The Psychical Kinship
The Conflict of Science and Tradition
Evidences of Psychical Evolution
The Elements of Human and Non-human Mind Compared
‘I saw, deep in the eyes of the animals, the human soul look out upon me.’
‘I saw where it was born down deep under feathers and fur, or condemned for awhile to roam four-footed among the brambles. I caught the clinging mute glance of the prisoner, and swore that I would be faithful.’
‘Thee, my brother and sister, I see and mistake not. Do not be afraid. Dwelling thus and thus for awhile, fulfilling thy appointed time—thou too shalt come to thyself at last.’
‘Thy half-warm horns and long tongue lapping round my wrist do not conceal thy humanity any more than the learned talk of the pedant conceals his—for all thou art dumb we have words and plenty between us.’
— Edward Carpenter.
I. The Conflict of Science and Tradition
The doctrine that on mankind’s account all other beings came into existence, and that non-human beings are mere hunks of matter devoid of all psychic qualities found in man, is a doctrine about as sagacious as the old geocentric theory of the universe. Conceit is a distinctly human emotion. No other animal has it. But it has been lavished upon man with a generosity sufficient to compensate for its total absence from the rest of the universe. Man has always overestimated himself. In whatever age or province of the world you look down on the human imagination, you find it industriously digging disparities and establishing gulfs. Man, according to himself, has had great difficulty many times in the history of the world in escaping the divine. According to the facts, he has only in recent biological times and after great labour and uncertainty abandoned his tail and his all-fours. According to himself, man was made ‘in the image of his maker,’ and has been endowed with powers and properties peculiarly his own. According to the facts, he has come into the world in a manner identical with that of all other animals, and has been endowed with like nature and destiny. Man has never manifested a warmer or more indelicate enthusiasm than the enthusiasm with which he has appreciated himself. And with the same ardour with which he has praised himself he has maligned and misrepresented others. Man has set himself up as the supreme judge and executive of the world, and he has not hesitated to award to himself the lion’s share of everything. He has ransacked his fancy for adjectives with which to praise himself, and driven his inventive faculties to the verge of distraction in search of justification for his crimes upon those around him. Every individual bent on deeds of darkness first seeks in his own mind justification for his purposed sins. And it is a caustic comment on the character of human conviction that no enthusiastic criminal—from the marauder of continents to the kitchen pilferer—ever yet sought unsuccessfully at the court of his conscience for a sinful permit. It was an easy matter, therefore, for man—aided as he was by such an experienced imagination—to convince himself that all other animals were made for him, that they were made without feeling or intelligence, and that hence he was justified in using in any way he chose the conveniences so generously provided by an eccentric providence. But Darwin has lived. Beings have come into the world, we now know, through the operation of natural law. Man is not different from the rest. The story of Eden is a fabrication, bequeathed to us by our well-meaning but dimly-lighted ancestors. There has been no more miracle in the origin of the human species than in the origin of any other species. And there is no more miracle in the origin of a species than there is in the birth of a molecule or in the breaking of a tired wave on the beach. Man was not made in the image of the hypothetical creator of heaven and earth, but in the image of the ape. Man is not a fallen god, but a promoted reptile. The beings around him are not conveniences, but cousins. Instead of stretching away to the stars, man’s pedigree slinks down into the sea. Horrible revelation! Frightful antithesis! Instead of celestial genesis and a ‘fall’—long and doleful promotion. Instead of elysian gardens and romance—the slime. Instead of a god with royal nostrils miraculously animating an immortal duplicate—a little lounging cellule, too small to be seen and too senseless to distinguish between midnight and noon. But the situation is not half so horrible as it looks to be to those who see only the skin of things. Is it not better, after all, to be the honourable outcome of a straightforward evolution than the offspring of flunky-loving celestials? Are the illustrious children of the ape less glorious than the sycophants of irrational theological systems? Darwin dealt in his quiet way some malicious blows to human conceit, but he also bequeathed to a misguided world the elements of its ultimate redemption.
The supposed psychical gulf between human and non-human beings has no more existence, outside the flamboyant imagination of man, than has the once-supposed physical gulf. It is pure fiction. The supposition is a relic of the rapidly dwindling vanity of anthropocentricism, and is perpetuated from age to age by human selfishness and conceit. It has no foundation either in science or in common-sense. Man strives to lessen his guilt by the laudation of himself and the disparagement and degradation of his victims. Like the ostrich, who, pursued by death, improvises an imaginary escape by plunging its head into the desert, so man, pursued by the vengeful correctives of his own conscience, fabricates a fictitious innocence by the calumniation of those upon whom he battens. But such excuses cannot much longer hold out against the rising consciousness of kinship. Psychology, like all other sciences, is rapidly ceasing to attend exclusively to human phenomena. It is lifting up its eyes and looking about; it is preparing to become comparative. It has come to realise that the mind of man is but a single shoot of a something which ramifies the entire animal world, and that in order to understand its subject it is necessary for it to familiarise itself with the whole field of phenomenon. The soul of man did not commence to be in the savage. It commenced to be in the worm, whose life man grinds out with his heel, and in the bivalve that flounders in his broth. The roots of consciousness are in the sea. Side by side with physical evolution has gone on psychical evolution; side by side with the evolution of organs and tissues has gone on the evolution of intellect, sensibility, and will. Human nature and human mind are no more sui generis than are human anatomy and physiology. The same considerations that prove that man’s material organism is the cumulative result of long evolution proclaim that human mind, the immaterial concomitant of the material organism, is also the cumulative result of long evolution.
We might just as well recognise facts first as last, for they will have to be recognised some time. Truths are not put down by inhospitality—they are simply put off. The universe has a policy, a program. We may close our eyes to the facts around us, hoping in this way to compel them to pass away or be forgotten. But they do not pass away, nor will they be forgotten. They simply become invisible. They will live on and present themselves to other minds or ages or climes more hospitable or honest than our own. The only proper attitude of mind to assume toward the various doctrines existing among men is the attitude of perfect willingness to believe anything—anything that appeals to us as being reasonable and right. The great majority of men, however, are intellectual solids—unable to move and unwilling to think. They have certain beliefs to which they are determined to hold on, and everything that does not fit in with these beliefs is rejected as a matter of course.
II. Evidences of Psychical Evolution
That mind has evolved, and that there is a psychical kinship, an actual consanguinity of feelings and ideas, among all the forms of animal life is proved incontestably by the following facts:
1. The evolution of mind is implied by the fact of the evolution of structures. ‘I hold,’ says Romanes, in the introduction to his great work on ‘Mental Evolution,’ ‘that, if the doctrine of organic evolution is accepted, it carries with it, as a necessary corollary, the doctrine of mental evolution.’ It makes no difference what theory we adopt regarding the essential natures of the physical and the psychical—whether we agree with the materialist that mind is an attribute of matter, with the idealist that matter is a creation of mind, with the monist that mind and body are only different aspects of the same central entity, or with the dualist that body and soul are two distinct but temporarily dependent existences—we must in any case recognise the fact, which is perceived by all, that there is an ever-faithful parallel between the neural and psychical phenomena of every organism. And if the elements which enter into and make up the physical structure of man have been derived from, and determined by, preceding forms of life, the elements which enter into and make up the psychical counterpart of the physical have also, without any doubt, been inherited from, and determined by, ancestral life forms.
2. Closely allied to the foregoing reason for a belief in the evolution of mind is that derived from a comparative survey of the nervous system in man and other animals. In man, mind is closely associated with a certain tissue or system of tissues—nerve tissue or the nervous system. That mind is correlated with nerve structure, and that mental anatomy may be learned from a study of the anatomy of the nervous system, especially of the brain, is the basic postulate of the science of physiological psychology. Now, nerve cells exist in all animals above the sponge, and a comparatively well-developed nervous system is found even among many of the invertebrates, as the higher worms, crustaceans, insects, and mollusks. The nervous system of invertebrates, though composed of the same kind of tissue, is constructed according to a somewhat different plan of architecture from that of the vertebrates. But in all of the great family of backboned animals the nervous system is built on the same general plan as in man, with a cerebro-spinal trunk extending from the head along the back and motory and sensory nerves ramifying to all parts of the body. There is also a sympathetic nervous system in all animals down as far as the insects. The brain, which is the most important part of the nervous system, and which has been called the ‘organ of consciousness,’ presents throughout the animal kingdom, from its beginning in the worms to man, a graduated series of increasing complication proceeding out of the same fundamental type. This is especially true of the vertebrates. Fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, all have in their brains the same primary parts, the same five fundamental divisions, as are found in the brain of man. Hence, whatever may be thought about the mental states of invertebrates, we have the right, in the case of the vertebrate orders of life, to infer, from the general similarity of their nervous system to our own, that they have a corresponding similarity to ourselves in mental constitution and experience.
3. The evolution of mind is suggested by the existence in the animal world of all grades of intelligence, from almost mindless forms to forms even exceeding in some respects the mental attainments of men. The jelly-fish and the philosopher are not mental aliens. They are linked to each other by a continuous gradation of intermediate intelligences. The existence of these grades of mental development suggest psychical evolution and kinship, just as the existence of like grades of structural development suggest physical evolution.
4. In the mental life of animals the same factors of evolution exist as those by means of which organic structures have been brought into existence, and it is reasonable to suppose that the operation of these factors have produced in the mental world results analogous to those produced by the operation of the same factors among organic structures.
Men and other animals vary in their natures and mental faculties quite as much as they do in colour, size, and shape. It is commonly supposed that the mental and temperamental variety existing among individual men does not exist among individual birds, quadrupeds, insects, etc. But a little observation or reflection ought to be enough to convince anyone that such a supposition belongs to that batch of pre-Darwinian mistakes presented to us by an over-generous past. We are not acquainted with the inhabitants of our fields and barn-yards. We are almost as ignorant of the mental life and personality of these door-yard neighbours and friends of ours as we would be if they were the inhabitants of another continent. That is why our obtuse minds lump them together so indiscriminately—we do not know anything about them. We never take the trouble, or think it worth while, to get acquainted with them, much less to study and know them. We have grown up in the falsehood that they are altogether different from what we are, and that it is really not worth while to bother our gigantic heads about them, except to use them when it comes handy, or kick them to one side, or execute them, when they get in the way. Everybody else looks at the matter in about the same way, so we just let it go at that.
There is a sameness about foreigners and other classes of human beings with whom we are but slightly, or not at all, acquainted, until we come to know them and can discriminate one from another. I remember once asking my sister, if her baby, which looked to me like all other babies I had ever seen, were mixed up with a lot of other babies of about the same age, whether she could pick hers out from all the rest, and she gave me an unmistakable affirmative by answering, ‘What a foolish question!’
There is less variety among the individuals of non-human races than among individual men, just as there is less variety among individual savages than among the members of a civilised community. But there is mental diversity among all beings, and we only need to whittle our observation a little to recognise the fact. You never hear the keeper of a menagerie or any intelligent associate of dogs, horses, birds, or insects say there is no individuality among these animals. Brehm, the great German naturalist, assures us that each individual monkey of all those he kept tame in Africa had its own peculiar temper and disposition. And this is no more than what everyone who knows anything about it knows to be true of dogs, horses, cats, cattle, birds, and even fishes and insects. Any intelligent dog-fancier or pigeon-fancier can tell you the personal peculiarities of every one of the fifty or a hundred dogs or pigeons in his charge. He has watched and studied them since they came into existence, and through this continuous association he has come to know them. He simply makes discriminations that are not made by the casual or superficial observer. The Laplander knows and names each reindeer in his herd, though to a stranger they are all as much alike as the multitudes on an ant-hill. The Peckhams of Milwaukee, those indefatigable investigators of spiders and insects, are constantly telling us of the wonderful individuality possessed by these lowly lessees of our fields and gardens. In their work on ‘The Habits and Instincts of the Solitary Wasps,’ speaking of the ammophiles, these authors say: ‘In this species, as in every one that we have studied, we have found a most interesting variation among the different individuals, not only in methods, but in character and intellect. While one was beguiled from her hunting by every sorrel blossom she passed, another stuck to her work with indefatigable perseverance. While one stung her caterpillars so carelessly and made her nest in so shiftless a way that her young could survive only through some lucky chance, another devoted herself to these duties not only with conscientious earnestness, but with an apparent craving after artistic perfection that was touching to see.’ The variation in the mental phenomena of animals, including man, is partly innate, and partly the result of environment or education.
Animals not only vary in their mental qualities, but they also inherit these variations, just as they do physical properties and peculiarities. Evidence of this is furnished by every new being that comes into the world. Insanity runs in families, and so does genius and criminality. Even the most trifling idiosyncrasies are often transmitted, not only by men, but also by dogs, horses, and other animals. Such qualities of mind as courage, fidelity, good and bad temper, intelligence, timidity, special tastes and aptitudes, are certainly transmitted in all the higher orders of animal life.
Animals are also selected, are enabled to survive in the struggle for life quite as much through the possession by them of certain mental qualities as on account of their physical characters. Whether the selections are made by nature or by man, they are not determined by the physical facts of size, strength, speed, and the like, more than by cunning, courage, sagacity, skill, industry, devotion, ferocity, tractability, and other mental properties. The fittest survive, and the fittest may be the most timid or analytic as well as the most powerful. No better illustration of this truth can be found than that furnished by man himself. Man is by nature a comparatively feeble animal. He is neither large nor powerful. Yet he has been selected to prosper over all other animals because of his ingenuity, sympathy, and art. The great feeling and civilisation of higher men have been built up by slow accretion due to the operation of the law of survival extending over vast measures of time. Creeds and instincts, governments and impulses, forms of thought and forms of expression, have struggled and survived just as have cells and species. A struggle for existence is constantly going on, as Max Müller has pointed out, even among the words and grammatical forms of every language. The better, shorter, easier forms are constantly gaining the ascendancy, and the longer and more cumbrous expressions grow obsolete.
If, therefore, the higher types of mind have not come into existence as have the higher types of structure, through evolution from simpler and more generalised forms, it has not been due to the absence of the factors necessary for bringing about this evolution.
5. The presumption created by the existence of the factors of psychic evolution is strengthened by the facts of artificial selection. We know mind can evolve, for it has done so in many cases. The races of domesticated animals, the races whom man has exploited and preyed upon during the past several thousand years, have, many of them, been completely changed in character and intelligence through human selection. Old instincts have been wiped out and new ones implanted. In many instances the psychology has been not only revolutionised, but remade.
Take, for instance, the dog. The dog is a reformed bandit. It is a revised wolf or jackal. It has been completely transformed by human selection; indeed, it may be said that the dog in the last ten or fifteen thousand years has made greater advances in sagacity and civilisation than any other animal, scarcely even excepting man. Man has made wonderful strides along purely intellectual lines, but in the improvement of his emotions he has not been so successful. The rapid development of the dog in feeling and intelligence has no doubt been due to the fact that his utility to man has always depended largely on his good sense and fidelity, and man has persistently emphasised these qualities in his selection. Fierceness and distrust—two of the most prominent traits in the psychology of the primitive dog—have been entirely eradicated in the higher races of dogs. There is not anywhere on the face of the earth a more trustful, affectionate, and docile being than this one-time cut-throat. Whether the dog has been derived from the wolf or from some wild canine race now extinct, or from several distinct ancestors, he must have had originally a fierce, distrustful, and barbaric nature, for all of the undomesticated members of the dog family wolves, foxes, jackals, etc.—have natures of this sort.
There are about 175 different races of domestic dogs. They represent almost as great a range of development as do the races of men. Some of them are exceedingly primitive, while others are highly intelligent and civilised. The Eskimo dogs are really nothing but wolves that have been trained to the service of man. They look like wolves, and have the wolf psychology. They are not able to bark, like ordinary dogs; they howl like wolves, and their ears stand up straight, like the ears of all wild Canidae. Some of the more advanced of the canine races—like the sheep-dogs, pointers, and St. Bernards—are animals of great sympathy and sensibility. When educated, these dogs are almost human in their impulses and in their powers of discernment. In patience, vigilance, and devotion to duty, they are superior to many men. At a word, or even a look, from its master, the loyal collie will gather the sheep scattered for miles around to the place designated, and do it with such tact and expedition as to command admiration. It has been said that if it were not for this faithful and competent canine the highlands of Scotland would be almost useless for sheep-raising purposes, because of the greater expense that would be entailed if men were employed. One collie will do the work of several men, and will do it better, and the generous-hearted creature pours out its services like water. It requires no compensation except table refuse and a straw bed. In South America sheep-dogs are trained to act as shepherds and assume the whole responsibility of tending the flock. ‘It is a common thing,’ says Darwin, ‘to meet a large flock of sheep guarded by one or two dogs, at a distance of some miles from any house or man.’ When the dogs get hungry, they come home for food, but immediately return to the flock on being fed. ‘It is amusing,’ remarks this writer, ‘to observe, when approaching a flock, how the dog immediately advances barking, while the sheep all close in his rear as around the oldest ram.’ Romanes relates an incident which well illustrates the high character and intelligence of the dog and its wonderful devotion to a trust. ‘It was a Scotch collie. Her master was in the habit of consigning sheep to her charge without supervision. On this particular occasion he remained behind or proceeded by another road. On arriving at home late in the evening, he was astonished to learn that his faithful animal had not made her appearance with the drove. He immediately set out in search of her. But on going out into the streets, there she was coming with the drove, not one missing, and, marvellous to relate, she was carrying a young puppy in her mouth. She had been taken in travail on the hills, and how the poor creature had contrived to manage her drove in her condition is beyond human calculation, for her road lay through sheep all the way. Her master’s heart smote him when he saw what she had suffered and effected. But she was nothing daunted, and after depositing her young one in a place of safety she again set out full speed for the hills, and brought another and another, till she brought the whole litter, one by one; but the last one was dead’.1a
What a wonderful transformation in canine character! The very beings whose blood the dog once drank with ravenous thirst it now protects with courage and fidelity. And this transformation in character is not due to education simply. It is innate. Young dogs brought from Tierra del Fuego or Australia, where the natives do not keep such domestic animals as sheep, pigs, and poultry, invariably have an incurable propensity for attacking these animals.
The feeling of ownership possessed by so many dogs is an entirely new element in canine character, a trait implanted wholly by human selection. Bold and confident on his own premises, the dog immediately becomes weak and apologetic when placed in circumstances in which he feels he has no rights.
The pointers and setters have been developed as distinct breeds by human selection during the past 150 or 200 years.
What is true of the dog is true also, to a large extent, of the cat, cow, horse, sheep, goat, fowl, and other domestic animals. Serene and peaceful puss is the tranquillised descendant of the wild cat of Egypt, one of the most untamable of all animals. The migratory instinct, so strong in wild water-fowl, is almost absent from our geese and ducks, as is the fighting propensity (prominent in the Indian jungle-bird) from most varieties of the domesticated chicken. There are now as many as a hundred different kinds of domesticated animals, and there is scarcely one of these animals that has not been profoundly changed in character during the period of its domestication. There are much greater changes in some races than in others. Some races have been much longer in captivity than others. And then, too, there is great difference in the degree of plasticity in different races, the races of ancient origin being much more fixed in their psychology than those of more recent beginnings. In some races, too—as in the sheep—the selections made by man have been made primarily with reference to certain physical qualities, and in these cases the mental qualities have been only incidentally affected. In Polynesia, where it is selected for its flavour instead of for its fleetness or intelligence, the dog is said to be a very stupid animal. But in most cases of domestication the changes wrought by selection in the mental make-up of the race have been fully as great as the changes in body, and in some instances much greater. And the process by which these great changes in psychology have been effected is in principle identically the same as that by which mental evolution in general is assumed to have been brought about.
