But the mind of the child not only unfolds: it unfolds in a certain order, the more complex parts and the more civilised emotions invariably appearing last. The initial powers of the newborn babe are those of sensation and perception. The babe cannot think. It has no feeling of fear, no affection, no sympathy, and no shame. It can see, and hear, and taste, and feel pain and satisfaction—and these are about all. Even these are vague and confused. In a week the perceptions are more sharp and vivid, more distinct and orderly. Memory arises. Memory is the power of reproducing past impressions. At three weeks the emotions begin to sprout. The first to make their appearance are fear and surprise. When the babe is seven weeks old the social affections show themselves, and the simplest acts of association are performed. At the age of twelve weeks jealousy and anger may be expected, together with simple exhibitions of association by similarity. At fourteen weeks affection and reason dawn. Sympathy germinates at about the age of five months; pride and resentment germinate at eight months; grief, hate, and benevolence at ten months; and shame and remorse at fifteen months.
Now, the remarkable thing about this is that this is the order, or very much like the order, in which mind in the animal kingdom as a whole has apparently evolved. The lower orders of animal life have none of the higher emotions and none of the more complicated processes of mind. There is no shame in the reptile, no dissimulation in the fish, no sympathy in the mollusk, and no memory in the sponge. Memory dawns in the echinoderms, or somewhere near the radiate stage of development, and fear and surprise in the worms. Pugnacity makes its appearance in the insects, imagination in the spiders, and jealousy in the fishes. Pride, emulation, and resentment originate in the birds: grief and hate in the carnivora; shame and remorse among dogs and monkeys; and superstition in the savage.[1b]
It is also an important fact bearing on the general problem of evolution, that the civilised child, from about the age of one on, is a sort of synopsis, rude but unmistakable, of the historic evolution of the human race. The child is a savage. It has the emotions of the savage, the savage’s conceptions of the world, and the desires, pastimes, and ambitions of the savage. It hates work, and takes delight in hunting, fishing, fighting, and loafing, like other savages. The hero of the child is the bully, just as the demigod of primitive man is a blood-letting Caesar or Achilles. The children of the civilised are savages—some more so than others—and if they ever become civilised—some do, and some do not—they do so through a process of rectification and selection similar to that through which the Aryan races have passed during the ages of human history.
There is a similar evolution in the young of other animals, especially of the higher animals. Each individual begins in a perfectly mindless form, and grows mentally as it develops physically. The young puppy has a very different thinking and feeling apparatus from the grown-up mastiff. It is controlled almost exclusively by sense and instinct. It is devoid of common-sense, and divides its time impartially between play and sleep. It is easily frightened, and cries at every little thing. It has the rollicking, awkward, irresponsible personality of a boy of six. About the same thing is true of kittens, colts, calves, bear cubs, the whelps of wolves, and other young quadrupeds. A kitten will chase shadows, try to catch flies crawling on the other side of a windowpane, sit and watch in wonder the moving objects about it, and do many other things which it never thinks of doing when it has grown to be a wise and sophisticated puss trained in the ways of the world about it. Doghood, cathood, and horsehood, like manhood and womanhood, are the ripened products of long processes of growth and exfoliation.
The parallel is, of course, imperfect. There are many abbreviations, many breaks and ambiguities, in the summary presented by the individual mind of the evolution of the race. And, in the present state of psychogeny, only the barest outline can be traced. But enough is known to render the fact unquestionable.
9. If human mind has been evolved, it is logical to expect to find in other animals, especially in those more closely resembling ourselves in structure, mind elements similar to those we find in ourselves.[6] And this is precisely what we do find. The same great trunk impulses that animate men animate also those more rudimentary but not less real individuals below and around men. The great primary facts of sex, of self-preservation, of pleasure and pain, of life and death, of egoism and altruism, of motherhood, of alimentation, etc.—all of these are found everywhere, down almost to the very threshold of organic life. And they are the antecedents of the same great tendencies as those that control the lives of men. It is often supposed by the superficial that the facts of sex and alimentation, which are so prominent in other animals, have been relegated to a very subordinate place in the nature of man. But nothing could be much farther from the truth. It has been said that there are only two things that will induce the typical African or Australian to undergo prolonged labour—hunger and the sex appetite. It is probable that men—not only primitive men, but the most evolved races, including even poets and philosophers—will do more desperate and idiotic things and undergo more trying experiences when actuated by the sex impulse than from the effects of any other impulse in human nature. This impulse is especially overmastering in races like the Italian and Spanish, and has been mentioned by ethnologists as a probable factor in the deterioration of these races. The sentiments of love, marital affection, and family life control mankind more completely than any other motives. And next to these comes hunger. Let anyone who imagines that only the non-human creatures are carnal observe with what uniformity almost every function in both savage and civilised life gravitates toward eating and drinking. If it is a picnic, a convention, a national holiday, a Christmas celebration, a meeting of a fraternal society, a thanksgiving ceremony, or what not, eating is one of the main things, and the one exercise into which four-fifths of those present probably enter with the greatest enthusiasm.
