Hume, who is considered among the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment, advocated the separate creation and innate inferiority of nonwhite peoples. In the mid-1700s, Hume wrote: “I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufacturers among them, no arts, no sciences” (cited in
...more
