Chapter XX Tyranny of the Nervous System
Accord and discord between organs and acts.—Torses and sacred scarab.—The hand of man.—Mediocre fitness of sexual organs for copulation.—Origin of “luxuria.”—The animal is a nervous system served by organs.—The organ does not determine the aptitude.—Man’s hand inferior to his genius.—Substitution of one sense for another.—Union and rôle of the senses in love.—Man and animal under the tyranny of the nervous system.—Wear and tear of humanity compensated by acquisitions.—Man’s inheritors.
It is a universal belief that nature or God, in their wisdom, have made the corporal organs in the best possible form: perfection of the eye, of the hand, of the paw-jaw of the mantis, of the sexual apparatus of man, of the bird or the scarab, the furnishing tarses of hymenoptera, the beaver’s tail, the grasshopper’s hams, the cicada’s tambourine. It is sometimes true and very often false. It happens that there appears an exact concord between the organ and the act which it is to perform; but it happens also, and that not rarely, that the organs seem in no way fashioned for the deed they must accomplish: most of them are indeed chance tools, with which the creature manages, as he can, the acts which he wants to, or should, do.
The forefeet of scarabs are so little destined for modelling and rolling mud-balls that their tarses are worn out in the process, as human fingers would perhaps be worn if they had to knead the raw clay and mortar. In considering the scarab one has to think of a humanity lacking fingers, having lost them by a long and slow diminution of nails, bones, flesh. The scarab is a modeller, nothing would be more useful to him than fingers; instead of losing them by use, he ought to have grown them longer and more supple. He has lost them, and it is with the arm stumps that he turns the little balls which are to be food for himself or his offspring. This insect is condemned to a labour that will become increasingly difficult as the species grows increasingly older. It remains to know whether the ancestors of the sacred scarab had tarses. Horus Apollo grants them as many fingers as the month has days, that is thirty, which corresponds quite well with the six feet and five tarses of the scarab. If he was a good observer, the question is answered, but a single testimony is insufficient, and moreover it is unlikely that so great a wearing-away would have occurred in so small a number of centuries. Horus, and a savant like Latreille himself, have been the dupes of symmetry; if either has looked closely at a scarab, and if he has seen the forefeet lacking tarses, he has put this down to chance or to accident. Fabre has at least noted one indisputable fact, it is that neither as nymph nor adult has the scarab tarses on his forefeet. If it ever had them, our reasoning draws new vigour from the negation, for then less than ever is it possible to find the least logical concordance between the insect’s stumps and the need of modelling and turning to which nature condemns it.
This scarab is a type to which one can relate a great number of other examples: purveyor hymenoptera are wholly deprived of tools adapted to their work as quarry-men and well-diggers: thus, at the end of their labours the greater part of these fragile insects are very much damaged. One knows the beaver’s constructions, but who without the certitude we have gained by observation, would have dared to attribute them to these great rats?
Eighteenth century philosophers set themselves the question: Is man man because he has hands; or has he hands because he is man? One may answer boldly, that man’s hands marvellous as they appear to us, add almost nothing to his intelligence. One does not see that they are indispensable for anything save for playing the piano. What constitutes man is his intelligence, his nervous system. The exterior organ is secondary: no matter what exterior organ, beak, prehensile tail, teeth, proboscis, paws would have done the work of the hands. There are birds’ nests which no manual cleverness could weave.
The reproductive organs are no better adapted to their purpose than are the working organs. Doubtless they attain very often their end, but at the cost of efforts which a better disposition would have attenuated or eliminated altogether. The interior mechanism is, or seems, marvellous; the external mechanism is rudimentary and gives no result, save, as they say, thanks to the ever-renewed ingenuity of the couples. Instinct, in one of its most necessary acts, is often put to difficult proof. The plausible adventure of Daphnis has been presumably often repeated, even though the limberness of the human form is well suited to coition; but who has not been surprised to see a heavy bull leap clumsily onto a lowing cow, bending his useless hocks along her back, panting, and often not succeeding save thanks to the good offices of a farm hand? Among beavers, says A. de Quatrefages (Orbigny’s “Dictionnaire d’histoire naturelle”), the external orifice of the generative organs opens in a cloaca so placed under the tail that one hardly understands how the coupling takes place.
