Feijoo's Mapa intelectual y cotejo de naciones (Teatro critico, discourse XV)
The discourse in which a Benedictine in Oviedo argues that no nation holds a monopoly on intelligence — and devotes its American section to demolishing the idea that the Indians were governed by instinct rather than reason. Its sharpest line answers the story of gold traded for glass beads: whoever judges them coarse for that is coarser than they are. Read here in the Madrid 1765 printing of the second tome, whose censura is dated 1728.
Why this wins its question: Feijoo reaches English-language summaries as a debunker of superstitions, and this discourse, when it is mentioned at all, is mined for the one sentence about criollos being quicker than peninsulars. The part that matters is the part nobody quotes: an argument from Oviedo, printed under licence, that the Indians were never the fools of the glass-bead story and that the fool is whoever believed it. This object gives that argument in the writer's own words from the sheets, with the bishop, the Jesuits and the conquest history he leans on named, his own warning about hyperbole included, and the fact that no American speaks in it recorded as its own claim rather than left out.
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 second tome of the Teatro critico universal, "nueva impresion, en la qual van puestas las adiciones del Suplemento en sus lugares", printed "En Madrid: En la Imprenta de Antonio Perez de Soto. Año M.DCC.LXV. a costa de la Compañia de Impresores, y Libreros del Reyno". Its table of discourses lists "Mapa intelectual, y cotejo de Naciones" as discourse XV at page 348, and the censura bound into the front matter is signed by Fr. Joseph Navajas at Madrid on 28 February 1728, which fixes the composition of the tome to the late 1720s and this volume as a later reprinting of it.
The discourse opens by conceding the strongest form of the climate argument where Feijoo thinks it holds. Its first line is that "No es dudable que la diferente temperie de los Paises induce sensible diversidad en hombres, brutos, y plantas", and the examples that follow are of plants innocent in one country and venomous in another, and of animals that degenerate entirely from the character held to be typical of their species. The argument of the rest of the discourse is therefore not that climate does nothing, but that what it does to intellect has been wildly overstated.
The section on Africa states the general principle in one sentence. Africans and Spaniards, Feijoo writes, have the same blood and the same sky as when the Africans were the superiors of the Spaniards in military skill and Carthage cost Spain dearly, "y por tanto capaces de producir iguales genios. Si les falta la cultura, no es vicio del clima, sino de su inaplicacion." The section argues capacity from ancient military and rhetorical examples; the Atlantic slave trade then carrying Africans to the Americas is not mentioned anywhere in it.
The American section names the opinion it means to destroy. "El concepto que desde el primer descubrimiento de la America se hizo de sus habitadores, y aun oy dura entre la plebe es, que aquella gente no tanto se gobierna por razon, quanto por instinto: como si alguna Circe, peregrinando por aquellos vastos Paises, huviese transformado todos los hombres en bestias." Feijoo answers that "Con todo sobran testimonios de que su capacidad en nada es inferior a la nuestra."
His first authority is a bishop's memorial to the king. Feijoo writes that "El Ilustrisimo señor Palafox no se contenta con la igualdad: pues en el Memorial que presento al Rey en favor de aquellos vasallos, intitulado Retrato natural de los Indios, dice que nos exceden", and repeats three of Palafox's cases: an Indian who practised six trades with perfection, one who learned the organ-builder's trade in five or six days purely by watching the master and without being taught, and one who made himself an organist in fifteen days.
The same page carries a courtroom anecdote in which the cleverness is entirely the Indian's. An Indian recovered a horse a Spaniard had stolen, the Spaniard swearing before the justice that it had been his for many years and the Indian having no witness. The Indian threw his cloak over the horse's eyes and asked the Spaniard which eye it was blind in; the Spaniard, taken aback, said the right; the Indian lifted the cloak and showed the judge and the whole company that the horse was blind in neither, "y convencido el Español de el robo, se le restituyo el cavallo al Indio".
The central argument of the section overturns the standard proof of Indian stupidity, the trading of gold for glass beads. "Es discurrir groseramente hacer baxo concepto de la capacidad de los Indios, porque al principio daban pedazos de oro por quentas de vidro. Mas rudo es que ellos quien por esto los juzga rudos." Value follows scarcity, Feijoo argues: where ornament is concerned the rarer thing is always preferred, and they had gold and no glass, so a small string of glass beads was rightly a finer jewel to a princess there than a great chain of gold. He generalises the point with cases in which Europeans were the ones exchanging by local scarcity rather than by intrinsic worth, including a Dutch admiral at the Cape of Good Hope in 1605 receiving thirty-eight sheep and two cows for a little iron, and the inhabitants of Formosa valuing brass above gold until the Dutch taught them otherwise.
Feijoo dates the evidence of equality to the conquest itself, from a history of it: "Apenas los Españoles debaxo de la conducta de Cortes entraron en la America, quando tuvieron muchas ocasiones de conocer, que aquellos naturales eran de la misma especie que ellos, e hijos del mismo Padre", the military stratagems of that people being on the page that follows "nada inferiores a las de Carthagineses, Griegos, y Romanos".
On the Spaniards born in America he endorses one claim and refuses the rider attached to it. "Muchos han observado que los Criollos, o hijos de Españoles, que nacen en aquella tierra, son de mas viveza, o agilidad intelectual, que los que produce España." What others add — that those wits, as they dawn earlier, also grow dark sooner — he declines to accept: "no se que este justificado."
The peoples reputed most barbarous get the longest treatment. Feijoo reports Lafitau on the nations of North America, whom others call savages, praising their government and their oratory to the point of saying that their speeches can run level with those of Cicero and Demosthenes; adds in a footnote Sebastien Rasles among the Illinois, who found nothing hyperbolical in that and describes a chief's unprepared harangue that the ablest Europeans could not have composed better after long study; and cites Father Chome on Guarani, which "no cede en nobleza, y harmonia a ninguno de los Idiomas que el avia aprendido en Europa". He also prices his own evidence: "Puede ser que en esto aya algo de hyperbole; pero no tiene duda, que se hace muy diferente juicio de las cosas miradas de cerca que de lexos."
The section closes on the optics of distance. "Padece nuestra vista intelectual el mismo defecto que la corporea, en representar las cosas distantes menores de lo que son." No man, however giant, does not look a pygmy at a great distance, and the same happens to the stature of souls: in nations very remote from ours, men are figured so small in the line of men "que apenas llegan a racionales. Si los considerasemos de cerca hariamos otro juicio."
The limits of the argument are visible in its own sources. Every witness Feijoo calls for America is European — a bishop's memorial, a history of the conquest, two Jesuit relations and a missionary's letters — and no American author, indigenous or creole, is quoted in the section. The claim being defended is capacity only: nothing in these pages examines conquest, tribute or forced labour, which are not the subject of the discourse.