Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 61.djvu/230

224 of theirs he endeavored to find out what moral right the Spaniards, and the whites generally, had to look down upon people who think as they do, study the same things they study, and have the same mental capacities they possess, simply because these people have a brown skin and stiff straight hair.

Europeans regard themselves as the sovereign masters of the earth, the only supporters of progress and culture and the sole legitimate species of the genus Homo sapiens, while they proclaim that all other races are inferior, by refusing to acknowledge their capability of acquiring European culture, so that, according to the European view, the colored races are varieties of the genus Homo brutus. Rizal then asked himself, Are these views just? He began asking this question when he was a school boy and at the same time began to answer it by observing his white fellow students closely while he studied his own mental processes and emotions in order to make comparisons. He soon remarked that, in school at least, no difference could be detected between the intellectual level of the whites and Filipinos. There were lazy and industrious, moral and immoral, dull and intelligent boys among the whites as well as among the Filipino scholars. Soon this study of race spurred him to exert himself to the utmost in his school studies and a kind of race rivalry took possession of him. He was overjoyed whenever he succeeded in solving a difficult problem which baffled his white companions. But he did not regard these events as personal successes so much as triumphs of his own collective people. Thus it was in school that he first became convinced that whites go through the same intellectual operations as Filipinos and—ceteris paribus—progress in the same way and to the same extent. From this observation he came to the conclusion that both whites and Filipinos have the same natural intellectual endowment.

In consequence of this conclusion there manifested itself in Rizal, as he himself avowed, a sort of national self-exaltation. He began to believe that the Tagals must stand higher intellectually than the Spaniards (the only whites he had known up to that time), and he used to like to tell how he came to this fallacious conclusion. In the first place, he said, in his school the whites received instruction in their own language while the Filipinos had to worry with a strange idiom in order to receive instruction which was given in it alone. The Filipinos therefore must be better endowed intellectually than the Spaniards, he inferred, since they not only kept up with the latter in their studies but even surpassed them, although handicapped by a different language. Still another observation caused him to disbelieve in the superiority of the European intelligence. He noticed that the Spaniards believed that the Filipinos looked up to them as beings of a superior nature and made of a finer clay than themselves. But Rizal knew very well that