History everywhere has come out of the night, out of the deep gloom of the unrecorded. But it has not leaped forth like lightning out of the darkness. It has dawned, night being succeeded by the amorphous shadows of legend and tradition, and these in turn by the attested events of true history. Almost every civilised people can trace back its genealogy to a time when it was represented on the earth by one or more tribes of savage or half-savage ancestors. The Anglo-Saxons go back to the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, three semi-savage tribes who came to England from the borderlands of the Baltic fourteen or fifteen centuries ago. The French are the descendants of the Gauls, who formed the scattered population of warring and superstitious tribes referred to by Julius Caesar in the opening lines of his ‘Commentaries.’ The blue-eyed Germans came from the Cimbri, the Goths, and the Vandals, those bold, wild hordes who charged out of the north to battle with the power of Rome. And all of the Aryan races—English, German, Italian, Scandinavian, Russian, Roman, Greek, and Persian—trace their ancestry back, by means of common languages and legends, to a time when they were wandering tribes of nomads tenting somewhere on the plains of transcaspian Asia.
6. The evolution of mind in the animal world in general is suggested by the fact that mind in man has evolved. The rich, luminous intellect of civilised man, with its art, science, law, literature, government, and morality, has been evolved from the rude, raw, demon-haunted mind of the savage. Evidence of this evolution is furnished by the recorded facts of human history, by the antiquarian collections of our museums, and by a study of existing savages.
In all our museums there are collections of the relics of prehistoric peoples. These collections consist of objects upon which men in distant ages of the world have wrought—their weapons, ornaments, utensils, implements, and playthings—which have been saved from the teeth of Time by their durability. The character of the minds which operated on these objects, which produced and used them, may be inferred from the character of the objects, just as the life and surroundings of an ancient animal or plant may be inferred from its fossil. These relics are of stone, bone, bronze, and iron. They are found in almost every region of the earth—all over Europe and its islands, in western and central Asia, in China and Japan, in Malay, Australia, and New Zealand, in the islands of the Pacific, and throughout the length and breadth of America. They antedate human history by thousands of years. They are the ruins of the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age of mankind. In all of these remains there is evidence of a slow but gradual improvement as we approach the present. There are places on the earth where the evolution of human implements, from the rudest chipped stones to the comparatively finished products of historic peoples, is epitomised in the deposits of a few feet in depth. One of these occurs at Chelles, a suburb of Paris, and was made the subject of a paper by Professor Packard in the Popular Science Monthly for May, 1902. Here three distinct layers, containing human remains entirely different in character from each other, appear within a depth of 30 feet from the surface. The lowest bed, a layer of pebbles and sand, and probably preglacial in origin, contains the famous Chellean ‘axes,’ rude almond-shaped implements of chipped flint, and used by these ancient inhabitants by being held in the hand. In this bed are also found the bones of the straight-tusked elephant, cave-bear, big-nosed rhinoceros, and other species now extinct. The next bed is the interglacial, and contains implements entirely different from the one below it, among which are skin-scrapers and lance-points. The animal remains of this bed are also different from those found in the bed below, and include animals like the musk-ox and the reindeer, which were probably driven to this southern clime from more northern regions by the excessive cold of the time. The third bed, which lies just below the surface soils, contains polished stone axes and other remains of human industry cotemporaneous with the Swiss lake-dwellers. From the swamps and loams are sometimes dug up the remains of Gallo-Roman civilisations—Gallic coins, serpentine axes, and bronzes of the time of the Antonines.
No one can fully realise the vast advance that has been made by the human mind until he has looked upon a savage—has seen the savage in his native haunts attacking the problems of his daily life, and has tasted of his philosophy and disposition. The savage is the ancestor of all higher men. When we look upon the savage, we look upon the infancy of the human world. All of the laws, languages, sciences, governments, religions, and philosophies of civilised man, or nearly all of them at any rate, are the exfoliated laws, languages, sciences, governments, religions, and philosophies of savages. It is impossible to understand the laws of civilised societies without a knowledge of the laws of savage societies. The same thing is true of government, religion, and philosophy—and of human nature itself. Human nature as exhibited by civilised men and women—I mean men and women with a veneering of civility, not really civilised folks, for there are none of them on the earth—is a perpetual enigma unless it is illumined by retrospection, by a comparative study of human nature, by a study of human nature as seen in more and more primitive men and women. The mind of the savage, as compared with that of civilised man, is exceedingly primitive. The picture drawn by Gilbraith of the North American Sioux is a typical picture of savage life and character. Gilbraith lived among these tribes for several years, and was thoroughly acquainted with them. He says:
‘They are bigoted, barbarous, and exceedingly superstitious. They regard most of the vices as virtues. Theft, arson, rape, and murder are regarded by them as the means of distinction. The young Indian is taught from childhood to regard killing as the highest of virtues. In their dances and at their feasts, the warriors recite their deeds of theft, pillage, and slaughter as precious things; and the highest, indeed the only, ambition of the young brave is to secure “the feather,” which is but the record of his having murdered, or participated in the murder of, some human being—whether man, woman, or child, it is immaterial’.2
‘Conscience,’ says Burton, ‘does not exist in East Africa, and “repentance” simply expresses regret for missed opportunities for crime. Robbery makes an honorable man; and murder, the more atrocious the crime the better, makes the hero’.‘Conscience,’ says Burton, ‘does not exist in East Africa, and “repentance” simply expresses regret for missed opportunities for crime. Robbery makes an honorable man; and murder, the more atrocious the crime the better, makes the hero’.3
Many things appear natural and self-evident to the savage which seem to us actually revolting. When the Fuegians are hard pressed by want, they kill their old women for food rather than their dogs, saying: ‘Old women no use; dogs kill otters.’ ‘What I’ said a negro to Burton, ‘am I to starve while my sister has children whom she can sell?’
Lubbock, in his great work on ‘The Origin of Civilisation,’ cites hundreds of instances of savage rudeness and simplicity which seem almost incredible to one accustomed all his life to types of human character such as are found in Europe and America. For instance, ‘when the natives of the Lower Murray first saw pack-oxen, some of them were frightened and took them for demons with spears on their heads, while others thought they were the wives of the settlers, because they carried the baggage.’ Speaking of the wild men in the interior of Borneo, this writer says: ‘They live absolutely in a state of nature, neither cultivating the ground nor living in huts. They eat neither rice nor salt, and do not associate with each other, but rove about the woods like wild beasts. The sexes meet in the jungle. When the children are old enough to shift for themselves, they usually separate, neither one afterwards thinking of the other. At night they sleep under some large tree whose branches hang low. They fasten the children to the branches in a kind of swing, and build a fire around the tree to protect them from snakes and wild beasts. The poor creatures are looked on and treated by the other Dyaks as wild beasts.’ Lubbock sums up his conclusions on the morality of savages in the following pathetic acknowledgment: ‘I do not remember a single instance in which a savage is recorded as having shown any symptoms of remorse; and almost the only case I can call to mind in which a man belonging to one of the lower races has accounted for an act by saying explicitly that it was right, was when Mr. Hunt asked a young Figian why he had killed his mother’.4a
A few pages further on, the same author adds, regarding the deplorable state of morality among savages: ‘That there should be races of men so deficient in moral feeling was altogether opposed to the preconceived ideas with which I commenced the study of savage life, and I have arrived at the conviction by slow degrees, and even with reluctance. I have, however, been forced to this conclusion, not only by the direct statements of travellers, but also by the general tenor of their remarks, and especially by the remarkable absence of repentance and remorse among the lowest races of men.’ Among ourselves the words used to distinguish right and wrong are metaphors. Right originally meant ‘straight,’ and wrong meant ‘twisted.’ Language existed, therefore, before morality; for if moral ideas had preceded language, there would have been original words to stand for them. Religion, according to Lubbock, has no moral aspect or influence except among the more advanced races of men. ‘The deities of savages are evil, not good; they may be forced into compliance with the wishes of man; they generally delight in bloody, and often require human, sacrifices; they are mortal, not immortal; they are to be approached by dances rather than by prayers; and often approve what we call vice rather than what we esteem as virtue. In fact, the so-called religion of the lower races of mankind bears somewhat the same relation to religion in its higher forms as astrology does to astronomy or alchemy to chemistry’.4b
Savages have few general ideas of any kind, as is evidenced by the almost total absence among them of words denoting general ideas. Many savage races cannot comprehend numbers greater than five or six, and are unable to make the simplest mathematical computations without using the fingers. The languages of savages are extremely rude, words being freely pieced out with pantomime. Savages talk with difficulty in the dark, because of their great reliance on gesture in conversation. The rich vocabularies of the languages of Europe and America have grown up step by step with the evolution of European and American mind. Every language is an evolution. The languages of many primitive peoples lack the verb to be entirely, and all nouns are proper nouns. Words are often little more than grunts or clucks, and are without the euphony and articulation found in the languages of the civilised. Darwin says that the language of the Fuegians sounds like a man clearing his throat. Not only every language, but every word, both in its form and meaning, is in process of evolution. Spirit, for instance, originally meant ‘blowing,’ understanding meant ‘getting beneath,’ and development the physical act of ‘unfolding.’ Words are continually drifting from their original meanings under the stress of incessant use, as ships drag their anchors in a gale. Those words that are exposed to common use undergo the most rapid changes, while words sheltered from the rush of human affairs, like harboured ships, hold to their moorings forever. Let, for instance, once meant ‘hinder’; now it means ‘allow.’ Bisect, on the other hand, a word of rare and technical use, has remained unaltered in significance for twenty centuries.
Even our alphabet has been evolved. The twenty-six symbols composing it have been eroded into the peculiar forms in which they appear at present by the various peoples through whose hands they have come to us. The originals were pictographs such as are still found on the aged monuments of earth’s earliest civilisations. The English got their alphabet from the Romans, who obtained it, along with almost everything else they had, from the Greeks. The Greeks received it from the Phenicians, and the Phenicians from the papyrus writers of Egypt, who in turn procured it from those hieroglyph chiselers who carved their curious literature on the granite tombs of the Nile in the remotest dawn of human history. A, the first letter of our alphabet, is a figure which has been evolved, as the result of long wear and tear, from the picture of an eagle; B was originally the picture of a crane; C represents a throne; D a hand; F an asp; H a sieve; K a bowl; L a lioness; M an owl; N a water-line; R a mouth; S a garden; T a lasso; X a chairback; and Z a duck.
The psychology of civilised man, though derived from that of the savage, and hence resembling it fundamentally, is, nevertheless, very different from it, both in character and in what it contains. The mind of the savage is rude, unresourceful, vicious, and childlike, while that of the civilised man or woman may be overflowing with wisdom and benignity. This gulf has not been covered by a stride, but by the slow operation of the same laws of Inheritance, Variation, and Selection by which all progress has been brought about.
7. Degeneration is a necessary part of the process of organic evolution. All progress, whether anatomical, intellectual, or social, takes place through selection, and selection means the pining and ultimate passing away of that which is left. In individual evolution it is organs, ideas, and traits of character that are eliminated, and in social evolution it is customs and institutions. One of the reasons given in the preceding chapter for the belief in the evolution of structures is the existence in man and other animals of vestigial organs, organs which in lower forms of life are useful, but which in higher forms are represented by useless or even injurious remnants. Similar remnants are found in the psychology of man and other animals. These vestiges of mind are not so easily recognised as the vestiges of structure, but they are everywhere. We find them in the antiquated instincts of man and the domestic animals, in the silent letters and worn-out words of languages, and in the emaciated remains of abandoned beliefs and institutions.
The hunting and fishing instinct of civilised man is a vestigial instinct, normal in the savage, but without either sense or decency among men devoted to industrial pursuits. The savage hunts and fishes because he is hungry, never for pastime; civilised men and women do so because they are too mechanical to assort their impulses. Civilised man is a mongrel, a cross between a barbarian and a god. His psychology is a compound of the jungle and the sky. In their loftier moments, many men are able to obscure the cruder facts of their origin and to put into temporary operation those more splendid processes of mind which characterise their ideals. But even the most civilised are forever haunted by the returning ghosts of departed propensities—propensities which grew up in ages of hate, which are now out-of-date, but which in the trying tedium of daily life come back and usurp the high places in human nature. Revenge, hate, cruelty, pugnacity, selfishness, vanity, and the like, are all more or less vestigial among men who have entered seriously on the life of altruism. Like the vermiform appendix and the human tail, these old obsolete parts of the human mind are destined, in the ripening of the ages, to waste away and disappear through disuse.
The practice of the dog of turning round two or three times before lying down is in response to an instinct which was no doubt beneficial to it in its wild life, when it was wont to make its bed in the grasses, but which is now a pure waste of time. Darwin records it as a fact, that he has himself seen a simple-minded dog turn round twenty times before lying down. The sheep-killing mania, which sometimes comes over dogs when three or four of them get together and become actuated by the ‘mob’ spirit, is a vestige of the old instinct of the carnivore which centuries of domestication have not yet quite erased. Goodness, if too prolonged, becomes irksome to dogs for the same reason that it does to men. Dogs have come from savages just as men have, and, while the civilised nature of the dog is more constitutional than that of civilised man, the old deposed instincts mount to the throne once in awhile, and the faithful collie is for the time being a wolf again. The instinct of domestic sheep to imitate their leader in leaping over obstacles is another probable survival of wild life. If a bar or other obstacle be placed where the leader of a flock of sheep is compelled to leap over it, and the obstacle is then removed, the entire band of followers will leap at the same place regardless of the fact that the obstruction is no longer there. No other animals do this. The instinct is probably a survival of wild life, when these animals, pursued by their enemies over chasms and precipices, were compelled to imitate in the flight those in front of them in order to live. Darwin thinks the donkey shows its aboriginal desert nature in its aversion for crossing the smallest stream, and its relish for rolling in the dust. The same aversion for everything aquatic exists also in the camel. Quails kept in captivity, I am told, persist in scratching at the pan when they are feeding, just as they would need to do, and were accustomed to do, among the leaves and grasses of the groves. The restlessness of cage-birds and domestic fowls at migrating time, the mimic dipping and sporting of ducks when confined to a terrestrial habitat, the grave marshalling of geese by the chief gander of the band, the ferocity of cows, ewes, and the females of other domestic animals during the first few days of motherhood, the hunting instinct of dogs kept as shepherds and pets, the squatting of young pigs when suddenly alarmed—all of these are vestigial instincts, functional in the wild state, but now useless and absurd.
The silent letters and superannuated words and phrases found everywhere in literature are the vestigial parts of language. Every silent letter was originally sounded, and every obsolete word was at one time used. In the French word, temps, for instance, which means ‘time,’ neither the p nor the s is sounded. But in the Latin word tempus, from which the French word is derived, all of the letters are sounded.
Man has been defined as a creature of habit. As he has done a thing once, or as his ancestors have done a thing, so he does it again. By precept and example he transmits to each new generation the customs, beliefs, and points of view which he has invented. Social changes take place with extreme moderation. The drowsy ages take plenty of time to get anywhere. Civilisation is lazy, deliberate, unimpassioned. It loafs and hesitates. It holds on to the past. Living civilisations always drag behind them a trail of traditions from dead civilisations. Religions and philosophies change, and creeds and governments flow into strange and undreamed-of forms; but their personalities survive, their souls live on, their remnants, transmitted as traditions from generation to generation, defy the meddlings of innovators. Hence in every society there are forms and ceremonies, laws and customs, games and symbols, etc., which have been completely diverted from their original purposes, or which have become so reduced in importance as to be of no use. Spencer has shown that the forms of salutation in vogue among civilised societies are the vestiges of primitive ceremonial used to denote submission. The May Day festivals with which the opening spring is usually hailed are the much-modified survivals of pagan festivals in honour of plant and animal fecundity. Superstition and folklore are vestigial opinions. The gorgeous Easter egg is a survival of a dawn myth older than the Pyramids, and our Christmas dinner is a reminiscence of a cannibal carnival celebrating the turning back of the sun at the winter solstice (Brinton). In the English government, where democracy has in recent centuries made such inroads on the monarchy, there are numerous examples of vestigial institutions—institutions which continue to exist purely because they have existed in the past, but which were functional a few centuries ago. The supreme office itself is one of these. The King represents the petered-out tail-end of a privilege which in the time of the early Stuarts was almost unlimited. Similar vestiges exist in the United States, where the national spirit during the last century and a half has so completely wiped out colonialism. Such are the Town Meetings of Boston and of New Haven. The earliest form of human marriage was marriage by capture. The man stole the woman and carried her away by force. This form of marriage was in the course of evolution succeeded by marriage through purchase. A man anxious to become a husband could do so by paying to the father a stipulated amount of cash or cattle for his daughter. This second form of marriage finally evolved into marriage arranged by direct and peaceful negotiation between the prospective husband and wife. This is the form most commonly employed at the present time among the more advanced societies of men. But in the ceremonies which surround the nuptial event among civilised peoples survive vestiges of many of the facts associated with aboriginal marriages. A marriage in high life is a sort of epitome of the evolution of the institution. The coyness and hesitancy of the woman in accepting the offers of her proposed spouse are the lineal descendants of the original reluctance of her savage sisters. The wedding-ring is the old token accepted by the woman when she gave her pledge of bondage. The coming of the groom with his aids to the marriage is a figurative marauding expedition. The honeymoon is the abduction. And the charivari and missile-throwing indulged in by friends and relatives on the departure of the wedded twain is a good-humoured counterfeit of the armed protest made by relatives of old when a bride-snatcher came among them.5
The vestiges found everywhere in the mental and social phenomena of man and other animals have arisen as necessary facts in the process of mental evolution. They are the vermiform appendices of the mind.
8. One of the strongest reasons for a belief in the physical evolution of animal species is that furnished by individual evolution. Each individual animal recapitulates in a wonderful manner the phylogenesis of its species. Now, it is extremely significant that a similar parallel exists in the case of mental evolution. Each individual mind ascends through a series of mental faculties which epitomises in a remarkable manner the psychogenesis of the animal kingdom.
The human child is not born with a full-grown mind any more than with a full-grown body. It grows. It exfoliates. It ripens with the years. It begins in infancy at the zero-point, and in manhood or womanhood may blaze with genius and philanthropy.
But the mind of the child not only unfolds: it unfolds in a certain order, the more complex parts and the more civilised emotions invariably appearing last. The initial powers of the newborn babe are those of sensation and perception. The babe cannot think. It has no feeling of fear, no affection, no sympathy, and no shame. It can see, and hear, and taste, and feel pain and satisfaction—and these are about all. Even these are vague and confused. In a week the perceptions are more sharp and vivid, more distinct and orderly. Memory arises. Memory is the power of reproducing past impressions. At three weeks the emotions begin to sprout. The first to make their appearance are fear and surprise. When the babe is seven weeks old the social affections show themselves, and the simplest acts of association are performed. At the age of twelve weeks jealousy and anger may be expected, together with simple exhibitions of association by similarity. At fourteen weeks affection and reason dawn. Sympathy germinates at about the age of five months; pride and resentment germinate at eight months; grief, hate, and benevolence at ten months; and shame and remorse at fifteen months.
Now, the remarkable thing about this is that this is the order, or very much like the order, in which mind in the animal kingdom as a whole has apparently evolved. The lower orders of animal life have none of the higher emotions and none of the more complicated processes of mind. There is no shame in the reptile, no dissimulation in the fish, no sympathy in the mollusk, and no memory in the sponge. Memory dawns in the echinoderms, or somewhere near the radiate stage of development, and fear and surprise in the worms. Pugnacity makes its appearance in the insects, imagination in the spiders, and jealousy in the fishes. Pride, emulation, and resentment originate in the birds: grief and hate in the carnivora; shame and remorse among dogs and monkeys; and superstition in the savage.1b
It is also an important fact bearing on the general problem of evolution, that the civilised child, from about the age of one on, is a sort of synopsis, rude but unmistakable, of the historic evolution of the human race. The child is a savage. It has the emotions of the savage, the savage’s conceptions of the world, and the desires, pastimes, and ambitions of the savage. It hates work, and takes delight in hunting, fishing, fighting, and loafing, like other savages. The hero of the child is the bully, just as the demigod of primitive man is a blood-letting Caesar or Achilles. The children of the civilised are savages—some more so than others—and if they ever become civilised—some do, and some do not—they do so through a process of rectification and selection similar to that through which the Aryan races have passed during the ages of human history.
