The resemblances, homologies, and metamorphoses existing everywhere among animal forms are, therefore, evidence of the most logical consanguinities. It is all so perfectly plain. The structures of organic beings have come about as a result of the action and reaction of environment upon these structures. Every being—and not only every being, but every species, the whole organic world—has come to be what it is as a result of the incessant hammerings of its surroundings, the hammerings not only of the present, but of the long-stretching past. By surroundings is meant, of course, the rest of the universe. Those animals belonging to the same stock resemble each other because they have been subjected to the same experiences, the same series of selections. They have lain on the same great anvil, and felt the down-comings of the same sledge. The similarities among animal forms in general indicate relationships, just as the similarities among the races of men indicate racial consanguinities. All men belong to the human species because they are all fundamentally alike. But there are differences in the character of the hair, in the colour of the skin, in the conformation of the skull, and in the structure of the language, among the different varieties of the species, indicating striking variety in relationship and origin. An eminent biologist has said that if Negroes and Caucasians were snails they would be classed as entirely distinct species of animals. Whether, as is thought by some, the woolly-haired races are the descendants of the African anthropoids, and the straight-haired varieties are the posterity of the orangs and gibbons, we may never know positively. But we do know that these two great branches of mankind must have different genealogies, extending to a remote antiquity, and that the varieties belonging to each great group sustain to each other the relations of a common kinship. Englishmen look like each other, act like each other, and speak the same language. So do Frenchmen and Swedes and Chinese. Every people is peculiar. This is not the result of accident or agreement, but the result of law. Mongolians do not all have short heads, yellow faces, slanting eyes, and prominent malars because they have agreed to have them, but as a result of a common pedigree. Similarity of structure implies commonalty of origin, and commonalty of origin means consanguinity.
And this is true whether you contemplate the featural resemblances of brothers and sisters of the same human parent, or those more fundamental characteristics which distinguish species, orders, and sub-kingdoms. All animals are composed of protoplasm, which is a compound of clay, because all animals are descended from the same first parents, protoplasmic organisms evolved out of the elemental ooze. All vertebrates have nerve-filled backbones with two pairs of ventrally branching limbs, because the original ancestors of the vertebrates had nerve-filled backbones with two pairs of ventrally branching limbs. Insects individually evolve from worms because worms are their phylogenetic fathers and mothers. Man has hands and a vertical spine, and walks on his hind-limbs, not because he was fashioned in the image of a god, but because his ancestors lived among the trees. The habit of using the posterior limbs for locomotion, and the anterior for prehension, and the resulting perpendicular, are peculiarities developed by our simian ancestors wholly on account of the incentives to such structure and posture afforded by aboreal life. These peculiarities would not likely have been acquired by quadrupeds living upon and taking their food from a perfectly level and treeless plain. If there had been no forests on the earth, therefore, there would have been no incentive to the perpendicular, and the ‘human form divine’ would have been inconceivably different from what it is to-day. And if fishes had had three serial pairs of limbs instead of two, and their posterity had inherited them, as they certainly would have had the foresight to do if they had had the opportunity, the highest animals on the earth to-day, the ‘paragons of creation,’ would probably be two-handed quadrupeds (centaurs) instead of two-handed bipeds. And much more efficient and ideal individuals they would have been in every way than the rickety, peculiar, unsubstantial plantigrades who, by their talent to talk, have become the masters of the universe, and, by their imaginations, ‘divine.’
Kinship is universal. The orders, families, species, and races of the animal kingdom are the branches of a gigantic arbour. Every individual is a cell, every species is a tissue, and every order is an organ in the great surging, suffering, palpitating process. Man is simply one portion of the immense enterprise. He is as veritably an animal as the insect that drinks its little fill from his veins, the ox he goads, or the wild-fox that flees before his bellowings. Man is not a god, nor in any imminent danger of becoming one. He is not a celestial star-babe dropped down among mundane matters for a time and endowed with wing possibilities and the anatomy of a deity. He is a mammal of the order of primates, not so lamentable when we think of the hyena and the serpent, but an exceedingly discouraging vertebrate compared with what he ought to be. He has come up from the worm and the quadruped. His relatives dwell on the prairies and in the fields, forests, and waves. He shares the honours and partakes of the infirmities of all his kindred. He walks on his hind-limbs like the ape; he eats herbage and suckles his young like the ox; he slays his fellows and fills himself with their blood like the crocodile and the tiger; he grows old and dies, and turns to banqueting worms, like all that come from the elemental loins. He cannot exceed the winds like the hound, nor dissolve his image in the mid-day blue like the eagle. He has not the courage of the gorilla, the magnificence of the steed, nor the plaintive innocence of the ring-dove. Poor, pitiful, glory-hunting hideful! Born into a universe which he creates when he comes into it, and clinging, like all his kindred, to a clod that knows him not, he drives on in the preposterous storm of the atoms, as helpless to fashion his fate as the sleet that pelts him, and lost absolutely in the somnambulism of his own being.
The Psychical Kinship
- [The Conflict of Science and Tradition]
- [Evidences of Psychical Evolution]
- [The Common-sense View]
- [The Elements of Human and Non-human Mind Compared]
- [Conclusion]
‘I saw, deep in the eyes of the animals, the human soul look out upon me.’
