MORAL ENERGY AND INTELLECTUAL LAW

"I find this loss of moral energy particularly harmful and pernicious, for it affects the individual's mental health. Ultimately, intellectual inequalities among individuals, if not among races, may be explained by differences in temperament or moral complexion. Indeed, in intellectual endeavors as in any other enterprise, only self-confidence and will power guarantee success. Thus, a man who is told over and over that he is naturally inferior ends up doubting that he has any natural abilities. He is stopped in his path; in fact, he is condemned to stagnate...

"What better rebuttal can one oppose to the arguments of the proponents of black inferiority than all those Haitians who have excelled in all sorts of intellectual fields, and those American blacks and Liberian blacks who have shown indisputably superior abilities in all sorts of intellectual endeavors? In Haiti as elsewhere, the considerable progress made by Ethiopians in literature and in the philosophical, biological, and natural sciences, may not be matched by similar progress in higher mathematics, a field which many persist in considering as the highest manifestation of intelligence. But we cannot pass judgment until they have career opportunities in this field. In fact, it seems that progress follows a pre-established pattern, as Claude Bernard suggests: 'It is rightly said that literature is the elder sister of science. There is an intellectual law, according to which a nation always produces its poets and philosophers before it does its scientists.'"