There is a similar evolution in the young of other animals, especially of the higher animals. Each individual begins in a perfectly mindless form, and grows mentally as it develops physically. The young puppy has a very different thinking and feeling apparatus from the grown-up mastiff. It is controlled almost exclusively by sense and instinct. It is devoid of common-sense, and divides its time impartially between play and sleep. It is easily frightened, and cries at every little thing. It has the rollicking, awkward, irresponsible personality of a boy of six. About the same thing is true of kittens, colts, calves, bear cubs, the whelps of wolves, and other young quadrupeds. A kitten will chase shadows, try to catch flies crawling on the other side of a windowpane, sit and watch in wonder the moving objects about it, and do many other things which it never thinks of doing when it has grown to be a wise and sophisticated puss trained in the ways of the world about it. Doghood, cathood, and horsehood, like manhood and womanhood, are the ripened products of long processes of growth and exfoliation.
The parallel is, of course, imperfect. There are many abbreviations, many breaks and ambiguities, in the summary presented by the individual mind of the evolution of the race. And, in the present state of psychogeny, only the barest outline can be traced. But enough is known to render the fact unquestionable.
9. If human mind has been evolved, it is logical to expect to find in other animals, especially in those more closely resembling ourselves in structure, mind elements similar to those we find in ourselves.6 And this is precisely what we do find. The same great trunk impulses that animate men animate also those more rudimentary but not less real individuals below and around men. The great primary facts of sex, of self-preservation, of pleasure and pain, of life and death, of egoism and altruism, of motherhood, of alimentation, etc.—all of these are found everywhere, down almost to the very threshold of organic life. And they are the antecedents of the same great tendencies as those that control the lives of men. It is often supposed by the superficial that the facts of sex and alimentation, which are so prominent in other animals, have been relegated to a very subordinate place in the nature of man. But nothing could be much farther from the truth. It has been said that there are only two things that will induce the typical African or Australian to undergo prolonged labour—hunger and the sex appetite. It is probable that men—not only primitive men, but the most evolved races, including even poets and philosophers—will do more desperate and idiotic things and undergo more trying experiences when actuated by the sex impulse than from the effects of any other impulse in human nature. This impulse is especially overmastering in races like the Italian and Spanish, and has been mentioned by ethnologists as a probable factor in the deterioration of these races. The sentiments of love, marital affection, and family life control mankind more completely than any other motives. And next to these comes hunger. Let anyone who imagines that only the non-human creatures are carnal observe with what uniformity almost every function in both savage and civilised life gravitates toward eating and drinking. If it is a picnic, a convention, a national holiday, a Christmas celebration, a meeting of a fraternal society, a thanksgiving ceremony, or what not, eating is one of the main things, and the one exercise into which four-fifths of those present probably enter with the greatest enthusiasm.
The human soul is the blossom, not the beginning, of psychic evolution. Mother-love compassionated infancy long before a babe came from the stricken loins of woman. The inhabitants of the earth had been seeking pleasure and seeking to avoid pain, and seeking ever with the same sad futility, long before man with his retinue of puny philosophies strutted upon the scene. Hate poisoned the cisterns of the sea and dropped its pollutions through the steaming spaces ages before there was malice among men. Altruism is older than the mountains, and selfishness hardened the living heart before the continents were lifted. There was wonder in the woods and in the wild heart of the fastnesses before there were waitings in synagogues and genuflections about altar piles. The frogs, crickets, and birds had been singing love a thousand generations and more when the first amoroso knelt in dulcet descant to a beribboned Venus. Human nature is not an article of divine manufacture, any more than is the human form. It came out of the breast of the bird, out of the soul of the quadruped. The human heart does not draw back from the mysterious dissolutions of death more earnestly than does the hare that flees before resounding packs or the wild-fowl that reddens the reeds with its flounderings. Bowerbirds build their nest-side resorts, decorate them with gay feathers, and surround them with grounds ornamented with bright stones and shells, for identically the same reason as human beings design drawing-rooms, hang them with tapestries, and surround them with ornamented lawns. The scarlet waistcoat of the robin and the flaming dresses of tanagers and humming-birds, which seem, as they flash through the forest aisles, like shafts of cardinal-fire, serve the same vanities and minister to the same instincts as the plumage of the dandy and the tints and gewgaws of gorgeous dames. Art is largely a manifestation of sex, and it is about as old and about as persistent as this venerable impulse. How did Darwin’s dog know his master on his master’s return from a five-years’ trip around the world? Just as the boy remembers where the strawberries grow and the philosopher recalls his facts—by that power of the brain to retain and to reproduce past impressions. Why does the thinker search his soul for new theories and the spaces for new stars? For the same reason that the child asks questions and the monkey picks to pieces its toys. What is reason? A habit of wise men—an expedient of ants—a mania the fools of all ages are free from. All of the activities of men, however imposing or peculiar, are but elaborations in one way or another of the humble doings of the animalcule, whose home is a water-drop and whose existence can be discovered by human senses only by the aid of instruments.
10. Mind has evolved because the universe has evolved. Whether mind is a part of the universe, or all of it, or only an attribute of it, it is, in any case, inextricably mixed up with it. And, since the universe as a whole has evolved, it is improbable that any part of it or anything pertaining to it has remained impassive to the general tendency. There are no solids. Nothing stands. The whole universe is in a state of fluidity. Even the ‘eternal hills,’ the ‘unchanging continents,’ and the ‘everlasting stars,’ are flowing, flowing ever, slowly but ceaselessly, from form to form. So is mind. Indeed, if there is anywhere in the folds of creation a being such as the one whom man has long accused of having brought the universe into existence, we may rest assured that even he is not sitting passively apart from the enormous enterprise which he has himself inaugurated.
The evidence is conclusive. The evolution of mind is supported by a series of facts not less incontrovertible and convincing than that by which physical evolution is established. The data of mental evolution are not quite so definite and plentiful as those of physical evolution. But this is due to the greater intangibility of mental phenomena and to the backward condition of the psychological sciences, especially of comparative psychology. Mental phenomena are always more difficult to deal with than material phenomena, and hence are always more tardily attended to in the application of any theory. But taking everything into account, including the close connection between physical and psychical phenomena, it may be asserted that it is not more certain that the physical structure of man has been derived from sub-human forms of life than it is that the human mind has also been similarly derived.
Man is the adult of long evolution. The human soul has ancestors and consanguinities just as the body has. It is just as reasonable to suppose that the human physiology, with its definitely elaborated tissues, organs, and systems, is unrelated to the physiology of vertebrates in general, and through vertebrate physiology to the physiology of invertebrates, as to suppose that the states and impulses constituting human nature and consciousness began to exist in the anthropic type of anatomy and are unrelated to the states and impulses of vertebrate consciousness in general, and through vertebrate consciousness to those remoter types of sentiency lying away at the threshold of organic life. Human psychology is a part of universal psychology. It has been evolved. It has been evolved according to the same laws of heredity and adaptation as have physiological structures. And it is just as impossible to understand human nature and psychology unaided by those wider prospects of universal psychology as it is to understand the facts of human physiology unaided by analogous universalisations.
1a. 1b. Romanes: Mental Evolution in Animals; New York, 1898.
2. Gilbraith: Ethnological Journal, 1869, p. 304.
3. Burton: First Footsteps in East Africa; London, 1856.
4a. 4b. Lubbock: Origin of Civilisation; New York, 1898.
5. Demoor: Evolution by Atrophy; New York, 1899.
6. This topic is more fully presented in the chapter “The elements of the human and non-human mind compared.”
III. The Common-sense View
But it is not necessary to be learned in Darwinian science in order to know that non-human beings have souls. Just the ordinary observation of them in their daily lives about us—in their comings and goings and doings—is sufficient to convince any person of discernment that they are beings with joys and sorrows, desires and capabilities, similar to our own. No human being with a conscientious desire to learn the truth can associate intimately day after day with these people—associate with them as he himself would desire to be associated with in order to be interpreted, without presumption or reserve, in a kind, honest, straightforward, magnanimous manner; make them his friends and really enter into their inmost lives—without realising that they are almost unknown by human beings, that they are constantly and criminally misunderstood, and that they are in reality beings actuated by substantially the same impulses and terrorised by approximately the same experiences as we ourselves. They eat and sleep, seek pleasure and try to avoid pain, cling valorously to life, experience health and disease, get seasick, suffer hunger and thirst, co-operate with each other, build homes, reproduce themselves, love and provide for their children, feeding, defending, and educating them, contend against enemies, contract habits, remember and forget, learn from experience, have friends and favourites and pastimes, appreciate kindness, commit crimes, dream dreams, cry out in distress, are affected by alcohol, opium, strychnine, and other drugs, see, hear, smell, taste, and feel, are industrious, provident and cleanly, have languages, risk their lives for others, manifest ingenuity, individuality, fidelity, affection, gratitude, heroism, sorrow, sexuality, self-control, fear, love, hate, pride, suspicion, jealousy, joy, reason, resentment, selfishness, curiosity, memory, imagination, remorse—all of these things, and scores of others, the same as human beings do.
The anthropoid races have the same emotions and the same ways of expressing those emotions as human beings have. They laugh in joy, whine in distress, shed tears, pout and apologise, and get angry when they are laughed at. They protrude their lips when sulky or pouting, stare with wide open eyes in astonishment, and look downcast when melancholy or insulted. When they laugh, they draw back the corners of their mouth and expose their teeth, their eyes sparkle, their lower eyelids wrinkle, and they utter chuckling sounds, just as human beings do.1 They have strong sympathy for their sick and wounded, and manifest toward their friends, and especially toward the members of their own family, a devotion scarcely equalled among the lowest races of mankind. They use rude tools, such as clubs and sticks, and resort to cunning and deliberation to accomplish their ends. The orang, when pursued, will throw sticks at his pursuers, and when wounded, and the wound does not prove instantly fatal, will sometimes press his hand upon the wound or apply grass and leaves to stop the flow of blood. The children of anthropoids wrestle with each other, and chase and throw each other, just as do the juveniles of human households. The gorilla, chimpanzee, and orang all build for themselves lodges made of broken boughs and leaves in which to sleep at night. These lodges, rude though they are, are not inferior to the habitations of many primitive men. The Puris, who live naked in the depths of the Brazilian forests, do not even have huts to live in, only screens made by setting up huge palm-leaves against a cross-pole.2 Some of the African tribes are said to live largely in caves and the crevices of rocks. This is the case with many primitive men. According to a writer in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (January, 1902), ‘common forms of dwelling among the wild tribes of the Malay Peninsula are rock-shelters (sometimes caves, but more commonly natural recesses under overhanging ledges) and leaf-shelters, which are sometimes formed on the ground and sometimes in the branches of trees. The simplest form of these leaf-shelters consists of a single palm-leaf planted in the ground to afford the wanderer some slight shelter for the night.’
When they sleep, the anthropoids sometimes lie stretched out, man-like, on their backs, and sometimes they lie on their side with their hand under their head for a pillow. The orang retires about five or six o’clock in the evening, and does not rise until the morning sun has dissipated the mists of the forest. The gorilla and chimpanzee seem to mate for life. The former lives, as a rule, in single families, each family consisting of a male and a female and their children. During the day this primitive family roams through the forests of equatorial Africa in search of food. They live on fruits and nuts and the tender shoots and leaves of plants. They are especially fond of sugar-cane, which they eat in small-boy fashion by chewing and discarding the juiceless pulp. Among the foods of the gorilla is a walnut-like nut which it cracks with stones. As evening comes on, the head of the family selects a sleeping-place for the night. This is usually some low tree with a dense growth at the top, and protected as much as possible by higher trees from the chilly night wind. Here, on a bed of broken branches and leaves, the mother and little ones go to sleep, while the father devotedly crouches at the foot of the tree, with his back against the trunk to guard his family from leopards and other nocturnal cut-throats who eat apes.3a When the weather is stormy, they cover themselves with broad pandanus leaves to keep off the rain. Koppenfels relates an incident of a gorilla family which makes one think of things he sometimes sees among men. The family consisted of the parents and two children. It was meal-time. The head of the family reposed majestically on the ground, while the wife and children hustled for fruits for him in a near-by tree. If they were not sufficiently nimble about it, or if they were so wanton as to take a bite themselves, the paterfamilias growled and gave them a cuff on the head.3b Notwithstanding the sensational tales of the ferocity of this being, the gorilla never attacks anyone at any time unless he is molested.3c He much prefers to attend to his own business. But if he is not allowed to do so, if he is attacked, he is as fearless as a machine. He approaches his antagonist walking upright and beating his breast with his fists. He presents one of the most terrifying of all spectacles, as, with gleaming eyes, hair erect, and resounding yells, he bears down on the object of his resentment. The natives fear the gorilla more than they fear any other animal.
The chimpanzee in his native wilds lives in small tribes consisting of a few families each. Like the gorilla, it passes the most of its time on the ground, going among the trees only for food or sleep. It builds a sleeping-place at night in the trees, as in the case of the gorilla. Brehm, who brought up a number of chimpanzees in his own home as comrades and playmates of his children, and who studied them and associated with them for years, says: ‘The chimpanzee is not only one of the cleverest of all creatures, but a being capable of deliberation and judgment. Everything he does is done consciously and deliberately. He looks upon all other animals, except man, as very inferior to himself. He treats children entirely different from grown-up people. The latter he respects; the former he looks upon as comrades and equals. He is not merely inquisitive: he is greedy for knowledge. He can draw conclusions, can reason from one thing to another, and apply the results of experience to new circumstances. He is cunning, even wily, has flashes of humour, indulges in practical jokes, manifests moods, and is entertained in one company and bored in another. He is self-willed but not stubborn, good-natured but not wanting in independence. He expresses his emotions like a human being. In sickness he behaves like one in despair, distorts his face, groans, stamps, and tears his hair. He learns very easily whatever is taught him, as, for instance, to sit upright at table, to eat with knife and fork and spoon, to drink from a glass or cup, to stir the sugar in his tea, to use a napkin, to wear clothes, to sleep in a bed, and so on. Exceedingly appreciative of every caress, he is equally sensitive to blame and unkindness. He is capable of deep gratitude, and he expresses it by shaking hands or kissing without being asked to do so. He behaves toward infants with touching tenderness. The behaviour of a sick and suffering chimpanzee is most pathetic. Begging piteously, almost humanly, he looks into his master’s face, receives every attempt to help him with warm thanks, and soon looks upon his physician as a benefactor, holding out his arm to him, stretching out his tongue whenever told, and even doing so of his own accord after a few visits from his physician. He swallows medicines readily, and even submits to surgical operations—in short, behaves very like a human patient in similar circumstances. As his end approaches, he becomes more gentle, and the nobler traits of his character stand out prominently’.4a
The New York Herald, in its issue of July 2, 1901, contained an account of the death of Charlemagne, a chimpanzee who died a short time before at Grenoble, France. This anthropoid at the time of his death was the most popular inhabitant of the town. His popularity was due to his good-nature and intelligence, and especially to the fact that a few years before his death he had saved a child from drowning in a well. The ape saw the child fall, and without a moment’s hesitation climbed down the rope used for the buckets, seized the child, and climbed out again by the same rope by which he had descended. The people of the town thought so much of him that they followed his remains to the grave, and the municipal council voted to erect a bronze statue to his memory.
A heartless hunter—maybe one of those assassins who fill the wilds with widows and orphans in the name of Science—tells of the murder of a mother chimpanzee and her baby in Africa. The mother was high up in a tree with her little one in her arms. She watched intently, and with signs of the greatest anxiety, the hunter as he moved about beneath, and when he took aim at her the poor doomed thing motioned to him with her hand precisely in the manner of a human being, to have him desist and go away.
According to Emin Pasha, who was for a number of years Governor of an Egyptian province on the Upper Nile, and whom Stanley made his last expedition to ‘rescue,’ chimpanzees sometimes make use of fire. He told Stanley that, when a tribe of chimpanzees who resided in a forest near his camp came at night to get fruit from the orchards, they always came bearing torches to light them on their way. ‘If I had not seen it with my own eyes,’ he declares, ‘I never could have believed that these beings have the power of making fire’.5 This same authority relates that on one occasion a band of chimpanzees descended upon his camp and carried off a drum. The marauders went away in great glee, beating the drum as they retreated. He says he heard them several times after that, at night, beating their drum, in the forest.
The monkeys are little inferior to the man-like races in their intelligence and in the general similarity of their feelings and instincts to those of men. Monkeys live in tribes, and at the head of each tribe is an old male chief who has won his place by his strength, courage, and ability. Monkeys have excellent memories and keen observation, and are able to recognise their friends in a crowd even after long absences. They are proverbially imitative, have a strong desire for knowledge, and are exceedingly sensitive and sympathetic in their natures. Sympathy and curiosity, the two most prominent traits in simian psychology, are, significantly, the two most important facts in the psychology of man. Sympathy and curiosity lie at the foundation of human civilisation, sympathy at the foundation of morals, and curiosity of invention and science. The monkey whose diary appears in the closing pages of Romanes’ ‘Animal Intelligence’ was possessed of an almost ravenous desire to know. He spent hour after hour in exploration, examining with the indomitable patience of a scientist everything that came within the bounds of his little horizon. And when he had found out any new thing, he was as delighted over it as a boy who has solved a hard problem, repeating the experiment over and over until it was thoroughly familiar to him. Among the many things he discovered for himself was the use of the lever and the screw. Monkeys are the most affectionate of all animals excepting dogs and men. This affection reaches its culmination, as among men, in the love of the mother for her child. The mother monkey’s little one is the object of her constant care and affection. She nurses and bathes it, licks it and cleans its coat, and folds it in her arms and rocks it as if to lull it to sleep, just as human mammas do. She divides every bite with her little one, but does not hesitate to chastise it with slaps and pinches when it is rude. The monkey child is generally very obedient, obedient enough for an example to many a human youngster.
‘Very touching,’ says Brehm, from whom many of the foregoing facts are gleaned, ‘is the conduct of the mother when her baby is obviously suffering. And if it dies she is in despair. For hours, and even for days, she carries the little corpse about with her, refuses all food, sits indifferently in the same spot, and often literally pines to death’.4b
Orphan monkeys, according to Brehm, are often adopted by the tribe, and carefully looked after by the other monkeys, both male and female. The great mass of human beings, who know about as much about the real emotional life of monkeys as wooden Indians do, are inclined to pass over lightly all displays of feeling by these people of the trees. But the poet knows, and the prophet knows, and the world will one day understand, that in the gentle bosoms of these wild woodland mothers glow the antecedents of the same impulses as those that cast that blessed radiance over the lost paradise of our own sweet childhood. The mother monkey who gathered green leaves as she fled from limb to limb, and frantically stuffed them into the wound of her dying baby in order to stanch the cruel rush of blood from its side, all the while uttering the most pitiful cries and casting reproachful glances at her human enemy, until she fell with her darling in her arms and a bullet in her heart, had in her simian soul just as genuine mother-love, and love just as sacred, as that which burns in the breast of woman.
The affection of monkeys is not confined to the love of the mother for her child, but exists among the different members of the same tribe, and extends even to human beings, especially to those who make any pretensions to do to them as they would themselves be done by. The monkey kept by Romanes, already referred to, became so attached to his master that he went into the wildest demonstrations of joy whenever his master, after an absence, came into the room. Standing on his hind-legs at the full length of his chain, and reaching out both hands as far as he could reach, he screamed with all his might. His joy was so hysterical that it was impossible to carry on any kind of conversation until he had been folded in his master’s arms, when he immediately grew quiet.
