Part 9

This question can be answered by actual experiment, strange as it may appear. Experiments have demonstrated that any change of temperature within the skull was soonest manifested externally in that depression which exists just above the occipital protuberance. Here Lombard fastened to the head at this point two little bars, one made of bismuth, the other of an alloy of antimony and zinc, which were connected with a delicate galvanometer; to neutralize the result of a gradual rise of temperature over the whole body, a second pair of bars, reversed in direction, was attached to the leg or arm, so that if a like increase of heat came to both, the electricity developed by one would be neutralized by the other, and no effect would be produced by the needle unless only one was affected. By long practice it was ascertained that a mental torpor could be induced, lasting for hours, in which the needle remained stationary. But let a person knock on the door outside of the room, or speak a single word, even though the experimenter remained absolutely passive, the reception of the intelligence caused the needle to swing twenty degrees. "In explanation of this production of heat," says Barker, "the analogy of the muscle at once suggests itself. No conversion of energy is complete, and as the heat of muscular action represents force which has escaped conversion into motion, so the heat evolved during the reception of an idea is energy which has escaped conversion into thought, from precisely the same cause." Dr. Lombard's experiments have shown that the amount of heat developed by the recitation to one's self of emotional poetry, was in every case less when recitation was oral; this is of course accounted for by the muscular expression. Chemistry teaches that thought-force, like muscle-force, comes from the food, and demonstrates that the force evolved by the brain, like that produced by the muscle, comes not from the disintegration of its own tissue, but is the converted energy of burning carbon. "Can we longer doubt," says Barker, "that the brain too, is a machine for the conversion of energy? Can we longer refuse to believe that even thought force is in some mysterious way correlated to the other natural forces? and this even in the face of the fact that it has never yet been measured. Have we not a right to ask 'why a special force (vital force) should be needed to effect the transformation of physical forces into those modes of energy which are active in the manifestation of living beings, while no peculiar force is deemed necessary to effect the transformation of one mode of physical force into any other mode of physical force?"

Richard Owen says: "In the endeavor to clearly comprehend and explain the functions of the combination of forces called 'brain,' the physiologist is hindered and troubled by the views of the nature of those cerebral forces which the needs of dogmatic theology have imposed on mankind. * * * Religion, pure and undefiled, can best answer how far it is righteous or just to charge a neighbor with being unsound in his principles who holds the term 'life' to be a sound expressing the sum of living phenomena, and who maintains these phenomena to be modes of force into which other forms of force have passed from potential to active states, and reciprocally, through the agency of the sums or combinations of forces impressing the mind with the ideas signified by the terms 'monad,' 'moss,' 'plant,' or 'animal.'"

We have now shown that the very forces which give vent to the attributes of man, are correlated to the physical forces. Let us now consider his attributes as manifested by his mental powers. There is no doubt the difference between the mental faculties of the ape and that of the lowest savage, who cannot express any number higher than four and who uses hardly any abstract terms for common objects or for the affections, is still very great and would still be great, says Darwin, "even if one of the higher apes had been improved or civilized as much as a dog has been in comparison with its parent form, the wolf or jackal." But when we examine the interval of mental power between one of the lowest fishes, as a lamprey or a lancelet, and one of the higher apes, and recognize the fact that this interval is filled up by numberless gradations, it does not become so difficult to understand the interval between an ape and man, which is not by far so great. As in finding out what is peculiar to a living body in distinction to a body not living, we found it absurd to take man as the perfection of the animal scale--the microscopic monad possessing life as well as him--so in the case of man's mental attributes, which have always been increasing, always perfecting, since the first genuine man came into existence, it would be equally absurd to compare the intellectual man of to-day with an ape to see what attributes he possesses which the ape does not possess; but if we go down in the scale and compare the savage with the ape, the difficulty is not by far so great. It will be found on close examination, though, that man and the higher animals, especially the primates, have many instincts in common. "All," says Darwin, "have the same senses, intuitions and sensations; similar passions, affections, and emotions; even the more complex ones, such as jealousy, suspicion, emulation, gratitude and magnanimity; they practice deceit and are revengeful; they are sometimes susceptible to ridicule and even have a sense of humor; they feel wonder and curiosity; they possess the same faculties of imitation, attention, deliberation, choice, memory, imagination, the association of ideas, and reason, though in very different degrees. The individuals of the same species graduate in intellect from absolute imbecility to high excellence; they are also liable to insanity, though far less often than in the case of man." Nevertheless, in the face of these facts, many authors have insisted that man is divided by an inseparable barrier from all the lower animals in his mental faculties. It only shows the improper or imperfect consideration of the subject they have under discussion.

