from our understanding
of ourselves?

The judge on the bench and the priest in the confessional follow the
thoughts and feelings of the minds they have to deal with, not by virtue
of any special power of divination, but simply by judging their
fellow-men's way of thinking and feeling to be even as their own.

The truth of the matter is that all men think in the same way, but not
always about the same things. There is no such thing as an inherent
racial mind but there are different national and racial cultures lasting
sometimes for centuries, like that of China, and some times only for a
generation, like that of modern Germany. But these differences are
temporary and outward and not inwardly heritable. The difference between
the mind of the philosopher and the plough-boy is one not of kind, not
even of degree, but of content. The things that occupy the mind of the
peasant farmer are not the same that fill the mind of the university
don, but if the respective environments of the two types had been
reversed the professor mi