‘After I took this monkey back to the Zoological Gardens,’ says Romanes, ‘and up to the time of his death, he remembered me as well as the day he was returned. I visited the monkey-house about once a month, and whenever I approached his cage he saw me with astounding quickness—indeed, generally before I saw him—and ran to the bars, through which he thrust both hands with every expression of joy. When I went away he always followed me to the extreme end of the cage, and stood there watching me as long as I remained in sight.’
The following account of the attachment of a male monkey for his murdered consort is a pitiful tale of human inhumanity and of simian tenderness and devotion:
‘A member of a shooting-party killed a female monkey, and carried her body to his tent under a banyan-tree. The tent was soon surrounded by forty or fifty of the tribe, who made a great noise and threatened to attack the aggressor. When he presented his fowling-piece, the fearful effects of which they had just witnessed, and appeared perfectly to understand, they retreated. The leader of the troop, however, stood his ground, threatening and chattering furiously. At last, finding threats of no avail, the broken-hearted creature came to the door of the tent and began a lamentable moaning, and by the most expressive signs seemed to beg for the dead body of his beloved. It was given to him. He took it sorrowfully in his arms and bore it away to his expecting companions’.6a
The chattering of monkeys is not, as is vulgarly supposed, meaningless vocalisation. It is language. It is meaningless to human ears for the same reason that the chattering of Frenchmen is meaningless to Americans—because human beings are foreigners. The conversation of monkeys is to convey thought. Every species that thinks and feels has means for conveying its thoughts and feelings, and the means for this exchange, whether it be sounds, symbols, gestures, or grimaces, is language. As Wundt somewhere says: ‘If psychologists of to-day, ignoring all that an animal can express through gestures and sounds, limit the possession of language to human beings, such a conclusion is scarcely less absurd than that of many philosophers of antiquity who regarded the languages of barbarous nations as animal cries.’ Mr. Garner, who has so long and so sympathetically associated with monkeys, has been able to translate a number of their words and to enter into slight communication with them. Among the words he has been able to understand are the words for ‘alarm,’ ‘good-will,’ ‘listen,’ ‘food,’ ‘drink,’ ‘monkey,’ and ‘fruit.’ According to him, the simian tongue has about eight or nine sounds which may be changed by modulation into three or four times that number, and each different species or kind has its own peculiar tongue slightly shaded into dialects. There may be more discriminating students than Garner, but few certainly who have approached their favourite problem with more feeling and humanity. Every one should read his beautiful book on ‘The Speech of Monkeys.’ ‘Among the little captives of the simian race,’ says he tenderly, in closing his chapter on the emotional character of these people, ‘I have many little friends to whom I am attached, and whose devotion to me is as warm and sincere, so far as I can see, as that of any human being. I must confess that I cannot discern in what intrinsic way the love they have for me differs from my own for them; nor can I see in what respect their love is less divine than is my own.’
Dogs are distinguished for their great intelligence, the pre-eminence of the sense of smell, fidelity to duty, nobleness of nature, patience, courage, and affection. In all of these particulars many individual dogs are superior to whole races of men. Dogs are more sensitive to physical suffering than savages, and will cry piteously from slight wounds or other injuries. Dogs of high life have genuine feelings of dignity and self-respect, and are easily wounded in their sensibilities. Such dogs have considerable sense of propriety, and suffer, like sensitive children, from disapprobation. Romanes had a dog that was so sensitive that he resented insult, and so sympathetic that he always fought in defence of other dogs when they were punished or attacked. When out driving with his master, this dog always caught hold of his master’s sleeve every time the horse was touched with a whip.6b Romanes also tells of a Scotch terrier who, having grown old and useless, and been supplanted by a younger dog, Jack, became painfully jealous, and imitated his rival in everything that he did, even to ridiculous details, in order to retain the attentions of the household. When Jack was tenderly caressed, the old dog would watch for a time, and then burst out whining as if in the deepest distress.6c Dogs communicate their ideas to each other and to human beings, generally by means of sounds and gestures. They growl in anger, yelp in eagerness, howl in despair, bark in joy or warning, bay in wonder, wail in bitterness and pain, whine in supplication, and prostrate themselves in submission or apology. It has been said that there never was a man who possessed the stateliness of a St. Bernard, the unerring sagacity of the collie, or the courage and tenacity of the bulldog. The vainest dandy is not more delicate in his ways than the Italian greyhound, nor more soft and affectionate than the Blenheim. Many a deed of heroism has been done by dogs which would, if done by men, have been honoured by the Order of the Victoria Cross. The St. Bernards belonging to the monks on the passes between Switzerland and Italy are especially celebrated for their devotion to the business of saving human life. They often lose their own lives in their efforts to rescue travellers baffled and overcome by storm. One particularly sagacious individual, who lost his life in this way some years ago, wore a medal stating that he had been the means of saving twenty-two human lives. In devotion the dog is superior to all other animals, not even excepting man. ‘How could one get relief from the endless dissimulation, falsity, and malice of mankind,’ exclaimed Schopenhauer in one of his inspired moments, ‘if there were no dogs into whose honest faces he could look without distrust?’ A dog will follow a handful of rags wrapped around a homeless beggar, day after day, through heat and cold and storm and starvation, just as faithfully as he will follow the purple of a king. The dog who stood over the lifeless body of his master, grieving for recognition and starting at every flutter of his garments, till he himself died of starvation, had in his faithful breast a nobler heart than that which beats in the bosom of most men. And the devotion of Greyfriars Bobby, who every night for twelve years, in all kinds of weather, slept on his master’s grave, was well worthy the marble tribute which to-day stands in Edinburgh to his memory. There has never been recorded in the history of the world an instance of more extravagant trust and devotion than that told of the canine companion of a certain vivisector, which licked the hand of his master while undergoing the crime of being cut to pieces. Such deeds of self-sacrifice remind one of the tales told of imaginary saints. But they are the deeds of only dogs—of beings whom half the world look upon with indifference and contempt, and whom the other half would feel, if they came within reach, under the strictest obligations to kick.
‘When some proud son of man returns to earth,
Unknown to glory but upheld by birth,
The sculptor’s art exhausts the pomp of woe,
And storied urns record who rests below;
When all is done, upon the tomb is seen,
Not what he was, but what he should have been;
But the poor dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is still his master’s own.
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes, for him alone,
Unhonoured falls, unnoticed all his worth—
Denied in heaven the soul he had on earth.’
I am not one of those who regard the evidence for the post-mortem existence of the human soul as being either abundant or conclusive. But of one thing I am positive, and that is, that there are the same grounds precisely for believing in the immortality of the bird and the quadruped as there are for the belief in human immortality. And it is delightful to find great thinkers like Haeckel, great biologists and philosophers, holding the same conviction. Haeckel is the giant of the Germans, and in his brilliant book ‘The Riddle of the Universe’ appears this rather poetical paragraph: ‘I once knew an old head-forester, who, being left a widower and without children at an early age, had lived alone for more than thirty years in a noble forest of East Prussia. His only companions were one or two servants, with whom he exchanged merely a few necessary words, and a great pack of different kinds of dogs, with whom he lived in perfect psychic communion. Through many years of training this keen observer and friend of nature had penetrated deep into the individual souls of his dogs, and he was as convinced of their personal immortality as he was of his own. Some of his most intelligent dogs were, in his impartial estimation, at a higher stage of psychic development than his old stupid maid and his rough and wrinkled man-servant. Any unprejudiced observer who will study the psychic phenomena of a fine dog for a year, and follow attentively the processes of its thought, judgment, and reason, will have to admit that it has just as valid a claim to immortality as man himself.’
Fido was a shaggy terrier who lived years ago in the old home on the farm by the beautiful brook. He was one of the very first acquaintances the writer of these lines made on coming into existence. In his earlier years, before age had dimmed his mind and rheumatism had fastened upon him, he was an exceedingly agreeable and clever canine, active in all the affairs of the farm. He knew the old homestead by heart, and he took about as much interest in having everything go right as anybody—more, perhaps, even than we boys did. He chased the pigs out of the orchard without being asked to do so, and guarded the house at night with the vigilance of a hired watchman. He seemed to realise the demands of everyday situations about as well as any of us. He could distinguish between neighbours who were accustomed to come on the premises and strangers who were not. He always knew when company came, for he invariably attempted to profit by the fact. He had been taught early the propriety of keeping in the background when his tyrants were feeding, and ordinarily on such occasions he slept dutifully by the kitchen stove. But just as sure as a guest sat at table, Fido would turn up, and, tapping the visitor gently to get his attention, would sit up perfectly straight, with his paws pendent and a peculiar grin on his face, in expectation of a morsel. Dear old Fido! How much he thought of all of us! And how meagerly, as I know now, were his matchless love and services requited; On Sundays sometimes the human members of the household would go away and stay all day, and Fido and the cat would be left alone to get along the best way they could. He knew as well as any of us when these days came around, and he dreaded them. I suppose he had learned from experience to associate cessation of farm work and peculiar preparations with a day alone. The long, lonely hours probably affected him somewhat as they do a human being who is compelled to stay alone all day with nothing to do. But what a welcome he gave us in the evening when we came back! This was indubitable evidence of his loneliness. The first familiar object we would see in the evening, on coming in sight of home, was faithful Fido, sitting out in the road on the hill above the house—sitting straight up in that peculiar way of his—watching and waiting for our home-coming. He knew, or seemed to know, the direction from which to expect us, and was able to recognise us a long way off. The years have been many, and Fido’s dust has long been scattered by the gusts over the farms of north-west Missouri; but now, in fancy, I can see this faithful creature bounding down the road in the sunset to meet us, as he used to do in the golden long-ago, leaping and smiling and wagging his tail, and wriggling and barking in a perfect ecstasy of gladness.
Well, I know Fido could feel and think, that he loved and feared and longed and dreaded and dreamed and hated and grieved and sympathised and reasoned and rejoiced—in short, that he was moved by about the same passions and considerations as human beings usually are. He gave the same evidence of it precisely as a human being does.
The dog is the oldest of human associates. Long before the historical period the dog was domesticated in Europe, Asia, and Africa. No race of men is too primitive to be without the dog. The bones of the dog are found in the middens of the Baltic, and rude representations of it are chiseled on the oldest monuments of Egypt and Assyria. The dog was the servant of man away in paleolithic times, when the mastodon was on earth, and man was a naked troglodyte, and Europe extended westward to the Azores. And he has been a faithful friend, a tireless ally, and an enthusiastic slave of a thankless and inhuman master ever since.
Birds are pre-eminently emotional and artistic. This is shown by their fondness for singing, their fine dress, their pining for their dead, their dainty architecture, their pretty forms and manners of life, their joyousness, and their love for their young. Birds are the most beautiful and engaging of all terrestrial beings. Endowed with the power of flight, eminently active, light-hearted and free, attired in all the colours of the rainbow, and with voices of unrivalled richness and melody, birds are the admiration and envy of all of those that dwell on the earth. Birds possess naturally and in marvellous perfection that power of locomotion which has been so long sought for by slow-shuffling man. Birds are also incomparable musicians, no other animals, not even men, approaching them in the surpassing brilliancy and sweetness of their song. No human musician in high-sounding hall can equal the artless lay of the wild bird ringing melodiously through the leafy colonnades of the woods. Like men, birds sing chiefly of love; but they also sing for pastime or pleasure. Their singing is sweetest during the season of courtship, and attains its highest development in the males. Birds are ardent lovers. To win their brides, the males contend with each other, and display their charms of plumage and song with the wildness of human Romeos.
The song of birds is generally acquired by inheritance from the species, but is sometimes borrowed by imitation from other birds, or even from other animals. Birds taken from their species when young, before they have heard their native song, sing generally the song of their kind, but it is likely to be interspersed with notes and phrases from the birds around them. Birds thus isolated have been known to adopt entirely the song of their surroundings. Olive Thorne Miller vouches for the fact that an English sparrow she once knew grew up in company with a canary, and came in time to sing the song of its more talented companion to perfection. It must have been a Shakspere of a bird, however, to have soared so high above the excruciating accomplishments of the generality of its species.
The songs of birds can be set to music just as the melodies of men can. The songs of several birds were published in the American Naturalist a few years ago. And Winchell, the well-known English student of birds, has written a clever book on the ‘Cries and Call-notes of Wild Birds,’ in which he prints the calls and songs of most of the native birds of England. According to this writer, who has perhaps studied the music of birds more critically than anyone else, the song of the nightingale, when printed in the notation of ordinary human music, is like a piano solo. It is made up of a score or so of different strains, with trills and crescendos, and all executed in so inimitable a manner that it is unrecognisable when repeated on a musical instrument or the human voice. One of these strains, curiously enough, is identical with the song of a certain bush-warbler of western Canada—as if the English vocalist had plagiarised the song of its humbler cousin in compiling its incomparable repertoire. The song of the mocking-bird is a magnificent medley, made up of the calls, trills, twitters, warbles, warnings, and love-songs, of a score or more of other birds. I have heard this bird along the Solomon and Arkansas valleys repeat in the most perfect manner the notes and songs of the pewee, purple martin, kingbird, flicker, blue jay, catbird, canary, crow, English sparrow, red-headed woodpecker, quail, cardinal, cuckoo, robin, red-wings, grackle, meadowlark, night-hawk, whip-poor-will, besides many other calls and notes, perhaps of birds I did not know. In the case of some of these birds the mocker made all of the different sounds of each bird. The song of the mocking-bird is delivered at any time, day or night, and generally in a state of high ecstasy and excitement, the performer flying from tree to tree and from house-top to barn-top, occasionally throwing himself into the air in the most absurd manner, and all the time pouring forth such a stream of melody that one would think all the birds in the neighbourhood had suddenly come together and let loose in a grand festival of song.
According to Chapman, many of the notes of birds are language notes rather than sounds expressive of sentiment. Of the robin this well-known student of birds says: ‘The song and call-notes of this bird, while familiar to everyone, are in reality understood by no one, and offer excellent subjects for the student of bird language. Its notes express interrogation, suspicion, alarm, and caution, and it signals to its companions to take wing. Indeed, few of our birds have a more extended vocabulary.’ Winchell says that the common English sparrow has as many as seven different notes, which it uses to express the thoughts and feelings passing through its rather active but not very highly honoured head: (1) The common note of address of the male to the female; (2) a note of alarm used by both male and female adults, but never by the young; (3) an emphatic alarm note, always uttered by sentinels when a hawk is near or when a man approaches with a gun; (4) the note of the female when surrounded by several noisy and contending male rivals; (5) an autumn cry uttered by the first one of the company perceiving danger and flying up from the hedges and fields—never uttered by young, but by adults of both sexes; (6) the love note of both male and female, used mostly by the female, and generally with a fluttering or shaking accompaniment of her wings; (7) a curious note sometimes heard in London—meaning not well understood, but supposed to be a sort of chuckle or sign of contentment. Each one of these several different notes may be used to stand for various ideas depending on the circumstances by being given different emphasis and inflection, just as in the languages of many primitive races of men a small vocabulary of words is used to stand for a much larger number of ideas by being pronounced differently. In the Chinese language, for instance, the words are increased to three or four times the original number by modulation; but the same thing is observed in all languages, both human and non-human. Verbal poverty is pieced out by verbal variation. We say ać-cent or ac-cent́, depending on whether we wish to express the idea of a noun or a verb.
The memory of birds is well developed. Many of them remember the very grove or meadow, and even the very knot-hole or bush, in which they built their nest the season before, although in the meantime they have journeyed over lands and seas and sojourned thousands of miles away. Every year, for several seasons past, in late summer and early fall, after the nesting-time is over and the young ones are all grown, the purple martins have gathered in large numbers about the Field Columbian Museum, in Jackson Park, Chicago. They stay here for a few weeks, foraging the surrounding air for insects by day, and sleeping on the great dome of the Museum by night, finally flying away to be seen no more in such numbers till next year. These birds, many of them anyway, must remember from one year to another this annual assembly here by the big waters, else why would they come together at this particular spot from all over the country? I have no doubt that some of them, having sojourned here year after year for some time, remember well the great ugly building where they meet, and are more or less familiar with the surrounding locality from having searched it so often. I wonder what led to the establishing of the custom in the first place. Customs do not fall from the skies. And what advantage is there in the practice? What are they up to as they chirp and wheel in the air, and flutter up the slopes and sail down again, and perch on the pinnacles and twitter? Maybe it is a sort of Saratoga for them, where they all come together ostensibly to dip their bills in the blue waves, but where sons swell in their new feathers, and sly mammas find prospects for unmarketable misses.
A parrot has been known to remember the voice of its mistress after an absence of a year and a half—a very remarkable feat even for the grey matter of a bird. A flock of geese mentioned by Romanes showed their knowledge of the arrival of market-day, which came every two weeks, by assembling regularly on such days, early in the morning, in front of the town inn where the market was held, to pick up the corn. They never came on the wrong day; and on one occasion, when the market was omitted on account of a holiday, here came the unfailing fowls cackling and shouting as usual in merry anticipation of their fortnightly feast, but ignorant of the national necessities which had doomed them to be disappointed.6d
Parrots remember and call for their absent friends, and mumble phrases in their dreams which have been taught to them. These gifted birds learn long poems by heart, and sing songs with considerable art. A parrot belonging to the canon of the Cathedral of Salzburg was given instruction regularly two hours every day for ten years, from 1830 to 1840. The bird became very proficient in speech and exceedingly intelligent. It took part in conversations, whistled tunes, and was able to sing a number of popular songs, among them an entire aria from Flotow’s opera of ‘Martha’.7a
Educated birds though, like educated dogs, horses, cats, mice, men, and everything else, are very different beings from the uneducated. Cultivation is a key that unlocks all sorts of miracles. Cats are cultivated tigers; and the richest grains that ripen in the fields of men, and the loveliest flowers that blow, are only educated weeds. Even the flea may be taught to exchange leaping for walking, to draw a tiny wagon, to ride on the seat, to fire a toy cannon, and do many other feats.
There is one family of birds in which the superior size, gorgeousness, and vivacity, usual to the males, are found in the other sex, the females being the larger and more brightly coloured—the Phalarope family. Indeed, the members of this small family not only reverse the usual arrangement of the sexual characters of birds, but completely upset many of the most cherished traditions of the avian household. The female does the wooing, and takes the lead in selecting the nest site. And while she lays the eggs, the privilege of incubation she hands over magnanimously to her dull-coloured mate.
Birds have a keen observation and a good deal of that invaluable faculty known as common-sense. It is wonderful how quickly they learn to avoid telegraph-wires when these invisible but deadly gossamers are first stretched across a country, and how unerringly they keep at safe distances when hunted with firearms. An experienced crow can tell a cane from a gun-barrel almost as far as he can see it.
Nearly all birds build nests of some kind in which to cradle their eggs and young. The cow-bird and cuckoo (European), however, are exceptions. These birds have the rather human practice of turning their cares and labours over to somebody else. They are loafers and parasites. They lay their eggs secretly in the nests of other birds, where their eggs are hatched and their young cared for by an alien mother. I have seen a mother song-sparrow hustling about among the shrubs and grasses for an hour at a time almost, gathering food for a young cow-bird nearly twice as big as she was, while her foundling sat phlegmatically at the foot of a tree chirping and fluttering its wings, and acting as a thankless and apparently bottomless receptacle for the morsel after morsel laboriously harvested for it by its tireless little foster-mother. Sand-martins and kingfishers burrow in the earth and rear their broods in subterranean cradles; gulls and gamebirds build on the ground; the flamingoes and barn-swallows build mud nests; the woodpeckers mine holes in trees; doves and eagles make platforms of sticks; the tailor-bird bastes living leaves together; the social weavers construct great straw roofs covering the top of a tree, and build their nests on the limbs beneath; most singing birds build daintily-lined baskets, and swing them in trees and bushes.
