The Mastery of the Earth and How Man Obtained It

ALL the world—at any rate, all that part of the world which is acquainted with the facts—is now agreed that man is a product of evolution, and that his remote ancestors were of different bodily make and shape, and of different mental type and calibre, from their late descendants. No study of human kind can be comprehensive that does not include a survey of the mode by which the faculties that have given man the mastery of the earth were evolved.

We Know the Present by the Past

A history of his evolution, based, like a political history, on episodes, cannot, of course, be written. But man is a bundle of parts and capabilities. By comparing the civilised being with the savage and the savage with lower animals, we are able to trace, in many important particulars at least, his natural history with a degree of certainty to which, I think, no political history can aspire. As our comprehension of adult man is helped by a knowledge of the development of the child, so our understanding of our species is aided by a study of its past. Armed with some clear conceptions of what man was, and is, we shall be the better fitted to investigate social and political change, and to perceive how it happens that while some nations have inherited the earth and the fruits thereof, others have stagnated or fallen into decay.

How Man Learns by Experience

At a certain stage in his development the caterpillar builds himself a cocoon. His dwelling is a wonderful structure, but from our human point of view the remarkable thing is that he does not learn to build it. He may never have seen a cocoon before, and he constructs only one in his life. Yet his work is perfect, or at least very excellent, and it is as good in its beginnings as in its endings. Evidently he owes nothing to experience, but is impelled and guided throughout by a faculty which we terminstinct. An instinct may be defined as an innate, inherited impulse, an inclination to do a certain definite act, the instinctive act, on receipt of a certain definite stimulus or incitement to action. In the case of the caterpillar the stimulus appears to be the sight at the proper time of a suitable spot in which to build a cocoon. Since this particular impulse does not appear at the beginning of conscious life, it is termed a deferred instinct. Man, on the other hand, cannot build his house unless he first learns how to build. He depends, not on instinct, but on experience. The faculty by means of which experience is stored in the mind ismemory. The faculty by means of which we use stored experience to guide present or future conduct isintelligence. When the contents of memory are very vast, and the processes of thought by which they are utilised comparatively difficult and complex, intelligence is termedreason. Intelligence and reason depend, therefore, on memory, on ability to learn, on capacity to profit by experience. Memory is not the whole of intelligence, but it is the basis of it. Without memory there could be feeling and emotion, but no thought, for the materials of thought would be lacking.

Instinct in Place of MemoryThe Basis of Rational Action

We always measure the intelligence of an animal by its power of profiting by experience. Thus, a cat is more intelligent than a rabbit because it can learn more; a dog, for the same reason, is still more intelligent. A purely instinctive animal, one that has no memory, can have no conception of its past, and therefore no idea of its future. It lives wholly in the immediate present; feeling, but not thinking. It acts entirely on inclination, not on reflection. It makes provision for the future, not with any notion of providing, but simply because it has an impulse to a certain course of action, the performance of which gives it pleasure of the kind a child derives from playing or eating, and with the ultimate result of which it is no more consciously concerned than a child. If a caterpillar sheltered in a hole with the idea, founded on past experience,of avoiding danger, his action would be intelligent. If, appealing to a memory in which a great number of complex experiences were stored, he took thought and designed himself a shelter in which provision was made for all sorts ofremembereddangers, his action would be rational. But if, making no appeal to the past nor taking thought for the future, he builds only because impelled by an innate impulse, then, no matter how elaborate the edifice he rears, his action is instinctive.

Animals low in the scale of life—for example, most insects—appear incapable of learning. But often they are wonderfully equipped by instinct. The details of the behaviour of a small beetle, as quoted from Professor Lloyd Morgan, may not have been quite correctly ascertained, but they are sufficiently accurate for our purpose.

