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Title: The Universal Kinship

Author: J. Howard Moore

Release date: February 9, 2020 [eBook #61363]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by L. Reeves from scans generously made available
        by the Internet Archive.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UNIVERSAL KINSHIP ***




Produced by L. Reeves from scans generously made available
by the Internet Archive.





THE UNIVERSAL KINSHIP

BY

J. HOWARD MOORE

INSTRUCTOR IN ZOOLOGY, CRANE MANUAL TRAINING HIGH SCHOOL, CHICAGO


  ‘A Sacred Kinship I would not forego
  Binds me to all that breathes.’

  — Boyesen.


CHICAGO

CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY

56 FIFTH AVENUE

1906


TO

MY DEAR MOTHER AND FATHER

WHO HAVE DONE SO MUCH FOR ME IN THE LONG YEARS

THAT ARE PAST AND GONE


PREFACE

_The Universal Kinship_ means the kinship of all the inhabitants of
the planet Earth. Whether they came into existence among the waters
or among desert sands, in a hole in the earth, in the hollow of a
tree, or in a palace; whether they build nests or empires; whether
they swim, fly, crawl, or ambulate; and whether they realise it or
not, they are all related, physically, mentally, morally—this is
the thesis of this book. But since man is the most gifted and
influential of animals, and since his relationship with other
animals is more important and more reluctantly recognised than any
other, the chief purpose of these pages is to prove and interpret
the kinship, of the human species with the other species of animals.

The thesis of this book comes pretty squarely in conflict with
widely-practised and highly-prized sins. It will therefore be
generally criticised where it is not passed by in silence. Men as a
rule do not care to improve. Although they have but one life to
live, they are satisfied to live the thing out as they have started
on it.

Enthusiasm, which in an enlightened or ideal race would be devoted
to self-improvement, is used by men in weaving excuses for their own
inertia or in singing of the infirmities of others.

_But there is a Future_. And the creeds and ideals, men bow down to
to-day will in time to come pass away, and new creeds and ideals
will claim their allegiance. Shrines change as the generations come
and go, and out of the decomposition of the old comes the new. The
time will come when the sentiments of these pages will not be hailed
by two or three, and ridiculed or ignored by the rest; _they will
represent Public Opinion and Law_.

M.
Chicago, 1905


CONTENTS

THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP

  I. Man an Animal
  II. Man a Vertebrate
  III. Man a Mammal
  IV. Man a Primate
  V. Recapitulation
  VI. The Meaning of Homology
  VII. The Earth an Evolution
  VIII. The Factors of Organic Evolution
  IX. The Evidences of Organic Evolution
  X. The Genealogy of Animals
  XI. Conclusion

THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP

  I. The Conflict of Science and Tradition
  II. Evidences of Psychical Evolution
  III. The Common-sense View
  IV. The Elements of Human and Non-human Mind Compared
  V. Conclusion

THE ETHICAL KINSHIP

  I. Human Nature a Product of the Jungle
  II. Egoism and Altruism
  III. The Ethics of the Savage
  IV. The Ethics of the Ancient
  V. Modern Ethics
  VI. The Ethics of Human Beings Toward Non-human Beings
  VII. The Origin of Provincialism
  VIII. Universal Ethics
  IX. The Psychology of Altruism
  X. Anthropocentric Ethics
  XI. Ethical Implications of Evolution
  XII. Conclusion


THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP

  I. Man an Animal
  II. Man a Vertebrate
  III. Man a Mammal
  IV. Man a Primate
  V. Recapitulation
  VI. The Meaning of Homology
  VII. The Earth an Evolution
  VIII. The Factors of Organic Evolution
  IX. The Evidences of Organic Evolution
  X. The Genealogy of Animals
  XI. Conclusion


  ‘Like the Roman emperors, who, intoxicated by their power, at
  length regarded themselves as demigods, so the ruler of the earth
  believes that the animals subjected to his will have nothing in
  common with his own nature. Man is not content to be the king of
  animals. He insists on having it that an impassable gulf separates
  him from his subjects. The affinity of the ape disturbs and humbles
  him. And, turning his back upon the earth, he flies, with his
  threatened majesty, into the cloudy sphere of a special “human
  kingdom.” But Anatomy, like those slaves who followed the
  conqueror’s car crying, “Thou art a man,” disturbs him in his
  self-admiration, and reminds him of those plain and tangible
  realities which unite him with the animal world.’

  — Broca.


THE UNIVERSAL KINSHIP

The PHYSICAL KINSHIP

I. Man an Animal.

It was in the zoology class at college. We had made all the long
journey from amoeba to coral, from coral to worm, from worm to
mollusk, from mollusk to fish, from fish to reptile, and from
reptile to mammal—and there, in the closing pages of faithful old
Packard, we found it. ‘A mammal of the order of primates,’ the
book said, with that unconcern characteristic of the deliverances of
science. I was almost saddened. It was the first intimation I had
ever received of that trite but neglected truth that _man is an
animal_.

But the intimation was so weak, and I was at that time so
unconscious, that it was not till years later that I began, through
reflection, actually to realise the truth here first caught sight
of. During these years I knew that man was not a mineral nor a
plant—that, indeed, he belonged to the animal kingdom. But, like
most men still, I continued to think of him as being altogether
different from other animals. I thought of man _and the animals_,
_not_ of man and the _other_ animals. Man was somehow _sui generis_.
He had had, I believed, a unique and miraculous origin; for I had
not yet learned of organic evolution. The pre-Darwinian belief that
I had come down from the skies, and that non-human creatures of all
kinds had been brought into existence as adjuncts of the
distinguished species to which I belonged, occupied prominent place
in my thinking. Non-human races, so I had been taught, had in
themselves no reason for existence. They were accessories. A chasm,
too wide for any bridge ever to span, yawned between the human and
all other species. Man was celestial, a blue-blood barely escaping
divinity. All other beings were little higher than clods. So
faithfully and mechanically did I reflect the bias in which I had
grown up.

But man _is_ an _animal_. It was away out there on the prairies,
among the green corn rows, one beautiful June morning—a long time
ago it seems to me now—that this revelation really came to me. And
I repeat it here, as it has grown to seem to me, for the sake of a
world which is so wise in many things, but so darkened and wayward
regarding this one thing. However averse to accepting it we may be
on account of favourite traditions, man is an animal in the most
literal and materialistic meaning of the word. Man has not a spark
of so-called ‘divinity’ about him. In important respects he is
the most highly evolved of animals; but in origin, disposition, and
form he is no more ‘divine’ than the dog who laps his sores, the
terrapin who waddles over the earth in a carapace, or the
unfastidious worm who dines on the dust of his feet. Man is not the
pedestalled individual pictured by his imagination—a being
glittering with prerogatives, and towering apart from and above all
other beings. He is a pain-shunning, pleasure-seeking,
death-dreading organism, differing in particulars, but not in kind,
from the pain-shunning, pleasure-seeking, death-dreading organisms
below and around him. Man is neither a rock, a vegetable, nor a
deity. He belongs to the same class of existences, and has been
brought into existence by the same evolutional processes, as the
horse, the toad that hops in his garden, the firefly that lights its
twilight torch, and the bivalve that reluctantly feeds him.

Man’s body is composed fundamentally of the same materials as the
bodies of all other animals. The bodies of all animals are composed
of clay. They are formed of the same elements as those that murmur
in the waters, gallop in the winds, and constitute the substance of
the insensate rocks and soils. More than two-thirds of the weight of
the human body is made up of oxygen alone, a gas which forms
one-fifth of the weight of the air, more than eight-ninths of that
of the sea, and forty-seven per cent, of the superficial solids of
the earth.

Man’s body is composed of cells. So are the bodies of all other
animals. And the cells in the body of a human being are not
essentially different in composition or structure from the cells in
the body of the sponge. All cells are composed primarily of
protoplasm, a compound of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen.
Like all other animals, man is incapable of producing a particle of
the essential substance of which his body is made. No animal can
produce protoplasm. This is a power of the plant, and the plant
only. All that any animal can do is to burn the compounds formed in
the sun-lit laboratories of the vegetable world. The human skeleton,
like the skeletons of nearly all other animals, is composed chiefly
of lime—lime being, in the sea, where life spent so many of its
earlier centuries, the most available material for parts whose
purpose it is to furnish shape and durability to the organism. Man
grows from an egg. So do all creatures of clay. Every animal
commences at the same place—in a single, lowly, almost homogeneous
cell. A dog, a frog, a philosopher, and a worm cannot for a long
time after their embryonic commencement be distinguished from each
other. Like the oyster, the ox, the insect, and the fish, like all
that live, move, and breathe, man is mortal. He increases in size
and complexity through an allotted period of time; then, like all
his kindred, wilts back into the indistinguishable flux from which
he came. Man inhales oxygen and exhales carbon dioxide. So does
every animal that breathes, whether it breathe by lungs, gills,
skin, or ectosarc, and whether it breathe the sunless ooze of the
sea floor or the ethereal blue of the sky. Animals inhale oxygen
because they eat carbon and hydrogen. The energy of all animals is
produced mainly by the union of oxygen with the elements of carbon
and hydrogen in the tissues of animal bodies, the plentiful and
ardent oxygen being the most available supporter of the combustion
of these two elements.

Man is, then, an animal, more highly evolved than the most of his
fellow-beings, but positively of the same clay, and of the same
fundamental make-up, with the same eagerness to exceed and the same
destiny, as his less pompous kindred who float and frolic and pass
away in the seas and atmospheres, and creep over the land-patches of
a common clod.

II. Man a Vertebrate.

Man is a _vertebrate_ animal.[1] He has (anatomically at least) a
backbone. He belongs to that substantial class of organisms
possessing an articulating internal skeleton—the family of the
fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Most animals have
some sort of skeleton, some sort of calcareous contrivance, whose
business it is to give form and protection to the softer parts of
the organism. Some animals, as the starfishes, have plates of lime
scattered throughout the surface parts of the body; others, as the
corals and sponges secrete plant-like frames, upon and among the
branches of which the organisms reside; and still others, as the
clams, crustaceans, and insects, have skeletons consisting of a
shell or sheath on the outside of, and more or less surrounding, the
softer substances of the body. The limbs of insects are tiny tubes
on the inside of which are the miniature muscles with which they
perform their marvels of locomotion. The skeleton of vertebrates,
consisting of levers, beams, columns, and arches, all skilfully
joined together and sunk deep within the muscular tissue, forms a
conspicuous contrast to the rudimentary frames of other animals. The
vertebrate skeleton consists of a hollow axis, divided into segments
and extending along the dorsal region of the body, from the ventral
side of which articulate, by means of awkwardly-constructed girdles,
an anterior and a posterior pair of limbs. This dorsal axis ends in
front in a peculiar bulbous arrangement called the head, which
contains, among other valuables, the brain and buccal cavern. The
thoracic segments of the backbone send off pairs of flat bones,
which, arching ventrally, form the chest for the protection of the
heart and other vitals. The limbs (except in fishes) consist each of
a single long bone, succeeded by two long bones, followed by two
transverse rows of short, irregular wrist or ankle bones, ending
normally in five branching series of bones called digits. This is
essentially the skeleton of all fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds,
and mammals. In short, it is the universal vertebrate type of frame.
There are minor modifications to suit the various kinds of
environment, adaptations to the necessities of aquatic, terrestrial,
and aerial locomotion and life, some parts being specialised, others
atrophied, and still others omitted, but there is never anywhere,
from fishes to philosophers, any fundamental departure from the
established vertebrate type of skeleton.[2] The pectoral fins of
fishes correspond to the fore-limbs of frogs and reptiles, the wings
of birds, and the arms of men. The pelvic fins of fishes are
homologous with the hind-limbs of frogs, reptiles, and quadrupeds,
and the legs of birds, apes, and men. The foot of the dog and
crocodile, the hand of the orang, and the flipper of the dolphin and
seal, all have the same general structure as the hand of man; and
the wings of the bat and bird, the forelimbs of the lizard and
elephant, and the comical shovels of the mole and ornithorhynchus,
notwithstanding the great differences in their external appearance
and use, contain essentially the same bones and the same arrangement
of the bones as do the arms of men and women. The human body has two
primary cavities in it. So have the bodies of all vertebrates: a
neural cavity containing the brain and spinal cord, and a visceral
cavity containing the heart, liver, lungs, and alimentary canal.
Invertebrates have only one body cavity—the one corresponding to
the visceral cavity of vertebrates—and the main nerve trunk,
instead of extending along the back, as among vertebrates, is in
invertebrates located ventrally. Vertebrates are the only animals on
the earth that have a highly developed circulatory system, a system
entirely shut off from the other systems, and containing a heart,
arteries, veins, and capillaries. In all invertebrates the digestive
and circulatory systems remain to a greater or less extent
connected, the blood and food mingling more or less in the general
cavity of the body. Worms and insects have pulsating tubes instead
of heart and arteries. Crustaceans have hearts with one chamber, and
mollusks have two or three chambered hearts, but the blood, instead
of returning to the heart after its journey through the arteries,
passes into the body cavity. In man and other vertebrates the
circulating current is confined strictly to the bloodvessels, no
particle of it ever escaping into the general body cavity. The heart
of vertebrates is distinguished from that of invertebrates by being
located ventrally. The heart of invertebrates is in the back. The
blood of vertebrates differs from that of invertebrates in
containing both red and white corpuscles. Invertebrates have white
corpuscles only. Worms have yellow, red, or bright green blood. The
blood of crustaceans is bluish, that of mollusks is white, and that
of insects dusky or brown. The blood of all vertebrates, excepting
amphioxus, is red. All backboned beings, whether they dwell in seas
or cities, and whether they build nests or empires, have two eyes,
two ears, nose and mouth, all located in the head, and always
occupying the same relative position to each other. Invertebrates
may have their brains in their abdomen, as do the mites; hear with
their legs or antennae, as many insects do; see with their tunics,
like the scallops; and breathe with their skin, as do the worms. The
crayfish hears with its ‘feelers,’ the cricket and katydid with
their fore-legs, the grasshopper with its abdomen, the clam with its
‘foot,’ and mysis and other low crustaceans have their auditory
organs on their tails.

Man is, then, like the fishes, frogs, reptiles, birds, and
quadrupeds, a vertebrate animal. Excepting in his infancy, when he
is a quadruped going on all fours, he uses his posterior limbs only
for locomotion, and his anterior for prehension and the like. His
spinal axis is erect instead of horizontal, and his tail is
atrophied. But he possesses all of the unmistakable qualities of the
vertebrate type of structure—a two-chambered body cavity, a highly
developed and dorsally located nerve trunk, vertebrate vitals, a
closed circulatory system, a ventral heart, red blood, a head
containing sense organs and brain, and a well-ordered internal
skeleton, consisting of a vertebral column with skull and ribs and
two pairs of limbs, the limbs consisting each of one long bone, two
long bones, two transverse rows of irregular bones, and five
branches at the end.

1. See ‘Classes of Animals,’ at the end of the chapter.
2. Snakes are limbless, and hind-limbs are lacking in whales and
other degenerates; but rudimentary limbs are found in the embryonic
stages of these animals. Frogs, it may be said also, have no ribs.

III. Man a Mammal.

Man is a _mammal_. He belongs to the most brilliant and influential
of the five classes of vertebrates—the class to which belong so
many of his associates and victims, the class to which belong the
horse, the dog, the deer, the ox, the sheep, the swine, the
squirrel, the camel, the unattenuated elephant, and the
timid-hearted hare. To this class belong also the lion, the tiger,
the kangaroo, the beaver, the bear, the bat, the monkey, the mole,
the wolf, the ornithorhynchus, and the whale—in short, _all
animals that have hair_. Fishes and reptiles have scales; birds have
feathers; all mammals are covered to a greater or less extent with
hair. The aquatic habits of whales render hair of no use to them.
Hence, while the unborn of these animals still cling to the
structural traditions of their ancestors and are covered with hair,
the adults are almost hairless. The sartorial habits of human beings
and the selective influences of the sexes have had a similar effect
on the hairy covering of the human body. Hair exists all over the
human body surface, excepting on the soles of the hands and feet,
but in a greatly dwarfed condition. It is only on the scalp and on
the faces of males, where it is scientifically assisted for purposes
of display, that it grows luxuriantly. It is by no means certain
that even the hair on the masculine scalp will last forever. For if
the hermetical derby and other deadly devices worn by men continue
their devastations as they have in the past, we may expect to have,
in the course of generations, men with foreheads reaching regularly
to the occiput. Most animals lay eggs. Man does not. Like the dog,
the horse, the squirrel, and the bat, man is viviparous, the eggs
hatching within the parental body. Human young are born helpless,
and are sustained during the period of their infancy by the
secretions of the milk glands. So are all the sons and daughters of
mammals. Whether they come into the world among the waters or among
the desert sands, in the hollow of a tree, in a hole in the earth,
or in a palace, the children of mammals are frail and pitiful, and
they survive to grow and multiply only because they are the object
of the loving and incessant sacrifices of a mother.

Mammals are distinguished from all other animals by the possession
of two kinds of skin glands—the sweat glands and the oil
glands—and by the development of certain of these glands in the
female into organs for the nourishing of the young. Among reptiles
and birds the lower jaw is suspended from the skull by a bone called
the quadrate bone. Among men and other mammals the lower jaw is
joined directly to the skull, the quadrate bone becoming, in the
vicissitudes of evolution, the hammer (malleus) of the mammalian
ear. Man has a four-chambered heart—two reservoirs which receive,
and two pumps which propel, the scarlet waters of the body. Fishes
have two-chambered hearts; frogs and most reptiles have
three-chambered hearts; all mammals and birds have four-chambered
hearts. The red corpuscles in the blood of fishes, frogs, reptiles,
and birds, are discs, double-convex, nucleated, and in shape oval or
triangular. In man and in all other mammals (except the archaic
camel) the red corpuscles are double-concave, non-nucleated, and
circular. ‘Man has a diaphragm dividing the body cavity into chest
and abdomen, and a shining white bridge of interlacing fibres,
called _corpus callosum_, uniting his cerebral hemispheres. And man
is a mammal because, like other mammals, he has, in addition to the
qualities already mentioned, these valuable and distinct
characteristics.

IV. Man a Primate.

Man is a _primate_. There are four divisions in the order of
primates—lemurs, monkeys, apes, and men. But the most interesting
and important of these, according to man, is man. Man is a primate
because, like other primates, he has arms and hands instead of
fore-legs. And these are important characteristics. It was a
splendid moment when the tendencies of evolution, pondering the
possibilities of structural improvement, decided to rear the
vertebrate upon its hind-limbs, and convert its anterior appendages
into instruments of manipulation. So long as living creatures were
able simply to move through the airs and waters of the earth and
over the surface of the solids, they were powerless to modify the
universe about them very much. But the moment beings were developed
with parts of their bodies fitted to take hold of and move and
fashion and compel the universe around them, that moment the life
process was endowed with the power of miracles. With the invention
of hands and arms commenced seriously that long campaign against the
tendencies of inanimate nature which finds its most marvellous
achievements in the sustained and triumphant operations of human
industry. None of the primates excepting man use their hind-limbs as
a sole means of changing their place in the universe, but in all of
them the fore-limbs are regularly used as organs of manipulation.
Man is a primate because his fingers and toes, like those of other
primates (except the tiny marmosets of Brazil), end in nails. Man
has neither claws to burrow into the earth, talons with which to
hold and rend his victims, nor hoofs to put thunder into his
movements. The human stomach, like that of all the other primates,
is a bagpipe. The stomach of the carnivora is usually a simple sack,
while rodents have, as a rule, two stomachs, and ruminants four. Man
is a primate because his milk glands are located on the breast and
are two in number. The mammary glands vary in number in the
different orders of mammals, from two in the horse and whale to
twenty-two in some insectivora. Most ruminating animals have four,
swine ten, and carnivora generally six or eight. These glands may be
located in the region of the groin, as in the horse and whale;
between the forelimbs, as in the elephant and bat; or arranged in
pairs extending from the fore to the hind limbs, as in the carnivora
and swine. In man and all other primates (except lemurs) the mammary
glands are pectoral and two in number. All primates, including man,
have also a disc-shaped placenta. The placenta is the organ of
nutrition in mammalian embryos. It is found in all young-bearing
animals above the marsupials, and consists of a mass of glands
between the embryo and the parental body. In some animals it
entirely surrounds and encloses the embryo; in others it assumes the
form of a girdle; and in still others it is bell-shaped. The
primates are the only animals in which this peculiar organ is in the
shape of a simple disc.[1]

The nearest relatives by blood man has in this world are the
exceedingly man-like apes—the tailless anthropoids—the gorillas
and chimpanzees of Africa, and the orangs and gibbons of southern
and insular Asia. The fact that man is an actual relative and
descendant of the ape is one of the most disagreeable of the many
distasteful truths which the human mind in its evolution has come
upon. To a vanity puffed, as is that of human beings, to the
splitting, the consanguinity of gorilla and gentleman seems
horrible. Man prefers to have arrived on the earth by way of a
ladder let down by his imagination from the celestial concave.
Within his own memory man has been guilty of many foolish and
disgraceful things. But this attempt by him to repudiate his
ancestors by surreptitiously fabricating for himself an origin
different from, and more glorious than the rest is one of the most
absurd and scandalous in the whole list. It is a shallow logic—the
logic of those who, without worth of their own, try to shine with a
false and stolen lustre. No more masterly rebuke was ever
administered to those in the habit of sneering at the truth in this
matter than the caustic reply of Huxley to the taunt of the
fat-witted Bishop—that he would rather be the descendant of a
respectable ape than the descendant of one who not only closed his
eyes to the facts around him, but used his official position to
persuade others to do likewise. Man’s reluctance to take his
anatomical place beside his simian kinspeople has been exceeded only
by his selfish and high-handed determination to exclude all other
terrestrial beings from his heaven.

Man is a talkative and religious ape. He is an ape, but with a much
greater amount of enterprise and with a greater likelihood of being
found in every variety of climate. Like the anthropoid, man has a
bald face and an obsolete tail. But he is distinguished from his
arboreal relative by his arrogant bearing, his skilled larynx, and
especially by the satisfaction he experiences in the contemplation
of the image which appears when he looks in a mirror.

The man-like apes are from three to six feet tall, and are all of
them very strong, the gorilla, who sometimes weighs over three
hundred pounds, being about the bravest and most formidable unarmed
animal on the planet. They are erect or semi-erect, have loud
voices, plantigrade feet, and irritable dispositions—in all of
these particulars being strikingly like men. The gorilla,
chimpanzee, and gibbon are highlanders, preferring the uplands and
mountains. The orang is a lowlander, living phlegmatically among the
sylvan swamps of Sumatra and Borneo. The gorilla and chimpanzee are
terrestrial, seldom going among the trees except to get food or to
sleep. The orang and gibbon are arboreal, seldom coming to the
ground except to drink or bathe. They all walk on their hind-limbs,
generally in a stooping posture, with their knuckles or fingers
touching the ground. But they sometimes walk with their arms hanging
down by their sides, and sometimes with their hands clasped back of
their heads to give them balance. None of them ever place their
palms on the ground when they walk—that is, none of them walk on
four feet. The anthropoid races, in the shape of their heads and
faces and in the general form and structure of their bodies, and
even in their habits of life, resemble in a remarkable manner the
lowest races of human beings. This resemblance is recognised by the
negro races, who call the gorilla and chimpanzee ‘hairy men,’
and believe them to be descendants of outcast members of their own
species.

There are differences in structure between man and the apes, just as
there are differences in structure between the Caucasian and the
Caffre, or even between individual Caucasians or individual Caffres.
There are differences in structure and topography, often very
noticeable differences, even among members of the same family. But
in all of its essential characters, and extending often to
astonishing particulars, the structure of man is identical with that
of the anthropoid.[2]

In external appearances the man-like races differ from men in having
a luxuriant covering of natural hair. But anthropoids differ very
much among themselves in this particular. The orang, usually covered
with long hair, is sometimes almost hairless. There are, too, races
of human beings whose bodies are covered with a considerable growth
of hair. The Todas (Australians) and Ainus (aborigines of Japan) are
noted for the hairiness of their bodies, certain individuals among
them being covered with a real fur, especially on the lower limbs.[3]

Individuals also often appear in every race with a remarkable
development of the hair. Adrian and his son Fedor, exhibited years
ago over Europe as ‘dog-men,’ are examples. The father was
completely covered with a thick growth of fine dirty-yellow hair two
or three inches long. Long tufts grew out of his nostrils and ears,
giving him a striking resemblance to a Skye terrier. Fedor, and also
his sister, were covered with hair like the father, but another son
was like ordinary men. The man-like races have also longer arms in
proportion to the height of the body than man generally has. But
this is also true of human infants and negroes. The gibbon has
relatively much longer arms than the other anthropoids. It differs
from the chimpanzee in this respect more than the chimpanzee differs
from man. When standing upright and reaching down with the middle
finger, the gibbon can touch its foot, while the chimpanzee can
reach only to the knee. Man ordinarily reaches part way down the
thigh, but negroes have been known to have arms reaching to the
knee-pan.[4]

The skeleton of the African races contains many characters
recognised by osteologists as ‘pithecoid,’ or ape-like. It is
massive, the flat bones are thick, and the pelvis narrow. In the
manlike apes the large toe is opposable to the other four, and is
used by them much as the thumb is used. But this difference between
the two races of beings is just what might be expected from the
differences in their modes of life. Man has little need of this
opposability on account of his exclusively terrestrial life, while
to the ape it is indispensable on account of his arboreal
environment and life. ‘But there are,’ says Haeckel, ‘wild
tribes of men who can oppose the large toe to the other four just as
if it were a thumb, and even new-born infants of the most
highly-developed races of men can grasp as easily with their
hind-hands as with their forehands. Chinese boatmen row with their
feet, and Bengal workmen weave with them. The negro, in whom the big
toe is freely movable, seizes hold of the branches of trees with it
when climbing, just like the four-handed apes’.[5]

Many men have lost their arms by accident and have learned to use
their feet as hands with wonderful skill. Not many years ago there
died in Europe an armless violinist who had during his lifetime
played to cultured audiences in most of the capitals of the world.
Some of the most accomplished of penmen hold their pen between their
toes. The man-like apes live to about the same age as man, and all
of them, like man, have beards. The anthropoid beard, too, like the
human, appears at the age of sexual maturity. The human beard often
differs in colour from the hair of the scalp, and whenever it does
it has been observed to be invariably lighter—never darker—than
the hair on the scalp. This is true among all races of men. The same
rule and the same uniformity exists among anthropoids. The races of
mankind are divided into two primary groups depending upon the shape
of the head and the character of the hair: the short-headed races
(Brachycephali), such as the Malays, Mongols, and Aryans, with round
or oval faces, straight hair, and vertical profiles; and the
long-headed races (Dolichocephali), with woolly hair and prognathous
faces, such as the Papuans and Africa races. The skin of the
short-headed races is orange or white, while the skin and hair of
the long-headed races are glossy black.

It is, at least, interesting that the orang and gibbon, who live in
Asia and its islands, where the brachycephalic races of men
supposedly arose, are themselves brachycephalic; and that the
gorilla and chimpanzee, who live in Africa, where the
dolichocephalic races chiefly live, are dolichocephalic. The gorilla
and chimpanzee also have, like the men and women of Africa, black
skin and hair; while the hair of the orang is a reddish-brown, and
its skin sometimes yellowish-white. The dentition of the anthropoids
and men is in all essentials identical. They all have two sets of
teeth: a set of milk-teeth, twenty in number, and thirty-two
permanent teeth, the permanents consisting of two incisors, one
canine, two premolars, and three molars, in each half-jaw. Man has
ordinarily twelve pairs of ribs and thirty-two vertebrae. So has the
orang. The other anthropoids have thirteen pairs of ribs. But the
number of ribs in both human and anthropoid beings is not uniform,
man occasionally having thirteen pairs, and the gorilla fourteen.
Man has also the same number of caudal vertebrae in his rudimentary
tail as the anthropoid has. The hands and feet of anthropoids, bone
for bone and muscle for muscle, correspond with those of men, no
greater structural differences existing than among different species
of men. The human foot has three muscles not found in the human
hand—a short flexor muscle, a short extensor muscle, and a long
muscle extending from the fibula to the foot. All of these muscles
are found in the anthropoid foot just as in the foot of man. There
are also the same differences between the arrangement of the bones
of the anthropoid wrist and ankle as between the wrist and ankle
bones of man. Whatever set of anatomical particulars may be
selected, whether it be hands, arms, feet, muscles, skull, viscera,
ribs, or dentition, it is found that the anthropoid races and men
are in all essentials the same. The differences are such as have
arisen as a result of different modes of life, and such as exist
between different tribes of either group of animals.

