Around the mid-nineteenth century, in fact, there existed a number of schools of thought, occupying themselves with the fundamental question of proving the inherent superiority of one people over another. A possible reason for their coming into existence was search for some popular explanation to account for the fact of imperialism, and to rationalize it in the public mind.
The aptitude of a race to colonies and the tendency of another to be colonized were already reflected in a number of earlier philosophical thinkers’ categories, devised mostly on racial lines. Gustav Klemm and A. Wuttke had designated the so-called civilized races as active and all others as passive in 1843. Carus divided mankind into “peoples of the day, night and dawn” in 1849, depending on their place in the scale of civilization, and implicitly marking out the ones who needed help to be pulled out of the continuing ‘night’.
Nott and Gliddon ascribed animal instincts only to the Tower’ races, and it was deduced from this by their supporters that conquest by the civilized races would slowly cure such instincts of the conquered. In all these categories, however, the supposed racial attributes, which made one race the perpetual conqueror and another doomed to conquest forever, had not been linked to any identifiable cause as yet.
Writings of the 1850s became more specific and pointed in their search. The first identifiable reasoning was in terms of alleged superior mental capacity of a people as compared to another: one would then naturally rule over another. These mental characteristics, moreover, seemed to clearly stem from some fixed attribute, which must be pinned down.
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Climate was a part of the unchanging environment surrounding any given set of people, and provided, in a number of creative ways, a ready explanation for the lower races’ possession of lower mental faculties. A.H.Keane, one of the vice presidents of the Anthropological Institute at Cambridge proposed that in excessively hot and moist intertropical regions, in the struggle for survival by the inhabitants, the animal side of a human being is improved at the expense of the mental side.
Another interesting point of view was that mental development suffered in regions where food was easily and abundantly available e.g. in the tropical regions. On the other hand, it was claimed that wherever men have been involved in a strenuous conflict with a cold climate, they have acquired heroic qualities of character: energy, courage, and integrity. It is important to note here that “struggle for existence” vis-a-vis the climate was held to have different consequences for the whites and the non-whites.
In the former it developed virtues of character, in the latter animal like physical development at the cost of the mental. A transition from ‘mental qualities’ to the category of ‘racial qualities’ was certainly an advance as far as popular rhetoric was concerned: new assertions could now be made without any reference to a constant factor like physical environment/climate as the earlier authors were impelled to do.
The genetically determined physical traits (manifested in the physical appearance of the body) become more important than the physical environment/ climate as the determinant of mental capacities of the colonized races. All along, there was a parallel school of research working on the physical person of the colonized, attempting to reach the same conclusion, viz. the colonized needed to be colonized.