It is often said that all the birds of a species build their nests in precisely the same way, and that, while men change and improve their dwelling-places from generation to generation, birds build their abodes in the same old way, just as their ancestors built theirs centuries and centuries ago. This is a favourite thought with the fogies, with those who change not in their thinking from the ways hacked out for them centuries and centuries ago. Birds are like men. Some of them—some races and some individuals—are much more given to initiative than others. There is as wide a difference between the hang-bird and the auk in the construction of their domiciles as between the millionaire and the savage. And the hang-bird has come by her home-making art through centuries of improvement, just as the millionaire has arrived at his. It is believed by ornithologists that the first nests of birds were the niches of rocks or simple hollows scooped in the sand and soil, such as are still seen among the more primitive bird races, and that from these aboriginal beginnings have come, through ages of evolution, the elaborate creations of the cotton-bird, weaver-bird, tailorbird, oven-bird, the baya-sparrow, the finches, and the orioles. The savage who lives unmolested generation after generation in the same land and country builds his simple hut in just the same way as his ancestors built theirs, and thinks the same things his ancestors thought a thousand years before him. Sir Samuel Baker, in a paper on ‘The Races of the Nile Basin,’ points out that each tribe of men in eastern Africa, like each species of bird, has its own peculiar style of hut, and that the huts of the various tribes are as constant in their types as are the nests of birds. The same thing is true of their headdresses as of their huts; and this fixed character exists also in their languages, customs, and religions. It is only some races of men that are given to growth and fluidity, and only some men of these special races.
Right in our own country, among the remote mountain recesses of Appalachia, surrounded on all sides by the most wonderful development, material and intellectual, the world has ever seen, lives a race of rude mountain folk almost as aboriginal in their ways and views of life, and as unaffected by civilisation, as if they were in the heart of Africa. They live huddled together in one-room log-cabins without windows or floors, eat bacon and cornmeal, carry on almost constant wars, and execute the deputies of civilisation who happen to stray into their illicit dominions, just as they have done from the time these mountain silences were first broken by them 150 or 200 years ago.
Birds, as a rule, use a great deal of care and thought in the location of their nests. After they have selected a certain grove or field as the one best suited to their purposes, or as the one around which cluster the happiest memories, it usually requires several days of flying and peeping about, of spying and exploration, before the exact spot for the precious domicile is finally settled upon. It is a delicate matter for many birds, for security from sun, storm, and enemies must all be taken into account. Old birds, as has been frequently observed, build better nests and select more clever locations for their nests than the young and inexperienced. The nest-building habits of many birds are known to have changed during the past few hundred years. The American house-swallow did most certainly not build under the eaves of human houses 300 years ago, nor did the hair-bird in her nest with horsehair as she invariably does now. The fact that wrens, swifts, and martins now build almost altogether in boxes and chimneys shows that birds are able and willing to adapt themselves to new conditions. The chimney-swift and purple martin, it is said, still cling to their aboriginal custom of rearing their young in hollow trees in the unsettled parts of America. The indomitable house-sparrow builds its nest almost anywhere, from knot-holes and tin cans to electric-light globes and tree-tops. Its original dwelling was probably an arboreal affair, like that of other sparrows, and different nesting-places have been adopted as a result of its association with man. Not only in its architecture, but in several other ways, this bird has departed from the traditions of its tribe. The Fringillidae (the sparrow family of birds) are seed-eaters, both in structure and practice. But the house-sparrow, since it left the fields and groves to become a gamin on human streets, has learned to eat almost anything, and one thing, too, about as cheerfully as another. The varied habits of this bird are probably due to its natural elasticity in the first place, supplemented by the unsettling influences of its rather kaleidoscopic experiences during the past few hundred years.
The fear of birds for man is an acquired trait due to ages of persecution. If man would treat birds kindly, they would act toward him as they do toward any other friendly animal. When unfrequented islands are first visited by man, the birds are found to be perfectly fearless of him, flying about him, feeding from his hand, and manifesting no more timidity than if he were a big-hearted bird himself. Darwin states that, when he stopped at the Galapagos Islands on his famous trip around the world in the Beagle, he found the birds there so tame that he could push them from the branches of the trees with his gun-barrel. Professor Cutting, of the State University of Iowa, in an article in the Popular Science Monthly for August, 1903, tells of the almost absolute fearlessness of the birds on the island of Laysan, an isolated atoll in the Pacific west of the Hawaian Islands, which he visited during that summer. The island swarms with bird life—petrels, albatrosses, and tropical birds of various kinds—and these birds betray no more fear in the presence of man than if he were a cow. The albatrosses were so numerous and so indifferent to the presence of man that it was necessary to shove them aside with one’s foot to keep from stepping on them when one went for a walk along the sand-stretches of the shore. Professor Cutting took photographs of birds which literally posed for him in all sorts of positions, and half-savage jackies amused themselves by going about and pulling the pretty tail feathers from the tropical birds as they sat on their nests. I have known of two cases where persons, by going to the same place day after day with food and kindness, have in the course of a few weeks taught robins, sparrows, and other birds, to lose all fear of them, so much so as to sit on their shoulders and arms and eat out of their hands. This is the spirit all birds would show all the time toward their featherless lords if these featherless ones would only treat them with half the consideration they merit.
The love of a bird for the treasures of her nest is one of the most beautiful things of this world. Mother-like, the parent bird will do anything almost for the sake of her little ones. Who has not seen the kildeer strive with all the tact of her clever little soul to allure some big giant of a human being, who has wandered into her neighbourhood, away from her nest of precious young? Many a time as a boy on the farm I have followed one of these birds limping and tumbling and fluttering along on the ground a few feet ahead of me, utterly disabled, as I supposed, but always managing to keep just a little beyond the reach of my eager hands. And when the artful mother has led me far from the sacred spot where lay all there was in this world to her, how triumphantly she has lifted herself on her unharmed wings and, to my utter astonishment, sailed away. The partridge and the mourning-dove are, if possible, even more artful in their acting than the kildeer. After I became a large boy and had been told the meaning of these exhibitions by parent birds, I often followed the mourning-dove, thinking the bird must be really wounded after all, so perfectly did it pretend. But the cunning of the kildeer is not confined to luring one away from the nest. If by some accident one finds her nest (and the nest is so cleverly concealed that, if it is discovered at all, it will be by pure accident), the resourceful mother is ready with other expedients to outwit you. She watches you all the time from the proper distance, and knows by your conduct the moment you have found her nest. And before you have even had time to admire the skill displayed by the mother in blending so perfectly her abode with its surroundings, a single peculiar note from her has caused the whole nestful of cuddling young ones to dart out of their cradle and disappear among the surrounding clods as if by magic. No amount of searching can find one of them. They have vanished as effectually as if they had evaporated. And it is enough to touch the heart of the most indifferent to see the anxious mother bird, as I have seen her from the cranny of a neighbouring rock-pile, come back to her nest and call her scattered children together again after they have once dispersed at her command. Circling around the nest two or three times to assure herself that no one is nigh, she alights and begins a low clucking sound like that of a hen calling her brood. The little ones come out of their hiding-places one after another as mysteriously as they vanished. You can’t see for the life of you where they come from. They seem to just emanate. And if one of them fails to come at her call—for the devoted mother knows very well just how many she has—she extends her search farther out from her nest, looking all around and keeping up that peculiar little cluck, until the half-scared-to-death little slyboots finally comes creeping out from his improvised snuggery somewhere. If a kildeer’s nest has once been found, and the mother feels that it is in danger of future visits, she will move her family at night to some other locality, and it is practically impossible ever to find it again. The family relations of the ring-dotterels are said to be ‘so charming and touching that even hunters recoil from shooting a female surrounded by her young ones.’
Human beings, true to their instinct never to call into action their ability to think if they can employ their faculty for nonsense instead, call this love of the mother bird ‘machinery.’ But there are some of us (and our numbers are increasing) who are disposed to put off the adoption of this conclusion until we go mad. The bird builds her nest, weaving it of the rarest fibres. She hides it in the copse or prudently hangs it far out on some inaccessible bough. She lays her beautiful eggs, and hatches them with the warmth and life of her own breast. She tends her young, bringing them food and drink, and watching over them with a tender and tireless vigilance. She protects them in storm with her own little body, worries about them when danger lurks, and dreams of them, no doubt, as she rocks and sleeps under the silent stars. She sings to them in the overflow of her gladness and hope, and risks her very existence to shield them from harm. She teaches them to fly, to find their food, and to detect their enemies. She is true to her mate, and her mate is true and kind to her. As the days of summer shorten, and the cool, long nights warn of approaching autumn, she leads her children away from the old place, she and her faithful mate, out into the wide old world. And I say there is love in the heart of that mother as truly as in the heart of woman, and there are joy and genuineness and sorrow and fidelity in that sylvan home more sacred than may sometimes bloom in the cold mansions of men.
Conjugal love is also very strong in many of the feathered races, especially among those in which the wedding is for successive seasons or for life. The pining of love-birds for their dead sweethearts is well known. The mandarin duck is proverbial for its marital faithfulness, and a pair of these fowls is carried by the Chinese in their marriage processions as an emblem of constancy. Many instances are recorded of birds, after having been deprived of their mates, refusing steadfastly the attentions of other birds, and even sometimes separating themselves entirely from the society of their kind. The following account of the devotion of a widowed pigeon for her deceased consort sounds like a tale of human woe:
‘A man set to watch a field much patronised by pigeons shot an old male pigeon who had long been an inhabitant of the farm. His mate, around whom he had for many a year cooed, whom he had nourished with his own crop and had assisted in rearing numerous young ones immediately settled on the ground by his side She refused to leave him, and manifested her grief in the most expressive manner. The labourer took up the dead bird and hung it on a stake. The widow still refused to forsake her husband, and continued day after day slowly walking around the stake on which his body hung. The kind-hearted wife of the farmer heard of the matter, and went to the relief of the stricken bird. On arriving at the spot, she found the poor bird still watching at the side of her dead, and making an occasional effort to get to him. She was much spent with her long fasting and grief. She had made a circular beaten path around the corpse of her companion’.8a
And these are the beings whose bones men jest over at their feasts, and brutes shoot for pastime on human holidays. Much has been said of the sorrow of birds for their deceased mates, but not too much. For the avian soul may be smothered by the gloom and loneliness that come upon the heart, when the great light of love and companionship has gone out, quite as completely as the soul of a bereaved human. In not many human homes where loved ones lie sick and dying are felt the pangs of more genuine grief than those sometimes suffered by birds when their friends and companions are stricken in death. The following incident, vouched for by Dr. Franklin, who observed it, is only one among many such instances recorded in the literature on birds:
A pair of parrots had lived together on the most loving terms for four years, when the female was taken with a serious attack of gout. She grew rapidly worse, and was soon so weak as to be unable to leave her perch for food, when the male, faithful and tender as a human spouse, took it upon himself to carry food to her regularly in his beak. ‘He continued feeding her in this way for four months, but the infirmities of his companion increased day by day, until at last she was no longer able to support herself on the perch. She remained cowering down in the bottom of the cage, making from time to time ineffectual efforts to regain her perch. The male was always near her, and did everything in his power to aid the feeble efforts of his dear better-half. Seizing the poor invalid by the beak or the upper part of her wing, he tried his best to enable her to rise, and repeated his efforts several times. His constancy, his gestures, and his continued solicitude, all showed in this affectionate bird the most ardent desire to relieve the sufferings and assist the weakness of his sinking companion. But the scene became still more affecting when the female was dying. Her unhappy consort moved about her incessantly, his attentions and tender cares redoubled. He even tried to open her beak to give some nourishment. He ran to her, and then returned with a troubled and agitated look. At intervals he uttered the most plaintive cries; then, with his eyes fixed on her, kept a mournful silence. At length his companion breathed her last. From that moment he pined away, and in the course of a few weeks died’.6e
Even the rough-looking ostrich has sensibility enough to die of a broken heart, as was the case in the Jardin des Plantes at Paris a few years ago. There is many a heart with a slabless grave far from the haunts of men, and many a tear in secret brews that never wets the eye.
The individual who has never acquired the enthusiasm for a knowledge of the birds and a love for their presence and association has omitted some of the richest emotions of life. ‘The sight of a bird or the sound of its voice is at all times an event of such significance to me,’ says Chapman, ‘a source of such unfailing pleasure, that when I go afield with those to whom birds are strangers I am deeply impressed by the comparative barrenness of their world, for they live in ignorance of a great store of enjoyment that might be theirs for the asking.’
‘I cannot love the man who does not love, As men love light, the song of happy birds.’
I have seen a mother mouse in a moment of peril flee from her home among the falling pieces of a cord-wood pile, and disappear under the roots of a neighbouring oak. I have seen her a little later, recovered from her initial dismay, making her way back again, clambering along among the tangled timbers, stopping now and then to look and listen, her eyes wild and anxious, and her whole little body quaking with excitement. I have seen her go among the ruins of her dwelling, take a poor little squeaking young one in her mouth, and hurry away with it to the gloomy refuge in the roots of the oak. I have watched her return again and again, each time taking in her careful teeth the tiny body of a babe, until five mouthfuls of precious pink were safely lodged within the fortress of the oak. And I could as soon believe that woman, when she saves her children from some fearful harm, is a soulless machine as think that that brave little wood-mother, out there alone under the trees, snatching her darlings from the jaws of death, was a heroine without sense or feeling. That little hairy mother with four feet and bead-like eyes loved her young ones in just the same way and for just the same reason as a human mother loves her young ones. She looked upon her babies, in all probability, with the same mother-love and tenderness as a human mother looks upon hers, and felt in miniature, with evil hovering above them, the same consternation a woman feels when destruction reaches out after those that are nearest and dearest. And when it was all over, when the good angel of deliverance had finally spread its healing white wings over that afflicted family, the heart of that little rodent was doubtless soothed by the same joy as that which, in the hour of deliverance, calms the hearts of humankind.
Ants tend their fields, gather their harvests, domesticate other insects, and keep slaves. They help each other bear heavy burdens, extricate each other from misfortune, speak to each other when they meet, and bury their dead. They build roads and bridges, and manifest wonderful engineering skill in their construction. They even tunnel under rivers. They go far from home, and find their way back again. They inhabit towns, and build splendid and spacious palaces. Each ant knows every other citizen of its own town, and an ant from any other town is immediately recognised as a foreigner. Ants have their overseers of industrial enterprises, and regular hours for work and sleep. The ant is the most pugnacious of all animals, and the most muscular compared with its size. It will boldly attack the biggest creature that walks if this creature invades its home. It will fasten its mandibles into an enemy, and allow itself to be torn to pieces without relaxing its hold. Among some savage tribes, certain species of ants are said to be used as surgeons. Infuriated ants are allowed to fasten their mandibles on the opposite edges of a gash, and in this way the wound is closed. The ants are decapitated, and their bodiless heads with their relentless jaws serve as stitches to the wound. Ants have holidays and athletic festivals. On such occasions they romp and chase each other and play hide-and-seek like children. They stand on their hind-legs, embrace each other with their fore-limbs, grasp each other by the feet or antennae, pull each other down the entrances to their towns, wrestle and roll over on the sand, and so on—all in the friendliest manner. It is greatly to the credit of these little people that no observer has ever yet known them to become so inventively helpless or so athletically hard up as to play slug-ball. Ants educate their young, and practise the fundamental principles of human states and societies. Forel, the great Swiss student of ants, says that several hundred nests are sometimes united into a single confederation. Each ant knows every other ant of the entire confederation, and they all take part in the common defence. Haeckel says, speaking of social evolution in ants, that the aboriginal ants of the Chalk Age had as little idea of the division of labour and organisation of modern ant states as paleolithic flint-chippers had of the complexity and organisation of twentieth-century civilisation. ‘If we take an ant’s nest, we not only see that work of every description—rearing of progeny, foraging, building, rearing of aphides, and so on—is performed according to the principles of voluntary mutual aid, but we must also recognise, with Forel, that the fundamental feature of the life of many species of ants is the obligation of every ant to share its food, already swallowed and partly digested, with every member of the community which may apply for it. Two ants belonging to the same nest or to the same confederation of nests will approach each other, exchange a few movements with the antennae, and if one of them is hungry or thirsty—and especially if the other has its crop full—it immediately asks for food. The individual thus requested never refuses. It sets apart its mandibles, takes a proper position, and regurgitates a drop of transparent fluid, which is licked up by the hungry ant. Regurgitating food for others is so prominent a feature in the life of the ants, and it so constantly recurs both for feeding hungry comrades and for feeding larvae, that Forel considers the digestive tube of ants to consist of two different parts, one of which—the posterior—is for the special use of the individual, and the other—the anterior part—is chiefly for the use of the community. If an ant which has its crop full has been selfish enough to refuse to feed a comrade, it will be treated as an enemy. If the refusal has been made while its kinsfolks were fighting with some other species, they will fall upon the greedy individual with greater vehemence even than upon the enemies themselves. All this has been confirmed by the most accurate observations and experiments’.9
Ants keep slaves. And the slaves, in some instances, carry their masters about, feed them, groom them, and attend to their every want, just as human lackeys do helpless aristocrats. In some species the institution of slavery is so old that the physical structures of the masters have been modified until the masters are physically unable to feed themselves, and will perish from hunger, though surrounded by food, if they are left to themselves. The brain of the ant, as Darwin says, is one of the most wonderful bits of matter in the universe. It is scarcely one-fourth the size of the head of a pin, yet it is the seat of the most astonishing wisdom and activity. If human intelligence were as great, compared with the mass of the human brain, as is the ant’s, man would be several hundred times as wise as he is now, and would then probably not fall far short of that state of erudition which the average man imagines he already represents. Ants remember, and a fact becomes impressed by repetition, showing that the faculty of memory in ants is governed by the same laws as is this faculty in man. Sir John Lubbock found it necessary to teach his ants the way by repeating the lesson where the way was long or unusual. ‘Sensation, perception, and association follow in the social insects, on the whole, the same fundamental laws as in the vertebrates, including ourselves. Furthermore, attention is surprisingly developed in insects’ (Forel). Ants keep standing armies, make alliances, and maraud neighbouring states. They have their wars, civil and foreign, and their massacres and enslavements of the conquered. But they have never got so low yet, so far as anyone knows, as to hypocritically prosecute their conquests in the name of God and humanity. The battlefields of ants resemble the carnage-plains of men, strewn with ghastly corpses and covered with the headless and dying. And the accounts of their expeditions—their going forth in regular columns, with captains, scouts, and skirmish lines, their battles, and their return laden with plunder and captives—read like the grisly tales of human history. Ants perform, in short, about all the antics of civilised man, except maltreating the females and drinking gin. And shall we say their civilisation is less real because it is miniature and because it is carried on far below the Brobdingnagian contemplations of man? ‘When we see an ant-hill tenanted by thousands of industrious inhabitants, excavating chambers, forming tunnels, making roads, guarding their home, gathering food, feeding the young, tending their domestic animals, each one fulfilling its duties industriously and without confusion, it is difficult altogether to deny them the gift of reason or to escape the conviction that their mental powers differ from those of men not so much in kind as in degree’ (Lubbock).
The industrious and gifted bee, with its wonderful social system, in advance even of that of the most enlightened societies of men; the generous horse, who thinks and feels so much more than the clowns who maul him ever suspect; the artful spider, that confirmed waylayer lurking in his lair of silk; the soft and predaceous cat; the timid-hearted hare, poor hounded little dweller of the fields and stream-sides; the beautiful and vivacious squirrel; the lowly lady-bug; the cautious fox; the irascible serpent, so cruelly misunderstood by men; the patient camel; the scornful peafowl; the indomitable goat; the grave and vindictive elephant; the ingenious beaver, the woodman of the primeval wilderness; the lordly and polygamous cock; the maternal hen; the wary trout, beset everywhere by the villainous traps of impostors; the bride-like butterfly; the delicate antelope and deer; and the sturdy, incorruptible ox—all of these beings have within them souls composed primarily of the same elements as those that compose the souls of men.