‘The structural differences which separate man from the gorilla
and chimpanzee,’ says Huxley, in summing up the conclusion of his
brilliant inquiry into ‘Man’s Place in Nature,’ ‘are not so
great as those which separate the gorilla from the lower apes.’

‘The body of man and that of the anthropoid are not only
peculiarly similar,’ says Haeckel, ‘but they are practically one
and the same in every important respect. The same two hundred bones,
in the same order and structure, make up our inner skeleton; the
same three hundred muscles effect our movements; the same hair
clothes our skin; the same four-chambered heart is the central
pulsometer in our circulation; the same thirty-two teeth are set in
the same order in our jaws; the same salivary, hepatic, and gastric
glands compass our digestion; the same reproductive organs insure
the maintenance of our race’.[6]

‘Not being able,’ says Owen in his paper on ‘The Characters of
Mammalia,’ ‘to appreciate or conceive of the distinction between
the psychical phenomena of a chimpanzee and of a Boschisman or of an
Aztec with arrested brain-growth, as being of a nature so essential
as to preclude a comparison between them, or as being other than a
difference in degree, I cannot shut my eyes to the significance of
that all-pervading similitude of structure—every tooth, every
bone, strictly homologous—which makes the determination of the
difference between _Homo_ and _Pithecus_ the anatomist’s
difficulty.’

‘If before the appearance of man on the earth,’ says Ward in his
‘Dynamic Sociology,’ ‘an imaginary painter had visited it, and
drawn a portrait embodying the thorax of the gibbon, the hands and
feet of the gorilla, the form and skull of the chimpanzee, the brain
development of the orang, and the countenance of _Semnopithecus_,
giving to the whole the average stature of all of these apes, the
result would have been a being not far removed from our conception
of the primitive man, and not widely different from the actual
condition of certain low tribes of savages. The brain development
would perhaps be too low for the average of any existing tribe, and
would correspond better with that of certain microcephalous idiots
and cretins, of which the human race furnishes many examples.’

And it is not true, as is commonly supposed, that, after all other
resemblances between the human and anthropoid structures have been
made out, there still exists somewhere some undistinguishable
difference in the organic structure of their brains. All differences
in structure from time to time suspected or asserted to exist
between the brain of man and that of the man-like apes have been one
after another completely swept away. And it is now known to all
neurologists that the human and anthropoid brains differ
structurally in no particulars whatever, both of them containing the
same lobes, the same ventricles and cornua, and the same
convolutional outline. Even the posterior lobe, the posterior cornu,
and the hippocampus minor, so long triumphantly asserted to be
characteristic features of the human brain, have been pitilessly
identified in all anthropoids by the profound and terrible Huxley.
There is not an important fold or fissure in the brain of man that
is not found in the brain of the anthropoid. ‘The surface of the
brain of a monkey,’ says Huxley, ‘exhibits a sort of skeleton
map of man’s, and in the man-like apes the details become more and
more filled in, until it is only in minor characters that the
chimpanzee’s or the orang’s brain can be structurally
distinguished from man’s’.[7]

The great difference physically between man and the anthropoids,
aside from man’s talented larynx and erect posture, lies in
man’s abnormal cranial capacity. The normal human cranium never
contains less than 55 cubic inches of space, while the largest
gorilla cranium contains only 34½ cubic inches. This is a
difference of 20½ cubic inches. And 20½ cubic inches of thinking
matter is an alarming amount to be lacking in a single individual.
But this cranial gap between gorilla and man is deprived of some of
its significance by the fact that human crania sometimes measure 114
cubic inches, making a difference between the smallest and largest
human brains of 59 cubic inches. The difference between the gorilla
and the savage in cranial capacity is, therefore, _only about
one-third as great as the cranial chasm between the savage and the
sage_.

1. The bat and a few other animals have a disc-like placenta, but it
develops into the disc shape by a different route from what it does
in the primates.
2. Hartmann: _Anthropoid Apes_; New York, 1901.
3. Quatrefages: _The Human Species_; New York, 1898.
4. Tyler: _Anthropology_; New York; 1899.
5. Haeckel: _History of Creation_, 2 vols.; New York, 1896.
6. Haeckel: _The Riddle of the Universe_; New York, 1901.
7. Huxley: _Man’s Place in Nature_; New York, 1883.

V. Recapitulation.

The anatomical gulf between men and apes does not exist. There are,
in fact, no gulfs anywhere, only gradations. All chasms are
completely covered by unmistakable affinities, in spite of the fact
that the remains of so many millions of deceased races lie hidden
beneath seas or everlastingly locked in the limy bosoms of the
continents. There are closer kinships and remoter kinships, but
there are kinships everywhere. The more intimate kinships are
indicated by more definite and detailed similarities, and the more
general relationships by more fundamental resemblances. All
creatures are bound to all other creatures by the ties of a varying
but undeniable consanguinity.

Man stands unquestionably in the primate order of animals, because
he has certain qualities of structure which all primates have, and
which all other animals have not: hands and arms and nails, a
bagpipe stomach, great subordination of the cerebellum, a disc-like
placenta, teeth differentiated into incisors, canines, and molars,
and pectoral milk glands.

Man is more closely akin to the anthropoid apes than to the other
primates on account of his immense brain, his ape-like face, his
vertical spine, and in being a true two-handed biped. The manlike
apes and men have the same number and kinds of teeth, the same limb
bones and muscles, like ribs and vertebrae, an atrophied tail, the
same brain structure, and a suspicious similarity in looks and
disposition. Men and anthropoids live about the same number of
years, both being toothless and wrinkled in old age. The beard, too,
in both classes of animals appears at the same period of life and
obeys the same law of variation in colour. Even the hairs on
different parts of the bodies of men and anthropoids, as on the
arms, incline at a like angle to the body surface. The hair on the
upper arm and that on the forearm, in both anthropoids and men,
point in opposite directions—toward the elbow. This peculiarity is
found nowhere in the animal kingdom excepting in a few American
monkeys.

Man’s mammalian affinities are shown in his diaphragm, his hair,
his four-chambered heart, his _corpus callosum_, his non-nucleated
blood-corpuscles, and his awkward incubation.

The fishes, frogs, reptiles, birds, and non-human mammals are human
in having two body cavities, segmented internal skeletons, two pairs
of limbs, skulls and spinal columns, red blood, brains, and dorsal
cords; and in possessing two eyes, two ears, nostrils, and mouth
opening out of the head. And finally all animals, including man, are
related to all other animal forms by the great underlying facts of
their origin, structure, composition, and destiny. All creatures,
whether they live in the sea, in the heavens, or in subterranean
glooms; whether they swim, fly, crawl, or walk; whether their world
is a planet or a water-drop; and whether they realise it or not,
commence existence in the same way, are composed of the same
substances, are nourished by the same matters, follow fundamentally
the same occupations, all do under the circumstances the best they
can, and all arrive ultimately at the same pitiful end.

VI. The Meaning of Homology.

The similarities and homologies of structure existing between man
and other animals, and between other animals and still others, are
not accidental and causeless. They are not resemblances scattered
arbitrarily among the multitudinous forms of life by the capricious
levities of chance. That all animals commence existence as an egg
and are all made up of cells composed of the same protoplasmic
substance, and all inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, and are
all seeking pleasure and seeking to avoid pain, are more than
ordinary facts. They are filled with inferences. That vertebrate
animals, differing in externals as widely as herring and Englishmen,
are all built according to the same fundamental plan, with
marrow-filled backbones and exactly two pairs of limbs branching in
the same way, is an astonishing coincidence. That the wing of the
bird, the foreleg of the dog, the flipper of the whale, and the
fore-limb of the toad and crocodile, have essentially the same bones
as the human arm has is a fact which may be without significance to
blind men, but to no one else. The metamorphosis of the frog from a
fish, of the insect from a worm, and of a poet from a senseless
cell, are transformations simply marvellous in meaning. And it is
not easy, since Darwin, to understand how such lessons could remain
long unintelligible, even to stones and simpletons. Not many
generations have passed, however, since these revelations, now so
distinct and wonderful, fell on the listless minds of men as
ineffectually as the glories of the flower fall on the sightless
sockets of the blind.

It is hardly two generations since the highest intelligences on the
earth conceived that not only the different varieties of men—the
black, the white, and the orange—but all the orders and genera of
the animal world, and not only animals, but plants, had all been
somehow simultaneously and arbitrarily brought into existence in
some indistinct antiquity, and that they had from the beginning all
existed with practically the same features and in approximately the
same conditions as those with which and in which they are found
to-day. The universe was conceived to be a fixed and stupid
something, born as we see it, incapable of growth, and indulging in
nothing but repetitions. There were no necessary coherencies and
consanguinities, no cosmical tendencies operating eternally and
universally. All was whimsical and arbitrary. It was not known that
anything had grown or evolved. All things were believed to have been
given beginning and assigned to their respective places in the
universe by a potential and all-clever creator. The serpent was
limbless because it had officiously allowed Eve to include in her
dietary that which had been expressly forbidden. The quadruped
walked with its face towards the earth as a structural reminder of
its subjection to the biped, who was supposed to be especially
skilled in keeping his eyes rolled heavenward. The flowers flung out
their colours, not for the benefit of the bugs and bees, and the
stars paraded, not because they were moved to do so by their own
eternal urgings, but because man had eyes capable of being affected
by them. Man was an erect and featherless vertebrate because his
hypothetical maker was erect and featherless. (I wonder whether, if
a clam should conceive a creator, it would have the magnanimity to
make him an insect or a vertebrate, or anything other than a great
big clam.)

VII. The Earth an Evolution.

The world now knows—at least, the scientific part of it
knows—that these things are not true, that they are but the solemn
fancies of honest but simple-minded ancients who did the best they
could in that twilight age to explain to their inquiring instincts
the wilderness of phenomena in which they found themselves. The
universe is a process. It is not petrified, but flowing. It is going
somewhere. Everything is changing and evolving, and will always
continue to do so. The forms of life, of continents and oceans, and
of streams and systems, which we perceive as we open our senses upon
the world to-day, are not the forms that have always existed, and
they are not the forms of the eternal future. There was a time, away
in the inconceivable, when there was no life upon the earth, no
solids, and no seas. The world was an incandescent lump, lifeless
and alone, in the cold solitudes of the spaces. There was a
time—there must have been a time—when life appeared for the
first time upon the earth, simple cellules without bones or blood,
and without a suspicion of their immense and quarrelsome posterity.
There was a time when North America was an island, and the Alleghany
Mountains were the only mountains of the continent. The time
was—in the coal-forming age—when the Mississippi Valley, from
the Colorado Islands to the Alleghanies, was a vast marsh or sea,
choked with forests of equisetum and fern, and swarming with
gigantic reptiles now extinct. There was a time when palms grew in
Dakota, and magnolias waved in the semi-tropical climate of
Greenland and Spitzbergen. There was a time when there were no Rocky
Mountains in existence, no Andes, no Alps, no Pyrenees, and no
Himalayas. And that time, compared with the vast stretches of
geological duration, was not so very long ago, for these mountains
are all young mountains. The time was when Jurassic saurians—those
repulsive ruffians of that rude old time—represented the highest
intelligence and civilisation of the known universe. There were no
men and women in the world, not even savages, when our ape-like
forefathers wandered and wondered through the awesome silences of
primeval wilds; there were no railroads, steamboats, telegraphs,
telephones, typewriters, harvesters, electric lights, nor sewing
machines; no billionaires nor bicycles, no socialists nor
steam-heat, no ‘watered stock’ nor ‘government by
injunction,’ no women’s clubs, captains of industry, labour
unions, nor ‘yellow perils’—there was none of these things on
the earth a hundred years ago. All things have evolved to be what
they are—the continents, oceans, and atmospheres, and the plants
and populations that live in and upon them.

There will come a time, too, looking forward into the future, when
what we see now will be seen no more. As we go backward into the
past, the earth in all of its aspects rapidly changes; the
continents dwindle, the mountains melt, and existing races and
species disappear one after another. The farther we penetrate into
the past, the stranger and the more different from the present does
everything become, until finally we come to a world of molten rocks
and vapourised seas without a creeping thing upon it. As it has been
in the past so will it be in time to come. The present is not
everlasting. The minds that perceive upon this planet a thousand
centuries in the future will perceive a very different world from
that which the minds of this day perceive—different arts, animals,
events, ideals, geographies, sciences, and civilisations. The earth
seems fixed and changeless because we are so fleeting. We see it but
a moment, and are gone. The tossing forest in the wrath of the storm
is motionless when looked at by a flash of lightning. The same
tendencies that have worked past changes are at work to-day as
tirelessly as in the past. By invisible chisels the mountains are
being sculptured, ocean floors are lifting, and continents are
sinking into the seas. Species, systems, and civilisations are
changing, some crumbling and passing away, others rising out of the
ruins of the departed. Mighty astronomical tendencies are secretly
but relentlessly at work, and immense vicissitudes are in store for
this clod of our nativity. The earth is doomed to be frozen to
death. In a few million years, according to astronomers, the sun
will have shrunken to a fraction of his present size, and will have
become correspondingly reduced in heat-giving powers. It is
estimated that in twelve or fifteen million years the sun, upon
whose mighty dispensations all life and activity on the earth are
absolutely dependent, will become so enfeebled that no form of life
on the earth will be possible. The partially-cooled earth itself is
giving up its internal warmth, and will continue to give it up until
it is the same temperature as the surrounding abysms, which is the
frightful negative of something like 270 centigrade degrees. These
are not very cheerful facts for those who inhabit the earth to
contemplate. But they that seek the things that cheer must seek
another sphere. No power can stay the emaciation of suns or the
thievery of enveloping immensities. Old age is inevitable. It is far
off, but it is as certain as human decay, and as mournful. In that
dreadful but inevitable time no living being will be left in this
world; there will be no cities nor states nor vanities nor creeping
things, no flowers, no twilights, no love, only a frozen sphere. The
oceans that now rave against the rocky flanks of the continents will
be locked in eternal immobility; the atmospheres, which to-day drive
their fleecy flocks over the azure meads of heaven and float sweet
sounds and feathered forms, will be, in that terrible time, turned
to stone; the radiant woods and fields, the home of the myriads and
the green play-places of the shadows, will, like all that live,
move, and breathe, have rotted into the everlasting lumber of the
elements. There will be no Europe then, no pompous philosophies, no
hellish rich, and no gods. All will have suffered indescribable
refrigeration. The earth will be a fluidless, lifeless, sunless
cinder, unimaginably dead and desolate, a decrepit and pitiful old
ruin falling endlessly among heartless immensities, the universal
tomb of the activities.

The universe is an evolution. Change is as extensive as time and
space. The present has come out of that which has been, and will
enter into and determine that which is to be. Everything has a
biography. Everything has evolved—_everything_—from the murmur
on the lips of the speechless babe to the soul of the poet, and from
the molecule to Jehovah.

VIII. The Factors of Organic Evolution.

The animal kingdom represents one of the two grand branches of the
organic universe. It has been evolved—evolved in a manner as
simple and straightforward as it is revolting. It has all been
brought about by _partiality_ or _selection_. Generations of beings
have come into existence. The individual members of each generation
have differed from each other—differed in size, strength, speed,
colour, shape, sagacity, luck, and likelihood of life. No two
beings, not even those born from the same womb, are in all respects
identical. Hardships have come. They have come from the inanimate
universe in the form of floods, fires, frosts, accidents, diseases,
droughts, storms, and the like; from other species, who were
competitors or enemies; and from unbrotherly members of the same
species. Some have survived, but the great majority have perished.
Only a fraction, and generally an appallingly small fraction, of
each generation of a species have lived to maturity. The lobster
lays 10,000 eggs in a season, yet the mortality is such that the
number of lobsters do not increase from one year to another. The
elephant is the slowest breeder of all animals, yet, if they should
all live, the offspring of a single pair in 750 years would,
according to Darwin, number nearly 19,000,000. It has been shown
that at the normal rate of increase of English sparrows, if none
were to die save of old age, it would take but twenty years for a
single pair to give one sparrow to every square inch in the State of
Indiana.[1] A single cyclops (one of the humbler crustaceans) may
have 5,000,000 descendants in a season. One aphis will produce 100
young, and these young will reproduce in like manner for ten
generations in a season, when, if they should all live, there would
be a quintillion of young. A female white ant, when adult, does
nothing but lie in a cell and lay eggs. She lays 80,000 eggs a day
regularly for several months. An oyster lays 2,000,000 eggs in a
season, and if all these eggs came to maturity a few dozen oysters
might supply the markets of the world. The tapeworm is said to
produce the incredible number of 1,000,000,000 ova, and some of the
humbler plants three times this number of spores. If each egg of the
codfish should produce an adult, a single pair in twenty-five years
would produce a mass of fish larger than the earth. Lower forms of
life are even more prolific than the higher. Maupas said that
certain microscopic infusorians which he studied multiplied so
rapidly that, if they should continue to multiply for thirty-eight
days, and all of them should live, any one of them would produce a
mass of protoplasm as big as the sun.

Those of each generation that have died have been inferior, or
unfitted to the environment in which they found themselves. Those
that have survived have been superior, superior in
something—bigness, cunning, courage, virtue, vitality, strength,
speed, littleness, or ferocity—something that has related them
advantageously to surrounding conditions. The surviving remnant of
each generation have become the progenitors of the next generation,
and have transmitted, or tended to transmit, to their offspring the
qualities of their superiority. This winnowing has gone on in each
generation of living beings during many millions of years—almost
ever since life commenced to be on the earth. Some have continued
themselves, and others have died childless. The environment of each
species has been an immense sieve, and only the superior have gone
through it. Different environments have emphasised different
qualities of structure and disposition, and have thus given rise to
permanent varieties in survival. These varieties, through the
accumulated effects of many generations of selection, have diverged
into species; species, after a still longer series of selections,
have evolved into genera; genera have evolved into families;
families into orders; and so on. In this simple, terrible manner
have all the branches of organic beings (thanks to the horrors of a
million ages) been brought into existence.

_Variation_, therefore, which furnishes variety in offspring;
_Heredity_, which tends to perpetuate peculiarities by causing
offspring to resemble more or less the characters of their parents;
and _Environment_, which determines the character of the selections,
are the three factors, and the only three factors, in organic
evolution.

1. Jordan: _Footnotes of Evolution_; New York, 1898.

IX. The Evidences of Organic Evolution.

That the forms of life to-day found on the earth have come into
existence by the evolution of the more complex forms from the
simpler, and of these simpler forms from still simpler, through the
ever-operating law of Selection, is a necessary conclusion from the
following facts:

1. The existence in the animal world of all grades of structures,
from the humblest possible protozoan, whose body consists of a
single simple speck, to the most powerful and complex of mammals.
There are estimated to be something like a million species of
animals living on the earth to-day. There may be several times this
number. These species are linked together by millions of varieties,
and are so related to each other that they may be all gathered
together into various genera; these genera may be grouped into
families, the families into orders, and the orders into seven or
eight great primary phyla. By taking existing species and adding to
them the extinct species of the rocks, and placing them all
according to their structural affinities, it is possible to arrange
them in the form of a tree with the various phyla, orders, families,
genera, and species, branching and rebranching from the main trunk.
The existence of structures, so graduated as to render such an
arrangement possible, is in itself suggestive of a common
relationship and origin.

2. Evolution is suggested by the similarities and homologies of
structure found throughout the animal kingdom. Some of these
similarities and homologies have already been mentioned. They are
everywhere—remoter and more fundamental, some of them, others
closer and more detailed. To the untrained mind, which sees surfaces
only, and not even surfaces well, the animal world is an
interminable miscellany of forms. But to the biologist, who looks
deeper and with immense acumen over the whole field of animal life,
there are only seven or eight different types of structure in the
entire animal world. These seven or eight types correspond with the
primary classes, or phyla, into which animals are divided, viz.,
protozoa, sponges, celenterates, echinoderms, worms, mollusks,
arthropods, and vertebrates. However widely the members of each of
these great groups may differ among themselves in colour, size,
habits of life, and the like, the members of each group all resemble
each other fundamentally. Moles differ from monkeys, bats from men,
and birds from crocodiles and toads. They differ enormously. But
they are all vertebrates with red blood, double body cavities,
backbones, two pairs of limbs, and five fingers on each limb. When
they are looked at superficially, there is not much similarity
between a water-strider and a butterfly or between a stag-beetle and
a gnat. But they are all, in reality, built according to the same
plan. Like all other insects, they have six legs, a sheath-like
skeleton, and bodies characteristically divided into head, thorax,
and abdomen. It is the same with all other great classes of beings.
All worms resemble each other; and so do all mollusks, although they
may differ in particulars as widely as nautiluses and clams.
Echinoderms have a radiate structure, celenterates and sponges are
vase-like in shape, and protozoa are one-celled. The differences in
structure among the members of a group consist in different
modifications of a fundamental type. Among the vertebrates the
fore-limb may be an arm, a leg, a wing, a shovel, a flipper, or a
fin. But in all cases it is the same organ—that is, the same
implement modified to serve different ends. Take the mouth-parts of
insects. In the grasshopper and cricket these parts are fitted for
grinding; in the moths and butterflies they are fashioned into long
tubes for sucking the sweets of flowers; in the mosquito they form
an elaborate apparatus for drilling and drinking; and in the mayfly
the mouth-parts, though present, are not used at all. In all of
these animals these parts are essentially the same, although
differing so much in their forms and purposes that the unscientific
can scarcely be made to believe they are fundamentally alike. There
is no fact more familiar to the biologist or more frequently met
with in the fields of animal morphology than the fact that the same
general type may be hammered into dozens, or hundreds, or even
thousands, of different patterns by the incessant industry of its
surroundings, and that the same organic part may be moulded into
various implements serving totally different ends by the
environmental vicissitudes of time and space. On the hypothesis that
the members of each group of animals possessing common
characteristics, whether the group be large or small, have sprung
from a common ancestry, and that the differences in structure have
arisen as a result of differences in environment, the similarities
and homologies of structure existing among animals are perfectly
intelligible. But on any other supposition they are inexplicable.

3. Evolution is suggested by the remarkable series of phenomena
presented by embryology. There are at least four facts in the
developmental history of every creature which can hardly be
accounted for on any other supposition than that of organic
evolution.

_First_, the fact that every animal, above the lowest, individually
passes through an evolution between the beginning of its existence
and its maturity. Terrestrial beings are not born, like Minerva,
full-grown. They grow. They evolve. They commence close down to the
very atoms. And from this lowly genesis they rise, through a series
of marvellous changes, to that high state of perfection and
greatness from which they descend to dissolution.

If we knew by actual observation as little concerning the evolution
of individuals as we do of the evolution of species—if we had
always been used to seeing animals, including ourselves, in full
bloom—had never watched the tadpole, the pupa, and the babe pass
through their wonderful metamorphoses on their way to maturity, it
would probably be just as hard for many minds to believe that
animals evolve individually to be what they are as it is for them to
believe that species have grown to be what they are. In the case of
individuals, however, the evolution takes place right before our
eyes largely, while the evolution of species goes on so slowly and
stretches back so far into the past that it can only be inferred.

_Second_, the fact that animals, no matter how much they may differ
from each other at maturity, all begin existence at the same place.
Every animal commences its organic existence as an egg—as a
one-celled animal—as an organism identical in structure with the
simplest protozoan. The ova of whales ‘are no larger than fern
seeds.’ The eggs of the coral, the crab, the ape, and the man are
so precisely alike that the highest powers of the microscope cannot
distinguish between them.

_Third_, the fact that the members of the same great group of
animals in their individual development pass through similar stages
of evolution. The ‘worm’ stage in the development of most
insects and the ‘fish’ stage of frogs are well known.

There are no more remarkable instances of individual evolution in
the whole range of animal life. The fish, the reptile, the bird, the
dog, and the human being—all vertebrates, in short—cannot for
some time after their embryonic commencement be distinguished from
each other. ‘The feet of lizards and mammals, the wings and feet
of birds, and the hands and feet of men,’ says the illustrious Von
Baer, as quoted by Darwin, ‘all arise from the same fundamental
form’.[1]

‘It is quite in the later stages of development,’ says Huxley,
‘that the human being presents marked differences from the ape,
while the latter departs as much from the dog in its development as
the man does’.[2]

Not only frogs, but reptiles, birds, and mammals, including man, all
have gills at a certain stage in their embryonic development. Nearly
all the lower invertebrate animals are hermaphroditic—that is, in
the body of each animal is found the two kinds of sex organs which
in the higher animals exist in distinct animals. And frogs, birds,
and other higher animals, which as adults are unisexual, have, as an
inheritance from these primitive forms, hermaphroditic embryos.[3]

_Fourth_, the fact that the structural stages through which animals
in embryo pass correspond in a wonderful manner with the permanent
structures of those lower forms which extend serially back to the
beginnings of life. It is the proudest boast of the embryologist
that he is able to know the route through which any species has come
to be what it is by a simple study of the individual evolution of
its members. Each animal repeats in its individual evolution the
evolution of its species. This recapitulation is not always
complete—is, in fact, frequently vague, sometimes circuitous, and
often broken or abbreviated. Processes requiring originally
centuries or thousands of years to accomplish are here telescoped
into a few months, or even days. It is not strange that the process
is imperfect. But so firmly is the belief in the correspondence of
ontogeny and phylogeny fixed in the minds of modern biologists that,
in determining the classification and affinities of any particular
animal, more reliance is placed on the facts of embryology than on
those of adult structure.

The first thing that an animal becomes after it is an egg—unless
it is a one-celled animal, in which case it remains always an
egg—is two cells; these two cells become four; these four become
eight; and so on, until the embryo becomes a many-celled ball,
consisting of a single layer of cells surrounding a fluid interior.
A dimple forms in the cell layer on one side of this ball, and, by
deepening to a hollow, changes the ball into a double-walled sac.
This is the gastrula—the permanent structure of the sponges and
celenterates, and an (almost) invariable stage in the larval
development of all animals above the sponges and celenterates. The
gastrula becomes a worm (or an insect or a fish through the worm) by
elongation and enlargement, and by the development of the endoderm,
which is the inner layer of the cell wall, into organs of nutrition
and reproduction, and by the development of the ectoderm, which is
the outer cell layer, into organs of motion and sensation.

The embryonic development of a human being is not different in kind
from the embryonic development of any other animal. Every human
being at the beginning of his organic existence is a protozoan,
about 1/125 inch in diameter; at another stage of development he is
a tiny sac-shaped mass of cells without blood or nerves, the
gastrula; at another stage he is a worm, with a pulsating tube
instead of a heart, and without head, neck, spinal column, or limbs;
at another stage he has, as a backbone, a rod of cartilage extending
along the back, and a faint nerve cord, as in amphioxus, the lowest
of the vertebrates; at another stage he is a fish with a
two-chambered heart, mesonephric kidneys, and gill-slits with gill
arteries leading to them, just as in fishes; at another stage he is
a reptile with a three-chambered heart, and voiding his excreta
through a cloaca like other reptiles; and finally, when he enters
upon post-natal sins and actualities, he is a sprawling, squalling,
unreasoning quadruped. The human larva from the fifth to the seventh
month of development is covered with a thick growth of hair and has
a true caudal appendage, like the monkey. At this stage the embryo
has in all thirty-eight vertebrae, nine of which are caudal, and the
great toe extends at right angles to the other toes, and is not
longer than the other toes, but shorter, as in the ape.

These facts are unmistakable. There is a reason for everything, and
there is a reason for these transformations through which each
generation of living beings journeys. The individual passes through
them because the species to which he belongs has passed through
them. They represent ancestral wanderings. As if to emphasise the
kinship of all of life’s forms and to render incontrovertible the
fact of universal evolution, Nature compels every individual to
commence existence at the same place, and to recapitulate in his
individual evolution the phylogenetic journeyings of his species.