‘I saw where it was born down deep under feathers and fur, or condemned for awhile to roam four-footed among the brambles. I caught the clinging mute glance of the prisoner, and swore that I would be faithful.’
‘Thee, my brother and sister, I see and mistake not. Do not be afraid. Dwelling thus and thus for awhile, fulfilling thy appointed time—thou too shalt come to thyself at last.’
‘Thy half-warm horns and long tongue lapping round my wrist do not conceal thy humanity any more than the learned talk of the pedant conceals his—for all thou art dumb we have words and plenty between us.’— Edward Carpenter.
The Psychical Kinship
I. The Conflict of Science and Tradition.
The doctrine that on mankind’s account all other beings came into existence, and that non-human beings are mere hunks of matter devoid of all psychic qualities found in man, is a doctrine about as sagacious as the old geocentric theory of the universe. Conceit is a distinctly human emotion. No other animal has it. But it has been lavished upon man with a generosity sufficient to compensate for its total absence from the rest of the universe. Man has always overestimated himself. In whatever age or province of the world you look down on the human imagination, you find it industriously digging disparities and establishing gulfs. Man, according to himself, has had great difficulty many times in the history of the world in escaping the divine. According to the facts, he has only in recent biological times and after great labour and uncertainty abandoned his tail and his all-fours. According to himself, man was made ‘in the image of his maker,’ and has been endowed with powers and properties peculiarly his own. According to the facts, he has come into the world in a manner identical with that of all other animals, and has been endowed with like nature and destiny. Man has never manifested a warmer or more indelicate enthusiasm than the enthusiasm with which he has appreciated himself. And with the same ardour with which he has praised himself he has maligned and misrepresented others. Man has set himself up as the supreme judge and executive of the world, and he has not hesitated to award to himself the lion’s share of everything. He has ransacked his fancy for adjectives with which to praise himself, and driven his inventive faculties to the verge of distraction in search of justification for his crimes upon those around him. Every individual bent on deeds of darkness first seeks in his own mind justification for his purposed sins. And it is a caustic comment on the character of human conviction that no enthusiastic criminal—from the marauder of continents to the kitchen pilferer—ever yet sought unsuccessfully at the court of his conscience for a sinful permit. It was an easy matter, therefore, for man—aided as he was by such an experienced imagination—to convince himself that all other animals were made for him, that they were made without feeling or intelligence, and that hence he was justified in using in any way he chose the conveniences so generously provided by an eccentric providence. But Darwin has lived. Beings have come into the world, we now know, through the operation of natural law. Man is not different from the rest. The story of Eden is a fabrication, bequeathed to us by our well-meaning but dimly-lighted ancestors. There has been no more miracle in the origin of the human species than in the origin of any other species. And there is no more miracle in the origin of a species than there is in the birth of a molecule or in the breaking of a tired wave on the beach. Man was not made in the image of the hypothetical creator of heaven and earth, but in the image of the ape. Man is not a fallen god, but a promoted reptile. The beings around him are not conveniences, but cousins. Instead of stretching away to the stars, man’s pedigree slinks down into the sea. Horrible revelation! Frightful antithesis! Instead of celestial genesis and a ‘fall’—long and doleful promotion. Instead of elysian gardens and romance—the slime. Instead of a god with royal nostrils miraculously animating an immortal duplicate—a little lounging cellule, too small to be seen and too senseless to distinguish between midnight and noon. But the situation is not half so horrible as it looks to be to those who see only the skin of things. Is it not better, after all, to be the honourable outcome of a straightforward evolution than the offspring of flunky-loving celestials? Are the illustrious children of the ape less glorious than the sycophants of irrational theological systems? Darwin dealt in his quiet way some malicious blows to human conceit, but he also bequeathed to a misguided world the elements of its ultimate redemption.
The supposed psychical gulf between human and non-human beings has no more existence, outside the flamboyant imagination of man, than has the once-supposed physical gulf. It is pure fiction. The supposition is a relic of the rapidly dwindling vanity of anthropocentricism, and is perpetuated from age to age by human selfishness and conceit. It has no foundation either in science or in common-sense. Man strives to lessen his guilt by the laudation of himself and the disparagement and degradation of his victims. Like the ostrich, who, pursued by death, improvises an imaginary escape by plunging its head into the desert, so man, pursued by the vengeful correctives of his own conscience, fabricates a fictitious innocence by the calumniation of those upon whom he battens. But such excuses cannot much longer hold out against the rising consciousness of kinship. Psychology, like all other sciences, is rapidly ceasing to attend exclusively to human phenomena. It is lifting up its eyes and looking about; it is preparing to become comparative. It has come to realise that the mind of man is but a single shoot of a something which ramifies the entire animal world, and that in order to understand its subject it is necessary for it to familiarise itself with the whole field of phenomenon. The soul of man did not commence to be in the savage. It commenced to be in the worm, whose life man grinds out with his heel, and in the bivalve that flounders in his broth. The roots of consciousness are in the sea. Side by side with physical evolution has gone on psychical evolution; side by side with the evolution of organs and tissues has gone on the evolution of intellect, sensibility, and will. Human nature and human mind are no more sui generis than are human anatomy and physiology. The same considerations that prove that man’s material organism is the cumulative result of long evolution proclaim that human mind, the immaterial concomitant of the material organism, is also the cumulative result of long evolution.