Mental Evolution in Man: Origin of Human Faculty

by George John Romanes

Again, as Mr. Chauncey Wright observes, “voluntary memory, or reminiscence, is especially aided by command of language. This is a tentative process, essentially similar to that of a search for a lost or missing external object. Trials are made in it to revive a missing mental image, or train of images, by means of words; and, on the other hand, to revive a missing name by means of mental images, or even by other words. It is not certain that this power is an exclusively human one, as is generally believed, except in respect to the high degree of proficiency attained by men in its use. It does not appear impossible that an intelligent dog may be aided by its attention, purposely directed to spontaneous necessaries, in recalling a missing fact, such as the locality of a buried bone.”[122]

But whether or not animals possess any power of recollection as distinguished from memory, there can be no doubt that the use of words as signs necessarily leads to the cultivation of this faculty, and so to the clear perception of a continuance of internal or mental states in which consists the consciousness of an abiding self.

Further, the acquisition of language greatly advances the conception of self, both as a suffering or feeling agent, and as an active cause; seeing that both the feelings and the actions of the self are placed clearly before the mind by means of denotative names, and even, as we have just seen, by pre-conceptual propositions. Doubtless, also, the recognition of self in each of these capacities is largely assisted by the emotions. The expressions of affection, sympathy, praise, blame, &c., on the part of others, and the feelings of emulation, pride, triumph, disappointment, &c., on the part of the self, must all tend forcibly to impress upon the growing child a sense of personality. “It is when the child’s attention is driven inwards in an act of reflection on his own actions, as springing from good or bad motives, that he wakes up to a fuller consciousness of himself.”[123]

The conspiring together of all these factors leads to the gradual attainment of self-consciousness. I say “gradual,” because the process is throughout of the nature of a growth. Nevertheless, there is some reason to think that when this growth has attained a certain point, it makes, so to speak, a sudden leap of progress, which may be taken to bear the same relation to the development of the mind as the act of birth does to that of the body. In neither case is the development anything like completed. Midway between the slowly evolving phases in utero and the slowly evolving phases of aftergrowth, there is in the case of the human body a great and sudden change at the moment when it first becomes separated from that of its parent. And so, there is some reason to believe, it is in the case of the human mind. Midway between the gradual evolution of receptual ideation and the no less gradual evolution of conceptual, there appears to be a critical moment when the soul first becomes detached from the nutrient body of its parent perceptions, and wakes up in the new world of a consciously individual existence. “Die Schlussprozesse, durch welche jene Trennung des Ich von der Aussenwelt vor sich geht, geschehen allmälig. Es ist eine langsame Arbeit, durch die sich die Scheidung bewerkstelligt. Doch diese Scheidung selber ist stets eine plötzliche That: es ist ein bestimmter Moment, in welchem das Ich mit einem Mal mit voller Klarheit in der Seele aufblitzt, und es ist derselbe Moment, in welchem das bewusste Gedächtniss beginnt, Sehr häufig ist es daher, dass gerade diesses erste blitzähnliche Aufleuchten des Selbstbewusstseins bis in späte Jahre noch als deutliche Erinnerung zurückbleibt.”[124]

Of course the evidence upon this point must always be more or less unsatisfactory—first, because the powers of introspective analysis at the particular time when they first become nascent must be most incompetent to report upon the circumstances of their own birth; and next, because we know how precarious it is to rely on adult reminiscences of childhood’s experience. Therefore, I have only mentioned this evidence for what it is worth, in order to remark that it has no important bearing upon our present subject. Whether or not there is in the life of every human being some particular moment between the ages of two and three when the fact of its own personality is revealed to the growing mind, the results of the present analysis are in no way affected. For, even if such were supposed to be invariably the case, it could not be supposed that the revelation were other than low and feeble to a degree commensurate with the still almost infantile condition of all the other mental powers. Nor could it be doubted that this revelation needed to be led up to by that gradual process of receptual evolution with which my analysis has been concerned, and which in the terms of our previous analogy we may liken to the pre-natal life of an embryo. While, on the other hand, as little can it be doubted that such consciousness of self as is then revealed, requires to be afterwards supplemented by another prolonged course of mental evolution in the conceptual sphere, before those completed faculties of introspective thought are attained, which serve to difference the mind of a full-grown man from that of a babbling child almost as widely as the same interval of time is found to difference the body of an adult from that of a new-born babe.

