Phenomenon Portuguese Quotes

Von Igelfeld was not sure. He remembered reading that Hume believed that our minds vibrated in sympathy, and that this ability – to vibrate in unison with one another – was the origin of the ethical impulse. And Schopenhauer’s moral theory was about feeling, was it not; so perhaps they were one and the same phenomenon.

A facile approach to this underside of the Portuguese presence in Asia would be to dismiss it as little more than a generalization of the phenomenon later celebrated by Joseph Conrad in Lord Jim: of the European “going native.” It is the contention in this chapter that such an approach is false, because it imposes on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the judgements and categories of a later period, judgements that were crucially related to changed attitudes towards miscegenation, and the “proper” place of the European in Asia.