"Good men, whether they be Christians or rationalists, do not desire to discriminate between races, but the distinctions implanted by Nature are too conspicuous to escape the observation of our senses"
About this Quote
Keith is trying to sound like the reasonable man in the room while smuggling in a conclusion that does the real work: racial hierarchy is not a choice, it is a fact of the senses. The opening move is reputational insurance. By invoking "good men" across ideological camps ("Christians or rationalists"), he frames anti-discrimination as a shared moral reflex, then immediately recasts it as naive sentimentality that must yield to "Nature". The pivot is clean and ruthless: if decent people still end up endorsing racial distinctions, then prejudice is absolved, even ennobled, as reluctant realism.
The subtext is a classic early-20th-century scientific-racist posture: discrimination is bad, but classification is inevitable; and once classification is treated as inevitable, unequal treatment can be sold as merely pragmatic. "Implanted by Nature" is the key phrase. It turns historically produced categories into biological destiny, relocating responsibility from institutions to anatomy. "Too conspicuous to escape the observation of our senses" adds a second layer of rhetorical pressure: if you disagree, you are either dishonest or blind. It pretends objectivity while exploiting the most error-prone instrument imaginable - everyday perception - as if it were a measuring device rather than a cultural lens.
Context matters. Keith wrote in an era when anthropology and anatomy were often recruited to launder empire, eugenics, and immigration restriction in the language of neutral expertise. The sentence performs that laundering in miniature: a moral disclaimer up front, a naturalizing claim in the middle, and a final appeal to common sense that dares the reader to contradict what they are told is simply "obvious."
The subtext is a classic early-20th-century scientific-racist posture: discrimination is bad, but classification is inevitable; and once classification is treated as inevitable, unequal treatment can be sold as merely pragmatic. "Implanted by Nature" is the key phrase. It turns historically produced categories into biological destiny, relocating responsibility from institutions to anatomy. "Too conspicuous to escape the observation of our senses" adds a second layer of rhetorical pressure: if you disagree, you are either dishonest or blind. It pretends objectivity while exploiting the most error-prone instrument imaginable - everyday perception - as if it were a measuring device rather than a cultural lens.
Context matters. Keith wrote in an era when anthropology and anatomy were often recruited to launder empire, eugenics, and immigration restriction in the language of neutral expertise. The sentence performs that laundering in miniature: a moral disclaimer up front, a naturalizing claim in the middle, and a final appeal to common sense that dares the reader to contradict what they are told is simply "obvious."
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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