The idea of the inequality of the human races is a constant in Renan’s thinking, even if he does not always pay much attention to it. This is because for him it goes without saying. "Men are not equal; races not equal. The negro, for instance, is made to serve the great enterprises that have been willed and conceived by the white man" ( Philosophical Dialogues and Fragments, p. xxix). And he imagines with horror what would result from the opposite position: "The lack of sound regarding the inequality of races may bring about a general debasement . . . . Fancy what a spectacle the earth would have presented, had it peopled solely with negroes, subordinating everything to individual enjoyment in the midst of a general mediocrity" (pp. 36-37). [p.111]

This vision of the races quite naturally entails some practical consequences. In The Future of Science, Renan imagines an educational project that retains some traces of the spirit of the Enlightenment (Helvetius or Condorcet): "The scientific and experimental study of the education barbarous races will become one of the most striking problems offered to the mind of Europe" (p. 359). However, at roughly the same time, in L'Origine du langage, a different project is emerging, one that has to be recognized as imperialistic : "Since the Aryan race and the Semitic race . . . are destined to conquer the world and restore unity to the human species, the rest of the world counts, alongside these races, only as experiments, obstacles, or auxiliaries. (p115) . . .

            Renan makes this vision somewhat more explicit in “La Re[/]forme intellectuelle et morale de la France” [Intellectual and Moral Reform in France]: “Nature created a race of laborers, the Chinese . . .; a race [p.112] of field-workers, the Negroes . . . ; a race of masters and soldiers European race" (p. 390). He conceives of a world state (the master race would "restore unity to the human species") in which races replace classes . . .  Everything is the work of nature; it is futile to protest. Humanity has no common ideal;  there are as. many models for happiness as there are races. "The life that disgusts our workers would make a Chinaman or a fellah happy for these creatures are in no way military. Let everyone do the work that he is intended to do, and all will be well" (p. 391). . . .  [pp.113]

Le Bon's position is distinguished by its tendency to identify the hierarchy of race with the hierarchies of sex and class (although Renan, was beginning to make the latter association, as we have seen). There is no need to go to Africa to observe the inferior races: we can simply study the workers at home. "The lowest strata of the European cities are homologous with the primitive men" (The Psychology of Peoples, p. 29). "It would suffice . . . to allow time to act to see the superior grade of a population separated intellectually from the inferior grades by a distance as great as that which separates the white man from the negro, or even the negro from the monkey” (p.43).  Within each country, some part of the population does not lend itself to civilization; Le Bon sees this threat hanging over the United States, a country that has absorbed too many members of inferior races into its work force.

And there is no need even to go to the factories or farms to see how primitive mentalities work: it suffices to go into the kitchen and take a [p.114] quick look at that inferior being who is your wife (Le Bon’s reader is necessarily male).  Between the observer and the observed, then, there is "great mental separation . . . The man and the woman may have common interests and sentiments, but never like chains of thought.  The difference in their logical faculties is alone sufficient to create between them an insuperable gulf ' (p. 36).We can see that, in Le Bon eyes, the civilized white man leads a dangerous life, surrounded as he is by so many abysses. The proof of female inferiority, and of the similarities between women and Negroes, is provided by craniology, another of Dr. Le Bon's specialties. White skulls are larger than black skulls -- but only in men; male skulls are larger than female skulls -- only in whites. "The average of the skulls of female Parisians classes, them among the smallest skulls with which we are acquainted, almost on a level with the skulls of Chinese women, and scarcely above the feminine skulls of New Caledonia" (p. 49). What else is there to say!