The Antiquity of Man

by Sir Charles Lyell

Professor Agassiz, after declaring that as yet we scarcely possess the most elementary information requisite for a scientific comparison of the instincts and faculties of animals with those of Man, confesses that he cannot say in what the mental faculties of a child differ from those of a young chimpanzee. He also observes, that "the range of the passions of animals is as extensive as that of the human mind, and I am at a loss to perceive a difference of kind between them, however much they may differ in degree and in the manner in which they are expressed. The gradations of the moral faculties among the higher animals and Man are, moreover, so imperceptible, that to deny to the first a certain sense of responsibility and consciousness would certainly be an exaggeration of the difference between animals and Man. There exists, besides, as much individuality within their respective capabilities among animals as among Man, as every sportsman, or every keeper of menageries, or every farmer and shepherd can testify, who has had a large experience with wild, or tamed, or domesticated animals. This argues strongly in favour of the existence in every animal of an immaterial principle, similar to that which, by its excellence and superior endowments, places Man so much above animals. Yet the principle exists unquestionably, and whether it be called soul, reason, or instinct, it presents, in the whole range of organised beings, a series of phenomena closely linked together, and upon it are based not only the higher manifestations of the mind, but the very permanence of the specific differences which characterise every organ. Most of the arguments of philosophy in favour of the immortality of Man apply equally to the permanency of this principle in other living beings."*

(* Contributions to the "Natural History of the United
States of North America" volume 1 part 1 pages 60 and 64.)

Professor Huxley, when commenting on a passage in Professor Owen's memoir, above cited, argues that there is a unity in psychical as in physical plan among animated beings, and adds, that although he cannot go so far as to say that "the determination of the difference between Homo and Pithecus is the anatomist's difficulty," yet no impartial judge can doubt that the roots, as it were, of those great faculties which confer on Man his immeasurable superiority above all other animate things are traceable far down into the animate world. The dog, the cat, and the parrot, return love for our love and hatred for our hatred. They are capable of shame and of sorrow, and though they may have no logic nor conscious ratiocination, no one who has watched their ways can doubt that they possess that power of rational cerebration which evolves reasonable acts from the premises furnished by the senses—a process which takes fully as large a share as conscious reason in human activity.*

(* "Natural History Review" Number 1 January 1861 page 68.)

GROUNDS FOR REFERRING MAN TO A DISTINCT KINGDOM OF NATURE.

Few if any of the authors above cited, while they admit so fully the analogy which exists between the faculties of Man and the inferior animals, are disposed to underrate the enormous gap which separates Man from the brutes, and if they scarcely allow him to be referable to a distinct order, and much less to a separate sub-class, on purely physical grounds, it does not follow that they would object to the reasoning of M. Quatrefages, who says, in his work on the "Unity of the Human Species," that Man must form a kingdom by himself if once we permit his moral and intellectual endowments to have their due weight in classification.

As to his organisation, he observes, "We find in the mammalia nearly absolute identity of anatomical structure, bone for bone, muscle for muscle, nerve for nerve—similar organs performing like functions. It is not by a vertical position on his feet, the os sublime of Ovid, which he shares with the penguin, nor by his mental faculties, which, though more developed, are fundamentally the same as those of animals, nor by his powers of perception, will, memory, and a certain amount of reason, nor by articulate speech, which he shares with birds and some mammalia, and by which they express ideas comprehended not only by individuals of their own species but often by Man, nor is it by the faculties of the heart, such as love and hatred, which are also shared by quadrupeds and birds, but it is by something completely foreign to the mere animal, and belonging exclusively to Man, that we must establish a separate kingdom for him (page 21). These distinguishing characters," he goes on to say, "are the abstract notion of good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, or the moral faculty, and a belief in a world beyond ours, and in certain mysterious beings, or a Being of a higher nature than ours, whom we ought to fear or revere; in other words, the religious faculty."—page 23.

By these two attributes the moral and the religious, not common to man and the brutes, M. Quatrefages proposes to distinguish the human from the animal kingdom.

But he omits to notice one essential character, which Dr. Sumner, the late Archbishop of Canterbury, brought out in strong relief fifty years ago in his "Records of Creation." "There are writers," he observes, "who have taken an extraordinary pleasure in levelling the broad distinction which separates Man from the Brute Creation. Misled to a false conclusion by the infinite variety of Nature's productions, they have described a chain of existence connecting the vegetable with the animal world, and the different orders of animals one with another, so as to rise by an almost imperceptible gradation from the tribe of Simiae to the lowest of the human race, and from these upwards to the most refined. But if a comparison were to be drawn, it should be taken, not from the upright form, which is by no means confined to mankind, nor even from the vague term reason, which cannot always be accurately separated from instinct, but from that power of progressive and improvable reason, which is Man's peculiar and exclusive endowment."

"It has been sometimes alleged, and may be founded on fact, that there is less difference between the highest brute animal and the lowest savage than between the savage and the most improved Man. But, in order to warrant the pretended analogy, it ought to be also true that this lowest savage is no more capable of improvement than the Chimpanzee or Orang-outang."