It may be thought at first that some of the mental attributes mentioned above are not possessed by animals. I therefore will briefly consider a few of the more complex ones. We can dismiss the consideration of such attributes as happiness, terror, suspicion, courage, timidity, jealousy, shame, and wonder, as well-known attributes. Curiosity in animals is often observed. An instance mentioned by Brehm will serve to illustrate: Brehm gives a curious account of the instinctive dread which his monkeys exhibited for snakes; but their curiosity was so great that they could not desist from occasionally satiating their horror in a most human fashion, by lifting up the lid of the box in which the snakes were kept. Imitation is also found among the action of animals, especially among monkeys, which are well known to be ridiculous mockers.

It is unnecessary to refer to the faculty of attention, as it is common to almost all animals, and the same may be said of memory as for persons or places.

One would hesitate to believe an animal possesses imagination, but such is the case. Dreaming, it will be admitted, gives us the best notion of this power. Now as dogs, cats, horses, and probably all the higher animals, even birds, have vivid dreams--this is shown by their movements and the sounds uttered--"we must admit," says Darwin, "they possess some power of imagination. There must be something special which causes dogs to howl in the night, and especially during moonlight, in that remarkable and melancholy manner, called baying. All dogs do not do so; and, according to Housyeau, they do not look at the moon, but at some fixed point near the horizon. Housyeau thinks that their imaginations are disturbed by the vague outlines of the surrounding objects, and conjure up before them fantastic images; if this be so, their feelings may almost be called superstitious."

The next mental faculty is reason, which stands at the summit; but still there are few persons who will deny that animals possess some power of reasoning. A few illustrations will be all that is necessary to satisfy the inquiring mind on this point. Reugger, a most careful observer, states that when he first gave eggs to his monkey in Paraguay they smashed them, and thus lost much of their contents; afterward they gently hit one end against some hard body, and picked off the bits of shell with their fingers. After cutting themselves once with any sharp tool, they would not touch it again, or would handle it with the greatest caution. Lumps of sugar were often given them, wrapped up in paper; and Reugger sometimes put a live wasp in the paper, so that in hastily unfolding it they got stung; after this had once happened, they afterward first held the packet to their ears to detect any movement within.

The following cases relating to dogs are described by Darwin: Mr. Colquhoun winged two wild ducks, which fell on the farther side of a stream; his retriever tried to bring over both at once, but could not succeed; she then, though never before known to ruffle a feather, deliberately killed one, brought over the other, and returned for the dead bird. Colonel Hutchinson relates that two partridges were shot at once--one being killed, the other wounded; the latter ran away, and was caught by the retriever, who, on her return, came across the dead bird; "she stopped, evidently greatly puzzled, and after one or two trials, finding she could not take it up without permitting the escape of the winged bird, she considered a moment, then deliberately murdered it by giving it a severe crunch, and afterward brought away both together. This was the only known instance of her ever having wilfully injured any game. Here we have reason, though not quite perfect; for the retriever might have brought the wounded bird first, and then returned for the dead one, as in the case of the two wild ducks. I give the above cases as resting on the evidence of two independent witnesses; and because in both instances the retrievers, after deliberation, broke through a habit which was inherited by them (that of not killing the game retrieved), and because they show how strong their reasoning faculty must have been to overcome a fixed habit."

