Note 172 — Chapter XIX

Which I deny. Affection, like love, is the fruit of animalism refined by sentiment. The old travellers knew better than the poet. “Here paternal affections and filial love hardly exist,” says the History. So Bosman declares of the Gold Coast: “The mother gives the infant suck for two or three years; which over, and they able to go, it is then ‘Turn out, brutes!’” An absorbing egotism is the necessary rule of savage and barbarous humanity, and society must have made great progress before a man can think of his neighbour’s interests and live. Hence the old author asserted of the negroes: “They are insensible to grief and want, sing till they die, and dance into their graves.” Mr. Duncan (vol. ii. p. 79) says: “Not even the appearance of affection exists between husband and wife, or between parents and children. So little do they care for their offspring, that many offered to sell me one of their sons or daughters as slaves. They are, to speak the truth, in point of parental affection, inferior to brutes.” But why multiply quotations?