The industrious and gifted bee, with its wonderful social system, in advance even of that of the most enlightened societies of men; the generous horse, who thinks and feels so much more than the clowns who maul him ever suspect; the artful spider, that confirmed waylayer lurking in his lair of silk; the soft and predaceous cat; the timid-hearted hare, poor hounded little dweller of the fields and stream-sides; the beautiful and vivacious squirrel; the lowly lady-bug; the cautious fox; the irascible serpent, so cruelly misunderstood by men; the patient camel; the scornful peafowl; the indomitable goat; the grave and vindictive elephant; the ingenious beaver, the woodman of the primeval wilderness; the lordly and polygamous cock; the maternal hen; the wary trout, beset everywhere by the villainous traps of impostors; the bride-like butterfly; the delicate antelope and deer; and the sturdy, incorruptible ox—all of these beings have within them souls composed primarily of the same elements as those that compose the souls of men.
Ground-wasps have been observed to use tiny stones as hammers in packing the dirt firmly over their nests—a very remarkable act of intelligence, since the use of tools is not common even among the higher mammals.[10]
Fishes have been taught to assemble at the ringing of a bell, and toads and tortoises to come at the call of their favourite friends. An alligator which was kept tame for several years became so much attached to its master that ‘it followed him about the house like a dog, scrambling up the stairs after him, and showing much affection and docility.’ The favourite friend and companion of this alligator was the cat; and, whenever the cat stretched herself on the floor in front of the fire, the alligator would lie down beside her, with its head on the cat, and go to sleep. ‘When the cat was absent, the alligator was restless, but it always appeared happy when the cat was near it’.[8b]
Wolves and foxes sometimes cooperate with each other in their hunting expeditions, somewhat as men do in theirs. One of their number will crouch in ambush by the side of a road known to be used by hares or other small animals, and leap on the unsuspecting fugitives when driven that way by others of the hunting band. Many animals post sentinels when they eat or sleep or engage in other hazardous undertakings, and these sentinels show a good deal of discrimination in distinguishing between animals that are friendly and those that are not. Beavers not only build lodges to live in, but also construct dams to keep the water in which the villages are located at a certain height. The outlet of these dams is carefully regulated, being regularly lessened and enlarged to suit the supply of water in the stream. The trees used by the beavers in their enterprises are felled by them along the margins of the stream, and floated to the place where they are used. In old communities, where the supply of timber near the stream has been exhausted, artificial canals are cut by these indomitable engineers for use in the transportation of their materials. These excavations are made at a great cost of labour and for the deliberate purpose of enabling the builders to accomplish that which they could not accomplish in any other way. ‘In executing this purpose,’ says Romanes, ‘there is sometimes displayed a depth of engineering forethought over details of structure required by the circumstances of special localities which is even more astonishing than the execution of the general idea’.[6f] When, for instance, a canal has been carried so far from the original water-supply that, owing to the rising ground, it cannot be continued without a very great expenditure of effort in digging, a second dam is built higher up-stream, and with water drawn from this the canal is continued on at a higher level. Sometimes a third dam is built above the second, and the canal again continued at a still higher level before the valuable timber of the higher grounds is reached. These enterprising rodents also carve sometimes enormous channels across the necks of land formed by winding rivers, to serve as cut-offs in travel and transportation. And yet all of these things—all of the intelligence, feeling, and ingenuity displayed by the non-human races—are still lumped together by belated psychologists under the head of ‘instinct,’ by which is meant a blind, unconscious knack of doing the right thing without in any way realising what is being done or what it is being done for! The principle in accordance with which mind is denied to non-human beings would, if carried to its legitimate conclusions, make machines out of all of us, and limit the possession of conscious intelligence to the individual who promulgates the theory. The attitude assumed by many psychologists toward the mental faculties of inferior races reminds one of Heine’s interview with the old lizard at Lucca. In the discussion which ensued between the poet and the reptile, the poet dropped the words, ‘I think.’ ‘Think!’ snapped the lizard with a sharp, aristocratic tone of profound contempt—‘think! Which of you thinks? For 3,000 years, wise sir, I have investigated the spiritual functions of animals, and I have made men and apes the special objects of my study. I have devoted myself to these queer creatures with as great zeal and diligence as Lyonnet to his caterpillars. And as the result of my researches, I can assure you no man thinks. Now and then something occurs to him, and these accidentally occurring somethings he calls thoughts, and the stringing of them together he calls thinking. But you can take my word for it, no man thinks—no philosopher thinks. And, so far as philosophy is concerned, it is mere air and water, like pure vapours in the sky. There is, in reality, only one true philosophy, and that is engraven in eternal hieroglyphics on my own tail’.[7b]
This attitude of the lordly saurian toward the human race is a stinging burlesque on the anthropocentric conceit which perverts all of man’s views of the other orders of life.
