Mental Evolution in Man: Origin of Human Faculty

by George John Romanes

In order that the points of difference on which these arguments are founded might be brought out into clear relief, I began by briefly considering the points of resemblance between the human mind and mind of lower orders. Here we saw that so far as the Emotions are concerned no difference of kind has been, or can be, alleged. The whole series of human emotions have been proved to obtain among the lower animals, except those which depend on the higher intellectual powers of man—i.e. those appertaining to religion and perception of the sublime. But all the others—which in my list amount to over twenty—occur in the brute creation; and although many of them do not occur in so highly developed a degree, this is immaterial where the question is one of kind. Indeed, so remarkable is the general similarity of emotional life in both cases—especially when we have regard to the young child and savage man—that it ought fairly to be taken as direct evidence of a genetic continuity between them.

And so, likewise, it is with Instinct. For although this occurs in a greater proportion among the lower animals than it does in ourselves, no one can venture to question the identity of all the instincts which are common to both. And this is the only point that here requires to be established.

Again, with respect to the Will, no argument can arise touching the identity of animal and human volition up to the point where the latter is alleged to take on the attribute of freedom—which, as we saw, under any view depends on the intellectual powers of introspective thought.

There remain, then, only these intellectual powers of introspective Thought, plus the faculties of Morality and Religion. Now, it is evident that, whatever we may severally conclude as touching the distinctive value of the two latter, we must all agree that a prime condition to the possibility of either resides in the former: without the powers of intellect which are competent to frame the abstract ideation that is concerned both in morals and religion, it is manifest that neither could exist. Therefore, in logical order, it is these powers of intellect that first fall to be considered. In subsequent parts of this work I shall fully deal both with morals and religion: in the present part I am concerned only with the intellect.

And here it is, as I have acknowledged, that the great psychological distinction is to be found. Nevertheless, even here it must be conceded that up to a certain point, as between the brute and the man, there is not merely a similarity of kind, but an identity of correspondence. The distinction only arises with reference to those superadded faculties of ideation which occur above the level marked 28 in my diagram—i.e. where the upward growth of animal intelligence ends, and the development of distinctively human faculty begins. So that in the case of intellect, no less than in that of emotion, instinct, and volition, there can be no doubt that the human mind runs exactly parallel with the animal, up to the place where these superadded powers of intellect begin to supervene. Therefore, upon the face of them, the facts of comparative psychology thus far, to say the least, are strongly suggestive of these superadded powers having been due to a process of continued evolution.

So much, then, for the points of agreement between animal and human psychology. Turning next to the points of difference, we had first to dispose of certain allegations which were either erroneous in fact or plainly unsound in theory. This involved a rejection in toto of the following distinctions—namely, that brutes are non-sentient machines; that they present no rudiments of reason in the sense of perceiving analogies and drawing inferences therefrom; that they are destitute of any immortal principle; that they show no signs of progress from generation to generation; that they never employ barter, make fire, wear clothes, use tools, and so forth. Among these sundry alleged distinctions, those which are not demonstrably false in fact are demonstrably false in logic. Whether or not brutes are destitute of any immortal principle, and whether or not human beings present such a principle, the science of comparative psychology has no means of ascertaining; and, therefore, any arguments touching these questions are irrelevant to the subject-matter on which we are engaged. Again, the fact that brutes do not resemble ourselves in wearing clothes, making fire, &c., clearly depends on an absence in them of those powers of higher ideation which alone are adequate to yield such products in the way of intelligent action. All such differences in matters of detail, therefore, really belong to, or are absorbed by, the more general question as to the nature of the distinction between the two orders of ideation. To this, therefore, as to the real question before us, we next addressed ourselves. And here it was pointed out, in limine, that the three living naturalists of highest authority who still argue for a difference of kind between the brute and the man, although they agree in holding that only on grounds of psychology can any such difference be maintained, nevertheless upon these grounds all mutually contradict one another. For while Mr. Mivart argues that there must be a distinction of kind, because the psychological interval between the highest ape and the lowest man is so great; Mr. Wallace argues for the same conclusion on the ground that this interval is not so great as the theory of a natural evolution would lead us to expect: the brain of a savage, he says, is so much more efficient an instrument than the mind to which it ministers, that its presence can only be explained as a preparation for the higher efficiency of mental life as afterwards exhibited by civilized man. Lastly, Professor De Quatrefages contradicts both the English naturalists by vehemently insisting that, so far as the powers of intellect are concerned, there is a demonstrable identity of kind between animal intelligence and human, whether in the savage or civilized condition: he argues that the distinction only arises in the domain of morals and religion. So that, if our opinion on the issue before us were to be in any way influenced by the voice of authority, I might represent the judgments of these my most representative opponents as mutually cancelling one another—thus yielding a zero quantity as against the enormous and self-consistent weight of authority on the other side.

But, quitting all considerations of authority, I proceeded to investigate the question de novo, or exclusively on its own merits. To do this it was necessary to begin with a somewhat tedious analysis of ideation. The general result was to yield the following as my classification of ideas.

1. Mere memories of perceptions, or the abiding mental images of past sensuous impressions. These are the ideas which, in the terminology of Locke, we may designate Simple, Particular, or Concrete. Nowadays no one questions that such ideas are common to animals and men.

2. A higher class of ideas, which by universal consent are also common to animals and men; namely, those which Locke called Complex, Compound, or Mixed. These are something more than the simple memories of particular perceptions; they are generated by the mixture of such memories, and therefore represent a compound, of which “particular ideas” are the elements or ingredients. By the laws of association, particular ideas which either resemble one another in themselves, or frequently occur together in experience, tend to coalesce and blend into one: as in a “composite photograph” the sensitive plate is able to unite many more or less similar images into a single picture, so the sensitive tablet of the mind is able to make of many simple or particular ideas, a complex, a compound, or, as I have called it, a generic idea. Now, a generic idea of this kind differs from what is ordinarily called a general idea (which we will consider in the next paragraph), in that, although both are generated out of simpler elementary constituents, the former are thus generated as it were spontaneously or anatomically by the principles of merely perceptual association, while the latter can only be produced by a consciously intentional operation of the mind upon the materials of its own ideation, known as such. This operation is what psychologists term conception, and the product of it they term a concept. Hence we see that between the region of percepts and those of concepts there lies a large intermediate territory, which is occupied by what I have called generic ideas, or recepts. A recept, then, differs from a percept in that it is a compound of mental representations, involving an orderly grouping of simpler images in accordance with past experience; while it differs from a concept in that this orderly grouping is due to an unintentional or automatic activity on the part of the percipient mind. A recept, or generic idea, is imparted to the mind by the external “logic of events;” while a general idea, or concept, is framed by the mind consciously working to a higher elaboration of its own ideas. In short, a recept is received, while a concept is conceived.