Certain matings are sheer tours de force, and the animal whether it be the scutilary, a tiny insect, or the elephant, a colossus, is compelled to take positions absolutely different from its normal postures. Nature who firmly intends the perpetuity of the species, has not yet found a simple and unique means thereto; or else, having found it, in budding, she has cast it aside to adopt the diversity of organs, means, and movements. There are none, even to those of our own specie which man may not criticize, even though he prize them; he has criticized, and his criticism has been to diversify them still further, which simplifies a fated necessity in making it pleasanter. Morals term this diversification “luxure.”1 This term is a pejorative which may be applied also to the exercise of our other senses. All is but luxuria. Luxuria, the variety of foods, their cooking, their seasoning, the culture of special garden plants; luxuria: the exercises of the eye, decoration, the toilet, painting; luxuria, music; luxuria, the marvellous exercises of the hand, so marvellous that direct hand work can be mimicked by a machine but never equalled; luxuria, flowers, perfumes; luxuria, rapid voyages; luxuria, the taste for landscape; luxuria, all art, science, civilization; luxuria, also the diversity of human gestures, for the animal in his virtuous sobriety has but one gesture for each sense, and that gesture unvarying; or if the gesture, as probable, undergoes a change, it is but a slow, invisible change, and there is at the end but one gesture. The animal is ignorant of diversity, of the accumulation of aptitudes; man alone is “luxurieux,” is libidinous.
There is a principle which I will call the individualism of species. Each specie is an individual which profits as best it may, for its useful ends, by the instruments which have devolved to it. A specie of hymenoptera feels itself obliged to protect its eggs from new enemies, by digging holes in the ground; it makes use of the tools which it has, without taking count of the fact that these tools have not been made for excavation; it acts thus at pressure of necessity, as man climbs trees in a flood, or gets onto the roof in case of fire. The need is independent of the organ; it precedes it, and does not always create it. In the sexual act, need commands the gesture: the animal adapts itself to positions which are strange to it, and very difficult. Coupling is nearly always a grimace. One would say that nature has set the male organ here, and the female there, and left to specific ingenuity the care of effecting the junction.
It is, I think, permitted us to conclude from the mediocre fitness of animals to milieu, and of organs to acts, that it is not the milieu which absolutely fashions, or the organs which absolutely govern, the acts. One then feels oneself inclined to reaccept Bonald’s definition of man, and even to find it admirable, just, and strict: An intelligence served by organs. Not “obeyed,” not always, but served, service implying imperfection, a discord between the order and its fulfillment. But the phrase applies not to man only, and its spiritualistic origin in no way diminishes its aphoristic value; it qualifies every animal. The animal is a nervous centre, served by the different tools in which its branches terminate. It commands, and the tools, good or bad ones, obey. If they were incapable of performing their work, at least the essential parts of it, the animal would perish. There are forms of parasitism which seem to be the consequence of a general renunciation of organs; impotent to enter into direct relations with the outer world, unmanned by the softness of the muscles, the nervous system brings the skiff it was piloting into some harbour or other, and beaches it.
