Connecting these remarks with our present subject, we assert that no brute ever yet said, or thought, “I.” With this, then, we may begin a series of simple distinctions between man and the brute, so far as the immaterial principle in each is concerned. These are mainly compiled from writers hereafter mentioned.
1. The brute is conscious, but man is self-conscious. The brute does not objectify self. “If the pig could once say, ‘I am a pig,’ it would at once and thereby cease to be a pig.” The brute does not distinguish itself from its sensations. The brute has perception, but only the man has apperception, i. e., perception accompanied by reference of it to the self to which it belongs.
2. The brute has only percepts; man has also concepts. The brute knows white things, but not whiteness. It remembers things, but not thoughts. Man alone has the power of abstraction, i. e., the power of deriving abstract ideas from particular things or experiences.
3. Hence the brute has no language. “Language is the expression of general notions by symbols” (Harris). Words are the symbols of concepts. Where there are no concepts there can be no words. The parrot utters cries; but “no parrot ever yet spoke a true word.” Since language is a sign, it presupposes the existence of an intellect capable of understanding the sign,—in short, language is the effect of mind, not the cause of mind. See Mivart, in Brit. Quar., Oct. 1881:154-172. “The ape's tongue is eloquent in his own dispraise.” James, Psychology, 2:356—“The notion of a sign as such, and the general purpose to apply it to everything, is the distinctive characteristic of man.” Why do not animals speak? Because they have nothing to say, i. e., have no general ideas which words might express.
4. The brute forms no judgments, e. g., that this is like that, accompanied with belief. Hence there is no sense of the ridiculous, and no laughter. James, Psychology, 2:360—“The brute does not associate ideas by similarity.... Genius in man is the possession of this power of association in an extreme degree.”
5. The brute has no reasoning—no sense that this follows from that, accompanied by a feeling that the sequence is necessary. Association of ideas without judgment is the [pg 468]typical process of the brute mind, though not that of the mind of man. See Mind, 5:402-409, 575-581. Man's dream-life is the best analogue to the mental life of the brute.
6. The brute has no general ideas or intuitions, as of space, time, substance, cause, right. Hence there is no generalizing, and no proper experience or progress. There is no capacity for improvement in animals. The brute cannot be trained, except in certain inferior matters of association, where independent judgment is not required. No animal makes tools, uses clothes, cooks food, breeds other animals for food. No hunter's dog, however long its observation of its master, ever learned to put wood on a fire to keep itself from freezing. Even the rudest stone implements show a break in continuity and mark the introduction of man; see J. P. Cook, Credentials of Science, 14. “The dog can see the printed page as well as a man can, but no dog was ever taught to read a book. The animal cannot create in its own mind the thoughts of the writer. The physical in man, on the contrary, is only an aid to the spiritual. Education is a trained capacity to discern the inner meaning and deeper relations of things. So the universe is but a symbol and expression of spirit, a garment in which an invisible Power has robed his majesty and glory”; see S. S. Times, April 7, 1900. In man, mind first became supreme.
7. The brute has determination, but not self-determination. There is no freedom of choice, no conscious forming of a purpose, and no self-movement toward a predetermined end. The donkey is determined, but not self-determined; he is the victim of heredity and environment; he acts only as he is acted upon. Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 537-554—“Man, though implicated in nature through his bodily organization, is in his personality supernatural; the brute is wholly submerged in nature.... Man is like a ship in the sea—in it, yet above it—guiding his course, by observing the heavens, even against wind and current. A brute has no such power; it is in nature like a balloon, wholly immersed in air, and driven about by its currents, with no power of steering.” Calderwood, Philosophy of Evolution, chapter on Right and Wrong: “The grand distinction of human life is self-control in the field of action—control over all the animal impulses, so that these do not spontaneously and of themselves determine activity” [as they do in the brute]. By what Mivart calls a process of “inverse anthropomorphism,” we clothe the brute with the attributes of freedom; but it does not really possess them. Just as we do not transfer to God all our human imperfections, so we ought not to transfer all our human perfections to the brute, “reading our full selves in life of lower forms.” The brute has no power to choose between motives; it simply obeys motive. The necessitarian philosophy, therefore, is a correct and excellent philosophy for the brute. But man's power of initiative—in short, man's free will—renders it impossible to explain his higher nature as a mere natural development from the inferior creatures. Even Huxley has said that, taking mind into the account, there is between man and the highest beasts an “enormous gulf,” a “divergence immeasurable” and “practically infinite.”
8. The brute has no conscience and no religious nature. No dog ever brought back to the butcher the meat it had stolen. “The aspen trembles without fear, and dogs skulk without guilt.” The dog mentioned by Darwin, whose behavior in presence of a newspaper moved by the wind seemed to testify to “a sense of the supernatural,” was merely exhibiting the irritation due to the sense of an unknown future; see James, Will to Believe, 79. The bearing of flogged curs does not throw light upon the nature of conscience. If ethics is not hedonism, if moral obligation is not a refined utilitarianism, if the right is something distinct from the good we get out of it, then there must be a flaw in the theory that man's conscience is simply a development of brute instincts; and a reinforcement of brute life from the divine source of life must be postulated in order to account for the appearance of man. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 165-167—“Is the spirit of man derived from the soul of the animal? No, for neither one of these has self-existence. Both are self-differentiations of God. The latter is simply God's preparation for the former.” Calderwood, Evolution and Man's Place in Nature, 337, speaks of “the impossibility of tracing the origin of man's rational life to evolution from a lower life.... There are no physical forces discoverable in nature sufficient to account for the appearance of this life.” Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 186—“Man's place has been won by an entire change in the limitations of his psychic development.... The old bondage of the mind to the body is swept away.... In this new freedom we find the one dominant characteristic of man, the feature which entitles us to class him as an entirely new class of animal.”
John Burroughs, Ways of Nature: “Animal life parallels human life at many points, but it is in another plane. Something guides the lower animals, but it is not thought; something restrains them, but it is not judgment; they are provident without prudence; they are active without industry; they are skilful without practice; they are wise without knowledge; they are rational without reason; they are deceptive without guile.... When they are joyful, they sing or they play; when they are distressed, they moan or they cry; ... and yet I do not suppose they experience the emotion of joy or sorrow, or anger or love, as we do, because these feelings in them do not involve reflection, memory, and what we call the higher nature, as with us. Their instinct is intelligence directed outward, never inward, as in man. They share with man the emotions of his animal nature, but not of his moral or æsthetic nature; they know no altruism, no moral code.” Mr. Burroughs maintains that we have no proof that animals in a state of nature can reflect, form abstract ideas, associate cause and effect. Animals, for instance, that store up food for the winter simply follow a provident instinct but do not take thought for the future, any more than does the tree that forms new buds for the coming season. He sums up his position as follows: “To attribute human motives and faculties to the animals is to caricature them; but to put us in such relation to them that we feel their kinship, that we see their lives embosomed in the same iron necessity as our own, that we see in their minds a humbler manifestation of the same psychic power and intelligence that culminates and is conscious of itself in man—that, I take it, is the true humanization.” We assent to all this except the ascription to human life of the same iron necessity that rules the animal creation. Man is man, because his free will transcends the limitations of the brute.