4. That existing forms of life have been evolved from other forms,
and that these ancestral forms have been different from those
derived from them, is shown by the occasional appearance of
antecedent and abandoned types of structure among the offspring of
existing species. Occasionally a human child is born strangely
unlike its parents, but bearing an unmistakable resemblance in looks
and disposition to his great-grandfather or some other remote
ancestor. This is _atavism_, that tendency to revert to ancestral
types which is prevalent among all animals. We may think of it
figuratively as a flash of indecision when Nature hesitates for a
moment whether to adopt a new form of structure or cling to the old
and tried. Horses and mules are sometimes born with three toes on
each foot, and zebra-like stripes on their legs and shoulders; and
domestic pigeons, such as are naturally black, red, or mottled,
occasionally produce offspring with blue plumage and two black
wing-bars, like the wild rock-dove, from which all domestic breeds
have sprung. In man the cheekbone and the frontal bone of the
forehead consist normally each of a single bone. But in children and
human embryos these bones are always double, as is normally the case
in adults among some of the anthropoids and other mammals. Gills
appear regularly in the embryos of reptiles, birds, and mammals, and
human young are sometimes born with gill-slits on the neck. There
are times when, owing to inaccurate or incomplete embryological
development, these fish-like characteristics are so perfect at birth
as to allow liquids, on being swallowed, to pass out through them
and trickle down on the outside of the neck. Many muscles are
occasionally developed in man which are normal in the apes and other
mammals. As many as seven different muscular variations have been
found in a single human being, every one of which were muscles found
normally in the structure of the apes.[1]

5. Closely akin to atavism, which is the occasional persistence of
ancestral types of character, is the regular occurrence of vestigial
organs or structures, organs which in ancestral forms have definite
functions, but which in existing species, owing to changed
conditions, are rudimentary and useless. On the back of each ankle
of the horse are two splints, the atrophied remains of the second
and fourth toes. Similar vestiges of two obsolete toes are also
found just back of the wrists and ankles on all the two-toed
ungulates, such as the cow and sheep. In the body of the whale where
hind-limbs would naturally be, there are found the anatomical ruins
of these organs in the form of a few diminutive bones. The same
thing is true in the sirenians. In the Greenland whale there are
remnants of both femur and tibia in the region of the atrophied
hind-limbs. The snakes are limbless, but the pythons and boas have
internal remnants of hind-limbs and sometimes even clawed structures
representing toes. The so-called ‘glass-snake’ or
‘joint-snake’ (which is really a limbless lizard) has four
complete internal limbs. Young turtles, parrots, and whalebone
whales have teeth, but the adults of these animals are toothless.
Cows, sheep, deer, and other ruminants, never have as adults any
upper incisors, but these teeth are found in the foetal stages of
these animals just under the gums. The female frog has rudimentary
male reproductive organs, and the male has corresponding vestiges of
female organs. Similar remnants of the reproductive structures exist
in many other animals. They represent stages in the transition from
the hermaphroditism of primitive animals to the unisexuality of the
higher forms, the separation of the sex organs into those of male
and female having come about through the decay of one set of
structures in each individual.

For reasons which it is not necessary to mention here, biologists
believe that insects all originated from a common parental form,
with two pairs of wings and six legs. Insects all retain their
original allowance of legs, but in many species one or the other
pair of wings has become more or less degenerated. In the whole
order of flies the back pair of wings is represented by a couple of
insignificant knobs. In the Strepsiptera, a sub-order of beetles,
the front-wings are similarly reduced, being mere twisted filaments.
Many parasites, such as fleas and ticks, whose mode of life renders
organs of aerial locomotion unnecessary, are entirely wingless. The
insects of small isolated islands are also largely without wings,
the proportion of wingless species being much larger than among
insects inhabiting continents. This is due to their greater
liability on small land masses of being carried out to sea and
drowned, owing to the feebleness and uncertainty of insect flight.
On the island of Madeira, out of the 550 species found there, 220
species no longer have the power of flight.

Air-breathing animals—amphibians, reptiles, birds, and
mammals—have normally a pair of lungs—a right one and a left
one. But in snakes and snake-like lizards, where the body is very
slender and elongated, only one lung, sometimes the right one, and
sometimes the left, is fully developed. The right ovary is likewise
aborted in all birds, the left one yielding all the eggs. The swifts
and frigate birds live almost their whole lives long on the wing,
and the legs of these birds have grown so short and weak and
rudimentary, as a result of their constant life in the air, that
they can scarcely walk. The chimney swift is said never to alight
anywhere except on the sooty inner walls of the chimney where its
nest is. Its food consists of insects which it gathers in the air,
and the few dead twigs used in making its nest are nipped from the
tree while the bird continues its flight. The ostriches,
cassowaries, and many other birds, have, on the other hand,
developed their legs at the expense of their wings. The ostrich is
said to be able to outrun the horse, but it has no power of flight,
although it has wings and wing muscles, and even the skin-folds
covering the wings corresponding to those of birds that fly. But its
whole flying apparatus is in ruins. The rudimentary hind-toe of
birds is a vestigial organ, and so are the claws which appear on the
thumb and first finger of all young birds. So also are the rudiments
of eyes in cave crickets, fishes, and other inhabitants of total
darkness. The flounder and other so-called flat fishes swim straight
up, as ordinary fishes do, when young. But as they grow they incline
more and more to one side, and finally swim entirely on their side,
the eye on the lower side migrating around, and joining the other on
the upper side of the head.

About the first thing a human infant does on coming into the world
is to prove its arboreal origin by grasping and spitefully clinging
to everything that stimulates its palms. A little peeperless babe an
hour old can perform feats of strength with its hands and arms that
many men and women cannot equal. It can support the entire weight of
its body for several seconds hanging by its hands. Dr. Robinson, an
English physician, found as a result of sixty experiments on as many
infants, more than half of whom were less than an hour old, that
with two exceptions every babe was able to hang to the finger or to
a small stick, and sustain the whole weight of the body for at least
ten seconds. Twelve of those just born held on for nearly a minute.
At the age of two or three weeks, when this power is greatest,
several succeeded in sustaining themselves for over a minute and a
half, two for over two minutes, and one for two minutes and
thirty-five seconds. The young ape for some weeks after birth clings
tenaciously to its mother’s neck and hair, and the instinct of the
child to cling to objects is probably a survival of the instinct of
the young ape. I believe it is Wallace who relates somewhere an
incident which illustrates the instinct of the young simian to cling
to something. Wallace had captured a young ape, and was carrying it
to camp, when the little fellow happened to get its hands on the
naturalist’s whiskers, which it mistook, evidently, for the
hirsute property of its mother, and, driven by the powerful instinct
of self-preservation, it hung on to them so desperately it could
scarcely be pulled loose. Many mammals are provided with a
well-developed muscular apparatus for the manipulation of their
ears. But in man there does not exist the same necessity for
auricular detection of enemies, and while these muscles still exist,
and are capable of being used to a slight extent by occasional
individuals, they are generally so emaciated as to be useless.

Another vestigial organ in the body of man, and one of significance
from the standpoint of morphology, is the tail. The tail is an
exceedingly unpopular part of the human anatomy, most men and women
being unwilling to admit that they have such an appendage. But many
a person who has hitherto dozed in ignorance on this matter has
learned with considerable dismay, when he has for the first time
looked upon the undraped lineaments of the human skeleton, that man
actually has a tail. It consists of three or four (sometimes five)
small vertebrae, more or less fused, at the posterior end of the
spinal column. That this is really a rudimentary tail is proved
beyond a doubt by the fact that in the embryo it is highly
developed, being longer than the limbs, and is provided with a
regular muscular apparatus for wagging it. These caudal muscles are
generally represented in grown-up people by bands of fibrous tissue,
but cases are known where the actual muscles have persisted through
life.[4]

The nictitating membrane, which in birds and many reptiles consists
of a half-transparent curtain acting as a lid to sweep the eye, is
in the human eye dwindled to a small membranous remnant, draped at
the inner corner. The growth of hair over the human body surface may
be regarded, in view of the sartorial habits of man, as a vestigial
inheritance from hairy ancestors. One of the most notorious of the
vestigial organs of man is the vermiform appendix, a small slender
sac opening from the large intestine near where the large intestine
is joined by the small intestine. In some animals this organ is
large and performs an important part in the process of digestion.
But in man it is a mere rudiment, not only of no possible aid in
digestion, but the source of frequent disease, and even of death.

There are in all, according to Darwin, about eighty vestigial organs
in the human body. But these organs occur everywhere throughout the
animal kingdom. There is not an order of animals, nor of plants
either, without them. They are necessary facts growing out of
evolution. Organic structures are the result of adjustment to
surrounding conditions. The continual changes in environment to
which all organisms are exposed necessitate corresponding changes in
structure. And the vestiges found in the bodies of all animals
represent parts which in the previous existence were useful and
necessary to a complete adjustment of the organism, but which, owing
to a change of emphasis in surroundings, have become useless, and
consequently shrunken. They are the obsolete or obsolescent parts of
animal structure—parts which have been outgrown and
superseded—the ‘silent letters’ of morphology. They sustain
the same relation to the individual organism as dead or dwindling
species sustain to a fauna. They furnish indisputable proof of the
kinship and unity of the animal world.

6. It is only on the supposition that the life of the earth has
evolved step by step with the evolution of the land masses, and that
the forms of life from which existing forms were evolved were
dispersed over the earth at a time when physiographic conditions
were very different from what they are now, that it is possible to
account for the peculiar manner in which animals are distributed
over the earth. The cassowary is a flightless bird of the ostrich
order inhabiting Australia and the islands to the north of it. This
bird is found nowhere else in the world, and each area has its own
particular species. The same things are also true of the kangaroo.
It is found over a similar region, with a different species
occupying each land mass. Now, on the hypothesis of special creation
there is no thinkable reason why these animals should be divided, as
they are, into distinct species, and restricted to this particular
region. But on the hypothesis of evolution it is perfectly plain.
All of these regions at one time were united with one another, and
were subsequently submerged in part, forming islands. Each group of
animals, being isolated from every other group and subjected to
somewhat different conditions, developed a style of departure from
the original type of structure different from that of every other
group in response to the peculiar conditions operating upon it. This
has led, in the course of centuries of selection, to the formation
of distinct species such as exist to-day.

Lombock Strait, a narrow neck of water between Bali and Lombock
Island, and Macassar Strait, separating Celebes from Borneo, are
parts of a continuous passage of water which in remote times
separated two continents—an Indo-Malayan continent to which
belonged Borneo, Sumatra, Java, and the Malay Peninsula; and an
Austro-Malayan continent, now represented by Australia, Celebes, the
Moluccas, New Guinea, Solomon’s Islands, etc. Wallace first
announced this ancient boundary, and it has been called
‘Wallace’s line.’ He was led to infer its existence by the
fact which he observed as he travelled about from island to island,
that, while the faunas of these two regions are as wholes very
different from each other, the faunas of the various land patches in
each area have a wonderful similarity. Australia is a veritable
museum of old and obsolete forms of both plants and animals. Its
fauna and flora are made up prevailingly of forms such as have on
the other continents long been superseded by more specialised
species. No true mammals, excepting men and a few rats, lived in
Australia when Englishmen first went there. The most powerful
animals were the comparatively helpless marsupials. The explanation
of these remarkable facts is probably this: The Australian
continent, which formerly included New Guinea and other islands to
the north, has not been connected with the other land masses for a
very long period of time. The development upon the other continents
of the more powerful mammals, especially of the ungulates and the
carnivora, resulted in the extermination of the more helpless forms
from most of the earth’s surface. But Australia, protected by its
isolation, has retained to this day its old-fashioned forms of life,
neither land animals nor plants having been able to navigate the
intervening straits. This supposition is strengthened by the fact
that fossil remains of marsupials are to-day found scattered all
over the world, while, with the exception of the American opossums,
living marsupials are found only in Australia and its islands. There
is to-day not a single survivor of these once-numerous races in
either Europe, Asia, or Africa. Similar facts of distribution are
furnished by the lemurs—those small, monkey-like animals with fox
faces, which are sometimes called ‘half-apes,’ since they are
supposed to be the link connecting the true apes with lower forms.
Fossil lemurs are found in both America and Europe, but lemurs are
now extinct in both continents. Those of America were probably
exterminated by the carnivora, who are known to be very fond of
monkey meat of all kinds. The European lemurs seem to have migrated
southward into eastern Africa at a time when Madagascar formed a
part of the mainland. ‘There they have been isolated, and have
developed in a fashion comparable to that which has occurred in the
case of the Australian marsupials. Of fifty living species, thirty
are confined to Madagascar, and the lemurs are there exceedingly
numerous in individuals. Outside of Madagascar they only maintain a
precarious footing in forests or on islands, and are usually few in
number’.[3]

If the earth were peopled by migrations from Ararat, it would
require a good deal of intellectual legerdemain to show why the
sloths are confined to South America and the monotremes to Australia
and its islands. The reindeer of northern Europe and Asia, and the
elk and caribou of Arctic America, are so much alike they must have
descended from a common ancestry, and been developed into distinct
species since the separation of North America and Eurasia. The same
thing is probably also true of the puma and jaguar, who inhabit the
middle latitudes of the New World, and the lion, tiger, and leopard,
occupying like latitudes of the Old World. They all belong to the
cat family, and represent divergences from a common feline type of
structure. The camel does not exist normally outside of northern
Africa and central and western Asia. And when the camel-like llama
of South America first became known to zoologists, it was a problem
how this creature could have become separated so far from the
apparent origin of the camel family. But since then fossil camels
have been found all over both North and South America. And it has
even been suspected that perhaps America was the original home of
the camel, and that, like the horse, the camel migrated to the
eastern hemisphere at a time when the eastern and western land
masses were connected. The foxes, hares, and other mammals of the
upper Alps, also many Alpine plants, are like those of the Arctic
regions. The most probable explanation of these resemblances is that
these Alpine species climbed up into these inhospitable altitudes,
and were left stranded here on this island of cold, when their
relatives, on the return of warmth at the close of the glacial
period, retreated back to the ice-bound fastnesses around the pole.
It is for a similar reason, probably, that the flora of the upper
White Mountains resembles that of Labrador.

7. One of the strongest pieces of evidence bearing on evolution that
is furnished by any department of knowledge is that furnished by
geology. It is the evidence of the rocks. Geology is, among other
things, a history of the earth. This history has been written by the
earth itself on laminae of stone. It is from these records that we
learn incontestably the order in which the forms of life have made
their appearance on the earth.

Three-fourths of the surface of the earth is sea. Over the surface
of the remaining fourth, excepting in mountainous places, is a layer
of soil, varying from a few feet to a few hundred feet in depth.
Beneath this coverlet of soil, extending as far as man has
penetrated into the earth, is rock. Excepting in regions overflowed
by lava poured out from beneath, or along the backbones of
continents where the surface rocks have been upheaved into folds and
carried away by denudation, the rocks immediately beneath the soil,
to a thickness often of thousands of feet, are in the form of
layers, or sheets, arranged one above another. These rocks are
called sedimentary rocks, as distinguished from the unlaminated
rocks of the interior. They have been formed at the bottom of the
sea, and have, hence, all been formed since the condensation of the
oceans. They have been formed out of the detritus of continents
brought down by the rivers and the accumulated remains of animal and
vegetal forms which have slowly settled down through the waters.
They are the successive cemeteries of the dead past. Such rocks are
now forming over the floors of all oceans—forming just as they
have formed throughout the long eons of geological history. Along
the axes of ancient mountains and in deep-cut canyons the rock
layers are exposed to a thickness of thousands of feet, in some
cases thirty or forty thousand feet. Here they lie, piled up, one on
top of another, the great, broad pages upon which are written the
long, dark story of our planet. It is the mightiest and most
everlasting of all annals—the autobiography of a world. It is
possible, by studying these rock records, to know not only the kind
of life that lived in each age, but a good deal regarding the
conditions in which that life lived and passed away. Just as the
naturalist is able, from a single bone of an unknown animal, to
reconstruct the entire animal and to infer something of its
surroundings and habits of life, and as the archeologist, by going
back to the graves of deceased races and digging up the dust upon
which these races wrought, is able to tell much of their history and
characteristics, so the geologist, by studying the bones of those
more distant civilisations, the civilisations sandwiched among the
fossiliferous rocks, is able to know, not only just the kind of life
that lived in each age, but, by comparing the species of successive
strata, can construct with astonishing fulness the genealogical
outline of the entire life process. The succession of life forms as
they appear in the rocks, with a sketch of their probable genealogy,
is traced elsewhere in this chapter. It is only necessary to say
here that the order in which the forms of life appear in the
sedimentary strata is that of a gradually increasing complexity. The
invertebrates appear first; then the fishes, the lowest of the
vertebrates; after these come the amphibians; following these the
reptiles; and finally the birds and mammals.

8. There is another reason for a belief in evolution furnished by
geology, but of a somewhat different kind from that just stated. It
consists in the fact that there are found in the rocks series or
grades of structures, which fit with amazing accuracy on to the
structures of existing species. Now, this is precisely what,
according to the evolutional hypothesis, is to be expected. For, if
evolution is true, existing species represent the tops of things.
They are the existing and visible parts of processes which extend
indefinitely back into the past, and whose deceased stages may
reasonably be expected to be found fossil in the earth. Considering
the youth and inexperience of paleontology and the torn and
incoherent character of the record, it is surprising that anatomists
have been able to accomplish what they have accomplished. In many
cases—notably, those of man, the snail, the crocodile, and the
horse—antecedent forms of structure have been found in almost
unbroken gradations leading back to types differing immensely from
their existing representatives. Bones and fossils of men have been
found buried beneath the alluvium of rivers, under old lava-beds,
and in caves, crusted over by the deposits of percolating waters.
Many such fossils are found in quaternary rocks, along with the
bones of animals still living and some extinct. Some of these
remains indicate unmistakable affinities with the ape. The most
celebrated of these discoveries is the fossil of an erect ape-man
(_Pithecanthropus erectus_), found by a Dutch Governor on the island
of Java in 1894. This fossil, in the shape and size of the head and
in its general structure, strikes about as near as could be the
middle between man and ape. That it is the fossil of an ambiguous
form is indicated by the fact that, when it was examined by a
company of twelve specialists at Berlin soon after its discovery,
three of them declared it to be the remains of an individual
belonging to a low variety of man; three others thought it was a
large anthropoid; while the other six held that it was neither man
nor anthropoid, but a genuine connecting link between them. It is
discussed at length by Haeckel in ‘The Last Link,’ a paper read
before the International Congress of Zoology, at Cambridge, in 1898.
‘It is,’ says the veteran biologist, ‘the much-sought
“missing link” supposed to be wanting in the chain of primates
which stretches unbroken from the lowest catarhine to the most
highly developed man.’ Associated with this fossil ape-man were
the fossils of the elephant, hyena, and hippopotamus, none of which
any longer exist in that part of the world, also the fossil remains
of two orders of animals now extinct. The genealogy of the crocodile
has been traced by Huxley, through all intermediate stages, back to
the giant reptiles of the early Tertiary.[5]And the pedigree of the
horse has been even more completely worked out by the indefatigable
Marsh. In the museum of Yale University may be seen the fossil
history of this splendid ungulate, from the time it was a clumsy
little quadruped only 14 inches high, and with four or five toes on
each foot, down to existing horses. The earliest known ancestor of
the horse, the eohippus, lived at the beginning of the Eocene epoch.
It had five toes, almost equal, on each front foot (four toes
behind), and was about the size of a fox. The orohippus, which lived
a little later, had four toes on each front-foot, and three behind.
The mesohippus, found in the Miocene, had three toes and one
rudimentary toe on each front-foot, and three toes behind. It was
about the size of a sheep. The miohippus, which is found later, had
three toes on each of its four feet, with the middle toe on each
foot larger than the other two. The pliohippus, living in the
Pliocene epoch, had one principal toe on each foot, and two
secondary toes, the two secondary toes not reaching to the ground.
It was about the size of a donkey. Existing horses have one toe on
each foot—the digit corresponding to the big middle finger—and
the ruins of two others in the form of splints on the back of each
ankle. In the embryo of the horse these splints are segmented, each
of them, into three phalanges. Fossil remains representing all
stages in the development of the horse have been found in the
regions about the upper waters of the Missouri River.

It is an important fact that the types of structure forming any
series grow more and more generalised as the distance from the
present increases, and that different lines of development, when
traced back into the past, often converge in types which combine the
main characters of various existing groups. The horses,
rhinoceroses, and tapirs, great as are the differences among them
now, can be traced back step by step through fossil forms, their
differences gradually becoming less marked, until ‘the lines
ultimately blend together, if not in one common ancestor, at all
events into forms so closely alike in all essentials that no
reasonable doubt can be held as to their common origin.’ ‘The
four chief orders of the higher mammals—the primates, ungulates,
carnivora, and rodents—seem to be separated by profound gulfs,
when we confine our attention to the representatives of to-day. But
these gulfs are completely closed, and the sharp distinctions of the
four orders are entirely lost, when we go back and compare their
extinct predecessors of the Cenozoic period, who lived at least
three million years ago. There we find the great sub-class of the
placentals, which to-day comprises more than two thousand five
hundred species, represented by only a small number of insignificant
pro-placentals, in which the characters of the four divergent orders
are so intermingled and toned down that we cannot in reason do other
than consider them as the precursors of those features. The oldest
primates, the oldest ungulates, the oldest carnivora, and the oldest
rodents, all have the same skeletal structure and the same typical
dentition (forty-four teeth) as these pro-placentals; all are
characterised by the small and imperfect structure of the brain,
especially of the cortex, its chief part, and all have short legs
and five-toed, flat-soled (plantigrade) feet. In many cases among
these oldest placentals it was at first very difficult to say
whether they should be classed with the primates, ungulates,
carnivora, or rodents, so very closely and confusedly do these four
groups, which diverge so widely afterwards, approach each other at
that time. Their common origin from a single ancestral group follows
incontestably’.[6]

9. Man is the most powerful and influential of animals. He rules the
world—rules it with a sovereignty more despotic and extensive than
that hitherto exercised by any other animal. Many races of beings
are, and have been for centuries, completely dominated by him. These
races, during their long subjection, have been changed and
transformed by man in a wonderful manner through his control of
their power to breed. All domestic animals have come from wild
animals; they have been derived by a process of selective evolution
conducted by man himself. By continually choosing as the progenitors
of each generation those with qualities best suited to his whims and
purposes, man has evolved races as different from each other in
appearance and structure, and as different from the original
species, as many groups which, in the wild state, constitute
distinct species; indeed, man has in some cases created entirely new
species, both of plants and animals—species that breed true and
are what biologists call ‘good’—by his own selections.

There are something over 150 different varieties of the domestic
pigeon. Some of these varieties—as many as a dozen, Mr. Darwin
thinks—differ from each other sufficiently to be reckoned, if they
are considered solely with reference to their structures, as
entirely distinct species. The carrier, for instance, the giant of
the pigeons, measures 17 inches from bill-tip to the end of its
tail, and has a beak 1 3/4 inches long. Around each eye is a large
dahlia-like wattle, and another large wattle is on the beak, giving
the beak the appearance of having been thrust through the kernel of
a walnut. The tumbler is small, squatty, and almost beakless. It has
the preposterous habit of rising high in the air and then tumbling
heels over head. The roller, one of the many varieties of the
tumbler, descends to the ground in a series of back somersaults,
executed so rapidly that it looks like a falling ball. The runt is
large, weighing sometimes as much as the carrier. The fantail has
thirty or forty feathers in its tail, while all other varieties have
only twelve or fourteen, the normal number for birds. The trumpeter,
so named on account of its peculiar coo, has an umbrella-like hood
of feathers covering its head and face, and its feet are so heavily
feathered that they look like little wings. In the correct specimens
of this variety the feathers have to be clipped from the face before
the birds can see to feed themselves. The pouter has the absurd
habit of inflating its gullet to a prodigious size, and the Jacobin
wears a gigantic ruff. The homing pigeon has such a strong
attachment for its cote that it will travel hundreds of miles,
sometimes as many as 1,400 miles, in order to reach the home from
which it has been separated. But it is not simply in their colour,
size, habits, and plumage, that pigeons vary. There are
corresponding differences in their structures, in the number of
their ribs and vertebrae, in the shape and size of the skull, in the
bones of the face, in the development of the breast-bone, and in the
length of the neck, legs, and bill. Pigeons also differ in the shape
and size of their eggs, and in their dispositions and voice.
‘There is,’ says Huxley in summing up his discussion of the
great variety in these birds, ‘hardly a particular of either
internal economy or external shape which has not by selective
breeding been perpetuated and become the foundation of a new
race’.[7]

All of the 150 different varieties of domestic pigeons have been
evolved by human selection during the past three or four thousand
years from the blue rock-doves which to-day inhabit the seacoast
countries of Europe.

What is true of pigeons is also true largely of most of the other
races associated with man—of cats, cattle, horses, sheep, swine,
goats, fowls, and the like. All varieties of the domestic
chicken—the clumsy Cochin with its feather-duster legs, the tall
and stately Spanish, the great-crested Minorca, the Dorking with its
matchless; comb and wattle, the almost combless Polish, the blue
Andalusian, the gigantic Brahma, the tiny Bantam, the Wyandottes in
all colours (black, white, buff, silver, and golden), the
magnificent Plymouth Rocks, and the exceedingly pugnacious
Game-cock—these and dozens of other varieties, all flightless,
have come from the jungle-bird whose morning clarion still greets
Aurora from the wilds of distant India. The dog is a civilised wolf,
and the wild-boar is the progenitor of the oleaginous swine. The
Merino and South Down breeds of sheep have come from the same stock
in the last century and a half. In 1790 a lamb was born on the farm
of Seth Wright in Massachusetts. It had a long body and short, bowed
legs. It was noticed that this lamb could not follow the others over
the fences. The owner thought it would be a good thing if all his
sheep were like it. So he selected it to breed from. Some of its
offspring were like it, and some were like the ordinary sheep. By
continual selection of those with long bodies and short legs the
ancon breed of sheep was finally produced. In 1770 in a herd of
Paraguay cattle a hornless male calf appeared, and from this
individual in a similar way came the stock of Muleys. The occasional
appearance of horned calves and lambs among the offspring of
hornless breeds of cattle and sheep are examples of atavism
indicating the presence of a vestigial tendency to breed true to
their horned ancestors. The Hereford cattle originated as a distinct
variety about 1769 through the careful selections of a certain
Englishman by the name of Tompkins. All domesticated quadrupeds,
except the elephant, have come from wild species with erect ears,
the ears acting as funnels to harvest the sound-waves. But there are
few of them in which there is not one or more varieties with
drooping ears—cats in China, horses in parts of Russia, sheep in
Italy, cattle in India, and pigs, dogs, and rabbits in all
long-civilised lands. We are so accustomed to seeing dogs and pigs
with pendent ears that we are surprised to know there are varieties
with erect ears. The goldfish is a carp, and in its native haunts in
the waters of China it has the colour of the carp. The golden hue
seen in the occupants of our aquaria has been given to this fish by
the Chinese through the continual selection of certain kinds. The
goldfish, almost as much as the pigeon, has been the sport of
fanciers, and the strangest varieties have resulted. Some have
outlandishly long fins, while others have no dorsal fin at all. Some
are streaked and splotched with gold and scarlet; others are pure
albinos. One of the most monstrous varieties has a three-lobed
tail-fin, and its eyeballs, without sockets, are on the outside of
its head. All of our common barnyard fowls—turkeys, ducks, geese,
and chickens—are flightless, but the varieties from which the
domesticated forms have come all have functional wings, two of these
varieties crossing continents in their annual migrations.

Not only animals, but plants also, many of them, have been greatly
changed by man in his efforts to adapt them to his uses as food,
ornamentation, and the like. On the seaside cliffs of Chili and Peru
may still be found growing the wild-potato—the small, tough,
bitter ancestor of the mammoth Burbank, Peerless, Early Rose, and
the nearly two hundred other varieties of this matchless tuber found
in the gardens of civilised man. The cabbage, kale, cauliflower, and
kohlrabi are all modifications of the same wild species (_Brassica
oleracea_), the cauliflower being the developed flower, kohlrabi the
stalk, and kale and cabbage the leaves. The peach and the almond,
Darwin thinks, have also come from a common ancestral drupe, the
peach being the developed fruit, and the almond the seed. There are
nearly 900 different varieties of apples, varying in the most
wonderful manner in size, colour, flavour, texture, and shape, but
all of them probably derived from the little, sour, inedible Asiatic
crab. The many times ‘double’ roses of our gardens have come
from the five-petalled wild-rose of the prairies. The cultivated
varieties of viburnum and hydrangea have showy corymbs of infertile
flowers only, but the wild forms from which the domestic varieties
have been derived have only a single marginal row of showy infertile
flowers surrounding a mass of inconspicuous fertile flowers. It has
been due to their efforts to please men that bananas, pineapples,
and oranges have got into the habit of neglecting to produce seeds.
There are certain species of grapes that are seedless, also seedless
sugar-cane, and a seedless apple has just been announced by
horticulturists. The development of domesticated plants is only in
its infancy, and it is probably impossible even for the most agile
imagination to dream of the miracles the horticulturist is destined
to work in the ages to come. There is every reason to believe that
seedless varieties of all our common fruits will ultimately be
produced, and that in size, flavour, nutrient constituents, and
appearance, they will be developed into forms utterly different from
existing varieties. Just within the last few years the U.S.
Department of Agriculture has developed a cotton-plant immune to the
bacterial diseases of the soil, which had completely driven the
cotton-raising industry out of large districts of the South. The
cultivation of many of the cereals has gone on so long, and has
proceeded so far, that their origin is lost in antiquity.

