and when he thinks of his continued success in the struggle for
supremacy he feels that he has a right to be proud of himself and his
race. He looks upon the black man as the fool of the human family who
has failed in every way, whereas he, the lord of creation, has achieved
the impossible, and this comparison which is so favourable to himself
naturally leads him to set up achievement as the sole test of ability.
If asked why the African Native has never accomplished anything at all
comparable with the feats of the European or the Asiatic the average
white man will answer, without hesitation, that it is because the Native
has always lacked the necessary capacity.

The average white man has a more or less vague notion that his own proud
position at the top of human society is the result of the continuous and
assiduous use of the brain by his forefathers in the struggle for
existence under the rigorous conditions of a northern climate during
thousands of generations by which constant exercise the mental faculty
of his race grew and increased till it became, in course of time, a
heritable intellectual endowment, whereas the Natives of Africa by
failing always to make use of whatever brain power they might have been
blessed with in the beginning have suffered a continuous loss of mental
capacity.

The idea that the evolution of the human intellect is a perpetually
progressive process by means of the constant use of the brain in the
pursuits of increasing civilisation towards the eventual attainment of
god-like perfection is one that appeals strongly to the popular fancy,
and its corollary, that those who fail during long periods to make full
use of their mental equipment in the ways of advancing civilisation must
gradually lose a part, if not the whole, of their original talents, is
commonly accepted as being warranted by the teaching of modern science.