Pedagogical Anthropology by Maria Montessori (best novels of all time TXT) 📕

Fig. 159.—Apollo.

Since the measurements are extremely numerous, it is necessary, in order to proceed to a separation of types, to select some one measurement to be regarded as fundamental, and in respect to which all others have a secondary importance; and such a measurement is found in the one which is associated with the development of the physiological man; namely, the sitting stature. In the centre there is the medial measurement; little by little, as we withdraw from the centre, we approach on the one side toward macroscelia and on the other side toward brachyscelia. It is possible to determine to within a millimetre the normality of any measurement whatever. When this fundamental datum has once been accepted as a basis for the construction of types, let us assume that we next add another and secondary measurement; for instance, that of the lower limbs. By the method of seriation we obtain a measurement that is absolutely normal when considered by itself; it is the central measurement. A perfectly formed and healthy man ought to possess both the medial sitting stature and the medial length of lower limbs; in actual cases, however, it is difficult to find so favourable a union, and the two series of measurements combine in various ways; showing a tendency, however, to unite in such a way that a short bust goes with long legs, and vice versa. The degree to which this rule is carried out produces two types that steadily tend to become more eccentric; they are the macroscelous and brachyscelous types, or, as De Giovanni calls them, morphological combinations. We have only to calculate the type of stature, and that also groups itself according to the binomial curve; and thus gives us a gradation of the combinations of parts. Viola notes that the paracentral individuals show characteristics quite different from those of the eccentrics; their constitution is more favourable, and they differ in respect to their characteristic proportions between thorax and abdomen, and in certain other physiological particulars that are of pathological importance.

In this way a method has been built up for determining mathematically the one absolute normality; as well as the anomalies in all their infinite variety, which may, however, be regrouped under types, on the basis of their eccentricities.

Here then we have, thanks to Viola, and under the guidance of the glorious school of De Giovanni, a pathway indicated, that is exceedingly rich in its opportunities for research, and that may advance the importance of anthropometry side by side with that of biometry, the development of which is to-day so earnestly pursued, especially in England.

One of the objections which may be raised to the theory of the medial man is that there cannot be any one perfect, human model because of the diverse races of mankind, each with its own established biological characteristics.

For instance, I believe that I have proved that what we consider as beautiful is distributed among different races; in other words, perfect beauty of all the separate parts of the body is never found united in any one race, any more than it is in any one person.

The women of Latium who are dark and dolichocephalic have most beautiful faces, but their hands and feet are imperfect; the brachycephalic blondes, on the contrary, are coarse-featured, while their hands and feet are extremely beautiful. The same may be said regarding their breasts and certain other details. Furthermore, the stature of the dolichocephalics is too low as compared with what is shown to be the average stature, while the brachycephalics are similarly too tall. Nevertheless, it is extremely difficult to discover racial types of such comparative purity as to establish these differences: it was by a lucky chance that I succeeded in tracing out, at Castelli Romani and at Orte, certain groups of the races that were very nearly pure. The rest of the population are, for the most part, hybrids showing a confused intermingling of characteristics.

In fact, pure types of race no longer exist, least of all where civilisation is most intense. In order to speak of types of race, it is necessary to go among barbaric tribes; and even this is a relative matter, because all the races on earth are more or less the result of intermixture. Yet in civilised countries an occasional group of pure racial stock may be discovered in isolated localities, as though they had found refuge, so to speak, from the vortex of civilisation which is engulfing the races. Throughout the history of humanity we may watch this absorption of racial and morphological characteristics, and the formation of more and more intimate intermixtures, leading to the final disappearance of the original types of race.

When a primitive race emigrated, when men crossed over from Africa to the European coast of the Mediterranean, or Aryans from oriental Asia traversed the mountains and steppes of Russia and the Balkan countries, they were on their way to conquer territory and to subjugate peoples, but they were also on their way to lose their own type, the characteristics of their race. Yet even this sacrifice of race was not without compensation: indeed, it seems as though the race loses through hybridism a large part of its ugly characteristics, but retains and transmits for the most part the characteristics that are pleasing. Unquestionably, the more civilised peoples are better looking than the barbarians, although the history of emigration would seem to indicate an almost common racial origin.

