Some are backward at birth, and have to make up, in the brief space of their individual history, the stages they missed on their way out of the black past.
With me, for example, it actually comes to this: that I have to recapitulate in my own experience all the slow steps of the progress of the race.

I seem to learn nothing except by the prick of life on my own skin.

I am saved from living in ignorance and dying in darkness only by the sensitiveness of my skin.

Some men learn through borrowed experience.

Shut them up in a glass tower, with an unobstructed view of the world, and they will go through every adventure of life by proxy, and be able to furnish you with a complete philosophy of life; and you may safely bring up your children by it.