“From the time when the social and sympathetic feelings came into operation and the intellectual and moral faculties became fairly developed, man would cease to be influenced by natural selection in his physical form and structure. As an animal he would remain almost stationary, the changes in the surrounding universe ceasing to produce in him that powerful modifying effect which they exercise on other parts of the organic world. But, from the moment that the form of his body became stationary, his mind would become subject to those very influences from which his body had escaped; every slight variation in his mental and moral nature which should enable him better to guard against adverse circumstances and combine for mutual comfort and protection would be preserved and accumulated; the better and higher specimens of our race would therefore increase and spread, the lower and more brutal would give way and successively die out, and that rapid advancement of mental organisation would occur which has raised the very lowest races of man so far above the brutes (although differing so little from some of them in physical structure), and, in conjunction with scarcely perceptible modifications of form, has developed the wonderful intellect of the European races” (pp. 316, 317, Second Edition, 1871).
This argument has suggestive illustration in the fifth chapter of the Origin of Species. Mr. Darwin there refers to a remark to the following effect made by Mr. Waterhouse: “A part developed in any species in an extraordinary degree or manner in comparison with the same part in allied species tends to be highly variable.” This applies only where there is unusual development. “Thus, the wing of a bat is a most abnormal structure in the class of mammals; but the rule would not apply here, because the whole group of bats possesses wings; it would apply only if some one species had wings developed in a remarkable manner in comparison with the other species of the same genus.” And when this exceptional development of any part or organ occurs, we may conclude that the modification has arisen since the period when the several species branched off from the common progenitor of the genus; and this period will seldom be very remote, as species rarely endure for more than one geological period.
How completely this applies to man, the latest product of organic evolution. The brain is that part or organ in him which has been developed “in an extraordinary degree, in comparison with the same part” in other Primates, and which has become highly variable. Whatever may have been the favouring causes which secured his immediate progenitors such modification of brain as advanced him in intelligence over “allied species,” the fact abides that in this lies the explanation of their after-history; the arrest of the one, the unlimited progress of the other. Increasing intelligence at work through vast periods of time originated and developed those social conditions which alone made possible that progress which, in its most advanced degree, but a small proportion of the race has reached. For in this question of mental differences the contrast is not between man and ape, but between man savage and civilized; between the incapacity of the one to count beyond his fingers, and the capacity of the other to calculate an eclipse of the sun or a transit of Venus. It would therefore seem that Mr. Wallace should introduce his “spiritual essence, or nature,” in the intermediate, and not in the initial stage.
As answer to Mr. Wallace’s argument that in their large and well-developed brains, savages “possess an organ quite disproportioned to their requirements,” Huxley cites Wallace’s own remarks in his paper on Instinct in Man and Animals as to the considerable demands made by the needs of the lower races on their observing faculties which call into play no mean exercise of brain function.
“Add to this,” Huxley says, “the knowledge which a savage is obliged to gain of the properties of plants, of the characters and habits of animals, and of the minute indications by which their course is discoverable; consider that even an Australian can make excellent baskets and nets, and neatly fitted and beautifully balanced spears; that he learns to use these so as to be able to transfix a quartern loaf at sixty yards; and that very often, as in the case of the American Indians, the language of a savage exhibits complexities which a well-trained European finds it difficult to master; consider that every time a savage tracks his game, he employs a minuteness of observation, and an accuracy of inductive and deductive reasoning which, applied to other matters, would assure some reputation, and I think one need ask no further why he possesses such a fair supply of brains.” ... But Mr. Wallace’s objection “applies quite as strongly to the lower animals. Surely a wolf must have too much brain, or else how is it that a dog, with only the same quantity and form of brain, is able to develop such singular intelligence? The wolf stands to the dog in the same relation as the savage to the man; and therefore, if Mr. Wallace’s doctrine holds good, a higher power must have superintended the breeding up of wolves from some inferior stock, in order to prepare them to become dogs” (Critiques and Addresses, p. 293).
After all is said, perhaps the effective refutation of the belief in a spiritual entity superadded in man is found in the explanation of the origin of that belief which anthropology supplies.