When we remember that in human hybridism the result is not always a true and complete fusion of characteristics, but for the most part an intermixture of them—so that, for example, the hybrid has the type of cranium belonging to one race, and the stature belonging to another race—we have the explanation of the fact that throughout thousands of years certain morphological characteristics have remained fixed, to such an extent as to permit anthropologists to use them as a basis upon which to trace out the origins of races. But these characteristics, while fixed in themselves, are interchanged among individual hybrids, who form more or less felicitous combinations of characteristics belonging to several races.

When we recall what was said in this regard concerning heredity (general biological section) it is necessary to conclude that Mendel's law must be invoked to explain the phenomenon.

Human hybridism, like all hybridism throughout the whole biological field, falls under this law.

But there is still another phenomenon that should be noted: civilised men, who are the most hybrid of all hybrids upon earth, have formed a new type that is almost unique, the civilised race, in which one and all resemble one another. It is only logical to believe that, in proportion as facilities of travel become easier and intermarriage between foreign countries more widespread, it will become less and less easy to distinguish the Englishman from the Frenchman, or the Russian or the Italian; provided that the various hybridisms in the respective countries have developed an almost uniform local type, so that the general characteristics of French hybridism may be distinguished from those of English hybridism, etc.

Even these local hybrid types, determining, as it were, the physiognomy of a people, will disappear when Europe finally becomes a single country for civilised man.

In short, we are spectators of this tendency: a fusion or intermixture of characteristics that is tending to establish one single human type, which is no longer an original racial type, but the type of civilisation. It is the unique race, the resultant human race, the product of the fusion of races and the triumph of all the elements of beauty over the disappearance of those ugly forms which were characteristic of primitive races.

Are the dominant forces in the human germinative cells those which bring a contribution of beauty? One would say "yes," on the strength of the morphological history of humanity.

There is no intention of implying by this that humanity is tending toward the incarnation of perfectly beautiful human beings, all identical in their beauty; but they will be harmonious in those skeletal proportions that will insure perfect functional action of their organism. Harmony is fundamental; the soft tissues, the colour of hair and eyes, may upon this foundation give us an infinite variety of beauty. "Even in music," says Viola, "so long as the laws of harmony are respected, there are possibilities of melodic thoughts of infinite beauty in gradation and variety; but the first condition is that the aforesaid laws shall be respected."

The soft and plastic tissues are like a garment which may be infinitely varied: because life is richer in normal forms than in abnormal; richer in triumphs than in failures; and hence more impressive in the varieties of its beauties than in its monstrosities.

Such philosophic concepts of the medial man are exceedingly fertile in moral significance. The ugly and imperfect races have gone on through wars, conquests, intellectual and civil advancement unconsciously preparing new intermarriages and higher forms of love, which eliminated all that is harsh and inharmonic, in order to achieve the triumph of human beauty. In fact, quite aside from the heroic deeds of man, the constructor of civilisation, we are witnessing the coming of the unique man, the man of perfect beauty, such as Phidias visioned in a paroxysm of æsthetic emotion.

A living man who incarnates supreme beauty, supreme health, supreme strength: almost as though it were Christ himself whom humanity was striving to emulate, through a most intimate brotherhood of all the peoples on earth.

On the analogy of the medial morphological man, Quétélet also conceived of the medial intellectual man and the medial moral man.

The medial intellectual man is closely bound to the thoughts of his century; he incarnates the prevailing ideas of his time; he vibrates in response to the majority. He is to his nation and century, says Quétélet, "what the centre of gravity is to the body—namely, the one thing to be taken into consideration in order to understand the phenomena of equilibrium and movement." Considered from the ideal side, the medial man ought to centralise in himself and keep in equilibrium the movement of thought of