A certain beetle (Sitaris) lays its eggs at the entrance of the galleries excavated by a kind of bee (Anthophora), each gallery leading to a cell. The young larvæ are hatched as active little insects, with six legs, two long antennæ, and four eyes, very different from the larvæ of other beetles. They emerge from the egg in the autumn, and remain in a sluggish condition till the spring. At that time (in April) the drones of the bee emerge from the pupæ, and as they pass out through the gallery the Sitaris larvæ fasten upon them. There they remain till the nuptial flight of the Anthophora, when the larva passes from the male to the female bee. Then again they wait their chance. The moment the bee lays an egg, the Sitaris larva springs upon it. Even while the poor mother is carefully fastening up her cell, her mortal enemy is beginning to devour her offspring, for the egg of the Anthophora serves not only as a raft, but as a repast. The honey, which is enough for either, would be too little for both, and the Sitaris, therefore, at its first meal, relieves itself from its only rival. After eight days the egg is consumed, and on the empty shell the Sitaris undergoes its first transformation, and makes its appearance in a very different form.... It changes into a white, fleshy grub, so organised as to float on the surface of the honey, with the mouth beneath and the spiracles above the surface.... In this state it remains until the honey is consumed, and, after some further metamorphoses, develops into a perfect beetle in August.

Wonderful Instinct of the Beetle

The beetle has sense organs; therefore she feels. But we have no reason to suppose that she remembers or thinks. Memory would be of little use to her; therefore parsimonious Nature bestows little or none. Cast adrift in a hostile world, she must come into existence ready armed by instinct for the battle of life. She has no time to learn, and during the rapid and strange changes in her career has little opportunity of acquiring knowledge that could beneficially guide her future conduct. Since memory and its corollary reflection are most developed in the highest animals, and are imperceptible in the lower, they are clearly later and higher products of evolution than instinct.

Man’s Helplessness at Birth

Family life is a product of memory, for the mate and offspring arere-cognised; therefore it always implies some degree of intelligence. The young are watched and protected, and taught by the higher animals. Opportunities are thus afforded of learning about the world, and more particularly of acquiring the traditions, the stored experiences, of the race. With the opportunity to profit by experience comes the ability to profit by it, and with the latter a gradual decay of instinct. Intelligence is substituted, more or less, for unthinking impulse. All the instincts are not lost, but in the higher animals we find no such elaborate innate impulses as in the lower. “Sitaris” is able to fend for herself from the first; but just in proportion as animals are highly placed in the scale of life, so they are helpless at the beginnings of consciousness, but correspondingly capable later. A young pig can run as soon as it is born, but the acquirements of the most learned pig are small compared to that of a dog, which, though more helpless than the pig at birth, is so teachable that he becomes the companion of man. Our domestic animals are all teachable, otherwise we could not tame them.

Of living beings man is by far the most helpless at birth. He cannot even seek the breast. In him instinct is at its minimum. For him more than any other animal prolonged and elaborate tuition is necessary; but so vast is his memory, and so great his power of utilising its stored experience, that in later life he is beyond comparison the most capable of the inhabitants of the earth. Compare what even a dull man knows, including the words of a language and its inflections and articulations, with what is acquired by the cleverest dog, and the immensity of the difference is at once apparent. We may take a solitary frog and rear him from the egg in an aquarium. If, subsequently, we remove him to a pond, hewill take his place with his fellows at once. He has little, if anything, to learn. Instinctively he knows his food, and how to seek it; his enemies and rivals, and how to escape or fight them; his mate, and how to deal with her; and she knows how to dispose of her eggs. But how forlorn and helpless would be a man reared from infancy in a dark cell out of sight and sound of his kind, and then turned into a world where hisexperiencedfellows struggle for existence!

Fear is the Result of Experience

Traditional knowledge—knowledge, that is, imparted by one generation to the next—is common enough amongst the higher of the lower animals, and forms no inconsiderable part of their mental equipment. Thus we may see the hen teaching her chickens how to seek food, and the cat instructing her kitten how to ambush mice. Birds and mammals inhabiting desert islands have none of that fear of man which in our country they acquire from dire experience. We have a saying, “as wild as a hawk”; but Darwin relates how he almost pushed a hawk from its perch with his gun in the Galapagos Islands. Round our coasts the sea-birds are exceedingly shy; in a harbor they feed from the hand. Formerly the Arctic seals, impelled by fear of bears, inhabited the outer margin of the floes; at the present day they have retreated from the more dangerous neighbourhood of man to the landward edge. Antarctic seals, harried by the great carnivora of the ocean, are watchful in the water; on land or on the surface of the ice, where till lately they met no danger, they may be slaughtered like sheep in a shambles. They are capable of profiting by experience; but they are slow to learn, and can acquire but little. Judged by our human standard, they are very stupid. The means of escape adopted by Arctic seals, and the means of capturing them, the ships and guns adopted by man, furnish a measure of the intellectual difference.