Ground-wasps have been observed to use tiny stones as hammers in packing the dirt firmly over their nests—a very remarkable act of intelligence, since the use of tools is not common even among the higher mammals.10
Fishes have been taught to assemble at the ringing of a bell, and toads and tortoises to come at the call of their favourite friends. An alligator which was kept tame for several years became so much attached to its master that ‘it followed him about the house like a dog, scrambling up the stairs after him, and showing much affection and docility.’ The favourite friend and companion of this alligator was the cat; and, whenever the cat stretched herself on the floor in front of the fire, the alligator would lie down beside her, with its head on the cat, and go to sleep. ‘When the cat was absent, the alligator was restless, but it always appeared happy when the cat was near it’.8b
Wolves and foxes sometimes cooperate with each other in their hunting expeditions, somewhat as men do in theirs. One of their number will crouch in ambush by the side of a road known to be used by hares or other small animals, and leap on the unsuspecting fugitives when driven that way by others of the hunting band. Many animals post sentinels when they eat or sleep or engage in other hazardous undertakings, and these sentinels show a good deal of discrimination in distinguishing between animals that are friendly and those that are not. Beavers not only build lodges to live in, but also construct dams to keep the water in which the villages are located at a certain height. The outlet of these dams is carefully regulated, being regularly lessened and enlarged to suit the supply of water in the stream. The trees used by the beavers in their enterprises are felled by them along the margins of the stream, and floated to the place where they are used. In old communities, where the supply of timber near the stream has been exhausted, artificial canals are cut by these indomitable engineers for use in the transportation of their materials. These excavations are made at a great cost of labour and for the deliberate purpose of enabling the builders to accomplish that which they could not accomplish in any other way. ‘In executing this purpose,’ says Romanes, ‘there is sometimes displayed a depth of engineering forethought over details of structure required by the circumstances of special localities which is even more astonishing than the execution of the general idea’.6f When, for instance, a canal has been carried so far from the original water-supply that, owing to the rising ground, it cannot be continued without a very great expenditure of effort in digging, a second dam is built higher up-stream, and with water drawn from this the canal is continued on at a higher level. Sometimes a third dam is built above the second, and the canal again continued at a still higher level before the valuable timber of the higher grounds is reached. These enterprising rodents also carve sometimes enormous channels across the necks of land formed by winding rivers, to serve as cut-offs in travel and transportation. And yet all of these things—all of the intelligence, feeling, and ingenuity displayed by the non-human races—are still lumped together by belated psychologists under the head of ‘instinct,’ by which is meant a blind, unconscious knack of doing the right thing without in any way realising what is being done or what it is being done for! The principle in accordance with which mind is denied to non-human beings would, if carried to its legitimate conclusions, make machines out of all of us, and limit the possession of conscious intelligence to the individual who promulgates the theory. The attitude assumed by many psychologists toward the mental faculties of inferior races reminds one of Heine’s interview with the old lizard at Lucca. In the discussion which ensued between the poet and the reptile, the poet dropped the words, ‘I think.’ ‘Think!’ snapped the lizard with a sharp, aristocratic tone of profound contempt—‘think! Which of you thinks? For 3,000 years, wise sir, I have investigated the spiritual functions of animals, and I have made men and apes the special objects of my study. I have devoted myself to these queer creatures with as great zeal and diligence as Lyonnet to his caterpillars. And as the result of my researches, I can assure you no man thinks. Now and then something occurs to him, and these accidentally occurring somethings he calls thoughts, and the stringing of them together he calls thinking. But you can take my word for it, no man thinks—no philosopher thinks. And, so far as philosophy is concerned, it is mere air and water, like pure vapours in the sky. There is, in reality, only one true philosophy, and that is engraven in eternal hieroglyphics on my own tail’.7b
This attitude of the lordly saurian toward the human race is a stinging burlesque on the anthropocentric conceit which perverts all of man’s views of the other orders of life.
It is not contended that non-human beings are psychically identical with human beings. The races of men are not psychically identical with each other. The difference between the intellectual splendours of a Spencer evolving volumes of the profoundest philosophy and the mind of an Australian who cannot count six, or between the understanding of an Edison, the wizard of the electrical world, and that of the South Sea islanders, who, when Captain Cook gave them some English nails, planted them in the hope of raising a new crop, is almost infinite. The lowest races of men have neither superstition nor the power of abstract thought as have the higher races. They have a word for black stone, white stone, and brown stone, but no word for stone; for elm-tree, oak-tree, and the like, but no word for tree. As Kingsley says, ‘It is difficult to believe that a dog does not form as clear an abstract idea of a tree as these people do.’ There are human beings living in the forests of Asia, Africa, and Australasia that wander about from place to place in herds without chief, law, weapons, or fixed habitations. They go naked, mate by chance, and climb trees like monkeys. Some of these races know nothing of fire, religion, or a moral world, chatter to each other like apes, and live on such natural products as roots, fruits, serpents, mice, ants, and honey. One of these creatures, we are told, will lie flat on his front for an hour by the runway of a field-mouse, waiting for a chance to snatch up the little creature when it comes along and eat it. Dozens of such degraded races are mentioned by Blichner in his ‘Man: Past, Present, and Future,’ and by Sir John Lubbock in his ‘Origin of Civilisation.’
Non-human beings have, as a rule, neither the psychic variety nor the intensity of higher humans. And it is not contended that in language, science, and superstition they are capable of being compared with the foremost few of civilised societies, any more than savages, especially the lowest savages, are capable of such comparison. But it is maintained that the non-human races of the earth are not the metallic and soulless lot of fixtures they are vulgarly supposed to be; that they are just as real living beings, with just as precious nerves and just as genuine feelings, rights, heartaches, capabilities, and waywardnesses, as we ourselves: and that, since they are our own kith and kindred, we have no right whatever, higher than the right of main strength (which is the right of devils), to assume them to be, and to treat them as if they were, our natural and legitimate prey.
1. Darwin: Expression of Emotions in Men and Animals; New York, 1899. 2. Starr: Human Progress; Pennsylvania, 1895. 3a. 3b. 3c. Hartmann: Anthropoid Apes; New York, 1901. 4a. 4b. Brehm: From North Pole to Equator; London, 1896. 5. Stanley: In Darkest Africa, vol i.; New York, 1890. 6a. 6b. 6c. 6d. 6e. 6f. Romanes: Animal Intelligence; New York, 1899. 7a. 7b. Evans: Evolutional Ethics and Animal Psychology; New York, 1898. 8a. 8b. Jesse: Gleanings in Natural History, vol. i.; London, 1832. 9. Kropotkin: Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution; New York, 1902. 10. Peckham and Peckham: Instincts and Habits of the Solitary Wasps; Madison, Wisconsin, 1898.
IV. The Elements of Human and Non-human Mind Compared
The analysis of human mind and the comparison of its elements or powers with the powers of non-human mind corroborate the conclusions already arrived at through observation and deductive inference. The chief powers of the mind of man are sensation, memory, emotion, imagination, volition, instinct, and reason. All of these faculties are found in non-human beings, some of them developed to a much higher degree than they are in man, and some of them to a much lower.
Sensation is the effect produced on the mind when a sense organ is affected in some way by external stimuli. Sensation is the lumber of the mind, the raw material out of which are elaborated all other forms of consciousness. The chief species of sensation are those of sight, sound, smell, taste, and feeling. The original sense was feeling, and out of this sense were evolved the other four. The organs of seeing, hearing, smelling, and tasting are therefore modifications of the skin, which is the organ of original sense. The fact that in all animals, down almost to the very beginnings of life, sense organs exist, suggests that sensation may be almost, if not quite, coextensive with animal life. All mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes have the same special sense organs as man, and the organs of sight, sound, taste, and smell occupy in all vertebrates the same relative positions in the head. Birds see better than any other animals, and carnivora smell better. Ruminants see, hear, and smell with great acuteness. Fishes also see and hear well; and the wings of the bat are so exceedingly sensitive that it will move about blindfolded and with ears stopped with cotton almost as unerringly as when aided by sight and sound. Insects have smell, sight, and taste well developed, as is shown by their keen appreciation of the colours, perfumes, and flavours of flowers. They also hear. Stridulation proves this. Worms have eyes and ears, and land-leeches scent the approach of their prey at a long distance. The starfish and the medusa respond to all the five classes of stimuli which affect the five senses of man, and nervous substance is found in all animals above the sponge.
Memory is the power of retaining or recognising past states of consciousness. The power to retain impressions follows in origin close upon the power to receive impressions. Memory is the historic faculty of the mind—the power of the mind to store up its experiences—and is found in nearly all animals. The lowly limpet, whose world is a seaside rock, will come back from its little roamings time after time to the same rude lodge from which it set out. Bees remember where they get honey or sugar months afterwards, and when it is necessary will sometimes go back to the old home hive which they left the year before. Ants retrace their steps after making long journeys from their nest, and are able in some way to recognise their friends after months of separation. The stickleback (fish) knows the way back to his nest, although he has been absent several hours. Fishes return and hatch their young year after year in the same waters; birds come back to their old nesting-places; and horses remember their way along devious roads over which they have not been for years. Horses used in the delivery of milk, or in other occupations in which they are accustomed to travel daily over about the same route, come in time to remember every alley, street, and stopping-place of the whole round almost as accurately as their drivers. Darwin’s dog remembered and obeyed him after an absence of five years. The power of dogs, squirrels, and other animals of remembering where they have long before cached food is indeed wonderful. A squirrel will come down out of a tree when the earth is covered to a depth of several inches with lately fallen snow and hop away, without the slightest hesitancy or mistake, to the exact spot where it has months before stored its mid-winter acorns. A lion has been known to recognise its keeper after seven years of separation, and an elephant obeyed all his old words of command on being recaptured after fifteen years of jungle life. The similarity of memory in other animals to the same faculty in man is shown by the fact that memory everywhere is governed by the same laws. In all animals, including man, memory is strengthened by repetition—that is, impressions are always deepened and confirmed by being made over and over. A parrot or a raven masters a new sentence by working at it and saying it over and over again, just as a boy memorises his rules and catechisms.
Imagination is the picturing power of the mind. In its lowest stages of manifestation it is akin to memory. Imagination, however, in its higher reaches, not only reimages previous impressions, but combines them in new and original relations. Imagination is displayed in dreams, images, delusions, anticipation, and sympathy. It also furnishes wings for speculation and reason. Spiders, when they attach stones to their webs to steady them during anticipated gales, probably exercise imagination. The tame serpent which was carried away from its master’s house and found its way back again, though the distance was one hundred miles, no doubt carried in its imagination vivid pictures of its old home.1a Cats, dogs, horses, and other animals dream, and parrots talk in their sleep. Horses and cattle sometimes stampede at imaginary objects, and often distort real objects into imaginary monsters. When a horse at night takes fright at a big black stump by the roadside, he no doubt imagines it to be some terrible creature ready to eat him up if he should go near it, just as a timid child does in the same circumstances. There is a great difference in horses in this respect, just as there is among children and men, some of them taking fright at every unusual thing, while others are more bold or stolid. The cat playing with a ball of yarn converts it by means of its imagination into an object of prey, just as a girl converts a doll into a baby, or a boy changes a stick into a steed. Sympathy is the putting or picturing of one’s self in the place of another, and by means of the imagination sharing or simulating the psychic conditions of that other. This high and holy exercise of the imagination is exhibited by horses, cattle, dogs, deer, elephants, monkeys, and birds—in fact, by nearly all animals as far down as the fishes and insects.
Emotion is the stirring of the sensibilities by way of the intellect or the imagination. The following emotions are found in non-human beings: fear, surprise, affection, pugnacity, play, pride, anger, jealousy, curiosity, sympathy, emulation, resentment, appreciation of the beautiful, grief, hate, cruelty, joy, benevolence, revenge, shame, remorse, and appreciation of the ludicrous. Excepting the emotions of conscience and religion, which are really compounds, with fear as the main ingredient, this list of non-human emotions is coextensive with the list of human emotions. Many of these emotions germinate low down in the animal kingdom, fear, anger, sexuality, and jealousy all being found in fishes and in the higher invertebrates. In the higher vertebrates many of these emotions are almost as strong as they are in men. Does anyone who has felt the throbbing sides of a frightened puppy or hare have any doubt that these creatures suffer the keenest agony of fear? Apes have been known to fall down and faint when suddenly confronted by a snake, so great is their instinctive horror of serpents; and gray parrots, which are extremely nervous birds, have been known to drop from their perch unconscious under the influence of great fear.2
The horse is, perhaps, of all animals, the one which occasionally gives itself over most completely to the emotion of fear, as everyone who has witnessed the terrible abandon of a runaway team can testify. Ants, fishes, birds, cats, dogs, horses, monkeys, porpoises, and many other animals play. Young kittens, colts, and puppies enjoy a scuffle about as well as boys do. Pugnacity originates among the spiders and insects, and is highly developed in the ant, cock, and bulldog. This emotion is strong in the males of nearly all vertebrates. Anyone who has observed the vigilance displayed by fishes in protecting their nests can have little doubt that these comparatively primitive beings possess pugnacity. I was one evening floating in a boat by the edge of a Long Island pond just over a village of perches. Each nest was guarded by an assiduous male, who hovered over it vigilantly, or darted this way and that to drive off the piscatorial hoi polloi hanging about the neighbourhood, ready to slip in at the first opportunity and eat the eggs. Just to see what would happen, I put my hand down into the water and moved it slowly toward one of the nests. To my surprise, the guardian of the nest, instead of fleeing in alarm, proceeded to show fight. It chased my hand away time after time, and when the hand was not removed it would nip it vigorously, not once simply, but two or three times if necessary, and each time with increasing energy. It contended with the courage of a little hero. I pushed it and jostled it about, and even took it in my hand and lifted it clear out of the water. To my amazement, on getting back into the water, it returned promptly to the attack. It fought until it was really fagged, for its onsets were at last much feebler than at first. I came away after twenty minutes, leaving the little hero in triumphant possession of his charge.
Among some species of monkeys several individuals will join together in overturning a stone for the possible ants’ eggs under it; and, when a burying beetle has found a dead mouse or bird, it goes and gets its companions to help it in the interment.3a Crows show benevolence by feeding their blind and helpless companions, and monkeys adopt the orphans of deceased members of their tribe. Brehm saw two crows feeding in a hollow tree a third crow which was wounded. They had evidently been doing this for some time, for the wound was several weeks old. Darwin tells of a blind pelican which was fed upon fishes, which were brought to it by its friends from a distance of thirty miles.4a The devotion of cedar-birds to each other and their kindness to all birds in distress are well known to every student of ornithology. Olive Thorne Miller tells of a cedar-bird that raised a brood of young robins that had been left orphans by the accidental killing of the parents. Weddell saw more than once during his journey to Bolivia that when a herd of vicunas were closely pursued the strong males covered the retreat of the weaker and less swift members of the herd by lagging behind and protecting them.3b
A remarkable instance of altruism which he once saw exhibited by the king-crabs in a London aquarium is mentioned by Kropotkin in his work on ‘Mutual Aid a Factor in Evolution.’ One of these crabs had fallen on its back in a corner of the tank. And for one of these great creatures, with its saucepan carapace, to get on its back is, even in favourable circumstances, a serious matter. The seriousness was increased in this instance by an iron bar, which hindered the normal activities of the unfortunate crustacean. ‘Its comrades came to the rescue, and for one hour’s time I watched how they endeavoured to help their fellow-prisoner. They came two at once, pushed their friend from beneath, and after strenuous efforts succeeded in lifting it upright. But then the iron bar prevented them from achieving the work of rescue, and the crab again fell heavily on its back. After many attempts, one of the helpers went into the depth of the tank and brought two other crabs, who began with fresh forces the same pushing and lifting of their helpless comrade. We stayed in the aquarium for more than two hours, and, when leaving, came to cast a glance upon the tank. The work of attempted rescue still continued. Since I saw that I cannot refuse credit to the observation quoted by Dr. Erasmus Darwin that the common crab during the moulting season stations a sentinel, an unmolted or hard-shelled individual, to prevent marine enemies from injuring moulted individuals in their unprotected state.’ Walruses go to the defence of a wounded comrade when summoned by its cries for help. Romanes tells of a gander who acted as a guardian to his blind consort, taking her neck gently in his mouth and leading her to the water when she wanted to take a swim, and after allowing her to cruise for a time under his guidance and care, conducting her back home again in the same thoughtful manner. When goslings were hatched, this remarkable gander seemed to realise the inability of the mother to look after them, for he took charge of them as if they were his own, convoying them to the waterside, and lifting them carefully out of the ruts and pits with his bill whenever they got into difficulty.1b
The disposition to go to the aid of a fellow in trouble is one of the most characteristic traits in the psychology of the swine. A single squeal of distress from even the scrawniest member of a swine herd will bring down on the one who causes this distress the hair-raising wrath of every porker within hearing. This trait has been considerably reduced by domestication, and in those varieties in which degeneracy has gone farthest it scarcely exists. But it is exceedingly strong in all wild hogs. Animals as low in the scale of development and as proverbially cold as snakes have been known, when educated and treated with kindness, to manifest considerable affection for their friends and masters. Nearly all domestic animals display a good deal of affection, not only to their young, but to adult members of their own kind and to their human masters. The devotion of the dog to man is without a parallel anywhere. It has been said that ‘the dog is the only thing on this earth that loves you more than he loves himself.’ When dogs become so much attached to their masters or mistresses that they pine and die on being separated from them, they show beyond any question that they have feelings which, in intensity, are not inferior to those possessed by the more highly developed men and women. And this has happened time after time.
A pathetic story of love and of its tragic close came last year out of the Maine woods. Two moose, who had been tracked all day by a couple of human tigers, were finally overtaken, when one of them fell pierced by two rifle-balls. The remaining moose, instead of dashing off into the forest, stood still, lowered its head, and sniffed at its fallen companion. Then, raising its antlers high into the air, it bellowed loudly. As the cry of the great creature echoed through the forest, it also fell at the discharge of the rifles. It was found on examination afterwards that the first moose was blind, and that the second one, which had neglected to leave it for safety, was its pilot.
My father once owned a cow who contracted a strong affection for my sister. This cow, who showed on many occasions and in many ways her highly developed emotional nature, would scarcely allow anyone else than my sister to milk her. She always presented herself to my sister as soon as she was let into the lot in order to be milked first, and she was so jealous of this privilege that if it were not accorded to her she would stand with her head down and give vent to her unhappiness in low moans. After she was milked she would follow her human friend around from one cow to another, in order to be as near her as possible. She knew my sister’s voice from that of everyone else, and would always low a response and come to her when called by name, even though she were a quarter of a mile away in the pasture. Romanes tells somewhere of a band of apes that were being pursued by dogs when a young ape was cut off from the rest and was about to be killed by the dogs. The chief of the band, seeing the peril of the young one, went deliberately back and rescued it.
