THE SEliF AND THE OTHER
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him a moment of repose than man, making a gigantic effort,
achieves an instant of concentration, enters into himself, that is, by
great labor keeps his attention fixed upon the ideas that spring
up within him, ideas which things have evoked and which have
reference to the behavior of things, to what the philosopher will
later call "the being of things." For the moment it is an extremely
clumsy idea of the world, but one which permits man to outline a
first plan of defense, a preconceived course of conduct. But the
things around him neither allow him to spend much time in this
concentration, nor even
if
they permitted it would our primigenial
man be capable of prolonging this twist of the attention, this fixation
upon the impalpable phantoms of ideas, for more than a few
seconds or minutes. This inwardly directed attention, this stand
within the self, is the most antinatural and ultra-biological of phen–
omena.
It
took man thousands upon thousands of years to educate
his capacity of concentration a little--only a little. What is natural
to him is to disperse himself, to divert his thought outward, like
the monkey in the forest and in his cage in the zoo.
Father Chevesta, explorer and missionary, who was the first
ethnographer to specialize in the study of the pygmies- probably,
as you know, the oldest known variety of man-and who went to
find them in the forests of the Tropics-Father Chevesta, who
knows nothing of the theory I am now setting forth and who con–
fines himself to describing what he sees, says in his most recent
book, on the dwarfs of the Congos:
They completely lack the power of concentration. They are always
absorbed by external impressions, whose continual change prevents
them from withdrawing into themselves, which is the indispensable
condition for any learning. To put them on a school bench would
be an unbearable torture to these little men. So that the work of the
missionary and the teacher becomes extremely difficult.
But even though momentary and crude, this primitive stand
within the self tends basically to separate human life from animal
life. Because now man, our primigenial man, goes back and again
submerges himself in the things of the world, but resisting them,
not delivering himself wholly over to them. He has a plan against
3. Bambuti, die Zwerge des Congo, 1932.