It has often been said that no animal uses any tool, but this can be so easily refuted on reflection, that it is hardly worth while considering; for illustration, though, the chimpanzee in a state of nature cracks nuts with a stone; Darwin saw a young orang put a stick in a crevice, slip his hand to the other end, and use it in a proper manner as a lever. The baboons in Abyssinia descend in troops from the mountains to plunder fields, and when they meet troops of another species a fight ensues. They commence by rolling great stones at their enemies, as they often do when attacked with fire-arms.

The Duke of Argyll remarks that the fashioning of an implement for a special purpose is absolutely peculiar to man; and he considers this forms an immeasurable gulf between him and the brutes. "This is no doubt," says Darwin, "a very important distinction; but there appears to me much truth in Sir J. Lubbock's suggestion, that when primeval man first used flint-stones for any purpose, he would have accidentally splintered them, and would then have used the sharp fragments. From this step it would be a small one to break the flints on purpose, and not a very wide step to fashion them rudely. The later advance, however, may have taken long ages, if we may judge by the immense interval of time which elapsed before the men of the neolithic period took to grinding and polishing their stone tools. In breaking the flints, as Sir J. Lubbock likewise remarks, sparks would have been emitted, and in grinding them heat would have been evolved; thus the two usual methods of 'obtaining fire may have originated.' The nature of fire would have been known in many volcanic regions where lava occasionally flows through forests."

It becomes a difficult task to determine how far animals exhibit any traces of such high faculties as abstraction, general conception, self-consciousness, mental individuality. There can be no doubt, if the mental faculties of an animal can be improved, that the higher complex faculties such as abstraction and self-consciousness have developed from a combination of the simpler ones; this seems to be well illustrated in the young child, as such faculties are developed by imperceptible degrees. These high faculties are very sparingly possessed by the savage; as Buchner has remarked, how little can the hard-worked wife of a degraded Australian savage, who uses very few abstract words and cannot count above four, exert her self-consciousness or reflect on the nature of her own existence. If there exist a class of people so inferior in their mental faculties as these, it is not difficult for us to understand how the educated animal who possesses memory, attention, association, and even some imagination and reason, can become capable of abstraction, &c., in an inferior degree even to the savage. It certainly cannot be doubted that an animal possesses mental individuality--as when a master returns to a dog which he has not seen for years, and the dog recognizes him at once.

One of the chief distinctions between man and animals is the faculty of language. Let us look at this for a moment. "The essential differences," says Prof. Whitney, "which separate man's means of communication in kind as well as degree from that of the other animals is that, while the latter is instinctive, the former is in all its parts arbitrary and conventional. No man can become possessed of any language without learning it; no animal (that we know of) has any expression which he learns, which is not the direct gift of nature to him." Any child of parents living in a foreign country grows up to speak the foreign speech, unless carefully guarded from doing so; or it speaks both this and the tongue of its parent with equal readiness. A child must learn to observe and distinguish before speech is possible, and every child begins to know things by their name before he begins to call them. "If it were not for the added push," says Prof. Whitney, "given by the desire of communication, the great and wonderful power of the human soul would never move in this particular direction; but when this leads the way, all the rest follows." No philologist now supposes that any language has been deliberately invented; it has been slowly and unconsciously developed by many steps.

There can be no question that language owes its origin to the imitation and modification of various natural sounds, the voices of other animals, and man's own instinctive cries, aided by signs and gestures; and this is the opinion of Max Müller. And Prof. Whitney remarks that "spoken language began, we may say, when a cry of pain, formally wrung out by real suffering, and seen to be understood and sympathized with, was repeated in imitation, no longer as a mere instinctive utterance, but for the purpose of intimating to another." Darwin says that "the early progenitor of man probably first used his voice in producing true musical cadences, that is, in singing, as do some gibbon-apes at the present day. It is therefore probable that the imitation of musical cries by articulate sounds may have given rise to words expressive of very complex emotions."

