Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Le Bon Gustave
Title : Anatomical and Mathematical Researches into the Laws of the Variations of Brain Volume and their Relation to Intelligence
Year : 1879

Link download : Le_Bon_Gustave_-_Anatomical_and_Mathematical_Researches_into_the_Laws_of_the_Variations_of_Brain_Volume.zip

Anatomists are today in agreement in recognizing that it is principally in the inequalities of the development of the nervous system where one must seek the origin of the differences which differentiate living beings. It was hardly a century ago that many philosophers considered all men as being endowed with a uniform nature and equal intelligence, and attributed their differences to the unequal education which they received. However, any attentive study of the diverse races that inhabit the globe will demonstrate the inanity of this belief. Such a study will show that the physical and intellectual differences which distinguish the various representatives of our species are profound and are produced in the newborn. Each man, it can be clearly perceived, already possesses behind him a long past. The ensemble of physical, intellectual, and moral characteristics which manifest themselves at some point exists already in the germ and represents the heritage of the past. A person’s aptitudes are the result of all the successive modifications undergone by his long series of ancestors. The ages weigh on him like a load, and there is no way to remove it. With his beauty and his ugliness, with his virtues and his vices, man conveys the traces of a past which is not his own. It requires the work of centuries and not that of one day to bring about by education the level of the European nations to savages similar to our ancestors of geologic ages, people who were unaware of metal, ignorant of agriculture, killed their aged parents and possessed no law but that of the strongest. ...