Feijoo's Españoles Americanos (Teatro critico, tome IV, discourse VI)
A discourse written because a reader told the author he had printed a common error. Feijoo had reported that Spaniards born in America ripen early and decay early; corrected, he devoted a whole discourse to destroying the second half, answering a saying with named living men and explaining the criollos' early degrees by their method of study rather than by their climate. Read in the Madrid 1773 printing of the fourth tome.
Why this wins its question: The theory that the American environment degenerated whatever lived in it is usually dated from Buffon and De Pauw in the 1760s and 1770s and answered from Clavijero in 1780. This discourse was printed in 1730, and it takes the same argument apart before the famous quarrel begins - not by asserting American superiority but by refusing both the flattering and the injurious halves of the same saying, and by replacing the climate with a curriculum. This object gives it from the sheets: the admission that the author had printed the error himself, the eulogy of a named office-holder near seventy, the sentence in which Spanish universities come off worse than American ones, the list of historians he leans on, and the limit of the argument - it is about criollos, not about Indians - recorded as its own claim.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The text used here is the fourth tome of the Teatro critico universal, "nueva impresion, en la qual ván puestas las addicciones del Suplemento en sus lugares", printed at Madrid in M.DCC.LXXIII "en la Imprenta Real de la Gazeta" and "á costa de la Real Compañia de Impresores, y Libreros". The tome was first published in 1730; what is read here is a printing forty-three years later whose own title page states that the supplement's additions have been moved into the body, so the wording is not guaranteed to be that of the first impression.
The discourse states its purpose in its first sentence, and the criterion is not patriotism but injury to a group. "Una pluma, destinada á impugnar errores comunes, nunca se empleará mas bien, que quando la persuasion vulgar, que vá á destruir, es perjudicial, é injuriosa á alguna República, ó cúmulo de individuos, que hagan cuerpo considerable en ella. Asi como es inclinacion de las almas mas viles deteriorar la opinion del próximo, es ocupacion dignisima de genios nobles defender su honor, y desvanecer la calumnia."
The error being destroyed was one the author had printed himself, and he says so on the same page. Having touched in the second tome, discourse XV, number 21, the common opinion that the criollos, sons of Spaniards born in America, "asi como les amanece mas temprano que á los de acá el discurso, tambien pierden el uso de él mas temprano", he was advised by an unnamed correspondent of illustrious blood - whom he declines to name so that the eulogy cannot be charged to imprudence or envy - that the whole opinion belonged among the common errors, and with proofs so conclusive that anything Feijoo adds is only to give the discourse some extension.
The refutation is made by producing named living men against a saying. The eulogy that runs into page 112 is of a criollo of sixty-eight years or a little more who knows philosophy, chemistry, botany, anatomy and medicine "con perfeccion (aquella de que el presente estado de estas facultades es capáz)", answers any question in history without recourse to books, exercises the office of Contador de Cuentas y particiones of the Real Audiencia and of the other tribunals of the city, and presides over an academy of mathematics and eloquence "que formó á sus expensas" - the whole accumulation shining, Feijoo writes, "en la edad casi septuagenaria de este esclarecido Criollo". The next paragraph sets beside him two Spaniards of the peninsula in their sixties still trusted with the government of Gerona and with the Regiment of Infantry of Santiago.
The explanation offered for what everyone had noticed is institutional, not climatic, and it ends in a comparison that runs against Spain. The criollos' anticipated progress in the faculties, Feijoo concludes, "no se debe á la anticipacion de su capacidad, sí á la anticipacion de estudio, y continua aplicacion á él. Si en España se practicára el mismo methodo, es de creer, que á los veinte años se verian por acá Doctores graduados in utroque, como en la América." He adds that the same unbroken occupation keeps that age out of the vices its idleness breeds, and says of the Spanish universities that their students, in the intervals of study, come home worse than they left and finish their courses better swordsmen and gallants than philosophers.
The witnesses he calls for the ability of the criollos are the historians of the Indies, named in a list: "Bien sé que muchos Autores celebran, no solo como iguales á los Europeos, mas como excelentes los ingenios de los Criollos. Tales son el Padre Fr. Juan de Torquemada en su Monarquia Indiana: Garzilaso de la Vega en sus Comentarios Reales de los Incas: el señor Don Lucas Fernandez Piedrahita, Obispo de Panamá, en su Historia del nuevo Reyno de Granada: el Padre Alonso de Ovalle en su Historia de Chile: Don Joseph de Oviedo y Baños."
He then refuses the flattering version of the same error, which is what makes the discourse an argument rather than a compliment. Even granting that the American Spaniards exceed the Europeans in comprehension and intellectual agility, "esto no prueba que el uso de su discurso se anticipe á la edad, en que regularmente dá sus primeros pasos el nuestro", since depth and earliness have no connection: "No es preciso, que para el dia mas claro la Aurora amanezca mas presto." His argument against the early-decay error is then indirect and evidential - among the authors alleged, none adds the limitation, "prueba de que no la tienen", because they wrote as historians and not as panegyrists and ought not to have kept it back.
For the conclusion he reserves a witness from the American clergy, chosen because that witness also explains where the error came from: "Don Antonio Peralta Castañeda, Doctor Theologo de la Universidad de Alcalá, Canonigo Magistral de la Puebla de los Angeles, y Cathedratico de Prima de sus Reales Estudios, cuyas palabras transcribiré."
The reach of the discourse should be stated exactly, because it is routinely overstated in both directions. Its subject is the Spaniards born in America - the head-title is "Españoles Americanos" and the men produced in evidence are criollos and peninsulars - and no page read here argues anything about the indigenous or mixed-descent inhabitants of the same countries, whose capacity Feijoo had defended in a different discourse of the second tome. The pages read likewise contain no discussion of conquest, tribute or labour. The claim defended is intellectual capacity and the timing of its decay, and nothing wider.