The nearest approach to language are the sounds uttered by birds. All that sing exert their power instinctively, but the actual song, and even the call notes, are learned from their parents or foster-parents. These sounds are no more innate than language is in man, as has been proved by Davies Barrington. The first attempt to sing "may be compared to the imperfect endeavor in a child to babble." Prof. Whitney says, if the last transition forms of man "could be restored, we should find the transition forms toward our speech to be, not at all a minor provision of natural articulate signs, but an inferior system of conventional signs, in tone, gesture, and grimace. As between these three natural means of expression, it is simply by a kind of process of natural selection and survival of the fittest that the voice has gained the upper hand, and come to be so much the most prominent that we give the name of language (tonguiness) to all expression." A single utterance or two at first had to do the duty of a whole clause; afterward man learned to piece together parts of speech, and thus arose sentences.

Although no language, as has already been said, has been deliberately invented, "still each word may not be unfitly compared to an invention; it has its own place, mode, and circumstances of devisal, its preparation in the previous habits of speech, its influence in determining the after progress of speech development; but every language in the gross is an institution, on which scores or hundreds of generations and unnumbered thousands of individual workers have labored."

There is no question at all but that the mental powers in the earliest progenitors of man must have been more highly developed than in the ape, before even the most imperfect form of speech could have come into use; but the constant advancement of this power would have reacted on the mind to enable it to carry on longer trains of thought. "A complex train of thought," says Darwin, "can no more be carried on without the aid of words, whether spoken or silent, than a long calculation without the use of figures in algebra. It appears also that even an ordinary train of thought almost requires or is greatly facilitated by some form of language; for the dumb, deaf, and blind girl, Laura Bridgman, was observed to use her fingers while dreaming. Nevertheless a long succession of vivid ideas may pass through the mind, without the aid of any form of language, as we may infer from the movements of dogs during their dreams."

The struggle for existence is going on in every language; one after another will be swept out of existence, and the languages best fitted for the practical uses of the masses of people will alone survive. Max Müller has well remarked: "A struggle for life is constantly going on amongst the words and grammatical forms in each language. The better the shorter; the easier forms are constantly gaining the upper hand, and they owe their success to their own inherent virtue."

It must not be thought for a moment that that which distinguishes a man from the lower animals is the understanding of articulate sounds--for, as every one knows, dogs understand many words and sentences; and Darwin says, at this stage they are at the same stage of development as infants, between the ages of ten and twelve months, who understand many words and sentences, but still cannot utter a single word. It is not the mere articulation which is our distinguishing character; for parrots and other birds possess the power. Nor is it the mere capacity of connecting definite sounds with definite ideas; for it is certain that some parrots, which have been taught to speak, connect unerringly words with things, and persons with events." The lower animals, as has already been stated, differ from man solely in his almost infinitely larger power of associating together the most diversified sounds and ideas; and this obviously depends on the high development of his mental powers.

We now come to the consideration of a very delicate subject--a subject which is certainly at best very unsatisfactory to handle, as far as popular sentiment is concerned; for, no matter how successfully it may be handled, according to one class of thinkers, to another class of more orthodox thinkers it would be entirely at fault. The subject is, Man's Moral Sense, Belief in God, Religion, Conscience, and Hope of Immortality.

It has been stated by some writers that where "faith commences science ends." How erroneous is such a statement as this! for, as Krauth has said, "The great body of scientific facts is actually the object of knowledge to a few, and is supposed to be a part of the knowledge of the many, only because the many have faith in the statements of the few, though they can neither verify them, nor even understand the processes by which they are reached."

"We believe," says Lewes, "that the sensation of violet is produced by the striking of the ethereal waves against the retina more than seven hundred billions of times in a second. * * * These statements are accepted on trust by us who know that there are thinkers for whom they are irresistible conclusions." It is evident that it is to faith that science owes, to a very great extent, her progress and development; for it is impossible for man to prove by experimental demonstration all the facts of science, and since a certain number of facts have got to be accepted before a new experiment can be attempted, he has to accept on faith that such and such a statement is a fact, because such and such a scientist has claimed to have demonstrated it. "We are not responsible for the fact," says Krauth, "that under the conditions of knowledge we know, or in defect of them do not know; we are responsible if, under the conditions of a well-grounded faith, we disbelieve."