Many animals show that they possess a rudimentary sense of humour by the pranks and tricks which they play on each other and on human beings. The monkey is the prince of nonhuman jokers, but dogs, cats, horses, elephants, and other animals have enough of this sense to have books written about it. A monkey has been observed to slyly pass his hand back of a second monkey and tweak the tail of a third one, and then composedly enjoy himself while the resentment of the injured monkey expended itself on the innocent middle one. Many monkeys enjoy entertaining their friends with grimaces, by carrying a cane, putting a tin dish on their heads, or other droll antics. These intelligent animals have a sufficiently high appreciation of the ludicrous to dislike ridicule. Like human beings, they can’t endure being laughed at, and get mad if they are made the victims of a joke. Romanes’ monkey was one day asked to crack a nut for the amusement of a visitor. The nut turned out to be a bad one, and the melancholy look of disappointment on the monkey’s face caused the visitor to laugh. The insulted monkey flew into a rage, and hurled the nut at the offending scoffer, then the hammer, and finally the coffee-pot which simmered on the grate fire.1c Darwin tells of a baboon in the Zoological Gardens of London who always became infuriated every time his keeper took out a letter or book and read aloud to him. On one occasion when Darwin was present the baboon became so furious that he bit his own leg until it bled.4b
The emotion variously known as shame, regret, repentance, and remorse, is not common among the non-human races. It is found sometimes in dogs and monkeys, and especially in educated anthropoids. But this emotion is exceedingly rare among savages, and is not at all universal even among civilised societies of men. Some animals manifest self-restraint, which is an exceedingly elite quality of mind, and one not so common as it might be even among the higher breeds of mankind. By restraint is meant the inhibition of a desire or instinct in the presence of circumstances tending to render the desire or instinct active—and this is obedience, and the beginning of morality. A dog that will not chase a hare in the presence of his master may do so in his absence. I taught my guinea-pigs to abstain from certain food in their presence which they wanted very much, and which they would have eaten if they had not been educated to let it alone. Sympathy is the most beautiful of all terrestrial emotions. It is manifested, sometimes to an exceedingly touching degree, by all the highest races of animals. No other instances than those already given can be mentioned here. It is sufficient to say that the difference between the savage—whose sympathies are so feeble that he has been known to knock his own child’s brains out for dropping a basket, and who puts his aged parents to death in order to avoid the burden of maintaining them, and whose sympathies seldom extend beyond his family or tribe—and civilised men and women, who feel actual pain when in the presence of those who suffer, and whose sympathies sometimes include all sentient creation, is much greater than that between the savage and many nonhuman animals. The frail, narrow, fantastic character of human sympathy is the most mournful fact in human nature. ‘Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn,’ and his inhumanity to not-men makes the planet a ball of pain and terror.
Volition is the power of the mind to act executively. Or, perhaps, it is the resultant of the impulses actuating a mind at any particular instant. Whatever volition is, it is the same thing in the insect as in the man. Non-human beings have been observed to pause and deliberate and to make wise and momentous decisions in the twinkling of an eye. A chased hare will decide to squat, to go straight ahead, or to do something else which the emergency demands, just as unmistakably as a human fugitive. In the sense of being the power to act differently from the manner in which a being actually does act, there is no such thing as freewill. The will of the worm is just as free as the will of the judge—not in the sense that it is as varied in the directions of its activity, but in the sense that the character of its activities is determined inevitably by the character of its antecedents. All will, whether human or non-human, invariably acts in the direction of the strongest motive, just as a stone or a river invariably moves, if it moves at all, in the direction of the strongest tendency or force. It is impossible that this should be otherwise. For, if the will in any case elects to overthrow this fact by arbitrarily discarding a stronger motive for a feebler, in the very motive of the election are concealed elements which transform the feebler motive into the stronger. All motion, voluntary and involuntary—the motion of bullets, beings, societies, and suns—takes place along the lines of least arrest. Every being is compelled to decide as he does decide and to act as he does act by the inherited tendencies of his own nature and the tendencies of the environment in which he exists. And if any being, after having passed through life, were again placed back at the beginning of life and endowed with the same nature as before, and were acted upon through life by surroundings identical with those he had previously met, he would act—that is, he would exercise his will—in precisely the same way in every particular as he had previously done. To deny these things is to assert that the conduct of living beings is without law, and that psychology and sociology are not sciences.
Non-human beings, all of the higher ones, have the same brain and nervous apparatus as man, and in their involuntary phenomena they closely resemble human beings. Aim a pretended blow near the eyes of a dog or a horse and it will wink involuntarily, just as a human being does. Sever the spinal cord of a man or a frog, and irritate the feet of each, and they will each manifest the same phenomena of reflex action, drawing their feet away each time from the stimulus.
Instinct and reason are forms of intelligence. Intelligence is the adaptation of acts to ends. Intelligence is manifested by all organisms, both plants and animals, and may be either conscious or unconscious. Plant intelligence and reflex action are forms of unconscious intelligence. Plant intelligence, or the adaptation of acts to ends by plants, is manifested by plants in the shifting of their positions when in need of light in order to obtain as large a supply as possible of the essential sunshine; in devices, such as traps and flowers, for utilising the juices and services of insects; in germinating and growing away from, instead of toward, the centre of the earth; in discriminating between this and that kind of food; and in a thousand other ways. Plant intelligence is all explicable in terms of chemistry and physics, and is, so far as is known, unaccompanied by consciousness. Reflex action is chemical affinity aided by the co-ordinating powers of nerve tissue. The vital processes of all animals, from the lowest to the highest, and many other highly habitual and highly essential operations, are carried on by reflex action. Reflex action in animals, like plant intelligence, is unconscious.
Instinct and reason are conscious. Instinct is inherited intelligence—intelligence manifested independently of, and prior to, experience and instruction. ‘Instinct,’ says Romanes, ‘is reflex action into which has been imported the element of consciousness’.5a It is exhibited by the babe when it nurses the mother’s breast; by the chick when it pecks its way out through the shell of the egg; by animals generally, including man, in their solicitude for their young; by the parent bird in incubation; and by all beings when they seek food in obedience to the impulse of hunger. Our conception of the mental processes of non-humans is as yet very primitive, owing to our limited means of information and the erroneous influence on our judgments of traditional ways of thinking; and much that is attributed by us to instinct is not instinct at all, but is acquired by the young through education imparted by the elders. Parent birds have often been seen teaching their young ones to fly, and no doubt a good deal of the migratory acumen manifested by birds is nothing but custom and tradition handed down to each younger generation by the old and experienced. A large part of the knowledge of mankind (or what passes for knowledge) consists of habits and hobbies, customs and traditions, impressed upon each new generation by the generation which produced it. Each generation of men seems to feel that whenever it creates a new generation it has got to pile on to this new generation all of the fool notions which have been acquired from the past, amplified by its own inventions. And when we come to know other animals better, there is practically no doubt that we shall find that a large part of what we now call instinct and look upon as congenital will, on closer and more rational examination, be found to be nothing but the pedagogical effects of early environment. Professor Poulton, of Oxford, who has made many experiments on just-born birds, says that young chicks learn to fear the hawk and to interpret the oral warnings of the mother. Cats teach their young to play with their prey in that cruel manner so characteristic of all the Felidae, as I have myself observed more than once. A mother cat will carry a live mouse into the presence of her kittens and lie down and play with it, tossing it playfully into the air, poking it with her paw when it does not move, and arresting it when it starts to run away, the kittens all the time looking on, but never once attempting to take the mouse. After awhile the mother hands the captive over to the kittens, who go through the same performance one after another. After they have practised on it until the unfortunate creature is almost dead, the old cat will probably walk over to where the mouse is and eat it up. The whole thing is a school. The mouse is obviously not intended as food for the young, but to be used simply to impart instruction to them.
‘In popular writings and lectures some or all of the following activities of ant-life are commonly ascribed to instinct: The recognition of members of the same nest; powers of communication; keeping aphides for the sake of their sweet secretions; collection of aphid eggs in October, hatching them out in the nest, and taking them in the spring to the daisies on which they feed, for pasture; slave-making and slave-keeping, which, in some cases, is so ancient a habit that the enslavers are unable even to feed themselves; keeping insects as beasts of burden—e.g. a kind of plant-bug to carry leaves; keeping beetles, etc., as domestic pets; habits of personal cleanliness—one ant giving another a brush-up, and being, brushed up in return; habits of play and recreation; habits of burying their dead; the storage of grain and nipping the budding rootlet to prevent further germination; the habit of Texan ants of preparing a clearing around their nest, and, six months later, harvesting the ant-rice—a kind of grass of which they are particularly fond—even seeking and sowing the grain which shall yield the harvest; the collection by other ants of grass to manure the soil, on which there grows a species of fungus upon which they feed; the military organisation of the ecitons of Central America; and so forth. But to class all of these activities of the ant as illustrations of instinct is a survival of an old-fashioned method of treatment.
‘Suppose that the intelligent ant were to make observations on human behaviour as displayed in one of our great cities or in an agricultural district. Seeing so great an amount of routine work going on around him, might he not be in danger of regarding all this as evidence of hereditary instinct? Might he not find it difficult to obtain satisfactory evidence of the fact that this routine work has to some extent to be learned? Might he not say (perhaps not wholly without truth), “I can see nothing whatever in the training of these beings to fit them for their life-work. The training of their children has no more apparent bearing upon the activities of their after-life than the feeding of our grubs has on the duties of ant-life. They seem to fall into the routine of life with little or no preparatory training as the periods for the manifestation of the various instincts arrive. If learning thereof there be, it has so far escaped our observation. And such intelligence as their activities evince (and many of them do show remarkable adaptations to uniform conditions of life) would seem to be rather ancestral than of the present time, as is shown by the fact that many of the adaptations are directed rather to past conditions of life than to those which now hold good. In the presence of new emergencies to which their instincts have not fitted them, these poor creatures are often completely at a loss. We cannot but conclude, therefore, that, although acting under somewhat different and less favourable conditions, instinct occupies fully as large a space in the psychology of man as it does in that of the ant, while human intelligence is far less unerring and hence markedly inferior to our own.”
‘Are these views much more absurd than the views of those who, on the evidence which we at present possess, attribute all the activities of ant-life to instinct?’6
Reason is the power of adapting means to ends which is acquired from experience or instruction. All animals that profit by experience, therefore, or that learn from instruction—that is, are teachable—exercise reason.
The line of demarkation between instinct and reason is a mezzotint, reason being often instinctive, and instinct being as frequently flavoured with judgment, ‘Instinct is usually regarded as a special property of the lower animals, and contrasted with the conscious reason of man. But just as reason may be looked upon as a higher form of the understanding or intellect, and not as something essentially distinct from them, so a closer examination shows that instinct and the conscious understanding do not stand in absolute contrast, but rather in a complex relation, and cannot be sharply marked off from each other.’ It is instinct that urges the bird to build its nest; but when birds whose habit it is to build on the ground learn, on the introduction of cats into the neighbourhood, to change their nesting-places to the tree-tops, intelligence and thought are necessary. The first time Cavy (one of my guinea-pigs) smelled a cat, she was almost scared to death. She jumped back from it as if she had come in contact with a red-hot stove, and screamed and kept on screaming, and shot down under my coat as if she were about to be crucified. After a little while I tried to pull her out, but she refused, and kept hiding. The second time the kitten was presented to her the result was the same. But after two or three days of association, she paid little more attention to it than to the other guinea-pigs. She had never seen a cat before. It was the odour of the carnivore that terrified her, and the effect was purely instinctive. But instinct was soon modified by intelligent experience. (Poor dear little Cavy! I wonder where she is now!)
Both instinct and reason (and one, too, just as much as the other) are absolutely dependent upon processes that are purely mechanical—that is, upon brain processes; and brain processes depend upon brain structure, which is inherited. Hence, reason is, in a certain sense, as truly inherited as instinct is. A being must be born with the particular nervous apparatus by means of which reasoning is carried on, or with the power or disposition to develop this apparatus, or he will never reason. The genius of the partridge in cajoling the passer-by from her nest is called instinct, but it is not more inherited than was the genius of Shakspere. Experience simply calls into being that, whatever it is in each particular being, which is inherited. Sir Isaac Newton took to philosophy and Ole Bull to music not less inevitably than the duck takes to water or the hound to hunting. Reason is, hence, inherited by every man, who has it as truly as his erect posture and plantigrade feet. There is something in the past of all of us and of everything which has determined, and which may be used to account for, everything that to-day exists or happens, even to the style and behaviour of every leaf that flutters in the forest, and to the eccentricities of our opinions and handwritings.
Reason, in the sense in which it is here used, is found feebly in the oyster. Oysters taken from a depth never uncovered by the sea open their shells, lose their water, and quickly perish. But oysters taken from the same depths, if kept where they are occasionally left uncovered for short intervals, learn to keep their shells closed and to live a much longer period out of the water. On the coast of France ‘oyster schools’ exist, where oysters intended for inland cities are educated to keep their shells closed when out of the water in order to enable them to survive the desiccating exposures of the overland journey.1d This act of the bivalve is probably the result of something like a vague form of reason. It is an act adapted to the accomplishment of a definite end, and the adapting power is acquired from experience. It is, moreover, reason which in its final analysis does not differ from the reason displayed by the wisest being that thinks. Judgment, forethought, common-sense, inference, ingenuity, genius, reason, and abstract thought, are all exercises of the cognitive or perceptive power of mind, and consist, all of them, in nothing more nor less than the discerning of relations among stimuli. The dog who adopts a cut-off in order to intercept a fleeing hare performs exactly the same kind of intellectual process as the mechanic who erects a windmill in order to divert the energies of the breeze, or the politician who adopts a particular platform to catch votes. ‘A perception is always in its essential nature what logicians term a conclusion, whether it has reference to the simplest memory of the past sensation or to the highest product of abstract thought. For, when the highest product of abstract thought is analysed, the ultimate elements must always be found to consist in material given directly by the senses; and every stage in the symbolic construction of ideas, in which the process of abstraction consists, depends on acts of perception taking place in the lower stages’.5b
The difference among the perceptive acts of different individuals consists, not in the different kinds of intellectual exercise, but in differences among the materials with which the perceptive faculty deals. There are perceptions of simple sensations, and there are perceptions of composite sensations, or concepts—perceptions of elementary relations, and perceptions of compound and elaborate relations. But all displays of rational faculty, from the simple judgment of distance by the dimness and distinctness of definition and the size of the visual angle, which all higher animals are compelled to make, to the labyrinthic abstractions of the logician, consist in nothing in addition to discriminations among stimuli.
Brehm one day gave one of his apes a paper bag with a lump of sugar and a wasp in it. The ape in getting the sugar was stung by the wasp. From that day, whenever Brehm gave that ape, or any other ape in that cage, a paper package, the animal, before opening it, took the precaution to shake the package at his ear and listen to find out whether or not there was a wasp inside.7
Now, such an act of intelligence implies several inferences. A train of thoughts something like this must have passed through this ape’s mind: ‘Now, if one wasp can sting, so can another; and, if a man can deceive me once by wrapping a wasp in a paper with a lump of sugar, he may try it again; and, if one man will attempt such a thing, so may another; and, if men will attempt it on me, they may attempt it on my friends; so I will warn my friends to look out for those villainous chaps outside.’ These inferences of the ape are the same kind of generalisations exactly as are made by men everywhere in their daily lives. And the common-sense inferences made by ordinary people in their every-day affairs are precisely the same processes of reasoning as those used by scientists and philosophers. Many people, like the character in Moliere’s plays who was surprised and delighted to learn that he had been talking prose all his life, are surprised on hearing for the first time that they use induction and deduction every hour almost of their waking lives. They imagine that philosophers must have some secret and superior way of acquiring their conclusions, different from what ordinary mortals have. ‘But there is no more difference,’ says Huxley, ‘between the mental operations of a man of science and those of an ordinary person than there is between the operations and methods of a grocer weighing out his goods in common scales and the operations of a chemist in performing a difficult and complex analysis by means of his balance and finely graduated weights. It is not that the scales in the one case and the balances in the other differ in the principles of their construction or manner of working; but the beam of the one is set on an infinitely finer axis than the other, and, of course, turns by the addition of a much smaller weight’.8 And the difference in mental method between the man of learning and the ordinary man or woman is the same as the difference between mature men and children and between men generally and other animals. It is one of degree, not of kind. The philosopher, the clodhopper, and the ape, all use precisely the same methods of reasoning, differing only in exactness and in the materials of consciousness dealt with.
Nearly all animals, from mollusks to men, reason—not once or twice in a lifetime, but the most of them every day and every hour of their existence. In fact, it would be impossible for any animal addicted to moving about, and with a delicate and easily wrecked organism, to long survive in a world like this without that elasticity of action which reason alone can impart. Since they live in the same world-conditions as human beings, and are seeking providence for substantially the same wants, non-human beings manifest reason in the same general directions as human beings do—in the location and construction of their homes and fortresses, in the arrest of their prey, in circumventing their enemies, in overcoming obstacles and surmounting dangers, in protecting and educating their young, in meeting the emergencies of food and climate, in the wooing of mates and the waging of wars, and in the thousand other cases where they are called upon in their daily wanderings and doings to deal with novel and unprecedented situations.
When wild geese are feeding there is said to be always one of them that acts as sentinel. This one never takes a grain of corn while on duty. When it has acted awhile it gives the bird next to it a sharp peck and utters a querulous kind of cry, and the second one takes its turn. This is prudence, or forethought, which is a form of reason. When swans are diving there is generally one that stays above the water and watches. Sentinels have alarm sounds of various kinds, which they give to signify ‘enemy.’ ‘Ibex, marmots, and mountain-sheep whistle; prariedogs bark; elephants trumpet; wild geese and swans have a kind of bugle call; rabbits and sheep stamp on the ground; crows caw: and wild ducks utter a low, warning quack.’
In the Popular Science Monthly for March, 1901, is an account of a series of experiments on the intelligence of the turtle made by Professor Yerkes, of Harvard. The turtle was placed in a labyrinth, at the farther end of which was a comfortable bed of sand. It took just thirty-five minutes of wandering for the turtle to reach the nest the first time. But in the second trial the nest was reached in fifteen minutes, and by the tenth trip the turtle was familiar enough with the route to go through in three and one-half minutes, making but two mistakes. The turtle was afterwards placed in a more complex labyrinth, containing, among other features, a blind alley and two inclines. The inclines were puzzles, and it took one hour and thirty-five minutes of aimless rambling for the wanderer to reach its nest the first time. But the fifth trip was made in sixteen minutes, and the tenth in four minutes, which was not far from direct.
These experiments show that animals of almost proverbial density may learn with surprising quickness. English sparrows and other avian inhabitants of the city learn to live tranquilly along the busiest thoroughfares, exposed to all sorts of dangers, and subjected to what would be to many birds the most terrifying circumstances. Whizzing trolleys, tramping multitudes, and screaming engines have no terrors for them. They simply exercise the caution necessary to keep from being run over. They boldly build their nests right under passing elevated cars, where the roar is sufficient to scare the life out of an ordinary country bird. I have seen these testy little chaps sit and feed and jabber to each other in a perfectly unconcerned way within ten or fifteen feet of a thundering express train. They do not do these things from instinct: they learn to do them. They know that a diabolical-looking locomotive is harmless, because they have seen it before; and they know that an insignificant urchin with a savage heart and a sling is not harmless, and they know it simply because they have previously had dealings with him. English sparrows will disappear completely from a neighborhood if a few of them are killed. Cats, dogs, horses—all animals, in fact—acquire during life a fund of information as to how to act in order to avoid harm and extinction. If they did not, they would not live long. And they do it just as man does it, by memory and discrimination, by retaining impressions made upon them, and acting differently when an impression is made a second, third, or thirteenth time.