Whether or not it is possible for new varieties and species to be
evolved is a question, therefore, which does not need to depend for
reply wholly upon theory. It is known to have taken place; and the
process by which the different varieties of domestic animals and
plants have been evolved—domestic selection—is not different in
principle from the process of natural selection, the chief operation
by which life in general, both plant and animal, is assumed to have
been evolved.

10. There are other reasons for a belief in organic evolution, but
the last one I shall mention is the fact that the theory of organic
evolution harmonises with the known tendencies of the universe as a
whole. The organic kingdoms of the earth—animals and plants—are
as truly parts of the terrestrial globe as the inorganic kingdom is;
and as such they share in, and are actuated by, the same great
tendency or instinct as that which actuates the whole. Nine-tenths
of the substance of all animals and plants is oxygen, hydrogen,
carbon, and nitrogen—the very elements which make up the entire
ocean and air, and enter largely into the composition of the
continents. The human body, which has essentially the same chemical
composition as the bodies of animals in general, is made up of four
solids, five gases, and seven metals—in all, sixteen elements of
the something like seventy which constitute the entire planet. ‘In
the past, man appeared to be a creature foreign to the earth, and
placed upon it as a transitory inhabitant by some incomprehensible
power. The more perfect insight of the present day sees man as a
being whose development has taken place in accordance with the same
laws as those that have governed the development of the earth and
its entire organisation—a being not put upon the earth
accidentally by an arbitrary act, but produced in harmony with the
earth’s nature, and belonging to it as do the flowers and the
fruits to the tree which bears them.’ Animals are not outside of,
nor distinct from, the universe, as one might suspect who has
listened much to the recital of tradition so long accepted as
science. They are more or less detached portions of the planet earth
which move over its surfaces and through its fluids and multiply,
but which in their phenomena obey the same laws of chemistry and
physics as those in accordance with which the rest of the universe
acts. Animals are moulds through which digressing matters from the
soil, sea, and sky pass on rounds of eternal itineracy.

Now, the earth as a planet is in process of evolution. Not many
things are more certain than this. The earth has come out of fire.
It has _grown_ to be what it is. Its mountains, valleys, plains,
seas, shores, islands, lakes, rivers, and continents—these were
not always here. They have been evolved. Not only the earth, but the
entire family of spheres of which the earth is a member—the solar
system—are all evolving. Mr. Spencer never did anything more
profound than when he demonstrated in his ‘Law and Cause of
Progress’ the universal migration of things from a condition of
homogeneity toward a condition of greater and greater heterogeneity.
The whole universe, or as much of it as can be examined by
terrestrial instruments, has probably evolved out of the same
primordial matters. The organic part of the earth has evolved,
therefore, and is destined to continue to evolve, because it is a
part of a whole whose habit or ambition it is to evolve.

The evidence is overwhelming. The theory of organic evolution is
sustained by a mass of facts not less authoritative and convincing
than that which supports the Copernican theory of the worlds.
Evolution is, in fact, a doctrine so apparent that it only needs to
be honestly and intelligently looked into to be accepted
unreservedly. It is, indeed, _more_ than a _doctrine_. It is a
_known_ fact. It is a _necessary effect_ of the _conditions known to
exist_ among the animals and plants of the earth. If beings _vary_
among themselves generation after generation, if only the _fittest_
of each generation _survive_ and if the survivors tend to _transmit_
to their offspring the qualities of their superiority (and the
animals and plants of the earth are known to do continually all of
these things), then it follows _with mathematical certainty_ that
evolution is going on, and that it will continue to go on as long as
these conditions continue. It is inevitable. It could not be
otherwise. We would _know_ that evolution were going on among
organisms where these conditions existed, even though we had never
observed it.

The boldest and most enthusiastic opponents of evolution have always
been those with the least information about it. But the evidence is
accumulating so rapidly, and is being drawn up in such unanswerable
array, that, if it is not already the case, it will not be many
years before it will be an intellectual reproach for anyone to
discredit, or to be known to have discredited, this splendid and
inspiring revelation.

1. Darwin: _Descent of Man_, 2nd edit.; London, 1874.
2. Huxley: _Man’s Place in Nature_; New York, 1883.
3. Thompson: _Outlines of Zoology_, 3rd edit.; Edinburgh, 1899.
4. Drummond: _Ascent of Man_; New York, 1894.
5. See table of geological ages, at the end of the chapter.
6. Haeckel: _The Riddle of the Universe_; New York, 1901.
7. Huxley: _On the Origin of Species_, lecture iv.

X. The Genealogy of Animals.

Life originated in the sea, and for an immense period of time after
it commenced it was confined to the place of its origin. The
civilisations of the earth were for many millions of years
exclusively aquatic. It has, indeed, been estimated that the time
required by the life process in getting out of the water—that is,
that the time consumed in elaborating the first species of land
animals—was much longer than the time which has elapsed since
then. I presume that during a large part of this early period it
would have seemed to one living at that time extremely doubtful
whether there would ever be on the earth any other kinds of life
than the aquatic. And if those who to-day weave the fashionable
fabrics of human philosophy, and who know nothing about anything
outside the thin edge of the present, had been back there, they
would no doubt have declared confidently, as they looked upon the
naked continents and the uninhabited air and the sea teeming with
its peculiar faunas, that life upon solids or in gases, life
anywhere, in fact, except in the sea, where it had always existed,
and to which alone it was adapted, was absolutely, and would be
forever, impossible; and that feathered fishes and fishes with the
power to run and skip, and especially ‘sharks’ competent to walk
on one end and jabber with the other, were unthinkable nonsense.
Life originated in the sea for the same reason that the first of the
series of so-called ‘civilisations’ which have appeared in human
history sprang from the alluvium of the Euphrates and the Nile,
because the conditions for bringing life into existence were here
the most favourable. The atmosphere was incompetent to perform such
a task as the inventing of _protoplasm_ and there was no land above
the oceans.

The first forms of life were one-celled—simple, jelly-like dots of
almost homogeneous plasm—the _protozoa_. These primitive organisms
were the common grandparents of all beings. From them evolved,
through infinite travail and suffering, all of the orders, families,
species, and varieties of animals that to-day live on the earth, and
all those that have in the past lived and passed away. By the
multiplication and specialisation of cells, and the formation of
cell aggregates, the sponges, celenterates, and flat worms were
developed from the protozoa.[1] The connecting links between the
one-celled and the many-celled animals consist of a series of
colonial forms of increasing size and complexity, some of which may
be found in every roadside ditch and pool, while others are extinct.
The development of these many-celled organisms (metazoa) from
one-celled organisms was a perfectly natural process, a process
which takes place in the initial evolutions of every embryo. There
is no more mystery about it than there is about any other act of
association. All association is simply a matter of ‘business.’
Many-celled organisms are colonies, or societies, of more or less
closely co-operating one-celled organisms, and they have come into
existence in obedience to the same laws of economy and advantage as
have those more modern societies of metazoa known as nations,
communities, and states, the organised bodies of men, ants, and
millionaires.

The sponges are the lowest of the many-celled animals. They consist
of irregular masses of loosely associated cells, hopelessly anchored
to the sea-floor. They represent the social instinct in embryo. The
cells are but slightly specialised, and each cell leads a more or
less independent existence. The sponge stands at about that stage of
social integration and intelligence represented by those stupendous
porifera which cover continents and constitute the ‘social
organisms’ of the civilised world. The nutritive system of sponges
consists of countless pores opening from the surface into a common
canal within, through which ever-waving cilia urge the alimental
waters. In the celenterates the cells arrange themselves in the form
of a cup with one large opening into and from the vase-like stomach.
The unsegmented worms are flat and sac-like, with bilateral symmetry
and the power to move about, but not tubular, as are the true worms.
They are bloodless, like the celenterates and sponges.

From the flat worms developed the annelid worms, animals perforated
by a food canal and possessing a body cavity filled with blood
surrounding this canal. The body cavity is the space between the
walls of the body and the alimentary canal, the cavity which in the
higher animals contains the heart, liver, lungs, kidneys, etc. The
worms and all animals above them have this cavity. The worms and all
animals above them also have, as an inheritance from the flat worms,
bodies with bilateral symmetry—that is, bodies with two halves
similar. This peculiarity was probably acquired by the flat worms,
and so fastened upon all subsequently evolved species, as a result
of pure carelessness. It probably arose out of the habit of using
continually, or over and over again, the same parts of the body as
fore and aft. It has been facetiously said that if it had not been
for this habit, so inadvertently acquired by these humble beings so
long, long ago, we would not to-day be able to tell our right hand
from our left. In the worm is found the beginning of that wonderful
organ of co-ordination, the brain. The brain is a modification of
the skin. It may weaken our regard for this imperial organ to know
that it is, in its morphology, akin to nails and corns. But it will
certainly add to our admiration for the infinite labours of
evolution to remember that the magnificent thinking apparatus of
modern philosophers was originally a small sensitive plate developed
down in the sea a hundred million years ago on the dorsal wall of
the mouths of primeval worms.

From the worms developed all of the highest four phyla of the animal
kingdom—the echinoderms, the mollusks, the arthropods, and the
chordate animals, the last of which were the progenitors of the
illustrious vertebrates. The lowest of the mollusks are the snails,
and from these humble tenants of our ponds and shores sprang the
headless bivalves and the giant jawed cuttles. The mollusks were for
a long time after their development the mailed monarchs of the sea,
and shared with the worms the dominion of the primordial waters. But
after the development of the more active arthropods, especially the
crustaceans, the less agile worms and mollusks rapidly declined.
Existing worms and mollusks are remnants of once powerful and
populous races.

From the worms also developed the arthropods, the water-breathing
crustaceans and the air-breathing spiders and insects. The
crustaceans came early, away back in the gray of the Silurian
period, just about the time North America was born. North America
lay, a naked, V-shaped infant, in the regions of Labrador and
Canada. The crustaceans rapidly superseded the mollusks as rulers of
the sea, attaining, in extreme species, a length of four or five
feet. The spiders and Insects came into existence toward the latter
part of the Silurian period,[1] probably contemporaneous, or nearly
so, with the appearance of land vegetation. The spiders and insects
were the aborigines of the land and air. They are the only races of
living beings, except the original inhabitants of the sea, who ever
invaded and settled an unoccupied world. The earliest land fossils
so far found are the fossils of scorpions. But the existence of a
sting among the structural possessions of these animals indicates
that there were already others who contended with them for supremacy
in the new world. The first insects were the masticating insects,
insects such as cockroaches, crickets, grasshoppers, dragon-flies,
and beetles. They are found abundantly in the Devonian and
Carboniferous rocks. The licking insects (bees) and the pricking
insects (flies and bugs) appeared first in the Mesozoic Era, and the
sipping insects (butterflies) in the Cenozoic. The flower-loving
insects (the bees and butterflies) came into the world at the same
time as did the flowers. The wings of insects may be modifications
of the gills used by insect young in respiration during their
aquatic existence. They are, hence, very different in origin from
the wings of birds, which are the modified fore-legs of reptiles.

The most important class of animals arising out of the worms, on
account of their distinguished offspring, were the hypothetical cord
animals. The only existing species allied to these animals is the
amphioxus, a strange, unpromising-looking creature, half worm and
half fish, found in the beach sands of many seas. It has white blood
and a tubular heart. It is without either head or limbs, and looks
very much like a long semitransparent leaf, tapering at both ends.
But it has two unmistakable prophecies of the vertebrate anatomy: a
cartilaginous rod, pointed at both ends, extending along the back,
and above this, and parallel to it, a cord of nerve matter. These
are the same positions occupied by the spinal column and spinal cord
in all true vertebrates. That the amphioxus is a genuine relative of
the ancestor of the vertebrates is also shown by the fact that these
simple forms of column and cord possessed by amphioxus are precisely
the forms assumed by the spinal column and spinal cord in the
embryos of all vertebrates, including man.

From these quasi-vertebrates developed the fishes—first (after the
scaleless, limbless lampreys) the sharks with spiny scales and
cartilaginous skeleton, and after these the lung fishes and the bony
fishes, with flat, horny scales and skeletons of bone. From the
beginning of the Devonian age, when fishes first came into
prominence, till the rise of the great reptiles in the Triassic
time, fishes were the dominant life of the sea. In the fishes first
appeared jaws, a sympathetic nervous system, red blood, backbone,
and the characteristic two pairs of limbs of vertebrates.

The lung fishes (Dipneusta), a small order of strange
salamander-like creatures which live ingeniously on the borderland
between the liquid and the land, may be looked upon as
physiological, if not morphological, links between the fishes and
the frogs. They combine the characters of both fishes and frogs, and
zoologists have been tempted to make a separate class of them, and
place them between the two classes to which they are related. They
are like fishes in having scales, fins, permanent gills, and a
fish-like shape and skeleton. They resemble frogs in having lungs,
nostrils, an incipiently three-chambered heart, a pulmonary
circulation, and frog-like skin glands. There are three genera with
several species. One genus (Neoceratodus) is found in two or three
small rivers of Queensland, Australia; another (Protopterus) lives
in the Gambia and other rivers of Africa; and the third
(Lepidosiren) inhabits the swamps of the Amazon region. They all
breathe ordinarily by means of gills, like true fishes, but have the
habit of coming frequently to the surface and inhaling air. The
air-bladder acts as an incipient lung in supplementing respiration
by gills. They all live in regions where a dry season regularly
converts the watercourses into beds of sand and mud. During the
season of drought these strange animals build for themselves a
cocoon or nest of mud and leaves. This cocoon is lined with mucus,
and provided with a lid through which air is admitted. Here they lie
in this capsule throughout the hot southern summer, from August to
December, breathing air by means of their lungs and living upon the
stored-up fat of their tails, until the return of the wet season,
when they again live in the rivers and breathe water in true
piscatorial fashion. These capsules have often been carried to
Europe, and opened 3,000 miles from their place of construction
without harming the life within.

Here, in these eccentric denizens of the southern world, we find the
beginnings of a grand transformation—a transformation in both
structure and function, a transformation made necessary by the
transition from life in the water to life in the air, a
transformation which reaches its maturity in the higher
air-breathing vertebrates, where the simple air-sac of the fish
becomes a pair of lobed and elaborately sacculated lungs, performing
almost exclusively the function of respiration, and the gills change
into parts of the ears and lower jaw.

The air-bladder of ordinary fishes, which is used chiefly as a
hydrostatic organ to enable the fish to rise and fall in the water,
is probably the degenerated lung of the lung fishes.

From the lung fishes or allied forms developed the amphibians, the
well-known fish quadrupeds of our bogs and brooks. The amphibians
are genuine connectives—living links between the life of the sea
and the life of the land. In early life they are fishes, with gills
and two-chambered hearts. In later life they are air-breathing
quadrupeds, with legs and lungs and three-chambered hearts. Here is
evolution, plenty of it, and of the most tangible character. And it
takes place right before the eyes. The transformation from the fish
to the frog is, however, no more wonderful than the embryonic
transformations of other vertebrates. It is simply more apparent,
because it can be seen. The lungs of amphibians and the lower
reptiles are simple sacks opening by a very short passage into the
mouth. Some amphibians, as the axolotl of Mexican lakes, ordinarily
retain their gills through life, but may be induced to develop lungs
and adapt themselves to terrestrial life by being kept out of the
water. Others, as the newts, which ordinarily develop lungs, may be
compelled to retain their gills through life by being forced to
remain uninterruptedly in the water. The black salamander,
inhabiting droughty regions of the Alps, brings forth its young
bearing lungs, and only a pair at a time. But if the young are
prematurely removed from the body of the mother and placed in the
water, they develop gills in the ordinary way. These are remarkable
instances of elasticity in the presence of a varying environment.

In the amphibians the characteristic five-toed or five-fingered
foot, which normally forms the extremities of the limbs of all
vertebrates except fishes, is first met with. It was this
pentadactyl peculiarity of the frog, inherited by men and women
through the reptiles and mammals, that gave rise to the decimal
system of numbers and other unhandy facts in human life. The decimal
system arose out of the practice of early men performing their
calculations on their fingers. This method of calculating is still
used by primitive peoples all over the world. The sum of the digits
of the two hands came, in the course of arithmetical evolution, to
be used as a unit, and from this simple beginning grew up the
complicated system of tens found among civilised peoples. It has all
come about as a result of amphibian initiative. Our very arithmetics
have been predetermined by the anatomical peculiarities of the
frog’s foot. If these unthinking foreordainers of human affairs
had had four or six toes on each foot instead of five, man would no
doubt have inherited them just as cheerfully as the number he did
inherit, and the civilised world would in this case be to-day using
in all of its mathematical activities a system of eights or twelves
instead of a system of tens. A system of eights or twelves would be
much superior in flexibility to the existing system; for eight is a
cube, and its half and double are squares; and twelve can be divided
by two, three, four, and six, while ten is divisible by two and five
only.

How helpless human beings are—in fact, how helpless all beings
are! How hopelessly dependent we are upon the past, and how
impossible it is to be really original! What the future will be
depends upon what the present is, for the future will grow out of,
and inherit, the present. What the present is depends upon what the
past was, for the present has grown out of, and inherited, the past.
And what the past was depends upon a remoter past from which it
evolved, and so on. There is no end anywhere of dependence, either
forward or backward. Every fact, from an idea to a sun, is a
_contingent link in an eternal chain_.

From the amphibians (probably from extinct forms, not from living)
there arose the highest three classes of vertebrates—the true
reptiles, the birds, and the mammals—all of whom have lungs and
breathe air from the beginning to the end of their days. Gills, as
organs of breathing, disappear forever, being changed, as has been
said, into parts of the organs of mastication and hearing. In the
reptiles first appear those organs which in the highest races
overflow on occasions of tenderness and grief, the tear glands.
These organs are, however, in our cold-blooded antecedents, organs
of ocular lubrication rather than of weeping. There are but four
small orders of existing reptiles—snakes, turtles, lizards, and
crocodilians. These are the pygmean descendants of a mighty line,
the last of a dynasty which during the greater part of the Mesozoic
ages was represented by the most immense and powerful monsters that
have ever lived upon the earth. Mesozoic civilisation was
pre-eminently saurian. Reptiles were supreme everywhere—on sea and
land and in the air. Their rulership of the world was not so bloody
and masterful as man’s, but quite as remorseless. Imagine an
aristocracy made up of pterosaurs (flying reptiles), with teeth, and
measuring 20 feet between wing-tips; great plesiosaurs (serpent
reptiles) and ichthyosaurs (fish reptiles), enormous bandits of the
seas; and dinosaurs and atlantosaurs, giant land lizards, 30 feet
high and from 50 to 100 feet in length. A government of demagogs is
bad enough, as king-ridden mankind well know, but dragons would be
worse, if possible. The atlantosaurs were the largest animals that
have ever walked upon the earth. They were huge plant-eaters
inhabiting North America. It has been surmised that one of these
behemoths ‘may have consumed a whole tree for breakfast.’ It was
the mighty saurians of the Mesozoic time who brought into
everlasting subordination the piscatorial civilisation of the
Devonian and carboniferous ages.

Toward the latter part of the Reptilian Age, and somewhere along
about the time of the appearance of hard-wood forests, came the
birds, those beautiful and emotional beings who, in spite of human
destructiveness, continue to fill our groves and gardens with the
miracles of beauty and song. The bird is a ‘glorified reptile.’
How the ‘slow, cold-blooded, scaly saurian ever became transformed
into the quick, hot-blooded, feathered bird, the joy of creation,’
is a considerable mystery, yet we know no reason for believing that
the transformation did not take place. Although in their external
appearance and mode of life birds and reptiles differ so widely from
each other, yet, in their internal structure and embryology, they
are so much alike that one of the brightest anatomists that has ever
lived (Huxley) united them both into a single class under the name
Sauropsida. It might naturally be supposed that the birds are
descendants of the flying reptiles, the pterosaurs. But this may not
be true. The pterosaurs were structurally much further removed from
the birds than were certain extinct terrestrial reptiles. The fact
that birds and pterosaurs both had wings has really nothing to do
with the case. For the wings of reptiles, we almost know, were not
homologous with the wings of birds. The bird’s wing is a feathered
fore-leg; the wing of the reptile was an expanded skin stretching
from the much-elongated last finger backwards to the hind-leg and
tail. Wings, it may be remarked in passing, have had at least four
different and distinct beginnings in the animal kingdom, represented
by the bats, the birds, the reptiles, and the insects. This does not
include the parachutes of the so-called flying squirrels, lemurs,
lizards, phalangers, and fishes.

The first birds had teeth and vertebrated tails. The archeopteryx,
which is the earliest toothed bird whose remains have yet been
found, was about the size of a crow. It had thirty-two teeth and
twenty caudal vertebrae. Two specimens of it have been found in the
Jurassic slates of Bavaria. One of these fossils is in the British
Museum, and the other in the Museum of Berlin. Other toothed birds
have been found fossil by Dr. Mudge in the cretaceous chalk of North
America. These last had short, fan tails like existing birds.

From the toothed birds developed the beaked birds—the
keel-breasted birds (the group to which most existing birds belong)
and the birds with unkeeled breasts, _i.e._, the ostrich-like birds.
The ostrich-like birds are runners. They have rudimentary wings, and
the keel of the breast-bone, which in the keel-breasted birds acts
as a stay for the attachment of the wing muscles, is lacking. The
ostrich-like birds are probably degenerate flyers, the flying
apparatus having become obsolete through disuse. The feathers of
birds are generally supposed to be the modified scales of reptiles.

The most brilliant offspring of the reptiles were the mammals,
animals capable of a wider distribution over the face of the earth
than the cold-blooded reptiles, on account of their hair and their
warm blood. Cold-blooded animals of great size are able to inhabit
but a small zone of the existing earth’s surface—the torrid
belt. They cannot house themselves during the seasons of cold, as
men can; nor escape to the tropics on the wings of the wind, as do
the birds; nor bury themselves in subaqueous mud, as do the frogs,
snakes, and crustaceans. During the Mesozoic period, when
cold-blooded reptiles of gigantic size flourished over a wide area
of the earth’s surface, the planet was far warmer than now.
Animals, therefore, like the mammals (or birds), capable of
maintaining a fixed temperature regardless of the thermal
fluctuations of the surrounding media, are the only animals of large
size and power capable of uninterrupted existence over the greater
part of the surface of the existing earth. The pre-eminent life of
the Cenozoic time was mammalian. But the decline and fall of the
saurian power was not wholly due to the rise of the more dynamic
mammals. It was in part due, no doubt, to adverse conditions of
climate, and also to the fact that mammals and birds guard their
eggs, and saurians do not.

The lowest of the mammals are the monotremes, animals which blend in
a marvellous manner the characteristics of birds, reptiles, and
mammals. Only two families of these old-fashioned creatures are
left, the echidna and the duck-bill (ornithorhynchus), both of them
found on or near that museum of biological antiquities, Australia.
They are covered with hair and suckle their young like other
mammals, but they have only the rudiments of milk glands, and they
lay eggs with large yolks from a cloaca, like the reptiles and
birds. The duck-bill hides its eggs in the ground, but the echidna
hatches its eggs in a small external brooding pouch, periodically
developed for this purpose. The young of the monotremes feed on the
oily perspiration which exudes from the body of the mother. The
monotremes first appear in the fossiliferous rocks of the Triassic
Age.

From the monotreme-like mammals developed the marsupial mammals,
animals possessing a purse-like pouch on the after part of the
abdomen, in which they carry their young. The young of marsupials
are born in an extremely immature state, and are carried in this
pouch in order to complete their development. The young of the
kangaroo, an animal as large as a man, are only about an inch in
length when they are born. They are carried for nine months after
their birth in the marsupium of the mother, firmly attached to the
maternal nipple. The marsupials came into existence during the
Jurassic Age, and during the next age, the Cretaceous, they arose to
considerable power. During this latter age they were found on every
continent. But they have been almost exterminated by their more
powerful descendants.

From the marsupials developed the placental mammals, animals so
called because their young are developed within the parental body in
association with a peculiar nourishing organ called the placenta.
From the herbivorous marsupials developed the almost toothless
edentates, the rodents, or gnawing animals, the sirenians, the
cetaceans, and the hoofed animals, or ungulates. The sirenians are
fish-like animals with two flippers, and are often called sea-cows.
They resemble whales in many respects, and are sometimes classed
with them. They are plant-eaters exclusively, and are found grazing
along the bottoms of tropical estuaries and rivers. They have tiny
eyes, teeth fitted for grinding (not spike-like as in the whales),
and a strong affection for their young, the mother, when pursued,
often carrying her little one under her flippers. An immense
sirenian, known as Steller’s manatee, was discovered on the
Behring Islands, along the Kamschatka coast, in 1741. Twenty-seven
years afterwards not one of them was left, all having been murdered
by the Russian sailors. The sirenians are probably degenerate forms
of land quadrupeds, having lost their hind-limbs and developed the
fish-like shape in adapting themselves to aquatic conditions. They
appear first in the Eocene Age.

Among the most interesting derivatives of the herbivorous
marsupials, because the most aberrant, are the whales. They are true
mammals—have warm blood, breathe the air with lungs, and suckle
their young like other mammals. But, like the sirenians, they live
in the surface of the waters, and have flippers and a fish-like tail
and form. They differ from the sirenians, however, in being
carnivorous, in having inguinal instead of pectoral milk glands, and
in being structurally less like quadrupeds. They probably
degenerated from land quadrupeds during the Jurassic period, and,
owing to their longer residence in the waters, have become further
removed from the quadrupedal type than the sirenians. Whales have
two limbs, the hind-limbs having disappeared as a result of the
pre-eminent development of the tail. The tails of whales and
sirenians are flattened horizontally, not vertically, as in fishes.

Out of generalised forms of hoofed animals now extinct developed the
odd-toed and even-toed races of existing ungulates. The original
ungulates had five hoofs on each foot, and were highly generalised
in their structure. From these original five-toed forms have arisen
the variously hoofed and variously structured tribes of existing
ungulates: the five-toed elephant, the four-toed tapir and
hippopotamus, the three-toed rhinoceros, the two-toed camel, sheep,
swine, deer, antelope, giraffe, and ox, and the one-toed horse and
zebra.

The carnivorous branch of the placental animals came from the
carnivorous branch of the marsupials. From early forms of
carnivorous placentals developed the ape-like lemurs and those
generalised forms of rapacious animals from which arose the
insect-eaters, the bats, and the true carnivora. The seals represent
a by-development from the main line of the carnivora, a third
defection, and a comparatively recent one, from land faunas. Seals
live at the meeting of the land and the waters rather than in or on
the waters, as do the cetaceans and sirenians. They have retained
their fur and their four limbs, but have almost lost their power of
land locomotion by the conversion of their feet into flippers. The
two front-limbs of seals are the only ones used as ordinary limbs
are used. The hind-limbs in most seals stretch permanently out
behind, the webbed digits spreading out fan-shaped on either side of
the stumpy tail, and constituting a rowing apparatus functionally
homologous with the tail of fishes and whales. According to Jordan,
the fur seals and the hair seals are descended from different
families of land carnivora, the former probably from the bears, and
the latter from the cats.

The lemurs are of especial interest to human beings, because in them
are found the first startling approximation in looks and structure
to the ‘human form divine.’ The lemurs are monkey-like creatures
living in trees, but differ enough from true monkeys to be often
placed in an order by themselves. Their milk glands are abdominal
instead of pectoral, as in the monkeys, and the second digit of each
hand and foot ends in a claw. The most of them live in Madagascar.
They are generally nocturnal in their habits, although some species
are diurnal. They appear first in the Eocene rocks, and Haeckel
thinks they may have developed from opossum-like marsupials in the
late Cretaceous or early Eocene Age.

