A Child’s Play Fits it for the Future
The higher amongst the lower animals also have their sports, which, in every instance, are adapted to fit the members of the species for the future business of life. Compare, for example, the ambush and pounce of the kitten, the ardent chase and overthrow of the puppy, and the climbing proclivities of the kid. As a general rule, in proportion as an animal is capable of becoming intelligent, and as long as it is so capable, it is inclined to sport. A cat loses the desire early in life, a man retains it to the end. A child’s play, therefore, is no indication of mere frivolity. It is the outward and visible sign of an eager and splendidly directed mental activity. Curiosity also prompts the child to store its memory. Imitativeness impels him to acquire those mental traits which enabled his progenitors to survive in their world. Parental love prompts to the care and instruction of offspring. Very illuminating and beautiful is the instinctive delight of some dull and careworn mother in babyish play with her infant, and her joy when it first “takes notice,” and in its earliest beginnings of speech and locomotion.
Every animal species is fitted by its structures and their associated faculties to its particular place in Nature. In some cases it holds its own largely through the evolution of some one structure or group of structures. Thus, the bat is especially distinguished by the great development of its fingers and of the web between them, and the elephant by its trunk. The principal distinguishing physical peculiarity of man is the enormous relative size in him of that upper part of the vertebrate brain which is termed the cerebrum, and, we have every reason to believe, constitutes the organ of memory and thought.
Evolution of Man’s Powers
Associated in a special way with his great brain are his organs of speech and manipulation. These three structures, the brain, the vocal apparatus, and the hand, undoubtedly underwent concurrent evolution by the constant survival, during a period of intense competition, of those individuals who were naturally the best capable of receiving and storing experience, of using it for the intelligent manipulation of objects, and of communicating it to their fellows and descendants through the medium of speech. Even the highest of the lower animals are able to learn from one another only by example or through such very elementary verbal signs as calls, growls, or cries of alarm, which express no more than simple emotions.
Their traditional knowledge, therefore, is as nothing compared with that of man, who by means of articulated speech communicates not only information concerning sense impressions and emotions, but complex items of knowledge and processes of thought which have been garnered, elaborated, and systematised during tens of thousands of years by millions of predecessors. Without speech, or some such method of communicating abstruse information, his great brain would be useless. But knowledge and powers of thought are of no avail unless they can be translated into action; and for this the hands are necessary. To set free the fore limbs, which had hitherto been organs of locomotion, for their new function of manipulation, man became a biped, and assumed the erect posture—by no conscious effort, however, but solely by the survival of the fittest in each generation.
Man Paves His Way to Greatness
Savage man, then, differs from the lower animals in that he has a larger brain, a more capacious memory, and greater powers of utilising and communicating its contents. Modern man differs from ancient man because he is the heir of longer experience. Civilised man differs from the savage chiefly in that he has invented and more or less perfected certain artificial aids to speech, written symbols by means of which he is able to store in an available form knowledge immensely more abstruse and voluminous than would otherwise be possible. His books are artificial memories and vehicles of communication of unlimited capacity and unerring accuracy. Moreover, by means of these symbols he is able, as in the mathematics, to perform feats of thinking quite beyond the powers of his unaided mind; just as by means of machinery and other mechanical contrivances he is able to perform physical feats beyond the unaided powers of his body.
To memory, then, is due the advance of the savage beyond the lower animal; to tradition, the child of memory, the advance of modern man beyond ancient man; to tradition stored in books the advance of civilised men beyond the savage. To written symbols are due also man’s vast powers for future advance. The brute, the mammoth, the mastodon, the whale, the elephant, and the tiger, became ever more and more helpless in the presence of a knowledge and an ingenuity that gathered with the rolling years, and, though accumulated for ages, were yet relatively new things in this enormously old world.
Low animals, in proportion as they lack memory, move in a narrow, instinctive groove. Their mental traits are all inherited, and therefore each individual follows exactly in the footsteps of its predecessor. Since they cannot learn, they cannot adapt themselves to circumstances. Removed from the ancestral environment they perish. Cast in a rigid, inexpansive mould, every individual resembles every other of the same species, as much mentally as physically.