Parenthetically, It Is Now A Question Whether Or Not An Added
Impulse Can Be Communicated From Without.
Such an impulse must
(a) unsettle all the old beliefs, (b) inspire an era of
skepticism, (c) reintroduce the
Old struggle of ideas between the
Insurgent and the Standpatter, and Radical and the Conservative,
(d) in the meantime furnish, from the older civilization,
materials, both in the thought-world and in the object-world, for
building slowly a new set of customs more closely approximating
those we are building for ourselves. This is a longer and slower
and more complicated affair than teaching the native to wear
clothes and sing hymns; or to build houses and drink gin; but it
is what must be accomplished step by step before the African
peoples are really civilized. I, personally, do not think it can
be done.
Now having, a hundred thousand years or so ago, worked out the
highest good of the human race, according to them, what must they
say to themselves and what must their attitude be when the white
man has come and has unrolled his carpet of wonderful tricks? The
dilemma is evident. Either we, as black men, must admit that our
hundred-thousand-year-old ideas as to what constitutes the
highest type of human relation to environment is all wrong, or
else we must evolve a new attitude toward this new phenomena. It
is human nature to do the latter. Therefore the native has not
abandoned his old gods; nor has he adopted a new.
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