Let us look, then, at the belief in God. The question under consideration at first will not be whether there exists a God, the creator and ruler of the universe--for this will be afterward considered--but is there any evidence that man was aboriginally endowed with the ennobling belief in the existence of an Omnipotent God.

Schweinfurth relates that the Niam-niam, that highly interesting dwarf people of Central Africa, have no word for God, and therefore, it must be supposed, no idea; and Moritz Wagner has given a whole selection of reports on the absence of religious consciousness in inferior nations. The idea that conscience is a sort of permanent inspiration or dwelling of God in the soul, I think, on consideration, any reasonable man will not assume. "It is a purely human faculty," says Savage, "like the faculty for art or music; and it gets its authority, as they do by being true, and just in so far as it is true. Consciousness is our own knowledge of ourselves and of the relation between our own faculties and powers. Conscience is our recognition of the relations, as right or wrong, in which we stand to those about us, God and our fellows. Con-scio is to know with, in relation.

There is such a thing, of course, as a false conscience and a true conscience. All the false "conscientiousness grows out of the fact that men suppose they stand in certain relationships that do not really exist. Thus they imagined duties that are not duties at all." The virtues which must be practised by rude men, so that they can hold together in tribes, are of course important. No tribe could hold together if robbery, murder, treachery, etc., were common; in other words, there must be honor among thieves. "A North-American Indian is well pleased with himself, and is honored by others, when he scalps a man of another tribe; and a Dyak cuts off the head of an unoffending person, and dries it as a trophy. The murder of infants has prevailed on the largest scale throughout the world, and has been met with no reproach; but infanticide, especially of females, has been thought to be good for the tribe, or at least not injurious. Suicide during former times was not generally considered as a crime, but rather, from the courage displayed, as an honorable act; and it is still practised by some semi-civilized and savage nations without reproach, for it does not obviously concern others of the tribe. It has been recorded that an Indian Thug conscientiously regretted that he had not robbed and strangled as many travelers as did his father before him."

See how weak the conscience of even more highly civilized men are in their dealings with the brute creation; how the sportsman delights in hunting-scenes, Spanish bull-fights, cock-fights, etc.; how indignant was the sensitive Cowper, if any one should "needlessly set foot upon a worm"! The rights of the worm are as sacred in his degree as ours are, and a true conscience will recognize them. What, then, is a true conscience? Savage states in a few words, it is "one that knows and is adjusted to the realities of life. When men know the truth about God, about themselves--body and mind and spirit--about the real relations of equity in which they stand to their fellow-men in state and church and society, and when they appreciate these, and adjust their conscience to them, then they will have a true conscience. An absolutely true conscience, of course, cannot exist so long as our knowledge of the reality of things is only partial."

It is evident, then, that the conscience of man depends on his education and environments, and therefore is the subject of improvement. It becomes, then, the duty of every man to search for truth, for his conscience is not infallible, and by so doing he will bring it to accord with the real facts of God. "Throw away," says Savage, "prejudice and conceit, seek to make your conscience like the magnetic needle. The needle ever and naturally seeking the unchanging pole." As conscience, then, is but a faculty capable of development, it is not so difficult to understand a race of people whose conscience was in just the first stages of development; and, finally, a race which did not possess this faculty at all, as in the inferior nations which Wagner speaks of.

(From Man's Place in Nature, by Huxley.)]

What kind of conscience and intelligence had the people near Cape Lopez, called the Anziques, which M. du Chaillu describes. They had incredible ferocity; for they ate one another, sparing neither friends nor relations. Their butcher-shops were filled with human flesh, instead of that of oxen or sheep, for they ate the enemies they captured in battle. They fattened, slayed, and devoured their slaves also, unless they thought they could get a good price for them; and moreover, for weariness of life or desire for glory (for they thought it a great thing and a sign of a generous soul to despise life), or for love of their rulers, offered themselves up for food. There were, indeed, many cannibals, as in the East Indies and Brazil and elsewhere, but none such as these, since the others only ate their enemies, but these their own blood relations.