Diversions of a Naturalist

by Sir E. Ray Lankester

We at once place ourselves in difficulty in discussing this subject by the use of the words "conscious" and "consciousness," for, as so often happens, they are customarily applied in a vague and uncertain way to the mental activities of man—without any precise agreement as to what is meant by either of them. We are all agreed that a rational human being may go through a series of elaborate actions apparently directed by purpose and yet not be what we call "conscious," that is to say, "aware" of what he is doing. This occurs in "sleep-walking" and in "day-dreaming." And again, we know that a man may be evidently conscious during a certain period, and yet forget directly afterwards that he has been conscious and said and done certain things during that period. This often happens after "concussion of the brain." It is, as a matter of fact, uncertain whether one ought to regard the condition of a man during that obliterated or forgotten period of seeming consciousness as rightly to be described by the term "conscious." And the reason why one has this doubt is that we all recognize that consciousness without memory is really a contradiction in terms. Memory—the inscription or record in our brains of past experiences—exists without consciousness, as we all know, by observation of ourselves and our fellows. But the very essence of consciousness is memory. We cannot even be "conscious" of the experience of a single moment without being also conscious of the memory of some previous condition—however small, temporary, and incomplete the memory may be. To be conscious we must compare the impressions reaching the brain at this moment with the memory of those of a past moment. And in lower animals and infants beginning to be conscious, the "recollections" available or accessible to consciousness may not extend farther back than a few seconds! If the memory of past experiences of which we are aware, that is to say, which are accessible to consciousness, is large and extends over the impressions of days, weeks, and years, then the conscious man or animal is in a totally different position from that of the man or animal who has only a very short and vague memory of which he or it is conscious. Thus it may be true that an animal or an infant is "conscious" and is comparing the present with the recollection of the past, and yet that the basis of comparison—the reach of memory accessible to consciousness—is so small as to be of little or no significance. Yet it is the beginning of a process which, gradually enlarging the access of consciousness to "memory," passes through a thousand degrees of increasing grasp and complexity (due to increased complexity in the microscopic connexions of the structural units, the branching nerve-corpuscles, which build up the brain) until it gives us the "consciousness" of a Shakespeare, a Newton, or a Darwin. The important fact in this consideration of what we mean by "conscious" and "consciousness" is, that memory is always for most lower animals, and during a period of growth in man, untouched by consciousness, and much of it remains so in all of us. As the dawn lights up a distant peak and then another and then a whole range and spreads to valley and plain, giving greater detail and variety as the moments pass—so does consciousness slowly invade in the course of development, whether of the individual or the species, the territory of memory. In the most man-like animals and the more ape-like men the process has not gone very far. In the highest apes consciousness is so limited in its access to memory that it is but a glimmer, a mere rudiment, of what it becomes in the modern races of mankind. We must not overlook the fact that it is only when we have to deal with men far advanced from the state of primeval savagery that the memory itself becomes rich and varied. Observation, memory, and record—the vast tradition of taboo, knowledge, custom, law, and religion not inborn in our structure but handed on by spoken or written word—are developed and increased by the very fact that the daylight of consciousness has reached the memory of them when less copious than they become in later development, and has given them life-saving value.

There is no reason to doubt that consciousness—a beginning of it—exists in such animals as dogs and monkeys. And it is equally true that man not only exists for some months after he is born without being "conscious," but for some years is so only in disconnected intervals. As a matter of fact, he is very incompletely "conscious," even when adult. He is quite unconscious of a great many of his elaborate actions. He has, moreover, an "unconscious memory"—that is to say, a memory of the existence of which he is not conscious—which guides him to, and in, the most complicated proceedings, and astonishes him when, by some chance, it is suddenly revealed to consciousness, or is converted into "conscious memory," when he dreams. Every man finds, sooner or later, that he has stored within him a register of things, persons, and events of the existence of which he was totally unaware. The gradual development of "consciousness" in higher ape-like animals and lower men, in the course of ages, is not the unparalleled thing which one is apt, at times, to consider it to be, since we can all remember the dawning of our own consciousness and its gradual development. We can also watch its growth in that most mysterious and wonderful casket of ancestral secrets and unfathomable destiny—a human infant.