Fabre says, thinking particularly of insects: “The organ does not determine the aptitude.” And this most aptly confirms Bonald’s manner of seeing. Thrown in at the end of a chapter, with scarcely anything directly to justify it, this affirmation but gains in value. It is the conclusion, not of a dissertation, but of a long sequence of scientific observations. As for the facts that one can set inside it, they are innumerable; one would group them under two heads: The animal serves himself as best he can with the organs he possesses; he does not always make use of them. The flying-stag, the best armed of all our insects, is inoffensive; while the carabe, of peaceful appearance, is a formidable beast of prey. Apropos of the pill in which the scarab shuts its egg, the skill with which it is worked up and felted, in a dark hole by a stump-armed insect, Fabre says simply: “It gave me the idea of an elephant wanting to make lace.” But in what insect will we see perfect accord of work and organ? In the bee? It would scarcely seem so. The bee uses for building, modelling, waxing, bottling honey, exactly the same organs that her sisters, the ammophile, bembex, sphex, ant, chalicodome, use for hollowing earth, excavating sand, making cellars, mud houses. The libellule does nothing with the hooks which render the termite dangerous, and she loafs, while her industrious brother, also neuroptera and nothing more, builds Himalayas.
The mole-cricket is so well organized for digging with her short powerful bow legs that she could cut sandstone: she frequents only the soft soil of gardens. The antophore, on the other hand, with no instruments save her mediocre mandibles, her velvet paws, forces the cement which holds the stone walls together, and bores the hardened earth of the slopes by the roadside.
Insects, like man, moreover, ask nothing better than to do nothing and to let their tools sleep; the xylocope, that fine violet bumble-bee, who ought to bore into wood, a gallery twice a hand’s length wherein to lay her eggs, if she finds a suitable hole ready made, confines herself to the meagerest possible works of accommodation. In sum, the insects who like the saw-fly (tenthredes) use a precise instrument for a precise job, are almost rare.
Man’s hand, to come back to this point, is useful to him because he is intelligent. In itself the hand is nothing. Proof, in the monkeys and rodents who use their hands only to climb trees, louse themselves, and crack nuts. Our five fingers! Really nothing is more broadcast in nature, where they are only a sign of age: the saurians have them, and are not a bit more clever thereby. It is without fingers, without hands, without members that the larvæ of insects construct for themselves marvellous mosaic shells, weave themselves tents in silk-floss, exercise the trades of plasterer, miner, and carpenter. But this hand of man, become the world’s marvel, how inferior to his genius, and how he has had to lengthen it, refine it, complicate it, in order to obtain obedience to the increasingly precise orders of his intelligence. Has the hand created machines? Man’s intelligence immeasureably surpasses his organs, and submerges them; it demands of them the impossible and the absurd: hence the railway, the telegraph, the microscope and everything which multiplies the power of organs which have become rudimentary in the face of the brains’ exigence, the brain being our master, who has demanded also of the sexual organs more than they were able to give: it is to satisfy these orders that the bed of love has been scattered with so many dreams and rose-leaves.
It is difficult to make people understand that the eye sees, not because it is an eye, but because it is situated at the tip of some filaments of nerve which are sensitive to light. At the end of filaments sensitive to sound, the eye would hear. Doubtless it is adapted to its function, as the ear is to hearing, but this function is an effect, not a cause. Insects’ eyes are very different from ours. One has spoken of the experiments of a German savant who wished to throw visual images on the brain without the eye’s intervention. This is suspicious, but not absurd: insects are gifted certainly with the power to smell, but one has never been able to discover the organ in any single one of them; and, also, the rôle of the antennæ which seems very considerable in their life, remains very obscure, since the removal of these appendices has not always a measurable effect on their activity.2
Organs, evidently the most useful, are sometimes placed in a position which diminishes their value. Notice a resting horse, and another horse coming toward him (observation can be made quite easily in the streets of Paris), what is he to do to gauge the danger, and reconnoitre the movement? Look at the other horse? No. His eyes are made to look sideways, not forward. He uses his long ears, raises them, shifts their open side toward the noise. Reassured he lets them fall, and re-establishes his calm. The horse looks with his ears. The blinkers by which people pretend to make him look forward, merely blind him, and perhaps, thereby diminish his impressionability. Blind horses moreover do the same work as the others.
The senses, as one knows, are substitutable one for the other, in a certain degree; but in the normal state they seem rather to reinforce each other mutually, and lend each other a certain support. One does not shut the eyes to hear better, save when one has determined the source of the sound. And even then, is it to hear better? Is it not rather to reflect and to hear at the same time, to manage an interior concentration with which the eye, essentially an explorative organ, would interfere?
