CHAPTER VI
MAN-ANIMAL AND ANIMAL-MAN
In remote ages man and animal were closely bound by a thousand ties. Under barbaric conditions human beings and animals lived, as it were, in touch with one another, they were next-door neighbours in the primeval forests, their necessities were the same to a large extent and their tastes did not widely differ. Both were actuated by the need of shelter, food, and protection against enemies. Is it surprising, then, that primitive man was closely allied to his less intelligent brothers, and that he believed them to be endowed with feelings and desires akin to his own?
Owing to his powers of mental growth, however, it was not long before man's instincts developed above those of the beasts. He was still, in reality, a savage animal, but he had more skill and ingenuity in the art of killing, as soon as he began to realise that a stick, a stone, or other weapons could be used to beat out the life of other animals.
Gradually he found out that he possessed higher qualities on the mental plane, and that he had the power of conscious spiritual development which was apparently denied to brute creatures.
Many writers have endeavoured to formulate the great kinship which exists amongst all created beings in this particular aspect of the evolution of soul.
"There is not any matter, nor any spirit, nor any creature, but it is capable of a unity of some kind with other creatures," writes Ruskin;[21] "and in that unity is its perfection and theirs, and a pleasure also for the beholding of all other creatures that can behold. So the unity of spirits is partly in their sympathy and partly in their giving and taking, and always in their love; and these are their delight and their strength; for their strength is their co-working and army fellowship, and their delight is in their giving and receiving of alternate and perpetual good; their inseparable dependancy on each other's being, and their essential and perfect depending on their Creator's."
"Let us label beings by what they are," says a more modern writer,[22] "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 great seer, Prentice Mulford, believed that the spirit of an animal could actually be re-embodied in a man or woman, and he thought that its prominent characteristics would appear in that man or woman. The mother might attract to her the spirit of some more intelligent or highly developed savage animal. That spirit would then lose its identity as a quadruped and reappear in the body of the new-born child.
"Remember," he writes, "that as to size and shape the spirit of a horse need not be like the horse materialised in flesh and blood. Spirit takes hold of a mass of matter and holds that matter in accordance with its ruling desire and the amount of its intelligence. An anaconda is but the faint spark of intelligence only awakened into desire to swallow and digest. Such low forms of life as the reptile or fish have not even awakened into affection for their young. The reptile, as to spirit or intellect, is but a remove from the vegetable. Trees have life of their own; they are gregarious, and grow in communities. The spirit of the old tree reanimates the new one. There is in the vegetable kingdom the unconscious desire for refinement, for better forms of life. For this reason is the entire vegetable kingdom of a finer type than ages ago, when the world's trees and plants, though immense in size, were coarse in fibre and in correspondence with the animal life about them."