Slavery in the World of Insects

When animals are social, and so have the opportunity of learning, not only from their parents, but from other members of the species, the power of making useful mental acquirements is correspondingly great. It reaches a remarkable degree of development even amongst insects, some species of which live together in great communities. Young ants, for example, are tended with anxious care. It is said that they are led about the nest and instructed by older individuals. They are reported to be playful. Most significant of all is the fact that some species have the habit of capturing slaves belonging to other species, which they take as pupæ, never as adult ants, and to whom, as they develop, they teach their duties. The slaves are neuter individuals, and have no offspring, the supply being maintained by fresh captures. It follows that the slaves mustlearntheir work, and therefore that their performance of it is not instinctive, but intelligent.

It is a fair inference that many of the so-called instincts of ants are really acquired habits, bits of knowledge and ways of thinking and acting which are handed down from one generation to the next, not by actual inheritance, but traditionally and educationally, just as children receive from us language, or religion, or a trade. Indeed, there is reason to believe that the power of making mental acquirements has evolved to a greater degree in the favourable environment of the ant-nest than among any other species except man.

Man’s Essential Instincts

The instincts of man, though comparatively few and simple, are yet essential to his existence. He has the instinct of hunger and the instinctive recognition of food as food, the instincts to sleep periodically, to rest when tired, and to sport when rested, the instincts of curiosity and imitativeness, and the deferred instincts of sexual and parental love, and perhaps one or two others. All these innate impulses he shares with the lower animals, but those which impel him to store and use his vaster memory are more developed in him than in any other type. Thus the instinct of sport urges him, not only to develop his limbs, but, through experience, to acquire dexterity and much besides. The little girl turns naturally to her doll, which she handles as she will her baby. The play of a boy as naturally involves contests, which foreshadow the grimmer battles of adult life. As he grows older the character of his sport changes. More and more it becomes an appeal to the wits, an appeal to wider experience and a means of adding to it.

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 membersof 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 evermore 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.

Man can Revert to Savagery

It is different with man. He is preeminently the educable, the reflective, the adaptive animal. Since the experiences of no two men are quite similar, they differ in knowledge, ideas, and aspirations, and, therefore, none are very closely alike mentally. The child does not follow exactly in the footsteps of the parent. So great is human adaptability that, though the mind of the savage differs immensely in all except instinct and power of learning from that of the civilised man, yet, were the child of the latter trained from birth by the former, he could not be other than a savage.

On the other hand, utter savages—for example, the Maories of New Zealand—have passed in a single generation from barbarism to civilisation. The average individual amongst us may be trained to fill the rôle of a beggar or a king, a scientist or a monk, a thief or a legislator. He is able to dwell in the Tropics or in the Arctic, in the town or in the wild. Memory, knowledge, intelligence, adaptability, are all links in a single chain of efficiency.

Dawn of Human Life

Memory is of two sorts, conscious and unconscious. The conscious memory contains experiences which can be recollected, such as the words of a language or the sights we have seen. The unconscious memory contains impressions which cannot be recalled to mind, but which are none the less important. Thus, we learn to use our limbs, a process which involves a precise but quite unconscious adjustment of the actions of numerous nerves and muscles, the very names and existences of which are known only to the anatomist. So, also, in youth we unconsciously imitate our fellows, adopting in great measure their mental tones and attitudes without knowing how or when we were influenced. Much, too, that was once capable of being recalled is added to that hidden store, and, though apparently lost, remains potent for good or evil. Our minds are like floating icebergs, of which the visible part is but a fraction of the whole, and are moved by deep currents in a seemingly unaccountable way. At birth the mind of a child, unlike that of a beetle, is practically blank. Sights and sounds and the other feelings convey no meanings to it. But soon the messages sent by the sensation are understood. In a few weeks the child evolves order out of chaos, and comprehends to a wonderful degree the world around it. It learns to move its muscles in a purposeful way, and in a year or two is able to walk and speak a language, and do a vast deal more besides. In these early years, the period of man’s greatest mental activity, are made his most valuable and indispensable acquirements. But as he becomes more and more completely equipped for the battle of life, his powers of adding to the store slowly decline. In adult life the gains are balanced by the losses. In old age the losses exceed the gains. Compare the perfection with which the young acquire the manners of society, and every accent, inflection, and intonation of a language, with the imperfections displayed when learning is undertaken later.