Animals of experience (including men) are more skilful in adjusting themselves to environmental exigencies than the young and inexperienced, because of their store of initial impressions. It is a matter of common observation that young animals are more easily caught or killed or otherwise victimised than the old and experienced. Many animals, however, (and a good many men) are able to profit by a single impression. One dose of tartar emetic is generally sufficient to cure an egg-sucking dog, and it is a very stupid canine indeed that does not understand perfectly after one or two experiences with a porcupine or an unsavory skunk. ‘The burnt child dreads the fire,’ but so does the burnt puppy. Rengger states that his Paraguay monkeys, after cutting themselves only once with any sharp tool, would not touch it again, or would handle it with the greatest caution.1e Older trout are more wary than young ones, and fishes that have been much hunted and deceived become suspicious of traps. Rats, martins, and other animals cannot long be trapped in the same way, and partridges and other birds seldom fly against telegraph-wires the second season after the wires are put up. These animals, however, cannot learn to avoid these dangers from experience, for only a few of them are ever caught or struck. They must learn it from observing their unfortunate companions. Everyone who has read the story of Lobo, the big gray wolf of the Carrumpaw, cannot but wonder at the remarkable shrewdness shown by this old leader in baffling for years the tigers that hung upon his tracks.9 Nansen states that the seals, before man invaded the Arctics, occupied the inner ice-floes to avoid the polar bear, but after man came they took to living on the outer floes in order to escape the persecutions of this new and more fearful enemy. Domestic animals, when first turned out in new regions, often die from eating poisonous weeds, but in some way soon learn to avoid them. Many animals, when pursuing other animals, or when being pursued, display a knowledge of facts very little understood by the majority of mankind, such as of places where scent lies or is obliterated, and the effects of wind in carrying evidence of their presence to their enemies. The hunted roebuck or hare will make circles, double on its own tracks, take to water, and fling itself for considerable distances through the air as cleverly as if it had read up all the theory of scent in a book. According to the London Spectator one of the large African elephants in the Zoological Gardens of that city restores to its entertainers all the bits of food which on being thrown to him fall alike out of his reach and theirs. He points his proboscis straight at the food, and blows it along the floor to the feet of those who have thrown it. He clearly knows what he is about, for if he does not blow hard enough to land the food the first time, he blows harder and harder until he does. The cacadoos (parrots) of Australia, before descending upon a field or orchard in search of food, send out a scouting party to reconnoitre the region and see that ‘all is well.’ Sometimes a second party is sent. If the report is favourable, the whole band advance and plunder the field in short order. These birds are exceedingly wary and intelligent, and seldom make mistakes. But ‘if man once succeeds in killing one of them, they become so prudent and watchful that they henceforward baffle all stratagems’.3c A short time ago a parrot at Washington, New Jersey, saved the life of its owner by summoning the neighbours to his relief. Cries of ‘Murder!’ ‘Help!’ ‘Come quick!’ coming from the home of the parrot, attracted the attention of neighbours, who ran to the house to find out the cause. ‘They found the owner of the parrot lying on the floor unconscious, bleeding from a great gash in his neck. He had been repairing the ceiling, and had fallen and struck his head against the stove. It required six stitches to close the wound, and the surgeon said that in only a few minutes the injured man would have been dead. A few years ago this parrot’s screams awakened its owner in time to arouse his neighbours and save them from a fire which started in the house next door.’
A friend of mine, who is thoroughly reliable, tells me that when he was a student at the University of Michigan a few years ago one of the professors of zoology there had a dog who was used by the department for experiments in digestion. The dog was compelled to wear a tube opening downward out of his stomach, and soon grew very weak and emaciated from the constant loss of food, which leaked out through this tube. After a time, however, the dog was observed to be growing unaccountably hale and strong. He was watched, and the poor creature was found to have struck upon an ingenious expedient to save his life. On eating his meal, he would go out to the barn, and, in order to prevent the artificial escape of the contents of his stomach, would lie down flat on his back between two boxes and remain there until his digested food had passed safely beyond the pylorus.
A few months ago, John, one of the monkeys at Lincoln Park, Chicago, was suffering from a terrible abscess on the cheek, and an operation became necessary in order to save the little fellow’s life. It was a pathetic sight to see the look of trust in the monkey’s eyes when the surgeon was ready to begin the operation, and the courage and fortitude displayed by the sufferer were almost human. At the first touch of the knife the monkey pressed his head hard against the knee of the assistant and grabbed the forefinger of each of the assistant’s hands, just as a person does who is about to undergo a painful operation. The swelling was first cut open and washed with antiseptic, when the cheek-bone was scraped and a small piece of it removed. After being again washed in antiseptic, the wound was sewed up, and John was lifted gently back into his cage—not, however, until he had licked the hands of the surgeon and kissed his face in gratitude. The little hero never uttered a sound from the time the knife first touched his face until he was put back into his cage. A similar act of intelligence is recorded of an orang. Having been once bled on account of illness, and not feeling well some time afterward, this orang went from one person to another, and, pointing to the vein in his arm, signified his desire to have the operation repeated. Both of these instances are examples of reason of a very high order—of a higher order, indeed, than many children and some grown people exhibit in similar circumstances. The chimpanzee, Mafuca, learned how to unlock her cage, and stole the key and hid it under her arm for future use. After watching the carpenter boring holes with his brad-awl, she took the brad-awl and bored holes in her table. She poured out milk for herself at meals, and always carefully stopped pouring before the cup ran over.
When baboons go on marauding expeditions, they show that they realise perfectly what they are doing by moving with great stealth. Not a sound is uttered. If any thoughtless youngster so far forgets the necessities of the occasion as to utter a single chatter, he is given a reminder in the shape of a box on the ear. ‘A certain Mr. Cops, who had a young orang, gave it half an orange one day, and put the other half away out of its sight on a high press, and lay down himself on the sofa. But the ape’s movements, attracting his attention, he only pretended to go to sleep. The creature came cautiously and satisfied himself that his master was asleep, then climbed up the press, ate the rest of the orange, carefully hid the peel among the shavings in the grate, examined the pretended sleeper again, and then went and lay down on his own bed.’ This incident is recorded by Tylor in his ‘Anthropology.’ ‘And such behaviour,’ he adds, ‘is to be explained only by supposing a train of thought to pass through the brain of the ape somewhat similar to what we ourselves call reason.’ These instances of undoubted intelligence and thought might be added to almost without number if there was room. Every person nearly who has been in the world any length of time, and has had occasion to associate with these so-called ‘machines,’ has seen for himself, often unexpectedly, many flashes of brightness among them.
It has been said that man differs from other animals, and is superior to them in the fact that he modifies his environment while other animals do not, but are modified by environment. Mr. Lester F. Ward makes this distinction in his ‘Pure Sociology.’ The distinction is no nearer the truth than other distinctions of like character that have from time to time been drawn between men and other animals. It is not much more than half true, if it is that, and does not by any means deserve the italics awarded to it by this writer. Many races of non-human beings have a far greater influence on their environment than many races of men have. Many tribes of men wander about naked, build no habitations, make no weapons, and feed upon the fruits, roots, insects, and such other chance morsels as they can pick up from day to day in their wanderings. Such races are far inferior in constructive activity to the birds, who build elaborate houses, and to the beavers, who not only construct substantial dwellings, but dam rivers, and cut down trees and transport them long distances, and dig artificial waterways, to be used as aids in their engineering enterprises. Compare the elaborate compartments of the Australian bower-birds, surrounded with ornamented and carefully-kept grounds, with the lean-to of many savage tribes, made by sticking two or three palm-leaves in the ground and leaning them against a pole. Even ants plant crops, make clearings, build roads and tunnels, etc. It must be remembered, too, that, however affirmative and masterful a race of men may become, it never succeeds, and never can succeed, in emancipating itself from the influences of environment. It is true that with the growth of intelligence among organic forms there has been a constant transfer of influence from the environment to the organism; but this transfer began, not with man by any means, but low down in the scale of animal life.
It has been said that man is the only animal that uses tools. But this is not true either, for animals as low in the scale of development as insects have been known to use tools. At least two different observers testify to having seen ground-wasps use small stones as hammers in packing the dirt firmly over their nests. Spiders use stones as weights to steady their webs in times of storm. Orangs throw sticks and stones at their pursuers, and certain tribes of Abyssinian baboons, when they go to battle with each other, carry stones as missiles. Monkeys often use stones to crack nuts with, and tame monkeys know very well how to use a hammer when it is given to them. In the London Zoological Gardens a monkey with poor teeth kept a stone hidden in the straw of its cage to crack its nuts with, and it would not allow any other monkey to touch the stone. ‘Here,’ says Darwin, in speaking of this case, ‘is the idea of property.’ Monkeys also use sticks as levers in prying open chests and lifting heavy objects. Cuvier’s orang used to carry a chair across the room and stand on it to lift the door-latch. Chimpanzees, who are very fond of making a noise, have been seen standing around a hollow log in the forest, beating it with sticks; and if we are to believe Emin Pasha, these ingenious parodies of men sometimes carry torches when they go at night on foraging expeditions. The Indian elephant, when travelling, will sometimes turn aside and break off a leafy branch from a roadside tree and carry it along in its trunk to sweep off the flies. As Dr. Wesley Mills says in his work on ‘The Nature and Development of Animal Intelligence,’ ‘It was formerly believed that animals cannot reason, but only those persons who do not themselves reason about the subject, with the facts before them, can any longer occupy such a position.’
1a. 1b. 1c. 1d. 1e. Romanes: Animal Intelligence; New York, 1899.
2. Cornish: Animals of To-day; London, 1898.
3a. 3b. 3c. Kropotkin: Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution; New York, 1902.
4a. 4b. Darwin: Descent of Man, 2nd edit.; London, 1874.
5a. 5b. Romanes: Mental Evolution in Animals; New York, 1898.
6. Morgan: Animal Behaviour; London, 1900.
7. Brehm: Thierleben; Leipzig, 1880.
8. Huxley: On the Origin of Species, lecture iii.
9. Thompson: Wild Animals I have Known; New York, 1900.
V. Conclusion
It is enough. The ancient gulf scooped by human conceit between man and the other animals has been effectually and forever filled up. The human species constitutes but one branch in the gigantic arbour of life. And all the merit and all the feeling and all the righteousness of the world are not, as we have been accustomed to aver, congested into this one branch. And all of the weakness and deformity are not, as we have also been anxious to believe, found elsewhere. The reluctance of wrinkles and deformities to appear in the pictures of men, and of strength and beauty to appear in the representations of the other races of the earth, is to be accounted for by the highly elucidative fact that man is the universal portrait-painter. There is no one to tell man what he is and how he strikes others, and hence he is the ‘paragon of creation’—the inter-stellar pet, half clay and half halo—the image and pride of the gods—the flower and gem of the eternal spheres. Man is the only professional linguist in the universe. And it is fortunate for him that he is. For, if he were not, his auditories would be compelled to carry to his perceptive centres a great many sentiments he now never hears. He would be likely to hear a good deal said, and said with a good deal of feeling, about perpendicular brigand—grandiloquent kakistocrat swelling with self-righteousness—rhetorical hideful wrapped in pillage and gorged with decomposition—a voluble and sanctimonious squash with two sticks in it. The definition of man as it appears in the dictionary of the donkey probably runs something like this: ‘Man is an animal that walks on its hind-legs, invents adjectives with which to praise itself, and displays its greatest utility in proving that all sharks are not aquatic.’ We know what a lion looks like when painted by a man, but human eyes have never yet been allumined by the sardonic lineaments of a man painted by a lion. Being boiled alive in order to look well as corpses in store-windows, and having wooden pegs thrust into our muscles and left there to rot for a week or two to keep us in our agony from doing something desperate—we know what these experiences are like when they are delegated to lobsters, and we take no more serious part in them than to insure their infliction, but we are too fervent barbarians to bother our heads about what they are like from the crustacean point of view.
Let us be candid. Men are not all gentle men and humane, and not-men are not all inhuman. There are reptiles in broadcloth, and there are warm and generous hearts among those peoples who have so long suffered from human prejudice and ferocity. Let us label beings by what they are—by the souls that are in them and the deeds they do—not by their colour, which is pigment, nor by their composition, which is clay. There are philanthropists in feathers and patricians in fur, just as there are cannibals in the pulpit and saurians among the money-changers. The golden rule may sometimes be more religiously observed in the hearts and homes of outcast quadrupeds than in the palatial lairs of bipeds. The horse, who suffers and serves and starves in silence, who endures daily wrongs of scanty and irregular meals, excessive burdens and mangled flanks, who forgets cruelty and ingratitude, and does good to them that spitefully use him, and submits to crime without resistance, misunderstanding without murmur, and insult without resentment, is a better Christian, a better exemplar of the Sermon on the Mount, than many church-goers, in spite of the creeds and interdictions of men. And the animal who goes to church on Sundays, wearing the twitching skins and plundered plumage of others, and wails long prayers and mumbles meaningless rituals, and gives unearned guineas to the missionary, and on week-days cheats and impoverishes his neighbours, glorifies war, and tramples under foot the most sacred principles of morality in his treatment of his non-human kindred, is a cold, hard-hearted brute, in spite of the fact that he is cunning and vainglorious, and towers about on his hinders.
There are lessons that may be learned from the uncorrupted children of Nature—lessons in simplicity of life, straightforwardness, humility, art, economy, brotherly love, and cheerfulness—more beautiful, perhaps, and more true than may sometimes be learned from the stilted and Machiavellian ways of men. Would you learn forgiveness? Go to the dog. The dog can stand more abuse and forgive greater accumulations of wrong than any other animal, not even excepting a wife. About the only thing in the universe superior to the dog in willingness to undergo outrage is the human stomach. Would you learn wisdom and industry? Go to the ant, that tireless toiler of the dust. The ant can do that which no man can do—keep grain in a warm, moist atmosphere without sprouting. Would you learn art? Go to the bee or to the wild bird’s lodge. The art of the honeycomb and of the hang-bird’s nest surpasses that of the cranny of the savage as the Cathedral of St. Peter exceeds the cottage. Would you learn socialism, that dream of poets and the hope and expectation of wise men? It is actualised around you in thousands of insect communities. The social and economic relations existing in the most highly wrought societies of bees and wasps are fundamentally the ideal relations of living beings to each other, but it will require millenniums of struggle and bloodshed for men to come up to them. Would you learn curiosity—not the curiosity that gossips and backbites, but the curiosity of the explorer and searcher after knowledge? Go to the monkey. The monkey has been known to work two hours, without pause, utterly unconscious of everything but its purposes, trying to open a fettered trunk lock.1 Would you learn sobriety? Go not to the gilded hells of cities, where men die like flies in gin’s vile miasma. Go to the spring where the antelope drinks. Would you learn chastity? Go not to the foul dens and fiery chambers of men. Go to the boudoir of the bower-bird, or to the subterranean hollow where the wild wolf rears her litter.
Man is not the surpassingly pre-eminent individual he so actively advertises himself to be. Indeed, in many particulars he is excelled, and excelled seriously, by those whom he calls ‘lower.’ The locomotion of the bird is far superior in ease and expedition to the shuffling locomotion of man. The horse has a sense which guides it through darkness in which human eyes are blind; and the manner in which a cat, who has been carried in a bag and put down miles away, will turn up at the back-door of the old home next morning dumfounds science. The eye of the vulture is a telescope. The hound will track his master along a frequented street an hour behind his footsteps, by the imponderable odour of his soles. The catbird, without atlas or geographic manuals, will find her way back over hundreds of trackless leagues, season after season, to the same old nesting-place in the thicket. Birds, thousands of them, journey from Mexico to Arctic America, from Algiers and Italy to Spitzbergen, from Egypt to Siberia, and from Australia and the Polynesian Islands to New Zealand, and build their nests and rear their young, year after year, in the same vale, grove, or tundra. The nightingale, who pours out his incomparable lovesong in the twilight of English lanes during May and June, winters in the heart of Africa; and some birds nest within the Arctic Circle and winter in Argentina. Some of the plovers travel the entire length of the American land mass every summer, from Patagonia to the Arctic Circle, in order to lay three or four pale-green eggs, and see them turn to birdlings by the shores of the Hudson Sea. Many animals have the power to foretell storms, and man, though he can weigh worlds, is ever glad to profit by their superior sense. When herons fly high above the clouds, when sea-birds dip and sport in the water and the bittern booms from the marshes, when swallows fly low and the sow repairs her bed, when horses scamper and cattle sniff the air, when ravens beat the air with their wings, make noises, and flock together, when the swan raises her eggs by additions to her nest and the prairie-dog scratches the dirt up around its hole, when beetles are not found in the air and caterpillars mass in their webs, when bees remain near their hives and ants carry their eggs to their innermost abodes, when frogs croak more loudly from their watery retreats and fishes seek the safety of the unharried deeps—look out for foul weather! Man has not the sweetness of the song-sparrow, the innocence of the fawn, nor the high relative brain capacity of the tomtit and the fice.
Many animals have powers by which they are able to act in concert at times, vast numbers of them moving in unison over immense areas by signals or intuitions which man can neither imitate nor understand. Such are the mysterious migrations of the Norway lemming and of many birds and insects, and such were the memorable stampedes of the bison hordes on the American plains in years gone by. Kropotkin saw on the Siberian steppes one autumn ‘thousands and thousands’ of fallow deer come together from an area as large as Great Britain at a point on the Amur River in an unprecedented exodus to the lowlands on the other side.2 How these scattered thousands knew when to start so as to arrive at the river at the same time, and how they knew the direction to travel and found their way so well, are mysteries which man can as yet only wonder at. More marvellous yet—more marvellous, perhaps, than the concurrent action of any other animal, for it implies the most accurate time-keeping extending over many years—are the annual festivals of the palolo, an annelid living among the interstices of the coral reefs of some of the islands of the South Pacific. About three o’clock on the morning following the third quarter of the October moon, these worms invariably appear on the surface of the sea, swarming in great numbers. Just after sunrise their bodies begin to break to pieces, and by nine o’clock no trace of them is left. On the morning following the third quarter of the November moon they appear again, but usually in smaller numbers. After that they are seen no more till the next October. This annual swarming is a phenomenon connected with reproduction, the ova escaping from the broken bodies of the females and, after being fertilised by the free-floating sperms, sinking down among the coral reefs and hatching into a new generation. ‘Year after year these creatures appear according to lunar time. And yet in the long-run they keep solar time. They keep two cycles, one of three and one of twenty-nine years. In the three-year cycle there are two intervals of twelve lunations and one of thirteen lunations. These thirty-seven lunations bring lunar time somewhat near to solar time. But in twenty-nine years there is enough difference to require the addition of another lunation; the twenty-ninth year is therefore one of thirteen instead of twelve lunations. In this way they do not change their season in an entire century. So unfailing is their appearance that in Samoa they have given their name to the spring season, which is called “the time of the palolo.”’
Instead of the highest, man is in some respects the lowest, of the animal kingdom. Man is the most unchaste, the most drunken, the most selfish and conceited, the most miserly, the most hypocritical, and the most bloodthirsty of terrestrial creatures. Almost no animals, except man, kill for the mere sake of killing. For one being to take the life of another for purposes of selfish utility is bad enough. But the indiscriminate massacre of defenceless innocents by armed and organised packs, just for pastime, is beyond characterisation. The human species is the only species of animals that plunges to such depths of atrocity. Even vipers and hyenas do not exterminate for recreation. No animal, except man, habitually seeks wealth purely out of an insane impulse to accumulate. And no animal, except man, gloats over accumulations that are of no possible use to him, that are an injury and an abomination, and in whose acquisition he may have committed irreparable crimes upon others. There are no millionaires—no professional, legalised, lifelong kleptomaniacs—among the birds and quadrupeds. No animal, except man, spends so large a part of his energies striving for superiority—not superiority in usefulness, but that superiority which consists in simply getting on the heads of one’s fellows. And no animal practises common, ordinary morality to the other beings of the world in which he lives so little, compared with the amount he preaches it, as man.
Let us be honest. Honour to whom honour is due. It will not emaciate our own glory to recognise the excellence and reality of others, or to come face to face with our own frailties. We are our brother’s keeper. Our brethren are they that feel. Let us universalise. Our thoughts and sympathies have been too long wingless. The Universe is our Country, and our Kindred are the Populations that Mount. It is well—it is eminently well, for it is godlike—to send our Magnanimity to the Dusts and the Deeps, our Sunrises to the Uttermost Isles, and our Charity to the Stars.
1. Romanes: Animal Intelligence; New York, 1899. 2. Kropotkin: Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution; New York, 1902.