The human soul is the blossom, not the beginning, of psychic evolution. Mother-love compassionated infancy long before a babe came from the stricken loins of woman. The inhabitants of the earth had been seeking pleasure and seeking to avoid pain, and seeking ever with the same sad futility, long before man with his retinue of puny philosophies strutted upon the scene. Hate poisoned the cisterns of the sea and dropped its pollutions through the steaming spaces ages before there was malice among men. Altruism is older than the mountains, and selfishness hardened the living heart before the continents were lifted. There was wonder in the woods and in the wild heart of the fastnesses before there were waitings in synagogues and genuflections about altar piles. The frogs, crickets, and birds had been singing love a thousand generations and more when the first amoroso knelt in dulcet descant to a beribboned Venus. Human nature is not an article of divine manufacture, any more than is the human form. It came out of the breast of the bird, out of the soul of the quadruped. The human heart does not draw back from the mysterious dissolutions of death more earnestly than does the hare that flees before resounding packs or the wild-fowl that reddens the reeds with its flounderings. Bowerbirds build their nest-side resorts, decorate them with gay feathers, and surround them with grounds ornamented with bright stones and shells, for identically the same reason as human beings design drawing-rooms, hang them with tapestries, and surround them with ornamented lawns. The scarlet waistcoat of the robin and the flaming dresses of tanagers and humming-birds, which seem, as they flash through the forest aisles, like shafts of cardinal-fire, serve the same vanities and minister to the same instincts as the plumage of the dandy and the tints and gewgaws of gorgeous dames. Art is largely a manifestation of sex, and it is about as old and about as persistent as this venerable impulse. How did Darwin’s dog know his master on his master’s return from a five-years’ trip around the world? Just as the boy remembers where the strawberries grow and the philosopher recalls his facts—by that power of the brain to retain and to reproduce past impressions. Why does the thinker search his soul for new theories and the spaces for new stars? For the same reason that the child asks questions and the monkey picks to pieces its toys. What is reason? A habit of wise men—an expedient of ants—a mania the fools of all ages are free from. All of the activities of men, however imposing or peculiar, are but elaborations in one way or another of the humble doings of the animalcule, whose home is a water-drop and whose existence can be discovered by human senses only by the aid of instruments.
10. Mind has evolved because the universe has evolved. Whether mind is a part of the universe, or all of it, or only an attribute of it, it is, in any case, inextricably mixed up with it. And, since the universe as a whole has evolved, it is improbable that any part of it or anything pertaining to it has remained impassive to the general tendency. There are no solids. Nothing stands. The whole universe is in a state of fluidity. Even the ‘eternal hills,’ the ‘unchanging continents,’ and the ‘everlasting stars,’ are flowing, flowing ever, slowly but ceaselessly, from form to form. So is mind. Indeed, if there is anywhere in the folds of creation a being such as the one whom man has long accused of having brought the universe into existence, we may rest assured that even he is not sitting passively apart from the enormous enterprise which he has himself inaugurated.
The evidence is conclusive. The evolution of mind is supported by a series of facts not less incontrovertible and convincing than that by which physical evolution is established. The data of mental evolution are not quite so definite and plentiful as those of physical evolution. But this is due to the greater intangibility of mental phenomena and to the backward condition of the psychological sciences, especially of comparative psychology. Mental phenomena are always more difficult to deal with than material phenomena, and hence are always more tardily attended to in the application of any theory. But taking everything into account, including the close connection between physical and psychical phenomena, it may be asserted that it is not more certain that the physical structure of man has been derived from sub-human forms of life than it is that the human mind has also been similarly derived.
Man is the adult of long evolution. The human soul has ancestors and consanguinities just as the body has. It is just as reasonable to suppose that the human physiology, with its definitely elaborated tissues, organs, and systems, is unrelated to the physiology of vertebrates in general, and through vertebrate physiology to the physiology of invertebrates, as to suppose that the states and impulses constituting human nature and consciousness began to exist in the anthropic type of anatomy and are unrelated to the states and impulses of vertebrate consciousness in general, and through vertebrate consciousness to those remoter types of sentiency lying away at the threshold of organic life. Human psychology is a part of universal psychology. It has been evolved. It has been evolved according to the same laws of heredity and adaptation as have physiological structures. And it is just as impossible to understand human nature and psychology unaided by those wider prospects of universal psychology as it is to understand the facts of human physiology unaided by analogous universalisations.