It is in love that this alliance of all the senses is most intimately exercised. In superior animals, as well as in man, each sense, together or in groups, comes to reinforce the genital sense. None remain inactive, eye, ear, scent, touch, even taste come into play. Thus one explains the gleam of plumage, the dance, song, sexual odours. The female eye, in birds, is more sensitive than the male eye; the contrary is true of humanity; but female birds and women are particularly moved by song or words. The two sexes in dogs have, equally, recourse to scent; sight seems to play but an insignificant rôle in their sexual access, since minuscule canine beasts do not fear to address themselves to monsters, which for man would be in proportion more than that of a mammoth. Insects before mating often caress each other with their mysterious antennæ; the male is sometimes given a sounding apparatus: cricket and grasshopper drum to charm their companions.
It is not necessary to explain how in humans, especially in the male, all the senses concur in the amour, at least when moral and religious prejudices do not stop their impetus. It should be so, in an animal so sensitive, and of so complex and multiple a sensibility. The abstention of a single sense from the coupling is enough to enfeeble the pleasure very greatly. The coldness of many women may proceed less from a diminution of their genital sense, than from the general mediocrity of their senses. Intelligence, being but the ripe fruit of the general sensibility, its intensity is very often found to be in a certain relation with the sexual sensibility. Absolute coldness might signify stupidity. There are, however, too many exceptions for one to generalize in this matter. It happens indeed that intelligence instead of being the sum total of the sensibility, is, so to speak, the deviation or transmutation. There remains very little sensibility; it is nearly all turned into intelligence.
Every organized animal has a master: its nervous system; and there is, doubtless, no real life save where a nervous system exists, be it the magnificent infinitely branching tree of mammals and birds, be it the double, knotted cord of the mollusks, or the nail head which is planted, in ascides, between the buccal and anal orifice. As soon as this new matter appears, it reigns despotically, and the unforeseen appears in the world. One would say a conqueror, or rather an intruder, a parasite come in by stealth, and lifting itself into the royal rôle.
Animals bear this tyranny better than man. Their master asks fewer things. Often it only asks one: to create a being in its exact likeness. The animal is sane, that is to say, ruled; man is mad, that is to say, out of rule: he has so many orders to execute at once, that he scarcely does any one well. In civilized countries he can hardly reproduce himself and the specie is in danger. It would disappear, if the means of protecting it did not compensate the sterility.
One can not say that humanity has attained its intellectual limits, although its physical evolution seems completed; but as superior human specimens are nearly always sterile, or capable of only mediocre posterity, it is found that, alone among values, intelligence is not transmitted by generation. Then the circle closes and the same effort ends ceaselessly in the same recommencement. However, even here, artificial means intervene, and the transmission of the acquisitions of intelligence is relatively assured by all sorts of instruments. This mechanism, much inferior to carnal generation, permits us, if the most exquisite forms of intelligence disappear as fast as they flower, to preserve at least part of their contents. Notions are transmitted, that is a result, even though most of them are vain, in default of sensibilities sufficiently powerful to assimilate them and make a real life of them.
Finally, if man ought to abdicate, which seems unlikely, animality is rich enough to raise up an inheritor. The candidates for humanity are in great number, and they are not those whom the crowd supposes. Who knows if our descendants may not some day find themselves faced with a rival, strong and in the flower of youth. Creation has not gone on strike, since man appeared: since making this monster, nature has continued her work: the human hazard might reproduce itself on the morrow.
Notes
1 The Latin luxuria and French luxure have no exact English equivalent; our “luxury,” is the French luxe; the phrase “the exercise of pleasant lusts” is perhaps as near as I can come to a definition of luxure.—Translator.
2 Fabre’s experiments on mason bees, the shaggy ammophile, and great-peacock moth.