From lemurs or from some other similar sort of semi-apes developed
the true apes—the flat-nosed (platyrhine) apes of the New World
and the narrow-nosed (catarhine) apes of the Old World. There is
considerable difference between the New World apes and those of the
Old World. The differences between the two classes is, in fact, so
striking that they are thought by some to have developed
independently of each other from distinct species of semi-apes. The
apes of the New World have flat noses, and the nostrils are far
apart and open in front of the nose, never below. The Old World apes
have narrow noses, the nostrils being close together and opening
downwards as in man. The tail of (nearly) all New World apes is
prehensile, being used regularly as a fifth limb, while among Old
World apes the tail is never so used. The Old World apes all have
the same number and kinds of teeth as man has, while the New World
apes (excepting the Brazilian marmosets) have an additional premolar
in each half-jaw, making thirty-six in all. The catarhine apes are,
therefore, structurally much nearer to man than their platyrhine
cousins. All tailed apes probably sprang originally from a single
stirp of semi-apes, and spread over the earth at a time when the
eastern and western land masses of the southern hemisphere were
connected with each other. The earliest remains of apes appear in
the Miocene Age.

From the Old World tailed apes were developed the tailless,
man-like, or anthropoid apes—the gorillas and chimpanzees of
Africa, and the orangs and gibbons of Asia and the East Indies. The
anthropoids arose from the tailed apes by the loss of the tail, the
thinning of the hairy covering, the enlargement of the fore-brain,
and by structural adaptations to a more nearly vertical position. No
remains of anthropoids are found earlier than the Pliocene Age.

The man-like apes are the nearest living relatives of the human
races. It is not probable that man has been derived directly from
any of the existing races of man-like apes. For no one of them in
all particulars of its structure stands closer to him than the rest.
The orang approaches closest to man in the formation of the brain,
the chimpanzee in the shape of the spine and in certain
characteristics of the skull, the gorilla in the development of the
feet and in size, and the gibbon in the formation of the throat and
teeth. The earliest human races probably sprang from man-like races
of apes now extinct, who lived in southern Asia or in Africa during
the Pliocene Age (possibly as early as the Miocene), and who
combined in their structures the various man-like characters
possessed by existing anthropoids.

The earliest races of men were speechless—the ape-like
‘Alali’—beings, living wholly upon the ground and walking upon
their hind-limbs, but without more than the mere rudiments of
language. The vertical position led to a much greater development of
the posterior parts, especially of the muscles of the back and the
calves of the leg. The great toe, which in the ape is opposable,
lost its opposability, or all except traces of it, after the
abandonment of arboreal life. It must have been a sight fit to stir
the soul of the most leathern, these children of the night, with low
brows, stooping gait, and ape-like faces, armed with rude clubs,
clothed in natural hair, and wandering about in droves without law,
fire, or understanding, hiding in thickets and in the holes of the
earth, feeding on roots and fruits, and contending doubtfully with
the species around them for food and existence.

From the ‘Alali’—the speechless ape-men—we may imagine the
true men to have evolved—talking men, men with erect posture and
mature brain and larynx, the woolly-haired ulotrichi and the
straight-haired lissotrichi. There are four existing species of
woolly-haired men: the Papuans of New Guinea and Melanesia, and the
Hottentots, Caffres, and Negroes of southern, equatorial, and north
central Africa respectively. They all have long heads, slanting
teeth, very dark skin, and black, bushy hair, each individual hair
in cross-section being flat or oval in shape. In the straight-haired
races the skin is much fairer than in the woolly-haired races, being
seldom darker than brown, and each individual hair in cross-section
is round like the cross-section of a cylinder. The principal species
of straight-haired men are the sea-roving Malays of the East Indies
and the Pacific, the round-faced Mongols of eastern and northern
Asia, the aboriginal Americans of the western hemisphere, and the
incomparable Aryans, including the ancient Greeks and Romans and the
modern peoples of India, Persia, and Europe.

Man is to-day the pre-eminent animal of the planet. The successive
ascendancies of the Worm, the Mollusk, the Crustacean, the Fish, the
Reptile, and the Mammal, are followed triumphantly by the ascendancy
of the Children of the Ape.

A large part of the life of the earth has remained steadfastly where
it was cradled, beneath the waves. But more restless portions have
left the sea and crept forth upon the land, or swarmed into the air.
One migration, the most numerous, is represented by the insects.
Another, the most enterprising, was the amphibian. After ages of
evolution the amphibian branch divided. One branch acquired wings
and sailed off into the air. The other divided and subdivided. One
of these subdivisions entered the forests, climbed and clambered
among the trees, acquired perpendicularity and hands, descended and
walked upon the soil, invented agriculture, built cities and states,
and imagined itself immortal. Human society is but the van—the
hither terminus—of an evolutional process which had its beginning
away back in the protoplasm of primeval waters. There is not a form
that creeps beneath the sea but can claim kinship with the eagle.
The philosopher is the remote posterity of the meek and lowly amoeba.

1. See ‘Genealogy of Animals,’ at the end of the chapter.
2. See table of geological ages, at the end of the previous chapter.

XI. Conclusion.

The resemblances, homologies, and metamorphoses existing everywhere
among animal forms are, therefore, evidence of the most logical
consanguinities. It is all so perfectly plain. The structures of
organic beings have come about as a result of the action and
reaction of environment upon these structures. Every being—and not
only every being, but every species, the whole organic world—has
come to be what it is as a result of the incessant hammerings of its
surroundings, the hammerings not only of the present, but of the
long-stretching past. By surroundings is meant, of course, the rest
of the universe. Those animals belonging to the same stock resemble
each other because they have been subjected to the same experiences,
the same series of selections. They have lain on the same great
anvil, and felt the down-comings of the same sledge. The
similarities among animal forms in general indicate relationships,
just as the similarities among the races of men indicate racial
consanguinities. All men belong to the human species because they
are all fundamentally alike. But there are differences in the
character of the hair, in the colour of the skin, in the
conformation of the skull, and in the structure of the language,
among the different varieties of the species, indicating striking
variety in relationship and origin. An eminent biologist has said
that if Negroes and Caucasians were snails they would be classed as
entirely distinct species of animals. Whether, as is thought by
some, the woolly-haired races are the descendants of the African
anthropoids, and the straight-haired varieties are the posterity of
the orangs and gibbons, we may never know positively. But we do know
that these two great branches of mankind must have different
genealogies, extending to a remote antiquity, and that the varieties
belonging to each great group sustain to each other the relations of
a common kinship. Englishmen look like each other, act like each
other, and speak the same language. So do Frenchmen and Swedes and
Chinese. Every people is peculiar. This is not the result of
accident or agreement, but the result of law. Mongolians do not all
have short heads, yellow faces, slanting eyes, and prominent malars
because they have agreed to have them, but as a result of a common
pedigree. Similarity of structure implies commonalty of origin, and
commonalty of origin means consanguinity.

And this is true whether you contemplate the featural resemblances
of brothers and sisters of the same human parent, or those more
fundamental characteristics which distinguish species, orders, and
sub-kingdoms. All animals are composed of protoplasm, which is a
compound of clay, because all animals are descended from the same
first parents, protoplasmic organisms evolved out of the elemental
ooze. All vertebrates have nerve-filled backbones with two pairs of
ventrally branching limbs, because the original ancestors of the
vertebrates had nerve-filled backbones with two pairs of ventrally
branching limbs. Insects individually evolve from worms because
worms are their phylogenetic fathers and mothers. Man has hands and
a vertical spine, and walks on his hind-limbs, not because he was
fashioned in the image of a god, but because his ancestors lived
among the trees. The habit of using the posterior limbs for
locomotion, and the anterior for prehension, and the resulting
perpendicular, are peculiarities developed by our simian ancestors
wholly on account of the incentives to such structure and posture
afforded by aboreal life. These peculiarities would not likely have
been acquired by quadrupeds living upon and taking their food from a
perfectly level and treeless plain. If there had been no forests on
the earth, therefore, there would have been no incentive to the
perpendicular, and the ‘human form divine’ would have been
inconceivably different from what it is to-day. And if fishes had
had three serial pairs of limbs instead of two, and their posterity
had inherited them, as they certainly would have had the foresight
to do if they had had the opportunity, the highest animals on the
earth to-day, the ‘paragons of creation,’ would probably be
two-handed quadrupeds (centaurs) instead of two-handed bipeds. And
much more efficient and ideal individuals they would have been in
every way than the rickety, peculiar, unsubstantial plantigrades
who, by their talent to talk, have become the masters of the
universe, and, by their imaginations, ‘divine.’

Kinship is universal. The orders, families, species, and races of
the animal kingdom are the branches of a gigantic arbour. Every
individual is a cell, every species is a tissue, and every order is
an organ in the great surging, suffering, palpitating process. Man
is simply one portion of the immense enterprise. He is as veritably
an animal as the insect that drinks its little fill from his veins,
the ox he goads, or the wild-fox that flees before his bellowings.
Man is not a god, nor in any imminent danger of becoming one. He is
not a celestial star-babe dropped down among mundane matters for a
time and endowed with wing possibilities and the anatomy of a deity.
He is a mammal of the order of primates, not so lamentable when we
think of the hyena and the serpent, but an exceedingly discouraging
vertebrate compared with what he ought to be. He has come up from
the worm and the quadruped. His relatives dwell on the prairies and
in the fields, forests, and waves. He shares the honours and
partakes of the infirmities of all his kindred. He walks on his
hind-limbs like the ape; he eats herbage and suckles his young like
the ox; he slays his fellows and fills himself with their blood like
the crocodile and the tiger; he grows old and dies, and turns to
banqueting worms, like all that come from the elemental loins. He
cannot exceed the winds like the hound, nor dissolve his image in
the mid-day blue like the eagle. He has not the courage of the
gorilla, the magnificence of the steed, nor the plaintive innocence
of the ring-dove. Poor, pitiful, glory-hunting hideful! Born into a
universe which he creates when he comes into it, and clinging, like
all his kindred, to a clod that knows him not, he drives on in the
preposterous storm of the atoms, as helpless to fashion his fate as
the sleet that pelts him, and lost absolutely in the somnambulism of
his own being.


THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP

  I. The Conflict of Science and Tradition
  II. Evidences of Psychical Evolution
  III. The Common-sense View
  IV. The Elements of Human and Non-human Mind Compared
  V. Conclusion


  ‘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.


THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP

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’.[1]

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’.[4]

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’.[4]

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.[1]

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.

1. Romanes: _Mental Evolution in Animals_; New York, 1898.
2. Gilbraith: _Ethnological Journal_, 1869, p. 304.
3. Burton: _First Footsteps in East Africa_; London, 1856.
4. 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.[3] 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.[3] Notwithstanding the sensational tales of the ferocity of
this being, the gorilla never attacks anyone at any time unless he
is molested.[3] 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’.[4]

_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’.[4]

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’.[6]

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.[6] 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.[6] 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.[6]

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’.[7]

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’.[8]

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’.[6]

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’.[8]

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’.[6] 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’.[7]

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.
3. Hartmann: _Anthropoid Apes_; New York, 1901.
4. Brehm: _From North Pole to Equator_; London, 1896.
5. Stanley: _In Darkest Africa_, vol i.; New York, 1890.
6. Romanes: _Animal Intelligence_; New York, 1899.
7. Evans: _Evolutional Ethics and Animal Psychology_; New York, 1898.
8. 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.[1] 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.[3] 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.[4] 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.[3]

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.[1]

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.[1] 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.[4]

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’.[5] 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.[1] 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’.[5]

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.[1] 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’.[3] 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.’

1. Romanes: _Animal Intelligence_; New York, 1899.
2. Cornish: _Animals of To-day_; London, 1898.
3. Kropotkin: _Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution_; New York, 1902.
4. Darwin: _Descent of Man_, 2nd edit.; London, 1874.
5. 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.


THE ETHICAL KINSHIP

  I. Human Nature a Product of the Jungle
  II. Egoism and Altruism
  III. The Ethics of the Savage
  IV. The Ethics of the Ancient
  V. Modern Ethics
  VI. The Ethics of Human Beings Toward Non-human Beings
  VII. The Origin of Provincialism
  VIII. Universal Ethics
  IX. The Psychology of Altruism
  X. Anthropocentric Ethics
  XI. Ethical Implications of Evolution
  XII. Conclusion

THE ETHICAL KINSHIP


  One of the wisest things ever said by one of the profoundest
  philosophers of all time was the warning to the seeker after truth
  to beware of the influence of the ‘idols (or illusions) of the
  tribe’ by which he meant that body of traditional prejudices which
  every sect, family, nation, and neighbourhood has clinging to it,
  and in the midst of which and at the mercy of which every human
  being grows up.


I. Human Nature a Product of the Jungle.

The Golden Rule is not exemplified by the conduct of any
considerable number of the inhabitants of the earth. To be civilised
or even half-civilised is, to the children of this world, neither
instinctive nor easy. To preserve a certain pretence or appearance
of virtue, especially when encouraged to do so by an uplifted cudgel
in the hands of the community, is a possible and not uncommon
accomplishment. But to be at heart and in reality as considerate of
others as we are of ourselves is, unfortunately, not natural. Human
beings are not children of the sun, sojourning for a season on this
spheroid of clay, and needing only pinions to be angels. Human
nature did not come, pure and shining, down from the glittering
gods. It came out of the jungle. Civilised peoples are the not very
remote posterity of savages, and savages are the posterity of
individuals who laid eggs and had literally cold blood in their
veins. Civilised men and women are troglodytes with a veneering of
virtue. In the heart of every ‘civilised’ man and woman is an
unconverted core, large or small, of barbarism. Humanity is only a
habit. Against it, and tending ever to weaken and subvert it, are
the powerful inertias of animalism. Like the ship in Ibsen’s
‘Rhymed Epistle,’ civilisation carries a corpse in its
cargo—the elemental appetites and passions which have been
implanted in all sentient nature by the laws in accordance with
which organic forms have been fashioned. Moral progress is simply
the sloughing off of this inherited animality.

To the initiated, therefore, it is not strange that we civilised
folk in our conduct display so freely the phenomena of the savage.
There is nothing more inevitable in the life of the convert than the
haunting inclination to give way to original impulses. It is not
strange that we are powerless to be as good and beautiful and true
as we would like to be, that our divine efforts are our half-hearted
efforts, and that the only time we get terribly in earnest and put
forth really titanic energies is when we are dominated directly or
indirectly by the instincts of the pack. Human aspiration is
fettered by the fearful facts of human origin. It is not strange
that we are continually conscious of being torn by contending
tendencies, conscious of ghastly masteries, and of horrible goings
on in our innermost beings. The human heart is the gladiatorial
meeting-place of gods and beasts.

II. Egoism and Altruism.

Everything has been evolved—_everything_—from daffodils to
states and from ticks to religion. Every organic thing is the result
of long and incessant survival of the advantageous—advantageous
from the standpoint of the organism itself or from the standpoint of
its kind, not necessarily so from the standpoint of the universe.
That which is true of everything is true also of egoism and
altruism. Egoism and altruism exist as facts in the natures of human
and other beings for the same reason that the various physical facts
exist in the structures of human and other beings, because they have
been advantageous in the struggle for life. There is just as
definite an explanation for the existence of egoism and altruism in
this world, and for their existence in the particular form and ratio
in which they do exist, as there is for the fact that the human hand
has five fingers, the rose odour, and the eggs of the kildeer the
mottled markings of the clods among which they lie.

Egoism is preference for self, partiality toward that part of the
universe bounded by one’s own skin. It may consist simply of
regard for self, but with regard for self is usually associated
enmity toward others. Egoism manifests itself in such qualities of
mind as selfishness, cruelty, intolerance, hate, hardheartedness,
savagery, rudeness, injustice, narrowness, and the like. It is the
primal impulse of the living heart. Enmity is older and more
universal than love. Enmity constituted the very loins from which
long ago came the original miscreants of this world.

  ‘I saw the fishes playing there;
  I saw all that was in the whole world round;
  In wood, and bower, and marsh, and mead, and field,
  All things which creep and fly, And put a foot to earth.
  All these I saw, and say to you,
  That nothing lives among them without hate.’

Life has been developed through selection. This selection has been
brought about largely through war—war between individuals and
between groups of individuals. War and competition are struggle
between living beings, and the soul of competition is selfishness.
Egoism is the primal and most powerful of terrestrial impulses,
because beings hated and exterminated each other before they
tolerated and loved, and because struggle has far overshadowed
cooperation as a factor in life evolution.

There are those who believe that mutual aid has been a more dynamic
factor in the development of terrestrial life than competition.
Cooperation has been an important element in the evolution of animal
life, and it has operated among nearly all animals, from the
humblest to the highest. Far down near the beginning of organic
existence we find the one-celled forms huddling together in
colonies, giving rise in the course of time to the many-celled
animals. But to conclude that cooperation is the chief factor in
animal development is to shut one’s eyes to one of the most
obvious and overwhelming facts of organic evolution. Individualism
antedates mutualism, both among the one-celled forms and among the
many-celled metazoa. Cooperation everywhere is the sequence of a
long preliminary of individual contention. And cooperation does not
mean cessation of struggle, either among those co-operating or among
the groups themselves, as Kropotkin and other exaggerators of the
mutual aid factor seem to assume. It usually does little more than
transfer the struggle from individuals to groups. When a lot of
pelicans or wolves get together and work together in order that they
may thereby the better defend themselves or slay others it is hard
to see how such facts can be placed to the credit of cooperation any
more than to that of competition. Then, too, excepting in a few
societies of insects, cooperation has not gone so far as to do more
than slightly alleviate the competition even among the members of a
co-operating group. Competition is a much more common and
influential fact in the phenomena of life than cooperation, for it
involves a large part of the activity of individual life, and is
also prominent in all social activities.

The preponderance of egoism in the natures of living beings is the
most mournful and immense fact in the phenomena of conscious life.
It has made the world the kind of world it would have been had the
gods actually emptied their wrath vials upon it. Brotherhood is
anomalous, and, even in its highest manifestations, is but the
expression of a veiled and calculating egoism. Inhumanity is
everywhere. The whole planet is steeped in it. Every creature faces
an inhospitable universeful, and every life is a campaign. It has
all come about as a result of the mindless and inhuman manner in
which life has been developed on the earth. It has been said that an
individual of unlimited faculties and infinite goodness and power
made this world and endowed it with ways of acting, and that this
individual, as the world’s executive, continues to determine its
phenomena by inspiring the order of its events. But one cannot help
thinking sometimes, when, in his more daring and vivid moments, he
comes to comprehend the real character and condition of the world,
what a discrepancy exists between the reputation of this builder and
his works, and cannot help wondering whether an ordinary human being
with only common-sense and insight and an average concern for the
welfare of the world would not make a great improvement in
terrestrial affairs if he only had the opportunity for a while.

Altruism is the recognition of, and regard for, others. It shows
itself in feelings of justice, goodwill, tenderness, charity, pity,
public spirit, sympathy, fraternity and love, and in acts of
kindness, humanity, mercy, generosity, politeness, philanthropy and
the like. Altruism is a graft. The stock is selfishness and
brutality. Altruism (the form of altruism to which I here refer:
there are several distinct species of altruism) has come into the
world as a result of cooperation and consanguinity. It has grown out
of the cooperation of individuals in families and tribes against
their cooperating enemies. Altruism—at least, in its initial
stages—is a sort of tribal egoism. Men and other animals have
learned to stand by each other and help each other against their
common foes because it was the only way in which they were able to
stand. Those aggregates that have had strongest this feeling of
fraternity have prospered and prevailed, while the less fraternal
have gone down.

The altruism manifested by men in their relations with each other is
not different in kind from the altruism and cooperation displayed by
other social animals. Human gregariousness—the gathering together
of human beings into tribes and communities for purposes of
companionship and defence—is a part of the phenomena of animal
gregariousness in general. The inhabitants of a human town, however
much they may think so, are not impelled to associate with each
other and to cooperate with each other in the affairs of life by
causes or considerations different from those which actuate a
society of ants or apes, of wasps or wolves, who do the same things.
The antecedents of human ethics and society are, therefore, to be
looked for in the ant-hill and the jungle.

The fact that altruism has been evolved by the cooperation of
individuals _with each other_ and _against others_ is a significant
fact in the analysis and understanding of the ethical phenomena of
the earth. _To this fact is due the restricted and illogical
character of all altruism_. The ethical systems of all peoples are,
and have always been, to a greater or less extent, provincial and
contradictory. Ethical feeling and practice are not extended
universally—that is, to all beings—but are maintained only among
those associating more or less closely as a group, and having
interests that are more or less nearly the same. Among men of
primitive mind, morality is a thing to be practised toward only a
few thousand or even a few hundred individuals, and then in a very
half-awake and half-hearted manner. But as the perceptions sharpen
and vivify and the horizon of knowledge widens—as commerce and
imagination cause the mind to overflow the narrow bounds of the
community into larger dimensions of time and space—as the myriad
influences operating as race experience and race selection enable
men to realise the wider and wider oneness of their origin, natures,
interests, and destiny—an increasing consistency characterises the
conduct among the members of the group, and an increasingly larger
number of individuals are admitted to ethical consideration and
kinship.

III. The Ethics of the Savage.
∂
The ethics of the savage is, almost without exception, purely tribal
in its extent. A marked distinction is everywhere made by primitive
peoples between injuries to persons _inside_ the tribe and injuries
to those _outside_ the tribe. Crimes which are looked upon as
felonious when committed by a savage against the members of his own
tribe may be regarded as harmless, or even highly commendable, when
perpetrated on those outside the tribe. Acts are not judged
according to their intrinsic natures or results, but wholly as to
whether they are performed on outsiders or on insiders. The Balantis
(Africa) punish with death a theft committed against a
fellow-tribesman, but encourage and reward thieving from other
tribes. The Afridi (Afghanistan) mother prays that her son may be a
successful robber—not a robber of her own people, but of other
peoples—and in order that he may become proficient in crime
teaches him to creep stealthily through a hole in the wall. By
certain Bedouin tribes the ‘strenuous life’ is held in such high
honour that ‘it is considered a disgrace to die in bed’; and
among the man-eating Fijians ‘men who have not slain an enemy
suffer the most degrading of all punishments’.[1] In the paradise
of the Kukis (India) the cut-throats who have in life killed the
largest number of aliens not only inherit the highest places, but
these adepts of the knife are supposed to be attended in their
celestial comings and goings by their victims as slaves.[1] In his
dealings with the other members of his tribe, the savage observes a
certain rude code of morals, this code being usually, as in the case
of the civilised code, an inglorious mixture of equity and
brutality, superstition and sanity, honesty and hypocrisy. But the
savage recognises no moral obligations to any being outside of his
tribe, clan, or family. Anthropology teaches nothing more positively
than this. Consanguinity and self-interest are the only bases of
savage friendship. Outsiders are outlaws. They may be attacked,
robbed, deceived, murdered, eaten, or enslaved, with perfect
propriety. It was this general hostility of foreigners that Cain
feared when he was turned out from his countrymen after his crime
upon Abel. He knew that he was liable to be set upon by the first
stranger that came upon him. So the Lord is said to have set a mark
upon him, ‘lest any finding him should kill him.’

‘There was no brotherhood recognised by our savage forefathers,’
says Sir Henry Maine, in speaking of the ancestors of the Aryan and
Semitic races, ‘except actual consanguinity regarded as a fact. If
a man was not of kin to another, there was nothing between them. He
was an enemy to be hated, slain, or despoiled as much as the wild
beasts upon which the tribe made war, as belonging, indeed, to the
craftiest and cruelest of wild animals. It would scarcely be too
strong to assert that the dogs which followed the camp had more in
common with it than the tribesmen of an alien and unrelated
tribe’.[2] Among some tribes of savage men the ethical code is
reversed in dealing with outsiders, and enmity toward aliens is
considered a duty.

This same senseless hostility toward every one from abroad, so
spitefully exhibited by primitive men, is also manifested by ants,
who immediately recognise and pounce upon an individual introduced
from a foreign colony, but welcome with every demonstration of joy,
even after a lapse of weeks or months, a returning member of their
own society. The same spirit of exclusiveness is found also in
elephants. If by accident an elephant becomes separated from his
herd, he becomes an outcast and a fugitive, never being permitted in
any circumstances to attach himself to another herd.[3]

That the savage should entertain feelings of friendship for those
belonging to the same social unit as himself is, considering the
circumstances in which it takes place, a perfectly natural
phenomenon. The members of his tribe are, to the savage, the beings
among whom he has come into existence, and in the midst of whom he
has grown up. He knows and understands them, and is known and
understood by them. They speak the same language as himself, and
cherish the same customs and traditions. They have the same sacred
trees, the same gods, the same experiences day after day, and the
same memories, as he himself. They are his associates in the chase,
his allies in war, and his comrades in sorrow and success. They are
the only beings into whose lives he has ever entered. They
constitute his world, and are to him the only real beings in the
universe.

The members of his tribe are, moreover, to the savage, for the most
part, his kinspeople. If they are not actually related to him by
blood, they are usually conceived by him to be so related. The
co-villagers of an Indian community call each other brothers. It is
a characteristic of all the Aryan and Semitic races when in the
tribal state to conceive that the tribes themselves, and all
subdivisions of them, are descended each from a single male
ancestor. The savage sees the living family of which he forms a part
descended from a single living man and his wife or wives. This
family group with which he is familiar and other similar groups make
up the tribe. And the process by which each family has been brought
about is in his mind identical with the process by which the
community as a whole has been formed.[2] It is a conception of this
kind, handed down as a tradition from ancient tribal times, which
causes the Jews even to-day to regard themselves as the ‘seed’
of that venerable sheik who, so many centuries ago, led them as a
band of nomads in their memorable migration westward from the plains
of Mesopotamia. It is not strange, therefore, considering all of the
circumstances in the midst of which the savage lives and moves, that
he should look upon his fellow-tribesmen as beings to be
distinguished by him from all other beings in the universe.

Nor is it strange, when we consider the mental sterility of the
savage, his lack of travel and imagination, the meagerness of his
experiences, and his utter ignorance of the world beyond the
community in which he lives, that he should look upon and treat all
outsiders as nobodies—as beings without any claims whatever upon
his humanity or mercy. The imagination is the picturing power of the
mind, the power by which beings are able to get out of themselves
and into the places of others, the power which enables us to view
the world comparatively—that is, from different points of view.
This power of mind, which imparts to the higher types of
intelligence their mobility and sympathy, is rudimentary in the
savage. This has been proved by Tylor in his study of the
comparative mythology of savages. It is this lack of imagination in
the savage, combined with his ignorance and his simplicity of life,
which gives to him his ferocity, and which renders him inaccessible
to those higher sentiments of justice and righteousness which
are—well, which are, at least, dreamed about and theorised about
by the more evolved savages of the ‘civilised world.’ The world,
to the simple mind of the savage, is, as it is to the mind of the
child, the world in which he lives and moves—the world which he
feels, hears, tastes, and sees. The horizon is the boundary of the
universe. Beings beyond his tribe are outside of the world. If they
exist at all, it is as a very different order of beings from him and
his people. They are not of kin to him, speak a strange tongue, and
have monstrous customs and superstitions. How could they be in any
way related to him? They are his enemies—vague villainous
apparitions who appear to him only in the horrible ordeals of
battle. His chief occupation is the waging of war against them, and
his keenest gratification is felt in laying them low. The accounts
of all travellers testify that the intertribal relations of savages
are, with few exceptions, those of chronic feud and hostility. The
irreconcilable antagonism between the savage and those around him
begets in the savage nature its dominating impulse—hate, hatred
and hostility toward other men, as well as toward all other beings.
In fact, the savage makes no moral distinction between man and the
other animals, but regards them all indiscriminately as his foes,
whom he must either use or remove from the face of the earth. The
savage hunts men about as he hunts other animals, and for a like
purpose. The Troglodytes hunted the Ethiopians in four-horse
chariots with as little compunction as Americans hunt antelopes
to-day.

1. Spencer: _Principles of Ethics_, vol. i.; New York, 1893..
2. Maine: _Early History of Institutions_; New York, 1869.
3. Tennent: _Natural History of Ceylon_; London, 1861.

IV. The Ethics of the Ancient.∂

But the doctrine that each petty tribe is the centre of the world
and the only real and important people in the universe, and that all
others are mere nobodies, is not peculiar to primitive peoples.
Ethnocentric ethics—the ethics of amity toward their own tribe or
state, their own clique or kind, and the ethics of enmity toward
outsiders—has been manifested to a greater or less extent by the
peoples of all times and of all degrees of enlightenment. Every
people that has ever existed has had its own particular point of
view, its own bias, its own knot-hole, large or small, through which
it has looked at life and the world. This is inevitable. It arises
as a necessary sequence out of the fact that all peoples above
savages are the descendants of savages, and as such have inherited
the limitations, mental and environmental, of those from whom they
have evolved.