Habits are Imitation Instincts

We learn to do new things, acquire new knowledge, and think new thoughts with toil. But practice brings facility. In the end we perform with ease that which was acquired with difficulty. We cannot, however, unlearn as we learnt, by an act of will. The facility lingers, and, as a consequence, our actions and thoughts, our mental attitudes, our whole outlook on life becomes more or less automatic and stereotyped. In other words, our acquirements come at last to resemble instincts, and are often so misnamed, as when a boy who has learned to dodge is said to avoid a blow instinctively. A being from another planet who for the first time saw a man walking or cycling could not distinguish the nature of these acquirements from such instinctive movements as the running or flying of an insect. The patriotism of a Spartan or a Japanese differs from that ofa bee only in its mode of origin. In brief, the low animal is a creature of instincts, the man is a creature of habits, which are nothing other than imitation instincts.

Mankind’s Substitutes for Instinct

A principal function, then, of our faculty of making mental acquirements, of our conscious and unconscious memories, is to supply us with those automatic ways of thinking and acting which are our substitutes for instincts. Our conscious memories supply us with our stereotyped mental attitudes—desires, beliefs, aspirations, habitual way of thinking, and so forth. Our unconscious memories supply our stereotyped ways of acting—the automatic ways of acting we have just considered. It is a principal business of our lives to acquire them; but, though a great advantage is thus gained, one almost as great is lost. We act and think more quickly in familiar situations, but in proportion as we grow older we lose our splendid human capacity for learning. Beyond the verge of our imitation instincts spreads a domain, very wide in the infant, but narrowing as we pass towards old age, which is the real realm of the active intellect. Here, where thoughts and actions are not yet stereotyped, memory gathers fresh harvests, imagination plays, and reason ponders. Here man is a rational being in the strict sense of the word.

Mind and Memory

A little thought renders it evident that a feeble-minded person, an idiot, or an imbecile, is always one with a defective memory. He is unable to profit like the normal individual from experience. The truth that the higher faculties are more often absent in the feeble-minded than the lower is due entirely to the fact that they can be acquired only by people whose receptive powers are well developed. In effect and in fact the feeble-minded person is an instance of reversion to a prehuman mental state. Judged by the human standard, every monkey is an idiot. But the reversion is not complete, for, though the imbecile loses some part of his power of profiting by experience, he regains no part of the lost power of being guided by instinct. Therefore he is correspondingly helpless as compared with a lower animal.

Owing to the constitution of the human mind, some decay of the faculty of profiting by experience accompanies advancing age. But it need seldom be so great as it usually is, and never so great as it often is. Certain mental attitudes, certain systems of education, certain environments, leave the mind of the man almost as open as that of a little child; others inflict on it premature senility. An Aristotle or a Darwin learns to the last year of his long life; a Mohammedan or a Tibetan ecclesiastic is old before he has ceased to be young. Convinced that pestilence is due directly to the wrath of God, he scorns the notion that sanitation can be right or useful; believing that the earth is flat, no evidence will convince him that it is round; holding his sacred religion with a steadfast faith, he will murder the heretic rather than think out his propositions.

