Touching these views I have only two things to observe. In the first place, they differ toto cælo from those both of Mr. Wallace and Mr. Mivart; and thus we now find that the three principal authorities who still stand out for a distinction of kind between man and brute on grounds of psychology, far from being in agreement, are really in fundamental opposition, seeing that they base their common conclusion on premisses which are all mutually exclusive of one another. In the next place, even if we were fully to agree with the opinion of the French anthropologist, or hold that a distinction of kind has to be drawn only at religion and morality, we should still be obliged to allow—although this is a point which he does not himself appear to have perceived—that the superiority of human intelligence is a necessary condition to both these attributes of the human mind. In other words, whether or not Quatrefages is right in his view that religion and morality betoken a difference of kind in the only animal species which presents them, at least it is certain that neither of these faculties could have occurred in that species, had it not also been gifted with a greatly superior order of intelligence. For even the most elementary forms of religion and morality depend upon ideas of a much more abstract, or intellectual, nature than are to be met with in any brute. Obviously, therefore, the first distinction that falls to be considered is the intellectual distinction. If analysis should show that the school represented by Quatrefages is right in regarding this distinction as one of degree—and, therefore, that the school represented by Mivart is wrong in regarding it as one of kind,—the time will then have arrived to consider, in the same connection, these special faculties of morality and religion. Such, therefore, is the method that I intend to adopt. The whole of the present volume will be devoted to a consideration of “the origin of human faculty” in the larger sense of this term, or in accordance with the view that distinctively human faculty begins with distinctively human ideation. When this matter has been thoroughly discussed, the ground will have been prepared for considering in subsequent volumes the more special faculties of Morality and Religion.[12]
CHAPTER II.
IDEAS.[13]
I now pass on to consider the only distinction which in my opinion can be properly drawn between human and brute psychology. This is the great distinction which furnishes a full psychological explanation of all the many and immense differences that unquestionably do obtain between the mind of the highest ape and the mind of the lowest savage. It is, moreover, the distinction which is now universally recognized by psychologists of every school, from the Romanist to the agnostic in Religion, and from the idealist to the materialist in Philosophy.
The distinction has been clearly enunciated by many writers, from Aristotle downwards, but I may best render it in the words of Locke:—
“If it may be doubted, whether beasts compound and enlarge their ideas that way to any degree; this I think I may be positive in, that the power of abstracting is not at all in them; and that the having of general ideas is that which puts a perfect distinction betwixt man and brutes, and is an excellency which the faculties of brutes do by no means attain to. For it is evident we observe no footsteps in them of making use of general signs for universal ideas; from which we have reason to imagine, that they have not the faculty of abstracting, or making general ideas, since they have no use of words, or any other general signs.
“Nor can it be imputed to their want of fit organs to frame articulate sounds that they have no use or knowledge of general words; since many of them, we find, can fashion such sounds, and pronounce words distinctly enough, but never with any such application; and, on the other side, men, who through some defect in the organs want words, yet fail not to express their universal ideas by signs, which serve them instead of general words; a faculty which we see beasts come short in. And therefore I think we may suppose, that it is in this that the species of brutes are discriminated from men; and it is that proper difference wherein they are wholly separated, and which at last widens to so vast a distance; for if they have any ideas at all, and are not bare machines (as some would have them), we cannot deny them to have some reason. It seems evident to me, that they do some of them in certain instances reason, as that they have sense; but it is only in particular ideas, just as they received them from their senses. They are the best of them tied up within those narrow bounds, and have not (as I think) the faculty to enlarge them by any kind of abstraction.”[14]