Aliens had no legal rights in ancient times—none whatever.
International cooperation, such as exists among the political
societies of Europe and America to-day, was absolutely unknown.
International relations were everywhere those of hostility. States
and races looked upon each other as foes, as objects of plunder and
victimisation, not as friends.

Caesar says of the ancient Germans that depredations committed
beyond the boundaries of each state bore no infamy, and that
stealing from aliens was even encouraged as a means of teaching
their young men adroitness.

The ancient Jews are an excellent illustration of a narrow and
self-centred people. Notwithstanding their insignificance,
politically and intellectually, as compared with the Egyptians,
Greeks, and Persians, the Jews believed themselves to be the only
people of the first class inhabiting the earth. They conceived that
they had been selected as favourites by the gods themselves, and
that around their little district in half-arid Palestine revolved
the interests of the entire world. Their chief city was supposed to
be the sacred and central city of the world, and heaven itself only
a new and idealised edition of their metropolis. Every Jew was bound
to every other Jew by high-wrought ceremony and obligation. But all
non-Jews were ‘Gentiles,’ chaff-like ‘pagans,’ who possessed
no rights which a ‘child of Abraham’ was bound to respect. Their
tribal god is said to have been so indulgent toward them as his
‘chosen people’ that he allowed them to exact usury from
foreigners, to sell them diseased meats, and to borrow jewels from
them and afterwards run away with them. He even permitted them to
make war upon weak peoples and dispossess them of their lands.
‘Whomsoever the Lord our God shall drive out from before us, them
will we possess’ (Judg. xi. 24).

The kings of the ancient Assyrians were so accustomed to cruelties
upon non-Assyrians, and were so proud of these cruelties, that they
recorded them in stone as a claim to immortality among men.
Assurbanipal, in speaking of the conquered, says: ‘I pulled out
their tongues and cut off their limbs, and caused them to be eaten
by dogs, bears, eagles, vultures, birds of heaven.’
Assur-natsir-pal, another wonderful fellow, boasts similarly: ‘I
flayed the nobles and covered the pyramid with their skins, and
their young men and maidens I burned as a holocaust.’ ‘Their
carcasses covered the valleys and the tops of the mountains,’ says
Tiglath-Pileser in his account of the slain Muskayans; and
Sennacherib informs us proudly that he drove his chariot over the
dead bodies of his victims until ‘its wheels were clogged with
flesh and blood.’ ‘Evidently’ remarks Spencer, in speaking of
these monstrous inscriptions, ‘the expectation was that men of
after-times would admire these merciless destructions; for we cannot
assume that these Assyrian kings intentionally made themselves
eternally infamous’.[1]

To the ancient Greeks there were two classes of human beings in the
world: Greeks and ‘barbarians.’ The Greeks were the inhabitants
of Hellas, which was believed to be the central region of the world,
and the ‘barbarians’ were the godless denizens of the
less-favoured and less centrally located remainder of the earth. The
world was believed to be flat or shield-shaped, and in its exact
centre stood Mount Olympus in northern Thessaly. This mountain,
which is 9,700 feet high, was supposed to be the highest elevation
on the earth, and was the awful abode of the gods. The Greeks called
themselves Hellenes. According to their fabled genealogy, they were
the descendants of Hellen, son of Deucalion, the Greek Noah. While
they were often at war with each other, they spoke a common
language, and always regarded themselves as members of a single
family. All non-Greeks were ‘barbarians,’ including the Romans,
who were called ‘barbarians’ down to the time of Augustus. While
the Greeks themselves traced their ancestry back to the bright blood
of the gods, the ‘barbarians’ were generally supposed to have
originated from stones and trees. The ‘barbarians’ were looked
upon and treated by the Greeks everywhere as a different order of
beings from themselves. Those taken by them in war were regularly
reduced to slavery. The slave population created in this way was
increased by the slave traffic carried on with the East until the
slave population of Greece was several times as great as the free
population. The whole Hellenic world, in fact, even in the days of
its greatest magnificence, was one vast pen of slaves. Almost every
freeman of Attica was a slave-owner. Out of a population of about
five hundred thousand, four hundred thousand were slaves. It was
considered a real hardship by the Greeks to be compelled to get
along with less than a half-dozen slaves. In Corinth and Aegina
there were ten slaves to one freeman. In Sparta the slaves were the
vanquished Helots, the original inhabitants of the Peloponnesus,
whom the Spartans had conquered and reduced to chains in early
times. Their lot was particularly horrible. They were the property
of the state, and were distributed to the Spartan lords by lot.
‘They practically had no rights which their masters felt bound to
respect. If one of their number displayed unusual powers of either
body or mind, he was secretly assassinated, as it was deemed unsafe
to allow such qualities to be fostered in the servile class. It is
affirmed [by Thucydides] that, when the Helots grew too numerous for
the supposed safety of the state, their numbers were thinned by
deliberate massacre of the surplus population’.[2] The conception
of human slavery entertained by the common mass of Greeks may be
inferred from the fact that philosophers like Aristotle taught that
‘slaves were simply domestic animals possessed of intelligence.’
It is this fact, this utter lack of justice and humanity manifested
by the Greeks in their treatment of non-Hellenic mankind, which
gives to Greek ‘civilisation’ its seamy side. Greek society has
been appropriately likened to a pyramid, its apex gleaming with
light and splendour, while its base was sunk in darkness.

Non-Romans were called ‘barbarians’ also by the Romans, and were
considered by the Romans to be an entirely different order of beings
from themselves. Any splinter of a Roman was, according to the
Romans, superior to the most illustrious ‘barbarian.’ Men were
not treated nor estimated according to their intrinsic qualities,
but wholly as to whether they were or were not ‘Roman citizens.’
To be a ‘Roman citizen’ was to be entitled to everything; to be
a ‘barbarian’ was not to be entitled to anything necessarily,
except to serve in some way the all-glorious Romans. The elaborate
legal and ethical codes formulated by these masters of the
Mediterranean were reserved religiously for themselves. The business
of the ‘barbarians’ was to furnish fields for pillage and
conquest, to impart magnitude to triumphal pageants, to act as
slaves, and to die by ignominiously butchering each other for the
amusement of their bloodthirsty masters. ‘Barbarian’ lands were
looked upon simply as game-preserves where ambitious captains from
the Tiber went to refresh their reputations by hunting and
victimising the inhabitants. The history of Rome is the history of
infamy on a colossal, almost world-wide, scale. There has never been
displayed by any people pretending to be civilised such shameless
savagery as that displayed by the Romans in their gladiatorial
arenas, where men (generally the captives of war) were ‘butchered
to make a Roman holiday.’ These tragedies, in their magnitude and
atrocity, seem almost frightful when we read of them on the pages of
history. They were generally celebrated by victorious captains and
emperors at the close of some unusual outrage against the
‘barbarians,’ or upon the departure of Roman legions for the
field of activity. The celebrations sometimes lasted weeks, or even
months. The Emperor Trajan celebrated his victories over the Dacians
with shows that lasted more than a hundred days. During this
horrible festival ten thousand men fought upon the arena, and more
than ten thousand wild animals were slain. The gladiators in these
ancient combats fought in chariots, on horseback, on foot—in all
the ways in which soldiers fought in actual battle. They fought with
swords, lances, daggers, tridents, and every other manner of weapon.
Some had nets and lassoes with which they entangled their
adversaries, and then slew them. The life of a wounded gladiator was
in the hands of the spectators, who showed their clemency or their
lack of it by turning their thumbs respectively down or up. The
thirst of the populace for blood was sometimes such that the dying
were aroused and forced on to the fight by burning with a hot iron.
The dead bodies were dragged from the arena with hooks, like the
carcasses of animals, and the pools of blood soaked up with dry
sand.[3] There was an occasional Roman, like Seneca, sane enough to
realise the real character of these performances, and brave enough
to denounce them as crimes. But by the great mass of all classes of
Romans, even by those who pretended to think, they were regarded
with perfect moral indifference. The excuse offered by Pliny was
generally concurred in by his countrymen, that these bloody shows
were necessary for the cultivation of manliness and for keeping
awake the strenuous and red-handed instincts in the young.

Scarce less revolting than the gladiatorial arena, in its violation
of every principle of humanity, was the institution of human
slavery. During the later republic and the earlier empire, one-half
the population of the Roman state was slaves. The slave population
was recruited chiefly, as in Greece, by war and by slave-hunting.
Slave-traders and slave-markets flourished both in the capital
itself and in all the great ports visited by Roman ships. Some of
the outlying provinces of Asia and Africa were almost depopulated by
the slave-hunters. Greek slaves were the highest-priced, because the
most intelligent. Among the wealthy, who, like the illiterate rich
of every age, dawdled their time in ostentation, there were slaves
for each different function in the household. There were the
_cubicularii_, who acted as housemaids; the _triclinarii_, who
waited at table; the _culinarii_, who acted as kitchen drudges; and
the _balnearii_, who looked after the baths. Then there were
_tonsores_ or barbers; _criniflores_, or hair-crimpers;
_calceatores_, who took care of the feet; and _lectores_, whose
business it was to read aloud to their masters at meals, in the
bath, or in bed. The _ostiarius_, who was sometimes chained in the
vestibule like a dog, was the porter; the _invitator_ summoned the
guests; and the _servus ab hospitiis_ looked after their lodgment.
There was the slave called the _sandalio_, whose sole duty was to
care for his master’s sandals; and another, called the
_nomenclator_, whose exclusive business it was to accompany his
master when he went upon the street, and give him the names of such
persons as he ought to recognise. The common punishment for a
refractory slave was beating. If the runaway were caught, as he
could hardly fail to be, since there were extremely heavy penalties
for harbouring or assisting him, he was either branded or had an
iron collar like a dog’s welded around his neck, or his legs were
fettered, or, in exaggerated or repeated cases of offence, he was at
once turned into the arena or otherwise put to death. If he
attempted to take personal vengeance upon his master for any wrong
whatsoever, his whole family shared his fate, and the regular form
of capital punishment for a slave was crucifixion under the most
ignominious and agonising circumstances.[4]

‘In many cases, as a measure of precaution, the slaves were forced
to work in chains and to sleep in subterranean prisons. The feeling
entertained toward this unfortunate class in the later republican
period is illustrated by Varro’s classification of slaves as
“vocal agricultural implements,” and by Cato the Elder’s
recommendation that old and worn-out slaves be sold, as a matter of
economy. Sick and hopelessly infirm slaves were taken to an island
in the Tiber, and there left to die of starvation and
exposure’.[3] Slaves were practically without any rights whatever
to the world in which they lived. A Roman could take the life of his
Gallic slave with as complete impunity as an American can slay his
bovine servant to-day. Romans, in short, looked upon and treated
non-Romans about as human beings to-day look upon and treat
non-humans—_as mere prey_.

1. Spencer: _Principles of Ethics_, vol. i.; New York, 1893.
2. Myers: _Ancient History_, part i.; Boston, 1899.
3. Myers: _Ancient History_, part ii.; Boston, 1899.
4. Preston and Dodge: _The Private Life of the Romans_; Boston, 1896.∂

V. Modern Ethics.

But the peoples of the ancient world are not the only human beings
who have suffered from the psychological bequests of savages. Modern
states and peoples, notwithstanding their far-flung professions of
righteousness, manifest, though in a somewhat weakened form, the
same ethnic prejudices and the same senseless antipathies as those
displayed by the ancients. Remnants of the primitive tribal morality
are found in the moral habits and conceptions of every people,
however emancipated they may imagine themselves to be. Many a person
who would not think of swindling one of his neighbours will not
hesitate to swindle a foreigner, especially if the foreigner happens
to be of a nationality much removed in language, colour, manners, or
interests from his own. Morality is genetic. It is not a consistent
something—something reasoned out and framed according to the
facts. It has grown up. It is essentially tribal—whether it is
confined to a family, as is done by some, to a corporation or trade,
to a nation, to an artificial fraternity, or to a species. We are,
in fact, all of us, even the broadest and most illuminated, simply
savages more or less leafed out. We all suffer, as men have always
suffered, from the over-vividness of the presentative powers of the
mind (sensation and perception) compared with the representative
powers (memory and imagination). We all exaggerate out of their
proper perspective in the phenomena of a universe the things that
are around us and about us—the events we witness or take part in,
the things that are ours, and the affairs of the street, city,
state, neighbourhood, world, and time, in which we live. Every human
being (the sage less than the savage, but the sage to some extent)
is inclined to lump together as foreign to him, and as more or less
useless and shadowy in themselves, the things, beings, and events
that are distant, and to consider them, of less reality than those
with which he is directly concerned, and of which his knowledge is
immediate. _The evolution of consciousness in its social and ethical
aspects consists in the evolution of the ability to make real and
vivid the phenomena that are more and more_ _distant in both space
and time_.

The Chinese call their country ‘the flower of the middle,’ and
believe it to be the central and choicest portion of the earth’s
surface. All those beyond the bounds of ‘The Heavenly Flower
Kingdom’ are, by those on the inside, venomously lumped together
as ‘foreign devils.’ The people of Spain look upon themselves in
much the same way as the Chinese look upon themselves, although they
are in reality the most belated of all peoples to-day pretending to
be civilised. There are a few travelled and educated Spaniards who
realise the pitiful place held by their country in the family of
reputable states. ‘But the great mass of the people are not only
perfectly satisfied with their condition, but consider themselves
the most fortunate of all God’s creatures. They never go outside
of their country and never read a foreign newspaper or book. Like
the Chinese, they consider other nations barbarians, and point to
Madrid as the centre of civilisation.’ The French, down to the
nineteenth century, confiscated the property of all aliens who died
within the realm; and the savage practice of punishing one alien for
the crimes of another alien was sanctioned by the laws of England
down to the middle of the fourteenth century. It has been only a day
in the history of the world since Caucasians hunted their dusky
brothers in Africa like ‘wild animals,’ and sold and loaned and
lashed them as we do horses to-day. Men now living can remember when
it made no difference how exalted in character men might be: if a
certain pigment of their bodies was dark, they were ‘niggers.’
They had no ‘souls’ as pale men had, and no more chance of
paradise than cattle. At the beginning of the nineteenth century,
incredible as it may seem, every country of Europe and America held
slaves, and was engaged in the soulless avocation of man-hunting in
Africa. Tens of thousands of Africa’s children were annually
seized by prowling pirate bands and exported to distant lands to
wear their lives out in disgrace and drudgery. It was not until the
latter part of the nineteenth century that civilised nations,
following the initiative of England, finally abolished human
slavery, the United States and Brazil being the last to act. The
Christian sneers at all who do not bow down to his deities and
worship according to his ritual, as ‘heathens’ or
‘freethinkers,’ and to the Moslem all who are not followers of
‘the True Prophet’ are ‘infidel dogs.’ The history of these
two religions is a chronicle of almost unparalleled crimes upon
disbelievers.

But it is not necessary to go to Arabia or Cathay, nor even
necessary to read history, in order to find examples of bigotry and
provincialism. It is only necessary to open our eyes. Americans are
not a peculiar people—unless it be in the unbridled character of
their conceit. All the barbarism is not behind us nor around us.
History looks dark and discouraging to us, as we turn its terrible
pages, but we would see something just as discouraging if we would
look into a mirror. The old savage spirit still circulates in our
veins. The ‘foreigner’ is not an enemy, but he is still an
individual whose chief significance is in his ‘fleece.’ If the
‘foreigner’ did not ease our economic theories by benevolently
‘paying the tax,’ it would be hard to tell what would become of
him. Those who suffer from a different government, speak a different
language, or laud other gods are regarded by us as distinctly
inferior to ourselves. Millions of dollars are annually squandered
by self-righteous societies in sending missionaries to the other
side of the planet to peoples who need evangels of mercy and
humanity far less than we do ourselves. In these times of
ecclesiastical enterprise, however, missionaries are being
superseded, as agents of evangelisation, by the more effective
inventions of Messrs. Maxim and Krupp. ‘American’ is regarded by
us as the synonym of perfection, and to be ‘patriotic’ is to
give unthinking enthusiasm to every scheme incubated by wolfish
spoilsmen. Crimes of conquest carried on by others become, when
undertaken by us, shining masterpieces of ‘benevolent
assimilation.’ We are not so far from the naked and unkempt
contemporaries of the cave-bear and sabre-toothed lion as we imagine
we are. To carry a bayonet, and especially to redden it with an
alien’s blood, is here in this degenerate land of Jefferson, more
glorious than to create a book. Captains particularly competent as
butchers, though their characters be as coarse as a savage
chief’s, are hailed as heroes by thousands besides silly women,
and held up, like the cutthroats of the Kukis, as the highest
exemplars of right-doing. Old Rameses, holding by their hair a
half-dozen dwarfs, and ostentatiously cutting off their heads with a
single sweep of his sword, finds his modern counterpart in miserable
Americans pompously gloating over the offhand slaughter of the
children of distant archipelagoes.

VI. The Ethics of Human Beings Toward Non-human Beings.∂

But the most mournful instance of provincial ethics afforded by the
inhabitants of the earth is not that furnished by the varieties of
the human species in their conduct toward each other, but that
afforded by the human race as a whole in its treatment of the
non-human races. Human nature is nowhere so hideous, and human
conscience is nowhere so profoundly inoperative, as in their
disregard for the life and happiness of the non-human animal world.
With the development of the representative powers of the mind, the
widening and mutualising of human activities, and the consequent
enlargement of the human horizon, the feeling of amity has spread
and intensified, until to-day, notwithstanding all that is true of
human sectionalism, the ethical systems of civilised peoples
include, theoretically at least, and more or less seriously, all
human beings whatsoever. Ethical consciousness has extended from
individual to family, from family to clan, from clan to tribe, from
tribe to confederacy, from confederacy to kingdom, from kingdom to
race, from race to species, until, in the case of many millions of
men, ethical feeling has reached, with greater or less vividness and
consistency, the anthropocentric stage of evolution. The fact that
an individual is a _man_—that is, that he belongs to the human
species of animals—entitles him in all civilised lands to the
fundamental rights and privileges of existence. The rights to life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are believed to-day, by all
exalted minds, to be the inalienable properties of every _human_
being who comes into the world.

But, except by occasional individuals here and there whose emotions
are more civilised than the rest, or whose conceptions are more
ample and clear, ethical relations are not extended by human beings
beyond the bounds of their own species. Non-human millions are
_outsiders_. They are looked upon and treated by human beings as if
they were an entirely different order of existences, with entirely
different purposes and susceptibilities, from human beings. They are
not considered to be living beings at all, as human beings are, who
are here in the world to enjoy life and all that life holds that is
dear to a living being. They belong to the same class of existences
as the waves of the sea and the weeds of the field. They are looked
upon as mere _things_—mere moving, multiplying objects, without
the slightest equity in the world in which they find themselves.
They may be set upon, beaten, maimed, starved, assassinated, eaten,
insulted, deceived, imprisoned, robbed, tormented, skinned alive,
shot down for pastime, cut to pieces out of curiosity, or compelled
to undergo any other enormity or victimisation anybody can think of
or is disposed to visit upon them. It is enough almost to make
knaves shudder, the cold-blooded and business-like manner in which
we cut their throats, dash out their brains, and discuss their
flavour at our cannibalistic feasts. As Plutarch says, ‘Lions,
tigers, and serpents we call savage and ferocious, yet we ourselves
come behind them in no species of barbarity.’ Accustomed from our
cradle up to look upon violence and assassination, we have become so
habituated and hardened to these things that we perpetrate them and
see them perpetrated with the same indifference as that with which
we watch waves die on the beach. Human beings are, in fact
(‘paragons’ though they pretend to be), the most predatory and
brutal of all animals—the great bone-breakers and bone-pickers of
the planet.

It is scarcely possible, astounding as it is, to commit crimes upon
any beings in this world, except men. There are no beings in the
universe, according to human beings, except themselves. All others
are commodities. They are of consequence only because they have
thighs and can fill up the unoccupied places of the human
alimentary. Human beings are ‘persons,’ and have souls and gods
and places to go to when they die. But the hundreds of thousands of
other races of terrestrial inhabitants are mere ‘animals,’ mere
‘brutes,’ and ‘beasts of the field,’ ‘livestock’ and
‘vermin.’ Every crime capable of being perpetrated by one being
upon another is day after day rained upon them, and with an
equanimity that would do honour to the managers of an inferno. Human
beings preach as the cardinal rule of morality—and they seem never
to tire of its reiteration—that they should do unto others as they
would that others would do unto them; but they hypocritically
confine its application to the members of their own crowd,
notwithstanding there are the same reasons identically for extending
it to all creatures. The happiness of the human species is assumed
to be so much more precious than that of others that the most sacred
interests of others are unhesitatingly sacrificed in order that
human desires may all be fastidiously catered to. Even for a tooth
or a feather or a piece of skin to wear on human vanity, forests are
depopulated and the land filled with the dead and dying.
Assassination is the commonest and most fashionable of human
pastimes. Jaded systems are regularly recuperated by massacre. Men
arm themselves—men who roar about ‘rights,’ and even ministers
of mercy—and go out on killing expeditions with as little
compunction as savages put on war-paint. They come back from their
campaigns of crime like the cut-throats of old Rome, trailing their
victims as trophies, and expecting to be hailed as heroes for the
hells they have established. Barbarians preponderate, and morality
is turned inside out. Cruelty is lionised, and broad-mindedness is
rewarded with a sneer. Compassion is a disease, and to be
fashionable is to be a fiend. If non-human peoples had no nerves and
no choice of emotions, and were utterly indifferent to life, they
could scarcely be treated more completely as personal nonentities.

The denial by human animals of ethical relations to the rest of the
animal world is a phenomenon not differing either in character or
cause from the denial of ethical relations by a tribe, people, or
race of human beings to the rest of the human world. The
provincialism of Jews toward non-Jews, of Greeks toward non-Greeks,
of Romans toward non-Romans, of Moslems toward non-Moslems, and of
Caucasians toward non-Caucasians, is not one thing and the
provincialism of human beings toward non-human beings another. They
are all manifestations of the same thing. The fact that these
various acts are performed by different individuals and _upon_
different individuals, and are performed at different times and
places, does not invalidate the essential sameness of their natures.
Crimes are not classified (except by savages or their immediate
derivatives) according to the similarity of those who do them or
those who suffer from them, but by grouping them according to the
similarity of their intrinsic qualities. All acts of provincialism
consist essentially in the disinclination or inability to be
universal, and they belong in reality, all of them, to the same
species of conduct. There is, in fact, but one great crime in the
universe, and most of the instances of terrestrial wrong-doing are
instances of this crime. It is the crime of _exploitation_—the
considering by some beings of themselves as _ends_ and of others as
their _means_—the refusal to recognise the equal, or the
approximately equal, rights of all to life and its legitimate
rewards—the crime of acting toward others as one would that others
would _not_ act toward him. For millions of years, almost ever since
life began, this crime has been committed, in every nook and quarter
of the inhabited globe.

_Every being_ is an _end_. In other words, every being is to be taken
into account in determining the ends of conduct. This is the only
consistent outcome of the ethical process which is in course of
evolution on the earth. This world was not made and presented to any
particular clique for its exclusive use or enjoyment. The earth
belongs, if it belongs to anybody, to the beings who inhabit it—to
_all_ of them. And when one being or set of beings sets itself up as
the sole end for which the universe exists, and looks upon and acts
toward others as mere means to this end, it is usurpation, nothing
else and never can be anything else, it matters not by whom or upon
whom the usurpation is practised. A tyrant who puts his own welfare
and aggrandisement in the place of the welfare of a people, and
compels the whole people to act as a means to his own personal ends,
is not more certainly a usurper than is a species or variety which
puts its welfare in the place of the welfare of all the inhabitants
of a world. The refusal to put one’s self in the place of others
and to act toward them as one would that they would act toward him
does not depend for its wrongfulness upon who makes the refusal or
upon whether the refusal falls upon this or that individual or set.
Deeds are right and wrong in themselves; and whether they are right
or wrong, good or evil, proper or improper, whether they should be
done or should not be done, _depends upon their effects upon the
welfare of the inhabitants of the universe_. The basic mistake that
has ever been made in this egoistic world in the judging and
classifying of acts has been the mistake of judging and classifying
them with reference to their effects upon some particular fraction
of the inhabitants of the universe. In pure egoism conduct is judged
as good or bad solely with reference to the results, immediate or
remote, which that conduct produces, or is calculated to produce, on
the _self_. To the savage, that is right or wrong which affects
favourably or unfavourably _himself_ or his _tribe_. And this
sectional spirit of the savage has, as has been shown, characterised
the moral conceptions of the peoples of all times. The practice
human beings have to-day—the practice of those (relatively) broad
and emancipated minds who are large enough to rise above the petty
prejudices and ‘patriotisms’ of the races and corporations of
men, and are able to view ‘the world as their country’ (the
world of _human_ beings, of course)—the practice such minds have of
estimating conduct solely with reference to its effects upon the
human species of animals is a practice which, while infinitely
broader and more nearly ultimate than that of the savage, belongs
logically in the same category with it. The partially emancipated
human being who extends his moral sentiments to all the members of
his own species, but denies to all other species the justice and
humanity he accords to his own, is making on a larger scale the same
ethical mess of it as the savage. The only consistent attitude,
since Darwin established the unity of life (and the attitude we
shall assume, if we ever become really civilised), is the attitude
of _universal gentleness and humanity_.

‘The world is my country,’ said Thomas Paine, and every man,
woman, and child capable of appreciating the exalted sentiment
applauded. But ‘the world’ of the great freethinker was
inhabited by _men only_.

The following lines were written by Robert Whitaker, and first
printed in a San Francisco newspaper:

  ‘My Country is the world! I count
  No son of man my foe,
  Whether the warm life currents mount
  And mantle brows like snow,
  Or whether yellow, brown, or black,
  The face that into mine looks back.

  ‘My Native Land is Mother Earth,
  And all men are my kin,
  Whether of rude or gentle birth,
  However steeped in sin;
  Or rich or poor, or great or small,
  I count them brothers one and all.

  ‘My Flag is the star-spangled sky,
  Woven without a seam,
  Where dawn and sunset colours lie,
  Fair as an angel’s dream,
  The Flag that still unstained, untorn,
  Floats over all of mortal born

  ‘My Party is all humankind,
  My Platform, brotherhood;
  I count all men of honest mind
  Who work for human good,
  And for the hope that gleams afar.
  My comrades in the holy war.

  ‘My Country is the world! I scorn
  No lesser love than mine,
  But calmly wait that happy morn
  When all shall own this sign,
  And love of country, as of clan,
  Shall yield to love of Man.’

Robert Whitaker, you are a grand improvement on the ‘jingo.’ But
you are still too small. There are conceptions as much more
prophetic and exalted than yours as your conception is superior to
that of the Figian.

Broad as he is who can look upon all men as his brethren and
countrymen—broad as he is compared with those groundlings called
‘patriots,’ who can see nothing clearly beyond the bounds of the
political unit to which they belong—he is not broad enough. He is
still a _sectionalist_, a _partialist_. He represents but a _stage_
in the process of ethical expansion. He is, in fact, small compared
with the _universalist_, just as the savage is small compared with
the philanthropist. ‘Mankind,’ ‘humanity,’ ‘all men,’
‘the whole human family’—these are big conceptions, too big
for the poor little nubbins of brains with which most millions make
the effort to think. But they are pitifully small compared with that
grand conception of kinship which takes in all the races that live
and move upon the earth. Smaller yet are these conceptions compared
with that sublime and supreme synthesis which embraces not only the
present generation of terrestrial inhabitants, but which extends
longitudinally as well as laterally, extends in time as well as in
space, and embraces the generations which shall grow out of the
existing generation and which are yet unborn—_that conception
which recognises earth-life as a single process, world-wide and
immortal, every part related and akin to every other party and each
generation linked to an unending posterity_.

Every individual, therefore, emancipated enough to judge of acts of
conduct according to their intrinsic natures and consequences rather
than according to some local or traditional bias, cannot help
knowing that the exploitation of birds and quadrupeds for human whim
or convenience is an offence against the laws of morality, not
different in kind from the offences denounced in human laws as
robbery and murder. The creophagist and the hunter exemplify the
same somnambulism, are the authors of the same kind of conduct, and
belong literally in the same category of offenders, as the cannibal
and the slave-driver. To take the life of an ox for his muscles, or
to kill a sheep for his skin is _murder_, and those who do these
things or cause them to be done are _murderers_ just as actually as
highwaymen are who blow off the heads of hapless wayfarers for their
guineas. If these things _seem untrue_ it is not because they _are_
untrue, but because those to whom they seem so _are unable to judge
conduct from the quadrupedal point of view_. If there were in this
world beings as much more clever than Caucasians as Caucasians are
more clever than cows and sheep, and these beings should regard
themselves as the darlings of the gods and should attach a
fictitious dignity and importance to their own lives, but should
look upon Caucasians as simply so much ‘beef’ and ‘mutton,’
these bleached terrorists of the world would in the course of a few
generations of experience probably become sufficiently illumined to
realise that current human conceptions of cows and sheep are not
only preposterous, but fiendish.

