Compendium of the Natural and Civil History of Chile

XVI.

Dazzled by the consequences of the ideal system he proposed to follow for reasons easily guessed, he carries things to such an extreme that his work remains in the category of an improbable novel. Nor does the logic with which he attempts to prove his decisive assertions do much honor to his intellect and talents, for it is enough for there to be a single small island or a district with some defect in the entire immense continent of America for all its provinces to share in it; it is sufficient for him to characterize so many and such innumerable nations by a wretched tribe of the most unknown savages Molina uses the term "savages" (salvages) to mirror the language of 18th-century debates, though he does so here to mock Pauw’s dismissive attitude toward diverse Indigenous civilizations.. It would be never-ending if I wished to expose one by one the inconsistent premises from which he deduces his anti-American conclusions, and by which method any other region of the earth could be equally discredited; but neither reason nor philosophy will ever approve of such a way of proceeding.

In short, PawLikely referring to Cornelius de Pauw (1739–1799), a Dutch philosopher and diplomat whose theories about the "degeneracy" of the American continent and its inhabitants were widely debated and criticized in the late 18th century. has written about the Americas and their inhabitants with the same