The theory of the origin and growth of the belief in souls and spiritual beings generally, and in a future life, which has been put into coherent form by Spencer and Tylor, is based upon an enormous mass of evidence gathered by travellers among existing barbaric peoples; evidence agreeing in character with that which results from investigations into beliefs of past races in varying stages of culture. Only brief reference to it here is necessary, but the merest outline suffices to show from what obvious phenomena the conception of a soul was derived, a conception of which all subsequent forms are but elaborated copies. As in other matters, crude analogies have guided the barbaric mind in its ideas about spirits and their behaviour. A man falls asleep and dreams certain things; on waking, he believes that these things actually happened; and he therefore concludes that the dead who came to him or to whom he went in his dreams, are alive; that the friend or foe whom he knows to be far away, but with whom he feasted or fought in dreamland, came to him. He sees another man fall into a swoon or trance that may lay him seemingly lifeless for hours or even days; he himself may be attacked by deranging fevers and see visions stranger than those which a healthy person sees; shadows of himself and of objects, both living and not living, follow or precede him and lengthen or shorten in the withdrawing or advancing light; the still water throws back images of himself; the hillsides resound with mocking echoes of his words and of sounds around him; and it is these and allied phenomena which have given rise to the notion of “another self,” to use Mr. Spencer’s convenient term, or of a number of selves that are sometimes outside the man and sometimes inside him, as to which the barbaric mind is never sure. Outside him, however, when the man is sleeping, so that he must not be awakened, lest this “other self” be hindered from returning; or when he is sick, or in the toils of the medicine-man, who may hold the “other self” in his power, as in the curious soul-trap of the Polynesians—a series of cocoa-nut rings—in which the sorcerer makes believe to catch and detain the soul of an offender or sick person. When Dr. Catat and his companions, MM. Maistre and Foucart were exploring the “Bara” country on the west coast of Madagascar the people suddenly became hostile. On the previous day the travellers, not without difficulty, had photographed the royal family, and now found themselves accused of taking the souls of the natives with the object of selling them when they returned to France. Denial was of no avail; following the custom of the Malagasays, they were compelled to catch the souls, which were then put into a casket, and ordered by Dr. Catat to return to their respective owners (Times, 24th March, 1891).
Although the difference presented by such phenomena and by death is that it is abiding, while they are temporary, to the barbaric mind the difference is in degree, and not in kind. True, the “other self” has left the body, and will never return to it; but it exists, for it appears in dreams and hallucinations, and therefore is believed to revisit its ancient haunts, as well as to tarry often near the exposed or buried body. The nebulous theories which identified the soul with breath, and shadow, and reflection, slowly condensed into theories of semi-substantiality still charged with ethereal conceptions, resulting in the curious amalgam which, in the minds of cultivated persons, whenever they strive to envisage the idea, represents the disembodied soul.
Therefore, in vain may we seek for points of difference in our comparison of primitive ideas of the origin and nature of the soul with the later ideas. The copious literature to which these have given birth is represented in the bibliography appended to Mr. Alger’s work on Theories of a Future Life, by 4977 books, exclusive of many published since his list was compiled. Save in refinement of detail such as a higher culture secures, what is there to choose between the four souls of the Hidatsa Indians, the two souls of the Gold Coast natives, and the tripartite division of man by Rabbis, Platonists, and Paulinists, which are but the savage other-self “writ large”? Their common source is in man’s general animistic interpretation of Nature, which is a vera causa, superseding the need for the assumptions of which Mr. Wallace’s is a type. As an excellent illustration of what is meant by animism, we may cite what Mr. Everard im Thurn has to say about the Indians of Guiana, who are, presumably, a good many steps removed from so-called “primitive” man. “The Indian does not see any sharp line of distinction such as we see between man and other animals, between one kind of animal and another, or between animals—man included—and inanimate objects. On the contrary, to the Indian all objects, animate and inanimate, seem exactly of the same nature, except that they differ in the accident of bodily form. Every object in the whole world is a being, consisting of a body and spirit, and differs from every other object in no respect except that of bodily form, and in the greater or lesser degree of brute power and brute cunning consequent on the difference of bodily form and bodily habits. Our next step, therefore, is to note that animals, other than men, and even inanimate objects, have spirits which differ not at all in kind from those of men.”
The importance of the evidence gathered by anthropology in support of man’s inclusion in the general theory of evolution is ever becoming more manifest. For it has brought witness to continuity in organic development at the point where a break has been assumed, and driven home the fact that if Evolution operates anywhere, it operates everywhere. And operates, too, in such a way that every part co-operates in the discharge of a universal process. Hence it meets the divisions which mark opposition to it by the transcendent power of unity.