Science Quote by Edward Burnett Tylor

Tylor’s sentence has the cool, clinical confidence of Victorian science at its most slippery: it sounds like hard-nosed observation, but it’s really a worldview doing administrative work. By praising Indigenous resilience, he sneaks in a biological partition between “the Indian” and “white men,” turning a messy reality of war, disease, and dispossession into a neat story of innate difference. The admiration is real enough, yet it arrives packaged as taxonomy.

The key move is “organization” - an elastic, pseudo-technical word that pretends to be purely physiological while smuggling in a full racial ontology. It lets Tylor imply that Europeans and Indigenous peoples are built on different blueprints, not simply living under different conditions. That matters because it shifts cause from history to nature: if some bodies “recover easily,” then the brutal injuries of frontier conflict can be narrated as less fatal, less tragic, even less ethically urgent. Resilience becomes a way to dull the moral edge of violence.

Context is doing the rest. Tylor wrote in an era when anthropology was hardening into a discipline alongside empire, and “the Indian” functioned as a catch-all category in travel writing and colonial reports. This line echoes that archive: generalized, confident, and uninterested in variability. It’s also a rhetorical sleight of hand: he avoids saying Europeans die more because of unfamiliar climates, different medical care, nutrition, or infection exposure. Instead, he makes difference inherent - and that makes inequality feel inevitable rather than produced.