Inscrutable as is the ultimate nature of "consciousness," we may put its further consideration aside on the present occasion, since it forms no actual barrier between men-like apes and ape-like men. On the contrary, the higher apes, the lower living races of men and the children of higher races, furnish us with evidence of transition from the lower condition of automatism to the higher one of self-recognition or consciousness in its most developed form. There is, however, a leading difference in the mental organization and mental processes of various animals, including man, which is of more importance in the matter which we are considering, and is largely related to the physical measurable difference in the size of the brain. The insects of which Fabre says: "They know nothing about anything," inherit a nervous mechanism—a brain and elongated mass of nerve-cells and fibres, like our spinal cord—which works sharply and definitely like a toy-automaton. Touch this part and that movement follows; excite the sense of vision with this visible thing, and such and such a movement of the limbs or jaws or other parts ensues. The stimulation of skin, eye, ear, or nose conveys a "message" by nerves to the "brain," or centre, and immediately by other nerves an "answer" is conveyed from the brain or centre in the shape of an order to this and those muscles to contract, the appropriate nerves being set at work and exciting the related muscles to contraction. The number of possible excitations and related responsive movements thus arranged is numerically very great in many animals, but they are limited. They are inherited just as they are, and come into action as soon as the necessary growth of the parts involved is attained, without hesitation or tentative trial. They are ready made. The terms "instinct" and "instinctive" should be limited to the action of this inherited apparatus or mechanism.

All animals, including man, have more or less of such an inherited instinctive nervous apparatus. Man, or for the matter of that an animal, may be "conscious" (in the sense of being "aware") of the stimulus given to this inherited apparatus, and of its related action, or he may be "unconscious" of either. The point is that we have here the "working" of an apparatus inherited in a complete working state; it is, therefore, what we call instinctive. On the other hand, there are in higher animals, and especially in man, a vast number of actions performed which are not the outcome of an inborn ready-made nervous mechanism. On the contrary, these actions are determined by a mechanism built up in the animal during its individual existence—a mechanism which is formed by its individual experience acting on its nerve-cells, and is the outcome of observation, comparison, and, more or less, of processes which we call judgment and reasoning. The persistence of this mechanism built up by the individual, as well as its continuous elaboration and development, is what we call "memory," unconscious or conscious. It is misleading to speak of "inherited memory" or "race memory," and to apply it in any way to the inherited mechanisms of instinct; the word should be reserved in its ordinary limitation to an individual's record. This new and superior apparatus appears to require a much larger bulk of brain-substance for its elaboration than that which is sufficient for the inherited mechanisms of instinct. It works in closer response to the innumerable details of the individual case, and so must be much more complicated, and we can well believe must require a larger instrument. Obviously it is an advantage to its possessor. He (be he animal or man) is provided not with a simple response suitable for the average of incidents in his life, but has, by the "education" due to the circumstances in which his individual life is carried on, formed an ever-increasing store of special little mechanisms, giving the useful or advantageous response which he has himself discovered to be appropriate to this or that sign, sound, colour, shape, smell, touch, or what not which may assail his senses. In proportion as the brain increases in volume (especially that part of it which is called "the cortex of the hemispheres") the animal to which that brain belongs loses—gets rid of—inherited mechanisms or instincts, and becomes "educable," that is to say, capable of forming for itself new individual brain mechanisms based on memorized experience.

"Educability" is the quality which distinguishes the brain of increased size. Dogs are more "educable" than rabbits; monkeys more so than dogs; and men more so—vastly more so—than monkeys and apes. The human infant is born with a few inherited mechanisms of "instinct," such as that which causes it to find its mother's nipple and to suck it, and to cling and support its own weight as no full-grown child can do. It is singularly free from any large number of inherited "instincts," and, to its own great advantage, has, during the many years in which it is protected by its parents, to learn everything and to construct new brain mechanisms—the results of "education" of the individual. We here use the word "education" in its proper and widest sense.

Thus we get an indication of "the reason why" the modern rhinoceros has a brain eight times as big as the titanotherium's. It is more "educable." The ancestors of our modern armour-plated friend have been surviving and beating their less "educable" brothers and sisters and cousins through a vast geological lapse of time; and the brains of the survivors have always been bigger, and they have become more educable and more educated until the race has culminated in those models of "sweet reasonableness," the modern rhinoceroses! It must be confessed that this character attributed to the rhinoceros is a matter of inference and not of direct observation of that animal when under his native sky. We do not judge the survivor of a fine early Miocene family by the fury and annoyance he shows when shot at, nor by the stolid contempt with which he treats mankind at the Zoo. The same signification—"educability"—attaches to the large brain of the higher apes; and man's still larger brain means still greater educability and resulting reasonableness.