It is not contended that non-human beings are psychically identical with human beings. The races of men are not psychically identical with each other. The difference between the intellectual splendours of a Spencer evolving volumes of the profoundest philosophy and the mind of an Australian who cannot count six, or between the understanding of an Edison, the wizard of the electrical world, and that of the South Sea islanders, who, when Captain Cook gave them some English nails, planted them in the hope of raising a new crop, is almost infinite. The lowest races of men have neither superstition nor the power of abstract thought as have the higher races. They have a word for black stone, white stone, and brown stone, but no word for stone; for elm-tree, oak-tree, and the like, but no word for tree. As Kingsley says, ‘It is difficult to believe that a dog does not form as clear an abstract idea of a tree as these people do.’ There are human beings living in the forests of Asia, Africa, and Australasia that wander about from place to place in herds without chief, law, weapons, or fixed habitations. They go naked, mate by chance, and climb trees like monkeys. Some of these races know nothing of fire, religion, or a moral world, chatter to each other like apes, and live on such natural products as roots, fruits, serpents, mice, ants, and honey. One of these creatures, we are told, will lie flat on his front for an hour by the runway of a field-mouse, waiting for a chance to snatch up the little creature when it comes along and eat it. Dozens of such degraded races are mentioned by Blichner in his ‘Man: Past, Present, and Future,’ and by Sir John Lubbock in his ‘Origin of Civilisation.’
Non-human beings have, as a rule, neither the psychic variety nor the intensity of higher humans. And it is not contended that in language, science, and superstition they are capable of being compared with the foremost few of civilised societies, any more than savages, especially the lowest savages, are capable of such comparison. But it is maintained that the non-human races of the earth are not the metallic and soulless lot of fixtures they are vulgarly supposed to be; that they are just as real living beings, with just as precious nerves and just as genuine feelings, rights, heartaches, capabilities, and waywardnesses, as we ourselves: and that, since they are our own kith and kindred, we have no right whatever, higher than the right of main strength (which is the right of devils), to assume them to be, and to treat them as if they were, our natural and legitimate prey.
[1.] Darwin: Expression of Emotions in Men and Animals; New York, 1899.
[2.] Starr: Human Progress; Pennsylvania, 1895.
[3a.] [3b.] [3c.] Hartmann: Anthropoid Apes; New York, 1901.
[4a.] [4b.] Brehm: From North Pole to Equator; London, 1896.
[5.] Stanley: In Darkest Africa, vol i.; New York, 1890.
[6a.] [6b.] [6c.] [6d.] [6e.] [6f.] Romanes: Animal Intelligence; New York, 1899.
[7a.] [7b.] Evans: Evolutional Ethics and Animal Psychology; New York, 1898.
[8a.] [8b.] Jesse: Gleanings in Natural History, vol. i.; London, 1832.
[9.] Kropotkin: Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution; New York, 1902.
[10.] Peckham and Peckham: Instincts and Habits of the Solitary Wasps; Madison, Wisconsin, 1898.
IV. The Elements of Human and Non-human Mind Compared.
The analysis of human mind and the comparison of its elements or powers with the powers of non-human mind corroborate the conclusions already arrived at through observation and deductive inference. The chief powers of the mind of man are sensation, memory, emotion, imagination, volition, instinct, and reason. All of these faculties are found in non-human beings, some of them developed to a much higher degree than they are in man, and some of them to a much lower.