In this brief analysis of the principles which are probably concerned in the evolution of self-consciousness, I should like to lay particular stress upon the point in it which I do not think has been sufficiently noticed by previous writers—namely, the ejective origin of subjective knowledge. The logic of recepts furnishes both the infant and the animal with a marvellously efficient store of ejective information. Indeed, we can scarcely doubt that to a very considerable extent this information is hereditary: witness the smile of an infant in answer to a caressing tone, and its cry in answer to a scolding one; not to mention the still more remarkable cases which we meet with in animals, such as newly-hatched chickens understanding the different sounds made to them by the hen, being terror-stricken at the voice of a hawk, newly-born mammals knowing the voice of their mother, &c.[125] Moreover, we find that the child, even for a considerable time after it has begun to use words, manifests a strong tendency to regard all objects, whether animate or inanimate, as ejects. This fact is a matter of such general observation that I need not wait to give special instances. I will, therefore, merely observe that the tendency is not wholly obliterated even when the faculty of speech has been fully acquired, and with it a general knowledge of the distinction between objects as animate and inanimate. Mr. Sully, for instance, gives a case of this when he records the saying of a little girl of five—“Ma, I do think this hoop must be alive; it is so sensible; it goes wherever I want it to.”[126] Again, we meet with the same tendency in the psychology of uncultured man. Pages might be filled with illustrations showing that savages all over the world both mentally and expressly personify, or endow with psychical attributes, the inanimate objects and forces of nature; while language, even in its most highly developed forms, still retains the impress of an originally ejective terminology. And, if Professor Max Müller is right in his generalization that the personal pronoun “I” is in all languages traceable to roots equivalent to “This one” (indicative of an accompanying gesture-sign), we have additional and more particular evidence of the originally ejective character of the idea of self. Nor is it too much to say that even civilized man is still under the sway of this innate propensity to attribute to external things the faculties of feeling and willing of which he is conscious in himself. On the one side we have proof of this in the universal prevalence of the hypothesis of psychism in Nature, while on the other side we meet with further proof in the fact of psychological analysis revealing that our idea of cause is derived from our idea of muscular effort.

Now it is evident that in all these cases the tendency which is shown by the human mind, in every stage of its development, to regard external phenomena ejectively, arises from man’s intuitive knowledge—or the knowledge which is given in the logic of recepts—of his own existence as twofold, bodily and mental. This in his early days leads him to regard the Ego as an eject, resembling the others of his kind by whom he is surrounded. But as soon as the power of pre-conceptual predication has been attained, the child is in possession of a psychological instrument wherewith to observe his own mental states; and as soon as attention is thus directed upon them, there arises that which is implied in every act of such attention—namely, the consciousness of a self as at once the subject and object of knowledge.

I may remark that this analysis is not opposed, as at first sight it may appear to be, to the conclusion with regard to the same subject which is thus given by Wundt:—“It is only after the child has distinguished by definite characteristics its own being from that of other people, that it makes the further advance of perceiving that these other people are also beings in or for themselves.”[127] In other words, the attribution of personality to self is prior to the attribution of personality to others. Now this I do not question, although I do not think there can be much before or after in these two concepts. But the point which I have been endeavouring to bring out is that, prior to either of these concepts, there are two corresponding recepts—namely, first the receptual apprehension of self as an agent, and, second, the eject of this receptual apprehension, whereby “other people” are recognized as agents. Out of these two recepts there subsequently develop the corresponding concepts of personality. The order of development, therefore, is:—

(A) Receptual Subject.	(a) Receptual Eject.
(B) Conceptual Subject.	(b) Conceptual Eject.