VII. The Origin of Provincialism.

Human provincialism, all of it, is the consequence of a common
cause—_the provincialism of the savage_. Back of the provincialism
of the savage is, of course, the antecedent fact of primordial
egoism. The savage is the common ancestor of all men, and as such
has imparted to all men their general characters of mind and heart.
Everything that grows, whether it be a tree, a human being, a grass
blade, or a race, grows from something. This something, this germ or
embryo from which each thing springs, imparts to the thing its
fundamental characters. However far anything may evolve, and however
much it may come to differ superficially from its original, it will
always remain at heart more or less faithful to the facts of its
genesis. This hereditary tendency of everything, this tendency
toward invariability, is the conservative, or inertial tendency of
the universe. All races, colours, and conditions of men—civilised,
slightly civilised, and barbarous—extend back to, and take root
in, savages, just as all savages have probably sprung in some still
more remote period of the past from a single stirp of anthropoids.
The savage is, therefore, the author of human nature and philosophy.
Just as the fish, which is the common ancestor of all amphibians,
reptiles, birds, and mammals, has predetermined the general
structural style of all subsequently evolved vertebrates, so the
savage, as the original ancestor of mankind, has predetermined the
general mental and dispositional make-up of all higher men. That
civilised and semi-civilised men are naturally narrow and
revengeful, selfish and superstitious, and find it next to
impossible to feel and act toward others as they would like to have
others feel and act toward them, is, therefore, not more mysterious
than that vertebrates have red blood, two eyes, two pairs of limbs,
and a backbone with a bulging brain-box at the hither end of it.
Just as the habits, beliefs, and conceptions of the child persist,
often but slightly modified, in the full-grown man or woman, so the
habits, beliefs, and conceptions, formed by the race in its
childhood, continue, under the influence of the same laws of
inertia, on into the more mature stages of racial development. Human
nature changes with great reluctance, and only in its superficial
aspects at that. There are cave-men, men with the primitive ideas
and practices of the Stone Age, and men in the pastoral and hunting
stages of mankind, in all the highest societies of men. There is
scarcely a habit, vice, occupation, amusement, crime, or trait of
character, found among men of the past but may be seen still among
our contemporaries.

Altruism (other-love) is just as natural as egoism (self-love) is.
There is not so much of it in the world as there is of egoism. But
that is simply the misfortune of our place of existence. There is no
reason why there might not have been as much, or even more, under
different conditions. With the same antecedents, nothing can, of
course, happen differently from what does happen. But with different
antecedents, different causes, the results are bound to be
different. Civilised men are not beings of altruism, because they
are not the _effects_ of that kind of _causes_. But there is no
reason why there might not be a world—several of them, in fact, or
even a universeful—where the inhabitants have never known or heard
of such an indelicate thing as of beings preferring themselves to
others—where it is as natural for them to act toward each other
according to what we call the Golden Rule as it is for us
terrestrial heathens to violate it. It is possible to conceive of
beings with even too much altruism. The ideal condition is one of
balanced egoism and altruism—one in which each thinks as much of
others as he does of himself, no more and no less. And if beings
were endowed with natures rendering them not only willing but
_determined_ to act primarily in the interests of others, and this
condition of things were universal, there would be about as much
discord and strife as if everyone acted in the interest of himself.
The Golden Rule among a lot of hypothetical otherists like this
would be the opposite of ours, for, instead of emphasising the
importance of others as we do, they would need to encourage regard
for self. Wouldn’t it seem original to live in a world where men
were sent to gaol for over-benevolence, and where sermons had to be
preached on such texts as, ‘Love thyself as thy neighbour’;
‘It is more blessed to receive than to give’; ‘Avoid doing to
yourself that which you do not like when done to others’; ‘The
Lord loves a cheerful taker’; and the like?

The persistence with which savage ideas and instincts continue to
influence men long after those ideas and instincts have really
become anachronistic and vestigial is well illustrated by civilised
men and women everywhere. The sun continues to ‘rise’ and
‘set’ in all civilised lands just as it used to do to the
savage, although men have long since learned that it does not do
either. Hell, as originally conceived, was an actual subterranean
region, and heaven was an abode located a few hours’ journey above
the supposedly flat earth. To-day we continue to say ‘_up_ to
heaven,’ and ‘_down_ to hell’ (never ‘down to heaven’ and
‘up to hell’), and always think of these places as being thus
relatively located, although it is extremely doubtful whether any
really sane mind continues to believe that hell is on the inside of
the earth (or any place else, for that matter), and although _up_
means simply away from the centre of the earth, and away from the
centre of a ball means literally every possible direction. The
theological theories of the origin, nature, and destiny of man and
of the universe in general, all of which originated in savage or
semi-savage minds, and all of which bear the unmistakable traces of
their origin, continue to cling to the minds of the masses of
civilised men, notwithstanding the inherent absurdity of these
theories, and notwithstanding the fact that their unsoundness is
vouched for by the most positive and unanimous assurances from the
scientific world. Why should civilised men and women, any of them,
be indifferent to the sufferings of others, or find delight in such
loathsome avocations as the fishing and hunting of their
fellow-creatures? Because their ancestors were savages, and they are
not yet sufficiently evolved to be independent of the instincts of
their savage sires. There is no other explanation. No human being
could enjoy seeing a pack of hounds hunt down and rend to pieces a
poor harmless hare—unless he were a savage. No human being could
go out to the abodes of the squirrel and quail, and shoot murderous
balls into their beautiful bodies for food or fun—unless he were a
savage. No human being would lounge all day about the margins of a
brook, blind to the beauties of the stream and the glories of forest
and sky, in order to thrust brutal hooks into the lips of those whom
he deceives, and drag them from their waters to suffocate in the
sun—unless he were a savage. No human being would have palaces and
parks and yachts and equipages, townships of lands, packs of hounds,
and studs of horses, troops of lackeys and nothing to do, when all
around him are the men and women who made this wealth, half clad and
half starved, suffocating in shanties and working like wretches from
morning till night—unless he were a savage. All of these deeds are
savage deeds, deeds of exceeding thoughtlessness and brutality, and,
instead of being enjoyable, are to every emancipated mind positively
painful.

Hunting, fishing, and fighting are the chief occupations of savage
life. Back of the activities displayed in these occupations are
powerful instincts prompting and sustaining them. Civilised peoples
are devoted primarily to the arts of industry and peace. But there
are enough savages in every civilised society, and enough of the
savage spirit in those who pretend to approximate the civilised
state, to give to civilised life a decidedly barbaric aspect. War is
a more or less regular exercise, and killing and competing and
torturing enter largely into the pastimes of all peoples. Next to
eating, fighting, in one form or another, is the favourite pursuit
of men nearly everywhere on holy days and days of leisure. Whenever
human beings have any energy or time left over from what they are
required to spend in maintaining their existence, they use it in
fighting somebody or in watching somebody else fight. And generally
the more brutal and sanguinary the conflict, the more popular and
satisfying it is. Witness the bull-fights and cock-fights of Spain
and Mexico, the fisticuffs of Anglo-Saxons, and the baseball and
slugball battles of the Americans, where eager thousands gather and
roar for hours like hysterical idiots simply to see one animal or
set of animals punish or discredit another. If there are no pigeons
to shoot, or if the community is ruled by men and women who are too
emancipated to allow such things, we make glass birds and heroically
bang away at them, supplying by our imaginations the blood and agony
of real carnage. And if we can’t do anything else, we take some
poor pig, that never did anyone any harm in the world, and grease it
and turn it loose, and then take after it with knives, as Chicago
butchers do on vacation days, and see who can cut its throat the
quickest. This amusement, in pure barbarity, certainly stands pretty
near the top in the list of human pastimes so far invented. Maybe it
is outclassed by that other contest sometimes advertised as a
feature of butchers’ barbecues, in which a band of professional
cutthroats compete to see who can kill, skin, and eviscerate the
largest number of their fellow-beings in a given time.

Games and other performances in which interest is aroused by
contending or killing are all of them entertainments gotten up
primarily for the amusement of the under-exercised savage within us.
The bloody carnivals of the ancient Romans, which seem so
incomprehensible to the people of to-day, find their diabolical
parallels right here in our high-sniffing civilisation. The
bull-pen, where poor quadrupeds are baited by gorgeous assassins for
the amusement of Castilian communities, and the cockpit and the
prize-ring, where irate fowls and naked thugs peck and pound each
other to insensibility for the entertainment of blood-loving mobs,
are the legitimate successors of the gladiatorial arena of the
Romans. The gladiatorial horror is not changed, either in its nature
or functions, by changing the combatants to cocks and bulls. The
ringside roars that rise to-day beside the Tagus and the Hudson over
the fatal thrust of the matador or the knockout lunge of the
pugilist are howls of barbaric elation arising from the satisfaction
of the same instincts as those which seventeen centuries ago made
amphitheatres thunder at the spectacle of gutted Gauls. The ability
to enjoy strife and suffering in one form is not different in kind
from the ability to be entertained by strife and suffering in any
other form. Beings who can follow in riotous glee the terrified form
of a fleeing stag, or shout ecstatically at sight of the
death-stagger of a mangled ox, are psychologically equipped to go
into raptures over the blood-curdling combustions of a literal hell.

Few pastimes indulged in by civilised peoples are more horrible to
an emancipated mind than that of bull-fighting. It is the national
amusement of Spain, and is carried on among all peoples who have
acquired their natures and institutions from the Spanish. ‘Every
Sunday afternoon, whenever the weather permits, 14,000 or 15,000 men
and women, representing every class of society, mothers and
grandmothers, priests and monks, assemble at the Plaza de Toros in
Madrid to witness the most brutal spectacle the human taste
approves. Six bulls are tortured and worried until they are
exhausted. Then they are killed by the thrusts of the sword of a
matador, who is the most popular person in the community and makes
more money than any other man. Often as many as twelve horses are
ripped open by the horns of the infuriated bulls, and are allowed to
die in the presence of the audience, with blood gushing from their
wounds and their entrails dragging upon the ground. This sort of
thing is carried on not only in Madrid, but is a regular weekly
festival in all the cities of Spain. The horses are blindfolded, so
they cannot even see what attacks them. The men who torture the
bulls have wooden screens behind which they can dodge when pursued,
and if one of the baited creatures crowds too closely upon any of
its tormentors, the other matadors throw a blanket over its head. It
is not sport, for the poor bulls have no chance whatever to escape
or to fight back. It is simply slow butchery, an exhibition of
unmitigated cowardice and cruelty. And yet, although the Spanish
people are the most religious people of Europe, 95 per cent, of the
population approve this atrocious barbarism—not only approve it,
but demand that the King shall appear in the royal box at every
bull-fight, or have his throne upset.’

The notorious ‘Juke’ family of criminals, who sprang from a
single ruffian who lived in 1720, has cost the State of New York
millions of dollars in money and incalculable misery and crime. But
the initial savage progenitors of the human species have stocked the
earth with the most stupendous array of wrong-doers—knaves,
felons, kings, warriors, barbarians, butchers, brutalitarians,
kleptomaniacs, and thugs—that has ever (let us hope) brought
damnation to a world.

VIII. Universal Ethics.∂

There are the same reasons for the recognition by human beings of
ethical relations to non-human beings as there are for the
recognition by human beings of ethical relations among themselves
Analyse the reasons for being considerate toward men, any variety of
men, and you will find the same reasons to exist for being
considerate toward all men. And analyse the reasons for being
altruistic toward men—for being kind and sympathetic toward
them—and you will find the same reasons to exist for being
altruistic toward those who are not men. The doctrine that we human
beings may perform upon the other inhabitants of the earth all sorts
of injurious acts, and that these acts when so performed by us are
perfectly right and proper, but that these same things when done by
others to us are crimes, is the logic of pure brutalitarianism. It
is a doctrine utterly without intelligence, at variance with every
sentiment of justice and humanity, and has no legitimate existence
outside the fibrous brains of ruffians.

_Right_ and _wrong_ are qualities belonging to two diverse kinds of
conduct. They are the qualities which render conduct respectively
proper and improper. All terrestrial races (unless the very lowest)
have the power of experiencing two kinds of conscious states—the
desirable (pleasurable) and the undesirable (painful). Now, if
beings were indifferent as to what sort of conscious states entered
into and made up their experiences, there would manifestly be no
such thing as propriety and impropriety in the causing of these
states. But they are not indifferent. The pleasurable experiences
are the experiences all beings are seeking, and the painful ones are
the ones they are all seeking to avoid. Those acts which help or
tend to help beings to those experiences for which they are striving
are, therefore, right and proper, and are, they and their authors,
called _good_. While those acts which compel beings to undergo that
which they are striving to avoid are improper and wrong, and are,
they and their authors, called _bad_. Kindness, courtesy, justice,
mercy, generosity, sympathy, love, and the like, are good, and
selfishness, cruelty, deceit, pillage, injustice, and murder, are
bad, because they are respectively the promoters and destroyers of
wellbeing and happiness in the world.

But these two kinds of conduct produce the same respective effects
upon non-human beings as they do upon human beings. The emotion of a
mangled sensory—is it not the same terrible thing whether the
sensory hang to the brain of a quadruped or a man? Do shelter and
food not affect shivering and empty cattle, horses, and fowls,
precisely as they do human beings? Thunder harsh words at your dog.
Will he not shrink and suffer, just as your child or hired hand will
under like acts of terrorisation? Speak kindly to him, love him, and
accord to him a quarter of the consideration you claim for yourself.
Is he not caused to be one of the happiest and most devoted of
associates? To take squirrels or song-birds, the most active of
animals, and shut them up in narrow cages, and keep them there shut
off from their companions and their own green world their whole
lives long; to take an animal as sensitive and high-minded as the
horse and put a pack on his back and a bit in his mouth, and then
strike him dozens of times a day with a lash whose touch is like
fire; to shoot off the legs and wings of birds and fill their vitals
with lead, and leave them to flounder out a lingering death in the
reeds and grasses—do these things not cause misery and desolation
in the world? To place temptations in the way of fur-bearing animals
and induce them to enter carefully concealed traps, and then allow
them to remain in the villainous clutches of these devices, not
minutes, but hours, perhaps days, until it suits the convenience of
the ensnarer to knock out their brains, or until, crazed by pain,
the poor wretches eat off their own limbs and escape—is not this a
_monstrous_ thing to do?

Oh that men everywhere were moved by the deep tenderness and the
all-embracing sympathy of poor Robert Burns, who could apologise
with real feeling to a frightened field-mouse whom he had
accidentally upturned with his plough.

  ‘Wee, sleekit, cow’rin’, tim’rous beastie,
  O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
  Thou needna start awa’ sae hasty,
  Wi’ bick’ring brattle!
  I had be laith to rin and chase thee,
  Wi’ murd’rous pattle!
  ‘I’m truly sorry man’s dominion
  Has broken nature’s social union,
  And justifies that ill opinion
  Which makes thee startle
  At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
  And fellow-mortal.’

Long ago it was said, and truthfully, that the merciful man is
merciful to his ox. The truly kind man, the truly honest and the
truly humane man, is not kind and honest and humane to men only, but
to _all_ beings—to the humble and lowly as well as to the proud
and powerful—_to all that have the misfortune to feel and mourn_.
Benevolence is the same beautiful thing whether it pour sunshine
into the dark and saddened souls of men or into the dark and
saddened souls of other beings. John Howard never hearkened to a
nobler duty when he lifted the darkness that hung over English gaols
than will some inflamed soul some day who hears the cry of the
lonely captives who to-day languish in menagerial dungeons to
satisfy human curiosity. He who will emancipate horses from the hell
in which they pass their lives—make them the associates of men
instead of their slaves—will deserve to stand in the constellation
of the world’s redeemers beside Garrison and Garibaldi. Is there
he who holds in his heart-cups the love and compassion of Buddha?
Let him go where the dagger drips and the heartless pole-axe
crashes, and the meek-eyed millions of the meadows pour out their
innocent existences in the soulless houses of slaughter. Let him
lift from off the races the hounding incubus of fear, give back to
them their birthright—the right to a free, unhunted life—and
make the great monster (man) to be their high-priest and friend.

  ‘Among the noblest in the land,
  Though he may count himself the least,
  That man I honour and revere
  Who, without favour, without fear,
  In the great city dares to stand
  The friend of every friendless beast,
  And tames with his unflinching hand
  The brutes that wear our form and face,
  The were-wolves of the human race.’

If to do good is to generate welfare, then to cause welfare to a
horse, a bird, a butterfly, or a fish, is to do good just as truly
as to cause welfare to men. And if to do evil is to cause
unhappiness and illfare, then to cause these things to one
individual or race is evil just as certainly as to cause them to any
other individual or race. And if to put one’s self in the place of
others, and to act toward them as one would wish them to act toward
him, is the one great rule—the Golden Rule—by which men are to
gauge their conduct when acting toward each other, then this is also
the one great rule—the Golden Rule—by which men are to regulate
their conduct toward all beings. There is no escape from these
conclusions, except for the savage and the fool.[1]

1. The deliberate causing of misery and death to criminals, whether
they be human or non-human beings, individuals or species, is not,
as is sometimes supposed, a violation or reversal of the general
theory of ethics. When they are prompted by a spirit of tenderness
and universal goodness rather than by a spirit of revenge, penalties
are justifiable by the everyday assumption that it is sometimes wise
to inflict or undergo a certain amount of illfare in order to avoid
or forestall a larger amount. The problems of universal penology are
not different from those of human penology, practically the same
cases and perplexities being presented by all delinquents. See
‘Better-World Philosophy,’ by the author, pp. 218-227, for a
discussion of the function of punishment.

IX. The Psychology of Altruism.∂

The growth of altruism in the world has been largely cotemporaneous
with the growth of the power of _sympathy_. Sympathy is the emotion
a being has when by means of his imagination he gets so actually
into the place of another that his own feelings duplicate more or
less the feelings of that other. It is the ability or the impulse to
weep with those who weep, and rejoice with those who are glad.
Sympathy is the substance and the only sure basis of morality—the
only tie of sincere and lasting mutualism. Men have always been to a
considerable extent, and are yet, disposed to think about and act
toward each other from motives of mutual fear or advantage. But such
motives are not the highest nor the most reliable bonds of
fellowship and unity. True altruism and solidarity—true expansion
and universalisation of the self—are found in sympathy. It is
impossible for one individual to do in his heart to another as he
would that another should do to him, unless he is at all times able
and willing to get into the place of that other, and to realise in
his own consciousness the results to the other of his acts. It is
only when there is such an intertwining of the consciousnesses that
the joys and sorrows of each individual consist to a greater or less
extent of the reflexes of the joys and sorrows around him that there
exists true social oneness. The great task of reforming the universe
is, therefore, since the world is so steeped in selfishness and
hate, the task of endowing beings, or the task of stocking the
universe with beings, with dispositions to get out of themselves. If
the far-away first parents of men and women had been broad-minded
beings instead of narrow—had been beings whose most natural
impulse was to be kind to others, and whose sympathies were as
far-reaching as feeling—terrestrial life would not to-day present
to the all-seeing understanding the disheartening spectacle it does
present, and the long struggle for justice and amelioration would
not have been.

The primary fact prompting and underlying the exploitation of one
being or set of beings by another is, and has always been.
_Selfishness_. Whenever and wherever one people have exploited
another—whether the exploiters have been savages, Jews, Romans,
Caucasians, or men—they have done so primarily because the act of
exploitation was a convenience and pleasure to them and in harmony
with their natures. This selfishness, in the case of civilised
peoples, has been acquired by them through inheritance from the
savage tribes from whom they have severally evolved; and the
selfishness of the savage is a legacy from the animal forms from
whom the savage has come. Human selfishness is simply an eddy of an
impulse that is universal—an impulse that has been implanted in
the nature of the life-process of the earth by the manner in which
life has been evolved.

But there is another fact which has generally, if not always,
contributed to every act of exploitation in this world, and that is
_Ignorance_—ignorance on the part of those who have executed the
exploitation: not ignorance of grammar or geography or any other
particular branch of human information or philosophy, but ignorance
regarding those upon whom they have worked their
will—unconsciousness on the part of the exploiters of the
similarity which actually existed between themselves and their
victims. However free an individual may be from naturally selfish
impulses, he will never act in an altruistic manner toward others
unless he is able to realise that these others, are similar to
himself, and that acts toward them produce results of good and evil,
of welfare and suffering, similar to what these same acts produce
when done to himself. Altruistic conduct implies not only altruistic
impulses, but altruistic conceptions as well. Tyrants hold, and have
always held, themselves to be an entirely different order of beings
from their subjects, and far more deserving. Read history—it is a
tale told over and over. Between those who have ruled and those who
have served—between the Ends and the Means—has ever yawned a
chasm, wide, deep, and impassable. The exploited have always been,
according to their masters, a fibrous set, unfavoured and unthought
of by the gods, endowed with little feeling or intelligence, and
brought into existence more or less expressly as adjuncts to their
masters. This is the theory of the savage, and it is the theory of
all those who have inherited his narrow and unfeeling philosophy.
The Gentile had no rights because he was a ‘pagan.’ He was a
human being, it is true, and had come forth from the womb of woman,
just as the Jew had. But he spoke a different language from the
Jews, had his own ways of life, belonged to a different order of
things, and was irritatingly unconcerned about the gods and
traditions of the ‘chosen people.’ The Gaul had no rights that
were inconvenient to Romans, because he was a ‘barbarian.’ The
fact that he had blood, and brains, and nerves, and love of life,
and ambitions, and that he suffered when he was subjected to
humiliation, hard treatment, and death, just as Romans did, was
never really thought of by the arrogant and reckless Romans. Romans
never realised in their minds what it meant for non-Romans to be
treated as they were treated; and one reason why they never realised
it was because it was convenient for them not to do so. To kill or
enslave a Gaul or German we now know, who are able to judge these
acts from an un-Roman and unprejudiced point of view, was
practically the same crime as to kill or enslave a Roman. But it was
not so to Romans. The most trifling offence against a Roman citizen
was enough, according to Roman law, to condemn the offender to
execution. But the most horrible outrages, when committed by Romans
upon non-Romans, were nothing. Romans always thought and felt _from
the standpoint of Romans_. They never got over into the world of the
‘barbarians,’ and really pictured to themselves—_really
felt_—the misfortunes of their victims. It was the same way with
the black man in the eyes of the white man a generation or two ago;
it is the same way with the brown man to-day. The black man had no
rights that were inconvenient for the white man to respect, because
he was a ‘nigger,’ and had no ‘soul,’ and was the offspring
of Ham. This spirit of unconsciousness, which has been so prominent
throughout the history of mankind, still survives in the minds of
civilised men and women to-day, as is shown by the conception (or
_mis_conception) cherished by the Caucasian toward the ‘nigger,’
by the Christian toward the ‘heathen,’ by the Moslem toward the
‘infidel,’ by the Protestant toward the Catholic, and _vice
versâ_, by the plutocrat toward the proletarian, by men toward
women, and by the human being toward the ‘animal.’

The psychology of the exploitation of nonhuman beings by human
beings is not different in kind from the psychology of any other act
of exploitation. The great first cause of man’s inhumanity to
not-men is the same precisely as the great first cause of man’s
inhumanity to man—_Selfishness_—blind, brutal, unconscionable
egoism. Monopolist-like man thinks and cares only about himself. He
has the heart of the bully—deriving from the contemplation of his
fiendish supremacy a sort of monstrous satisfaction. But there is
also present in this case the same half-sincere, half-fostered
nescience as in all other cases of exploitation. The ox, the hare,
the bird, and the fish have no rights in the world in which they
live other than those that are convenient for men to allow to them,
because they are ‘animals.’ They are assumed to belong to an
order of beings entirely different from that to which human beings
belong. They are filled with nerves, and brains, and bloodvessels;
they love life, and bleed, and struggle, and cry out when their
veins are opened, just as human beings do; they have the same
general form and structure of body, their bodies are composed of the
same organs busied with the same functions; and they are descended
from the same ancestors and have been developed in the same world
through the operation of the same great laws as we ourselves have.
But all of these things, and dozens of others just as significant,
are disregarded by us in our hard-hearted determination to exploit
them. We have a set of words and phrases which we use in speaking of
ourselves, and another very different set for other beings. The very
same things are called by different names with wholly different
connotations depending on whether it is a man that is referred to or
some other being. It is ‘murder’ to take the life of a human
being, but to take the life of a sheep or a cow is only ‘knocking
it on the head.’ A man may murder squirrels or birds all
day—that is, he may do that which when done to human beings is
called murder—but it is only ‘sport’ when done to these humble
inhabitants of the wilds. The dead body of a man is a ‘corpse’;
the dead body of a quadruped is only a ‘carcass.’ A race of
horses or dogs is a ‘breed’; but a breed of men and women is
always respectfully referred to as a race. We perpetuate our
blindness by the use of words. We accommodate our consciences by
inventing ways of looking at things that will bring out our own
lustre and relieve us from the ghastly faces of our crimes. For the
human race to rob and kill other races is the same kind of activity
exactly as it is for human beings to rob and kill each other. But it
is not considered so to-day—except by a few lost-caste
‘visionaries’ scattered here and there over Christendom, and
some millions of ‘heathens’ in Asia.

A short time ago a series of letters came into my hands written from
Burmah by an American missionary in that country. According to this
writer, one of the greatest obstacles the missionaries have to
contend with in their work there is the hostility aroused in the
people by the killing and flesh-eating habits of the missionaries
themselves. The native inhabitants, who are the most compassionate
of mankind, look upon the Christian missionaries, who kill and eat
cows and shoot monkeys for pastime, as being little better than
cannibals. Contemplate the presumption necessary to cause an
individual to leave behind him fields white for mission-work, and
travel, at great expense, halfway round the earth in order to preach
a narrow, cruel, anthropocentric gospel to a people of so great
tenderness and humanity as to be kind even to ‘animals’ and
enemies!

We human beings feel at liberty to commit any kind of outrage upon
other races, and these outrages are looked upon by us as nothing.
But the most trifling annoyances of other races are deemed by us of
sufficient consequence to justify us in visiting upon them the most
fearful retributions. We can break up the laboriously built home of
a mother mouse in the rubbish-heap of our back yard, scatter the
pink babies of that mother over the ground to die of cold and
starvation, and cause the frightened mother to flee at the risk of
her very life—all to give to the terrier and ourselves a little
moment of savage pastime. But if that same mother, some hard
winter’s night, when she has failed in her search elsewhere for
something to stay her hunger, comes into our larder and nibbles a
bit of cheese or a few mouthfuls of crust from our pie, although she
takes but a crumb in all, and is as dainty in her feeding as a lady,
we immediately get out our traps and poisons and storm around as if
a murder or some other irreparable wrong had been committed. We
think of our acts toward non-human peoples, when we think of them at
all, _entirely from the human point of view_. We never take the time
to put ourselves in the places of our victims. We never take the
trouble to get over into their world, and realise what is happening
over there as a result of our doings toward them. It is so much more
comfortable not to do so—_so much more comfortable to be blind and
deaf and insane_. We go on quieting our consciences, as best we can,
by the fact that everybody else nearly is engaged in the same
business as we are, and by the fact that so few ever say anything
about the matter—anaesthetised, as it were, by the universality of
our iniquities and the infrequency of disquieting reminders.