How the Minds of Men Differ

But habits of stupidity are not confined to particular regions of thought. Becoming almost as incapable of mental change as a beetle, a man may undergo an arrest of mental development which differs from that of the idiot only because it occurs later in life, is less complete, and is acquired, not innate. In his ordinary surroundings he appears a normal person; but placed among people of more open mind, his brute-like inability to learn suggests sharply the resemblance to the feeble-minded child. Let us sum up. Man has conquered the earth because he is pre-eminently the educable, the adaptive animal. His educability—indeed, his whole thinking capacity—depends on his memory. He has few instincts, a fact which increases his mental ductility; but one of the most important of his instincts is imitativeness, which impels him to copy not only such obvious things as the speech of his predecessors, but their mental attitudes as well. In this way not only the actual knowledge and beliefs but also the habits of thought of one generation are handed on to the next. Apart from a few instincts which are more active in the child than in the adult, and two or three others whose appearance is deferred till later life, the whole mental difference between the child and the adult lies in the fact that the former has a great memory in the sense that it is very capable of storing experience, whereas the latter has a great memory in the sense that it has already stored much experience. As parent to child, so one racial generation hands on its acquirements to the next, but with greater certainty; for the parent is not the only influence in the life of the child,who imitates many other people, sometimes more closely than the parent; whereas, since few individuals travel during youth, the young are seldom influenced by others than by members of their own race. Except in times of great change, therefore, racial generations resemble one another even more closely than parents and children.

Like individuals, races differ in their mental characteristics. The English have one set of characters, the Japanese another, and the Russians a third. The problem of the extent to which these characters are inborn or acquired is very important to the student of history. Accordingly as we believe they are the one or the other we are driven to accept one or other of two very different readings of the past.

Influences in a Child’s Life

Are races, then, brave or cowardly, energetic or slothful, enlightened or savage, and so forth, by nature or by training? Are the qualities that have enabled some races to flourish, while others are decadent, transmitted as instincts or handed on, as knowledge is? The reader has now materials of a kind not usually found in historical works on which to found a judgment. He must bear in mind that, while an American infant reared by cannibals would retain the bodily characteristics of his race mentally, he could not be other than a savage. He must remember also that some races have altered their mental characteristics very rapidly. Thus, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, immediately after the long Dark Ages, the British and several other European races suddenly became intellectually active and socially progressive. The Japanese supply a more modern, the Greeks and Romans more ancient, instances. The latter quite as suddenly sank into abysmal degradation. Innate mental characters, such as the instincts, usually change so slowly that not merely historical but geological time elapses before the alteration is perceptible. Again, the reader must note that, while theopinionthat racial traits are inborn is nearly universal, most menactas if they knew them to be acquired; for nearly all men are careful in training their children, especially with respect to those traits that contribute to the formation of character.

Great Facts to Remember

Doubtless, races of men differ innately in mind as they do in body, but these differences can occur only within narrow limits. The instincts of all races are, of course, very similar, for all the instincts are essential to the preservation of life. But races may differ in strength of instinct, and more especially in powers of memory. Thus it is possible, or probable, that the English, for example, are more capable of profiting by experience than Australian blacks. Certainly, their brains are larger. On the other hand, the brain grows under the stimulus of use, and therefore the larger size of the English brain may be due to more arduous labour.

The Real Value of History

Lastly, the reader must ask himself the question: What mental effects have centuries of freedom or slavery, or of civilisation, or of barbarism, on races? Do they produce innate changes, or do they merely render certain acquirements so nearly universal that their perpetuation by imitation is insured? If he supposes that the changes are innate, he must ask himself the additional question whether they arose through the transmission of parental acquirements to offspring, or through the actual and constant destruction in certain environments of certain definite types of individuals who were thus prevented from leaving offspring and so perpetuating their like. The former hypothesis is now generally repudiated by science. The latter may be true, but as yet has not been supported by evidence; or at any rate is supported only by such evidence as that which Mill and Buckle denounced. In either case, though history may furnish him with intellectual occupation, it will supply few lessons of practical value. If, on the other hand, he has perceived the greatness of the part played in the human mind by acquirement, if he has noted that man is man, a thinking and rational being, the conqueror of the earth, only because he is the most impressionable and therefore the most adaptable of living types, the reader will learn from the racial see-saw of the past what kinds of mental training have conduced to success and happiness and what to ruin, and so perhaps he may find himself in a position to help the fortunes of his people and his children. The real value of history, as in the last analysis of all experience, lies in its educational applications.

G. ARCHDALLREID

PREHISTORIC MEN ATTACKING THE GREAT CAVE BEARSLARGER IMAGE

PREHISTORIC MEN ATTACKING THE GREAT CAVE BEARS

LARGER IMAGE

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