Animal Life and Intelligence

by C. Lloyd Morgan

The plain and obvious facts of nature, as interpreted by men of science in 1890, have simply no existence for the untutored or the savage intellect. For him they have not emerged into the light of consciousness. But while we cannot blame the savage for entertaining ideas which are false to facts which for him have no existence, we may none the less believe that his system of ideas is not among those which are destined to become predominant species. So far as we can judge, the winning species among systems of ideas and interpretations of nature are those in which the greatest number of ideas are fused into harmonious synthesis; in which all the ideas are congruous, few or none neutral; and in which the abstract or conceptual ideas, when brought into contact with concrete or perceptual states of consciousness, are found to be in harmony and congruity therewith.

There is one more question in this connection on which I must say a few words. How, it may be asked, has the world become peopled, for many primitive and savage folk, with a crowd of immaterial spiritual essences, so that it is scarcely too much to say that, for some of these peoples, everything has its double; and there is no material existence that has not its spiritual counterpart?

I would connect this almost universal tendency with the origin of abstract ideas (isolates) through language. When the named predominant gave rise to the isolate (see [p. 374]), it could scarcely fail that the primitive speakers and thinkers should tend to regard those qualities or properties which they could isolate in thought (conceptually) as also isolable in fact (perceptually). And we may well suppose, though this is, of course, hypothetical, that one of the earliest severances to be thus effected through isolation was the severance of mind and body. The first phenomena that the nascent reason would endeavour to explain would probably be those of daily life and almost hourly experience. Many familiar facts would seem to point to the temporary or permanent divorce of the part which is conscious and feels, from the part which is tangible and visible. During wakeful life the two are closely associated. The visible part, or body, is conscious. But during sleep, or under the influence of a heavy blow, the visible part, which before was conscious, is conscious no longer. The conscious part is, therefore, absent, but returns again after a while. On death the conscious part returns no more. The divorce of the two has become permanent.

And then comes in the confirmatory testimony of dreams. In dreams the savage has seen his enemy, though that enemy's body was far away. Here, then, is the spirit which has left the body during sleep. In dreams also the slain enemy or the dead chief appears. The spirit, permanently divorced from the body, still walks the earth in spirit-guise.

Many occurrences would seem like the fulfilled threats of dead enemies or the fulfilled promises of dead ancestors. How can these be explained? Are they not produced by the ghost of the departed enemy, by the spirit of the deceased ancestor? And if these spirits are still powerful to act, why not petition them to act in certain ways?

Probably primitive man would explain all activities anthropomorphically. What knows he of gravitation or the laws of the winds? He knows himself as agent, and attributes his activities to the immaterial spirit within him; for when this is absent during sleep or in death these activities cease. All acting things might, therefore, come to be regarded as dual in their nature—possessed of a sensible material bodily part, and an insensible active spiritual part. And thus the whole world might be peopled with living existences of the spiritual order.

Now, whether the fetishistic faith arose in some such way as this or not—and we can never know how it arose, but can only guess—there would be nothing in such primitive explanations which would violate the law of congruity. They would have, therefore, a perfectly natural genesis. The attempted interpolation at such a stage of primitive reason of any modern scientific conception would be futile. It would at once be rejected through incongruity.

The history of scientific conceptions seems to show that they were first adopted with regard to phenomena on the very horizon of thought—in regions, that is to say, most remote from the central citadel of the soul. Only gradually have they, little by little, encroached upon this centre; and the application of them to physiology and psychology is a matter of quite modern times. Even to-day only a minority, but an increasing minority, of thinkers are prepared indissolubly to unite the mind and body, so long divorced in thought, so completely united, as many of us believe, in their essential being.

I have now, I trust, illustrated at sufficient length the principle of elimination through incongruity in interneural and its associated metakinetic or mental evolution. This, however, like natural selection, is a matter of guidance; we have still to consider the question of origin.

In truth, we know too little on the subject to enable us to discuss it with much profit. From the kinetic or organic point of view, neural variations take their place among the other variations, the origin of which, as we have already found, is so hard to account for. There may be a tendency for neural vibrations to mutually influence each other (like two clocks placed side by side), and thus gradually to drag each other into one harmonious and congruous rhythm. But this, though not improbable, is purely hypothetical. There is the hypothesis of the inheritance of acquired variations, the increased congruity acquired by the parent being in some degree transmitted to the offspring. There is the view which Mr. Wallace adopts[KM] with regard to the origin of accessory plumes, that such variations may be due to "a surplus of strength, vitality, and growth-power, which is able to expend itself in this way without injury," and not without profit. The development of the social habit, the mutual aid and protection thus afforded, may well have left a balance of the life-energy, previously employed in individual self-preservation, available for this purpose. And then there is always the hypothesis of favourable fortuitous variations to fall back upon.