In order that natural selection and the survival of the fittest should have led to this increased size and accompanying educability of the brain, it is necessary to suppose that the individuals with the more educable brain as they appeared profited by it, that is to say, did become more educated, and so defeated their rivals, and survived and transmitted their increased size of brain little by little in succeeding generations. There is no difficulty about admitting this supposition in regard to the passage from higher ape-like creatures to later forms having a full-sized brain, such as we find in the Neanderthal man and in some Australians. But we are met here by what looks, at first sight, as a fact inconsistent with our view. The obvious increased educability and consequent increased education of lower races of man by the circumstances of their lives, places them clearly enough in a position of great advantage over the higher surviving apes. But when we compare the actual mental accomplishments of the highest civilized races of man with those of big-brained savages, we find that a large proportion of individuals in the civilized races are much farther ahead of the lower savage races than most of these are ahead of the higher apes. Newton, Shakespeare, and Darwin are in mental accomplishment farther away from an Australian black, or even a Congo negro, than these "savages" are from a gorilla or a chimpanzee. Yet the difference when we compare the size and the abundance of the convolutions of the brain of the European philosopher and the black-fellow does not seem, superficially, to be proportionate to the difference in the mental performance of the two. No minute study of the microscopic differences in the structure of the two brains has, as yet, been made, and it is probable that there is a greater difference here than in the mere shape of the brain-mass. It seems that the "educability" of the brain measured by its size is little greater in the one group of men than in the other. And it is found—so far as observation and experiment have been carried—that individual savages belonging to races showing very low mental accomplishments in their native surroundings are yet capable of being "educated" to a far higher level of mental performance, when removed in early youth from their natural conditions and subjected to the same conditions as the better-cared-for children of a civilized race, than any of them ever reach in their own communities.

Very few really satisfactory experiments have been made in this direction, but the history of the negroes in America shows that the pure, unmixed negro brain is capable of showing high mathematical power, musical gifts of the best, and moral and philosophic activities equal to those of the best, or all but the exceptionally gifted, individuals of European race. It seems that the large educable brain gained by man in a relatively early period of his development from the ape has now entered on a new phase of importance. The pressure of natural selection no longer favours an increased educability (and therefore size) of brain, but the later progress of man has depended on the actual administration by each generation to its successors of an increasingly systematized exercise of that brain; in short, it has depended on education itself, and on the gigantic new possibilities of education, which have followed from the development, first, of language, then of writing, and lastly of printing, together with the accompanying growth and development of social organization, the inter-communication of all races, and the carrying on, by means of the Great Record—the written and printed documents of humanity—of the experience and knowledge of each passing generation of men from them to the men of the present moment.

Huxley agreed with Cuvier in the opinion that the possession of articulate speech is the grand distinctive character of man. It was no sudden acquirement, but was slowly, step by step, evolved from the significant grunts and cries of apes in the course of long ages, and corresponded in its progress with a parallel progress in mental capacities. Once attained, it led to the formation of vast educative products, namely, to oral tradition, to written and then to printed memorials and records. It is not desirable in our present state of knowledge to speculate as to whether the transitional ape-man acquired the use of fire before or after he had invented articulate speech. It probably was acquired very soon after some skill in the flaking of flints had been attained, and was of immense value, both as a defence against predatory animals and as a means of preparing food. Man probably learnt at a very early period to cover himself with clothing made from the skins of other animals, and thus to tolerate cold climates. The use of clothing was correlated with the diminution of his natural hairy covering. As to the circumstances which led to the reduction in size of his canine teeth and the diminution of the projection of his jaws, it is impossible to say more than that this was favoured by the increased skill of his hand and by the use of weapons, and probably was directly correlated with an increased growth of the brain. It is an interesting fact that very young children still exhibit the ancestral tendency to bite when angry, and that the use of the teeth as weapons of attack is more frequent among lower races with "prognathous" jaws than among Europeans.

A definite habit of the human infant, that of "crying"—the peculiar spasmodic howling of very young children—seems to be unknown in any of the apes. I do not know what ingenious reason may have been assigned for this difference. Apes laugh under the same circumstances as do men, but with less production of sound than is the case with man and the hyena. Man was, far back in his monkey-days, a social and companion-loving animal, and the fact that his laughing and his weeping are accompanied by noise is due to the desire for attention and sympathy from his friends. A great difference between man and apes is the greater power of expression of various feelings or emotions by the face, and also the greater variety and significance in man of the gestures both of the upper and the lower limbs. These again are methods of seeking for and gaining sympathy and co-operation. Though not all men and not all races in an equal degree have mobility and constantly varying expression in the face, yet it is the fact that the man-like apes which have been studied in life (the chimpanzee and orang) have even less variety and range of expression than the most unintelligent savages. Man seems to have developed in an ever-increasing degree the habit of watching and interpreting the face and of giving by it expression to his emotions and states of mind, thus establishing a ready means of producing common feeling and interest in a group of associated individuals. This seems to have led to a special appreciation of the features of the face, and so to the exercise of sexual selection, resulting in what we call "a standard of beauty" in regard to both shape and expression. It is quite possible that the reduction of the threatening canine teeth and projecting jaw may have been furthered by sexual selection when once a bite had become less effective than a blow with a sharp flint, and when persuasive sounds and gestures gained more adherents than the display of tusks by a snarl.