When I Was Old by Georges Simenon Page B

little time (another tendentious word!).
    ‘Aren’t the human races that are called primitive
(Pygmies, Hottentots, Guineans) on the contrary degenerate branches, returned to their wild state like the asses, cattle and pigs of the Galápagos?
    ‘Instead of a rise with plateaus haven’t there rather been rises and descents, with only certain races representing the rises?
    ‘Why, for example, in Africa, are one, two, or three generations, sometimes only one, enough for an evolution which, without contact with the white race, would never have taken place or would have taken centuries to produce?
    ‘Personal experience: in one month one can teach an illiterate black who has never seen whites before to drive a car.
    ‘Facility in absorbing mechanical concepts for the first time.
    ‘But in four centuries, in Martinique, it has been impossible to teach blacks philosophical concepts. The Bible and the Gospels were transformed into the Voodoo cult.
    ‘For an African or an Asiatic the bases of nuclear physics are easier to digest than elementary philosophical concepts (ours, of course!).
    ‘Ethics is more strongly incorporated into man and more difficult to replace by a foreign ethic.
    ‘The exact sciences, on the other hand, do not take the place occupied by something else.
    ‘Vacuum propitious to exact sciences?
    ‘In the United States, statistics indicate that mathematics
is more easily accessible to less philosophically developed classes, and it is the middle classes (and below) from which future students of the great schools like MIT are recruited and cadres of engineers are formed.
    ‘In France, blacks had been studying at the Polytechnic for a long time, while there were still cannibals in their native lands.
    ‘Does this only indicate a certain laziness, a resistance to certain disciplines, on the part of the children of rich or advantaged classes? Are the sciences of interpretation or of synthesis more attractive?’
    ‘Apathy, and, in some respects, resigned and
sad
refusal of evolution by the large primates like the gorilla. They make no effort to slow or avoid extinction.
    ‘Antithesis of the rat, which adapts to all conditions and all climates.
    ‘Doesn’t adaptation go with the philosophical mind?
    ‘Are there, in fact, resigned races and aggressive races?’
    ‘In man: aggression in primitives – non-aggression in the evolved?
    ‘Does evolution regularly stop at a certain stage?
    ‘Would this explain why each people, in turn, arrives at a certain degree of civilization, stops, gives up, and leaves to others the exertion of going first?
    ‘
Idem
for families of individuals?
    ‘
Idem
for moulds?
    ‘Will there be an age of aggression and an age of philosophic resignation?’
    ‘Possibility of a relationship of zoology and anthropology to psychology.’
    ‘Everything seems to me to have been born out of the sea. So one finds the first man at the seashore. First food shellfish, then fish, then small mammals.
    ‘The weakest races, thereby more or less doomed, are always hunted further inland by stronger races, into the forests, then into the mountains. Higher and higher as the competition becomes more intense.
    ‘So the doomed species, the last examples of the doomed species, would be found in the high mountains.
    ‘
Idem
for men? (Examples of the Indies, of Borneo, the Andes, etc.)
    ‘In seashore civilizations, then on the plains, one finds a certain exuberance, a certain gaiety.
    ‘The higher one climbs … (Muteness and sadness of the people in the high mountains.)
    ‘Comparison or parallel between animals and species that are too weak and retreat before disappearing.
    ‘It would be interesting to compare religions, legends, traditions, songs, dances, etc., of the seaside peoples, then those of the plains, the hills, and finally those of the mountains from this point of view.
    ‘Aggressiveness of races which have a future and passivity of the races which no longer have one?
    ‘(This