Many years ago an eccentric but gifted Englishman had a dream in
which he saw the fortunes of the world reversed. Man was no longer
master, but victim. The earth was ruled by the birds and quadrupeds,
the mice and monkeys, who proceeded to inflict upon their erstwhile
tyrant the same cruelties he had hitherto inflicted upon them.
‘Multitudes of human beings were systematically fattened for the
carnivora. They were frequently forwarded to great distances by
train, in trucks, without food or water. Large numbers of infants
were constantly boiled down to form broth for invalid animals. In
over-populous districts babies were given to malicious young cats
and dogs to be taken away and drowned. Boys were hunted by terriers
and stoned to death by frogs. Mice were a good deal occupied in
setting mantraps, baited with toasted cheese, in poor
neighbourhoods. Gouty old gentlemen were hitched to night-cabs, and
forced to totter, on their weak ankles and diseased joints, to
clubs, where fashionable young colts were picked up, and taken, at
such speed as whipcord could extract, to visit chestnut fillies.
Flying figures in scarlet coats, buckskins, and top-boots were run
down by packs of foxes that had nothing else to do. Old cock-grouse
strutted out for a morning’s sport, and came in to talk of how
many brace of country gentlemen they had bagged. Gamekeepers lived a
precarious life in holes and caves. They were perpetually harried by
game and vermin; held fast in steel traps, their toes were nibbled
by stoats and martens; and finally, their eyes picked out by owls
and kites, they were gibbeted alive on trees, head downwards, until
the termination of their martyrdom. In one especially tragic case, a
naturalist in spectacles dodged about painfully among the topmost
branches of a wood, while a mias underneath, armed with a gun,
inflicted on him dreadful wounds. A veterinary surgeon of Alfort was
stretched on his back, his arms and legs secured to posts, in order
that a horse might cut him up alive for the benefit of an equine
audience; but the generous steed, incapable of vindictive feelings,
with one disdainful stamp on the midriff, crushed the wretch’s
life out’.[1]

The following is from the Chinese. The speaker is an ox:

‘I request, good people, that you will listen to what I have to
say. _In the whole world there is no distress equal to that of the
ox_. In spring and summer, autumn and winter, I diligently put forth
my strength; during the four seasons there is no respite to my
labours. I drag the plough, a thousand-pound weight fastened to my
shoulders. Hundreds of thousands of lashes are, by a leather whip,
inflicted upon me. Curses and abuses, in a thousand forms are poured
upon me. I am driven, with threatenings, rapidly along, and not
allowed to stand still. Through the dry ground or the deep water I
with difficulty drag the plough, with an empty belly; the tears flow
from both my eyes. I hope in the morning that I shall be early
released, but I am detained until the evening. If, with a hungry
stomach, I eat the grass in the middle of the field, the whole
family, great and small, insultingly abuse me. I am left to eat any
species of herbs among the hills, but you, my master, yourself
receive the grain that is sown in the field. Of the _chen paddy_ you
make rice; of the _no paddy_ you make wine. You have cotton, wheat,
and herbs of a thousand different kinds. Your garden is full of
vegetables. When your men and women marry, amid all your felicity,
if there be a want of money, you let me out to others. When pressed
for the payment of duties, you devise no plans, but take and sell
the ox that ploughs your field. When you see that I am old and weak,
you sell me to the butcher to be killed. The butcher conducts me to
his home and soon strikes me in the forehead with the head of an
iron hatchet, after which I am left to die in the utmost distress.
My skin is peeled off, my bones are scraped, and my skin is taken to
cover the drum by which the country is alarmed.’

  ‘Witness the patient ox, with stripes and yells
  Driven to the slaughter, goaded as he runs
  To madness, while the savage at his heels
  Laughs at the frantic sufferer’s fury.’

The angler brags about his ‘haul’ and the hunter about his
‘bag’ and his ‘big game’ with as little realisation of what
these things mean as the slave-master boasts of his ‘niggers.’
Men talk of ‘chops’ and ‘steaks’ and ‘roasts’ with the
same somnambulism, the same profound unconsciousness of what these
things really signify in the psychic economies of the world, as the
conqueror contemplates his ‘captives,’ the robber his
‘spoil,’ or the savage his ‘scalps.’ If before the eyes and
in the mind of each individual who sits unconcernedly down to a
parsleyed ‘steak’ could rise the facts in the biography of that
‘steak’—the happy heifer on the far western meadows, the
fateful day when she is forced by the drover’s whip from her
home,[2] the arduous ‘drive’ to the village and her baffled
efforts to escape, the crowding into cars and the long, painful
journey, the silent heartaches and the low, pitiful moans, the
terrible hunger and thirst and cold, her arrival, bruised and
bewildered, in the city, her dazed mingling with others, the great
murder-house, the prods and bellowings, the treacherous crash of the
brain-axe, the death drop and shudder, the butcher’s knife, the
gush of blood from her pretty throat, and the glassy gaze of her
dead but beautiful eyes—there would be, in spite of the inherent
hardness of the human heart, a great drawing back from those acts
which render such fearful things necessary. If human beings _could
only realise_ what the hare suffers, or the stag, when it is pursued
by dogs, horses, and men bent on taking its life, or what the fish
feels when it is thrust through and flung into suffocating gases, no
one of them, not even the most recreant, could find pleasure in such
work. _How painful_ to a person of tenderness and enlightenment is
_even the thought_ of rabbit-shootings, duck-slaughterings,
bear-hunts, quail-killing expeditions, tame pigeon massacres, and
the like! And yet with what light-hearted enthusiasm the mindless
ruffians who do these atrocious things enter upon them! One would
think that grown men would be ashamed to arm themselves and go out
with horses and hounds and engage in such babyish and unequal
contests as sportsmen usually rely on for their peculiar
‘glory.’ And they would be if grown men were not so often simply
able-bodied bullies. _If human beings could only realise what it
means to live in a world and associate day after day with other
beings more intelligent and powerful than themselves, and yet be
regarded by these more intelligent individuals simply as merchandise
to be bought and sold, or as targets to be shot at, they would hide
their guilty heads in shame and horror_.

The Being from whose breaking heart gushed these lines of sorrow and
sympathy on seeing a wounded hare was a god:

  ‘Inhuman man! curse on thy barbarous art,
  And blasted be thy murder-aiming eye:
  May never pity soothe thee with a sigh,
  Nor ever pleasure glad thy cruel heart!

  ‘Go, live, poor wanderer of the wood and field
  The bitter little that of life remains;
  No more the thickening brakes and verdant plains
  To thee shall home, or food, or pastime yield.

  ‘Seek, mangled one, some place of wonted rest,
  No more of rest, but now thy dying bed;
  The sheltering rushes whistling o’er thy head.
  The cold earth with thy bloody bosom pressed.

  ‘Oft, as by winding Nith I, musing, wait
  The sober eve or hail the cheerful dawn,
  I’ll miss thee sporting o’er the dewy lawn.
  And curse the ruffian’s aim and mourn thy hapless fate.’

We human beings, in our conduct toward the races of beings
associated with us on this planet, are almost pure _savages_. We are
not even half civilised. And this fact is certain to bring upon us
the criticism and condemnation of the more enlightened generations
to come. The fact is apparent to-day, however—just as apparent as
the barbarity of the Romans—to everyone who will take the trouble
to rid himself of the prejudices which enslave and blind him, and
view human phenomena from an un-human, extra-terrestrial point of
view.

To most persons—to all except to a few—everything is simply a
matter of habit and education. And a majority of persons, too, can
become educated to one thing about as easily and completely as they
can to another. In Mr. Huxley’s ‘Man’s Place in Nature’
there is reprinted from an old volume the picture of a butcher’s
shop as it is said to have existed among the savage Anziques of
Africa in the sixteenth century. Mr. Huxley says that the original
engraving claims to represent an actual fact, and that he has
himself no doubt but it does really stand for just what it purports
to represent, especially since the fact has been corroborated by Du
Chaillu in comparatively recent times. The fact for which this old
picture stands is a good illustration of the power of custom in
shaping human ideas. In this savage ‘market’ pretty much the
same line of goods appears as is found in modern ‘markets,’
except that, instead of the quartered corpses of sheep and bullocks,
there hang the shoulders, thighs, and gory heads of men. The butcher
is represented as standing beside the chopping-block in the act of
cutting up the leg of a man. A child’s head and other fragments of
the human body are piled up on another block, and behind these on
pegs are ranged the more pretentious wares of the establishment.
‘Presently we passed a woman,’ says Du Chaillu, in speaking of
the cannibalism of the Fans, who were probably identical with those
referred to two centuries earlier as Anziques. ‘She bore with her
a piece of the thigh of a human body, just as we should go to market
and carry thence a roast of steak.’ We can easily imagine (by the
help of the sights we see every day) the anthropophagous crowd
standing around giving their early morning orders, and the
enterprising assassin hustling about to wait on them. One of them
wants an arm, another wants a leg, another a liver, another a
half-dozen nice fat ribs. One fellow wants a tender ‘cut’ of
young girl’s sirloin, and another would like an old man’s calf
for soup. A little naked urchin, who has had to wait a long time in
order to get a chance to buy anything at all, exchanges a few shells
for a section of human bologna. One fellow wants to know the price
of the boy’s head which lies on the neighbouring block, and a
woman complains that the baby’s brains which she bought the day
before, and which were recommended as being especially ‘fresh and
nice,’ turned out to be ‘bad.’ We can see them go home with
their gruesome purchases, cook them, and sit down and eat them,
discussing their flavour or their lack of it, and remarking their
tenderness, toughness, or juiciness, and finally throwing the bones
out to the dogs—all with as little thought of the immorality of it
as ‘Thanksgiving’ gluttons have to-day at their feasts of blood.
There may have been an occasional ‘visionary’ among these people
fanatical enough to ‘refuse to eat meat,’ or even to protest
against the practice. Probably there was. There generally are a few
such discordants in every generation of vipers. But ‘fanatics’
in those days were in all likelihood, as they are to-day, too few to
be troublesome.

To anyone familiar with the pliability of the human conscience, or
with the soundness and depth of intellectual sleep, these things are
neither impossible nor strange. There is so little looking into the
essence of things, so little looking at things as they are, and so
much thinking and doing as we are accustomed or told to think and
do—there are, in fact, so few who can really think at all—that
if we had been accustomed and taught to do so from childhood, and
the world were practically unanimous in its conduct and teachings on
the matter, very few of us indeed would not sit down to a breakfast
of scrambled infant’s brains, a luncheon of cold boiled aunt, or a
dinner of roast uncle, with as little compunction, perhaps with the
same horrible merriment, as we to-day attend a ‘barbecue’ or a
‘turkey.’ Why should we not make hash and sausages out of our
broken-down grandfathers and grandmothers just as we do out of our
worn-out horses, and help out the pigeons at our killing carnivals
with a few live peasants? How much more artistic and civilised to
pile our tables on holy days with the gold and crimson of the fields
and orchards than to load them with the dead! And yet how strangely
few are mature enough to care anything at all about the matter.

Oh, the helplessness and irresponsibility of the human mind! There
is no spontaneity, no originality, only the dead level of the
machine. How impossible it is for us to think, to discover anything
unassisted, to perceive anything after it has been pointed out to us
even, if it is a little different from what we are used to! This, it
seems to me, is one of the most pathetic things in all this
world—this illimitable impotence, this powerlessness to inspect
things from any other point of view than the one we inherit when we
come into the world; to be a knave or lunatic (or the next thing to
it), and never have the slightest suspicion of the fact. The human
mind will certainly not always be this way. It will surely be
different some time. It seems incredible that the planet will drag
along in disgrace this way forever. The men of Europe and America
are not so primitive as the junglemen, and the junglemen are
superior in some respects to the quadrupeds and reptiles, and this
gives reason for a little hope. _But when that is the question, when
will it be? In what distant time will the Golden Dream of our
prophetic hours come to this poor darkened larva of a world?_ Ages
upon ages after our little existences have gone out, and the
detritus of our wasted bodies has wandered long in the labyrinths of
the sod or been sown by aimless gusts over our native hills.

1. Hamley: _Our Poor Relations_; Boston, 1872.
2. I have many times seen cows chased all over their native
premises, round and round, through fields and barnyards, across
streams and over fences—chased until the poor things were utterly
exhausted, and whipped and beaten until their faces and backs were
covered with wounds—before they could be compelled to leave for
ever the old farm where they had been born and raised.

X. Anthropocentric Ethics.

Anthropocentricism, which drifted down as a tradition from ancient
times, and which for centuries shaped the theories of the Western
world, but whose respectability among thinking people has now nearly
passed away, was, perhaps, the boldest and most revolting expression
of human provincialism and conceit ever formulated by any people. It
was the doctrine that man was the centre about whom revolved all
facts and interests whatsoever; and Judaism and its two children,
Christianity and Mahometanism, were responsible for it. Everything,
according to this conception, was interpreted in terms of human
utility. Everything was made for man—including women. The sun and
moon were luminaries, not worlds, hung there by the fatherly
manufacturer of things for the convenience and delight of his
children. The stars were perforations in the overarching concave
through which eavesdropping prophets peered into celestial secrets,
and errand-angels came and went with messages between gods and men.
Not only the spheres in space, but the earth and all it
contained—the rivers, seas, and seasons, all the plants that grow,
and all the flowers that blow, and all the millions that swim and
suffer in the waters and skies—were, according to this remorseless
notion, the soulless adjuncts of man. Intrinsically they were
meaningless. They had significance only as they served the human
species. The hues and perfumes of flowers, the songs of birds, the
dews, the breezes, the rains, the rocks, the ‘beasts of the field
and the fowls of the air,’ the great forests, the mighty
mountains, the fearful solitudes, even famine and pestilence, were
all made for the being with the reinless imagination. Luther
believed that the fly—festive little _Musca domestica_, who
inhabits our homes, and sometimes unwittingly wanders over our
tender places—was a pestiferous invention of the devil,
maliciously sent to annoy him in his meditations. Garlic grew on the
swamp brim as a handy antidote for human malaria. Fruits ripened in
the summertime because the acids and juices which they contained
were believed to be necessary for man’s health and refreshment.
The great muscles of the ox were made to provide men with delicacies
and leisure. The cloak of the ewe was made without any special
thought, or without any thought at all, of the comforts of the ewe.
It was placed there on the ewe by an all-tender creator, to be torn
by his images from her bleeding back and worn. The fossil forms
found in the rocks were not the _bonâ fide_ remains of creatures
that had lived and perished when the calcareous foundations of the
continents were forming in ancient sea-beds. They were counterfeits,
slyly designed by a suspicious providence, and sandwiched among the
strata ‘to test human faith.’ The rainbow was a phenomenon with
which the laws of reflection and refraction had nothing whatever to
do. It was a sign or seal stamped on the retreating storms as a
pledge that submersion would not be again used as a punishment for
sinners. The universal ruler was conceived to be an individual of
transcendent power and respectability, but was supposed to spend the
most of his time and a good deal of anxiety on the regulation and
repair of his illustrious likenesses.

The history of intellectual evolution is the history of
disillusionment. The stars, we now know, are not hatchways, but
worlds. They burn because they are fire. They blaze and circle in
obedience to their own unchangeable inertias, just as the earth
does. They blazed and wheeled when the elemental matters of the
earth mingled indistinguishably with the vapours of the sun, and
they will blaze and wheel when the last inhabitant of this clod has
dissolved into the everlasting atoms. The earth is not the capital
of cosmos nor the subject of celestial anxiety. The earth is a
satrap of the sun—a subordinate among servants, not a sovereign
with a retinue of stars. The earth and its contents were not made
for man. They were not made at all. They were evolved. The concaves
of the sea have been hollowed, the mountains upheaved, and the
continents planted and peopled, by the same tendencies as those that
hold the universes in their grasp. The primal matters of the earth
came out of the substance of the sun, and by the play and activity
of these elements and the play and activity of their derivatives
were evolved all the multitudinous forms of land, fluid, plant,
animal, and society. The flowers that ‘blush unseen’ do not
necessarily ‘waste their sweetness on the desert air,’ as the
poet so melodiously imagines. The colours and scents of flowers
serve their purposes—which are to secure the services of insects
in fertilisation—quite as well when unperceived, as when perceived
by human senses. The non-human races of beings were not made for
human beings. They were evolved—the higher forms from the lower
forms, and the lower forms from still lower—just as the higher
societies of men have been evolved, under the eye of history, out of
barbarism and savagery. They are our ancestors. They have made human
life and civilisation possible. They made their homes on primeval
land patches when the continents we creep over were sleeping in the
seas. They lived and loved and suffered and died in order that a
being intelligent enough to analyse himself and recreant enough to
pick their bones might come into the world.

There are supposed to be something like a million (maybe there are
several million) species of inhabitants living on the earth. The
human species is one of these. Not more than a few thousand of these
species are seriously advantageous to men. The harmful and useless
species are many times more numerous than the helpful. Now, if the
999,999 non-human species were made for the human species, why were
the hundreds of thousands of species made that are of no possible
human importance, and the hundreds of thousands of other species
that are a positive injury? And if by some miraculous stretch of
imagination the 999,999 species now living on the earth are
conceived to have been made for man, why were the 10,000,000 or
15,000,000 of species made that lived and passed away before there
was a human being in existence. Perhaps the traditionist will
say—accustomed as he is to treat syllogisms with contempt—that
they were made to invigorate human ‘faith.’

If the age of the human species be estimated at 50,000 years and the
age of the life-process at 100,000,000 years, the time during which
man has been on the earth is, when compared with the entire period
during which the planet has been tenanted, as 1 to 2,000. And the
time during which the earth has been inhabited—immense as that
time is when compared with the little span of human history—is
also insignificant when compared with the enormous lapse of time
during which the planet was slowly cooling and solidifying
preliminary to the existence of life. And the entire life of the
planet—inconceivably vast as it is—is as nothing compared with
that eternity, that duration without beginning or close, during
which the sidereal millions have undergone, and are destined to
continue to undergo, their countless and immeasurable
transformations.

It is about as profound to suppose that the earth and its contents,
and the suns, stars, and systems of space, were all made for a
single species inhabiting an obscure ball located in a remote
quarter of the universe as it is to suppose that the gigantic body
of the elephant was made for the wisp of hair on the tip of its
tail. _Man_ is _not_ the _end_, he is but an _incident_, of the
infinite elaborations of Time and Space.

XI. Ethical Implications of Evolution.

The doctrine of organic evolution, which forever established the
common genesis of all animals, sealed the doom of
anthropocentricism. Whatever the inhabitants of this world were or
were thought to be before the publication of ‘The Origin of
Species,’ they never could be anything since then but a _family_.
The doctrine of evolution is probably the most important revelation
that has come to the world since the illuminations of Galileo and
Copernicus. The authors of the Copernican theory enlarged and
corrected human understanding by disclosing to man the comparative
littleness of his world—by discovering that the earth, which had
up to that time been supposed to be the centre and capital of
cosmos, is in reality a satellite of the sun. This heliocentric
discovery was hard on human conceit, for it was the first broad hint
man had thus far received of his true dimensions. The doctrine of
evolution has had, and is having, and is destined to continue to
have, a similarly correcting effect on the naturally narrow
conceptions of men. It tends to fry the conceit out of us. It has
been impossible since Darwin for any sane and honest man to go
around bragging about having been ‘made in the image of his
maker,’ or to successfully lay claim to a more honourable origin
than the rest of the creatures of the earth. And if men had accepted
the logical consequences of Darwin’s teachings, the world would
not to-day—a half-century after his revelation—be filled with
practices which find their only support and justification in
out-of-date traditions. But logical consequences, as Huxley
observes, are the official scarecrows of that large and prolific
class of defectives usually known as fools. The doctrine of
evolution is accepted in one form or another by practically all who
think. It is taught even in school primers. But while the _biology_
of evolution is scarcely any longer questioned, the _psychology_ and
_ethics_ of the Darwinian revelation, though following from the same
premises, and almost as inevitably, are yet to be generally
realised. Darwin’s revelation, like every other revelation that
has come to the world, is perceived most tardily by those working in
departments where the phenomena are the most intangible and
complicated.

Darwin himself called ‘the love for all living creatures the most
noble attribute of man.’ Giant as he was, he perceived more
clearly than any of his contemporaries, more clearly even than his
successors, the ultimate goal of evolving altruism. For he says:
‘As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into
larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual
that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all
members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. There
is, then, only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies
extending to the men of all nations and races. Experience, however,
shows us how long it is, if such men are separated from him by great
differences of appearance or habits, before he looks upon them as
his fellow-creatures. Sympathy beyond the confines of man is one of
the latest moral acquisitions. It is apparently unfelt by savages,
except for their pets. The very idea of humanity, so far as I could
observe, was new to most of the Gauchos of the Pampas. This virtue
seems to arise from our sympathies becoming more tender and more
widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient
beings.’[1]

The influences of a doctrine old enough and precious enough to have
become embodied in the life and institutions of a race persist
generally, through mere momentum, long after the substance of the
doctrine has passed away. This is eminently true of that
misconception which has come down to us regarding the nature and
origin of man and his relations to the rest of the universe. Darwin
has lived, shed his light over the world, and passed back to the
dust whence he came. Men no longer believe that other races and
other worlds were really made for them. But they continue to _act_
in about the same manner as they did when; they _did_ believe it.
This assertion applies not simply to those half-baked intelligences
who have only the rudest and most antiquated notions about anything
but also to thousands of men and women who pretend to have
up-to-date conceptions of themselves and the universe—men and
women noted even for their activity in reminding others of their
inconsistency—men and women who

  ‘Compound for sins they are inclined to,
  By damning those they have no mind to.’

The doctrine of Universal Kinship is not a new doctrine, born from
the more brilliant loins of modern understanding. It is as old
almost as human philosophy. It was taught by Buddha twenty-four
hundred years ago. And the teachings of this divine soul, spreading
over the plains and peninsulas of Asia, have made unnumbered
millions mild. It was taught also by Pythagoras and all his school
of philosophers, and rigidly practised in their daily lives.
Plutarch, one of the grandest characters of antiquity, wrote several
essays in advocacy of it. In these essays, as well as in many
passages of his writings generally, he demonstrates that he was far
ahead of his contemporaries in the breadth and intensity of his
moral nature, and in advance even of all except a very few of those
living to-day, 2,000 years after him. Shelley among the poets of
modern times, and Tolstoy in these latter days, are others among the
eminent adherents of this holy cause.

Wherever Buddhism prevails, there will be found in greater or less
purity, as one of the cardinal principles of its founder, the
doctrine of the sacredness of all Sentient Life. But the Aryan race
of the West has remained steadfastly deaf to the pleadings of its
Shelleys and Tolstoys, owing to the overmastering influence of its
anthropocentric religions. Not till the coming of Darwin and his
school of thinkers was there a basis for hope of a reformed world.
To-day the planet is _ripe_ for the old-new doctrine. Tradition is
losing its power over men’s conduct and conceptions as never
before, and Science is growing more and more influential. A central
truth of the Darwinian philosophy is the unity and consanguinity of
all organic life. And during the next century or two the ethical
corollary of this truth is going to receive unprecedented
recognition in all departments of human thought. Ignorance and
Inertia are fearful facts. They endure like granite in the human
mind. But the tireless chisels of evolution are invincible. And the
time will come when the anthropocentric customs and conceptions,
which are to-day fashionable enough to be ‘divine,’ will have
nothing but a historic existence. The movement to put Science and
Humanitarianism in place of Tradition and Savagery, which is so
weak, languishing, and neglected to-day, is a movement which has for
its ultimate destiny the conquest of the Human Species.

1. Darwin: _Descent of Man_, 2nd edit.; London, 1874.

XII. Conclusion.

_All beings are ends;_ _no_ creatures are _means_. All beings have
not equal rights, neither have all men; but _all have rights_. The
_Life Process_ is the _End_—_not man_, nor any other animal
temporarily privileged to weave a world’s philosophy. Nonhuman
beings were not made for human beings any more than human beings
were made for nonhuman beings. Just as the sidereal spheres were
once supposed by the childish mind of man to be unsubstantial
satellites of the earth, but are known by man’s riper
understanding to be worlds with missions and materialities of their
own, and of such magnitude and number as to render terrestrial
insignificance frightful, so the billions that dwell in the seas,
fields, and atmospheres of the earth were in like manner imagined by
the illiterate children of the race to be the mere trinkets of men,
but are now known by all who can interpret the new revelation to be
beings with substantially the same origin, the same natures,
structures, and occupations, and the same general rights to life and
happiness, as we ourselves.

In their phenomena of life the inhabitants of the earth display
endless variety. They swim in the waters, soar in the skies, squeeze
among the rocks, clamber among the trees, scamper over the plains,
and glide among the grounds and grasses. Some are born for a summer,
some for a century, and some flutter their little lives out in a
day. They are black, white, blue, golden, all the colours of the
spectrum. Some are wise and some are simple; some are large and some
are microscopic; some live in castles and some in bluebells; some
roam over continents and seas, and some doze their little day-dream
away on a single dancing leaf. But they are all the children of a
common mother and the co-tenants of a common world. Why they are
here in this world rather than some place else; why the world in
which they find themselves is so full of the undesirable; and
whether it would not have been better if the ball on which they ride
and riot had been in the beginning sterilised, are problems too deep
and baffling for the most of them. But since they are here, and
since they are too proud or too superstitious to die, and are
surrounded by such cold and wolfish immensities, what would seem
more proper than for them to be kind to each other, and helpful, and
dwell together as loving and forbearing members of One Great Family?

Act toward others as you would act toward a part of your own self.

This is _The Great Law_, the all-inclusive gospel of social
salvation. It is the rule of social rectitude and perfection which
has been held up in greater or less perfection in all ages by the
sages and prophets of the human species.

Hear Confucius, the giant of Mongolia, and the idol and law-giver of
one-third of mankind:

‘What you do not like when done to yourself do not do to others.’

And again he says:

‘Do not let a man practise to those beneath him that which he
dislikes in those above him.’

Over and over again the illustrious master repeats these precepts to
his disciples and countrymen.

In the Mahabharata, the great epic of the Sanskrit, written by
Indian moralists in various ages, and representing the accumulated
wisdom of one of the most marvellous of all peoples, we find these
words:

‘Treat others as thou wouldst thyself be treated.’

‘Do nothing to thy neighbour which thou wouldst not hereafter have
thy neighbour do to thee.’

‘A man obtains a rule of action by looking upon his neighbour as
himself.’

These same truths were also taught by Jesus, that godlike Galilean,
the great teacher and saviour of the Western world:

‘Love thy neighbour as thyself.’

‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.’

Oh that these words were etched in fire, and stamped in scorching
characters on the dull, cold hearts of this world!

Act toward others as you would act toward a part of your own self.

Look upon and treat others as you do your own hands, your own eyes,
your very heart and soul—with infinite care and compassion—as
suffering and enjoying members of the same Great Being with
yourself. This is the spirit of the ideal universe—the spirit of
your own being. It is this alone that can redeem this world, and
give to it the peace and harmony for which it longs. Yes,

  ‘So many gods, so many creeds,
  So many paths that wind and wind,
  While just the art of being kind
  Is all the sad world needs.’

Oh the madness, and sorrow, and unbrotherliness of this mal-wrought
world! Oh the poor, weak, poisoned, monstrous natures of its
children! Who can look upon it all without pain, and sympathy, and
consternation, and tears? What an opportunity for philanthropy, if
the ‘All-mighty One’ of our traditions would only set about it!

Yes, do as you would be done by—and _not_ to the dark man and the
white woman alone, but to the sorrel horse and the gray squirrel as
well; _not_ to creatures of your own anatomy only, but to all
creatures. You cannot go high enough nor low enough nor far enough
to find those whose bowed and broken beings will not rise up at the
coming of the kindly heart, or whose souls will not shrink and
darken at the touch of inhumanity. Live and let live. Do more. Live
and _help_ live. _Do to beings below you as you would be done by
beings above you_. Pity the tortoise, the katydid, the wild-bird,
and the ox. Poor, undeveloped, untaught creatures! Into their dim
and lowly lives strays of sunshine little enough, though the fell
hand of man be never against them. They are our fellow-mortals. They
came out of the same mysterious womb of the past, are passing
through the same dream, and are destined to the same melancholy end,
as we ourselves. Let us be kind and merciful to them.

  ‘Wilt thou draw near the nature of the gods?
  Draw near them, then, in being merciful;
  Sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge.’

Let us be true to our ideals, true to the spirit of Universal
Compassion—whether we walk with the lone worm wandering in the
twilight of consciousness, the feathered forms of the fields and
forests, the kine of the meadows, the simple savage on the banks of
the gladed river, the political blanks whom men call wives, or the
outcasts of human industry.

Oh this poor world, this poor, suffering, ignorant, fear-filled
world! How can men be blind or deranged enough to think it is a good
world? How can they be cold and satanic enough to be unmoved by the
groans and anguish, the writhing and tears, that come up from its
unparalleled afflictions?

But _the world is growing better_. And in the Future—in the long,
long ages to come—it will be redeemed! The same spirit of sympathy
and fraternity that broke the black man’s manacles and is to-day
melting the white woman’s chains will to-morrow emancipate the
working man and the ox; and, as the ages bloom and the great wheels
of the centuries grind on, the same spirit shall banish Selfishness
from the earth, and convert the planet finally into one unbroken and
unparalleled spectacle of Peace, Justice, and Solidarity.





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