Among some species of monkeys several individuals will join together in overturning a stone for the possible ants’ eggs under it; and, when a burying beetle has found a dead mouse or bird, it goes and gets its companions to help it in the interment.[3a]Crows show benevolence by feeding their blind and helpless companions, and monkeys adopt the orphans of deceased members of their tribe. Brehm saw two crows feeding in a hollow tree a third crow which was wounded. They had evidently been doing this for some time, for the wound was several weeks old. Darwin tells of a blind pelican which was fed upon fishes, which were brought to it by its friends from a distance of thirty miles.[4a]The devotion of cedar-birds to each other and their kindness to all birds in distress are well known to every student of ornithology. Olive Thorne Miller tells of a cedar-bird that raised a brood of young robins that had been left orphans by the accidental killing of the parents. Weddell saw more than once during his journey to Bolivia that when a herd of vicunas were closely pursued the strong males covered the retreat of the weaker and less swift members of the herd by lagging behind and protecting them.[3b]A remarkable instance of altruism which he once saw exhibited by the king-crabs in a London aquarium is mentioned by Kropotkin in his work on ‘Mutual Aid a Factor in Evolution.’ One of these crabs had fallen on its back in a corner of the tank. And for one of these great creatures, with its saucepan carapace, to get on its back is, even in favourable circumstances, a serious matter. The seriousness was increased in this instance by an iron bar, which hindered the normal activities of the unfortunate crustacean. ‘Its comrades came to the rescue, and for one hour’s time I watched how they endeavoured to help their fellow-prisoner. They came two at once, pushed their friend from beneath, and after strenuous efforts succeeded in lifting it upright. But then the iron bar prevented them from achieving the work of rescue, and the crab again fell heavily on its back. After many attempts, one of the helpers went into the depth of the tank and brought two other crabs, who began with fresh forces the same pushing and lifting of their helpless comrade. We stayed in the aquarium for more than two hours, and, when leaving, came to cast a glance upon the tank. The work of attempted rescue still continued. Since I saw that I cannot refuse credit to the observation quoted by Dr. Erasmus Darwin that the common crab during the moulting season stations a sentinel, an unmolted or hard-shelled individual, to prevent marine enemies from injuring moulted individuals in their unprotected state.’ Walruses go to the defence of a wounded comrade when summoned by its cries for help. Romanes tells of a gander who acted as a guardian to his blind consort, taking her neck gently in his mouth and leading her to the water when she wanted to take a swim, and after allowing her to cruise for a time under his guidance and care, conducting her back home again in the same thoughtful manner. When goslings were hatched, this remarkable gander seemed to realise the inability of the mother to look after them, for he took charge of them as if they were his own, convoying them to the waterside, and lifting them carefully out of the ruts and pits with his bill whenever they got into difficulty.[1b]The disposition to go to the aid of a fellow in trouble is one of the most characteristic traits in the psychology of the swine. A single squeal of distress from even the scrawniest member of a swine herd will bring down on the one who causes this distress the hair-raising wrath of every porker within hearing. This trait has been considerably reduced by domestication, and in those varieties in which degeneracy has gone farthest it scarcely exists. But it is exceedingly strong in all wild hogs. Animals as low in the scale of development and as proverbially cold as snakes have been known, when educated and treated with kindness, to manifest considerable affection for their friends and masters. Nearly all domestic animals display a good deal of affection, not only to their young, but to adult members of their own kind and to their human masters. The devotion of the dog to man is without a parallel anywhere. It has been said that ‘the dog is the only thing on this earth that loves you more than he loves himself.’ When dogs become so much attached to their masters or mistresses that they pine and die on being separated from them, they show beyond any question that they have feelings which, in intensity, are not inferior to those possessed by the more highly developed men and women. And this has happened time after time.A pathetic story of love and of its tragic close came last year out of the Maine woods. Two moose, who had been tracked all day by a couple of human tigers, were finally overtaken, when one of them fell pierced by two rifle-balls. The remaining moose, instead of dashing off into the forest, stood still, lowered its head, and sniffed at its fallen companion. Then, raising its antlers high into the air, it bellowed loudly. As the cry of the great creature echoed through the forest, it also fell at the discharge of the rifles. It was found on examination afterwards that the first moose was blind, and that the second one, which had neglected to leave it for safety, was its pilot.My father once owned a cow who contracted a strong affection for my sister. This cow, who showed on many occasions and in many ways her highly developed emotional nature, would scarcely allow anyone else than my sister to milk her. She always presented herself to my sister as soon as she was let into the lot in order to be milked first, and she was so jealous of this privilege that if it were not accorded to her she would stand with her head down and give vent to her unhappiness in low moans. After she was milked she would follow her human friend around from one cow to another, in order to be as near her as possible. She knew my sister’s voice from that of everyone else, and would always low a response and come to her when called by name, even though she were a quarter of a mile away in the pasture. Romanes tells somewhere of a band of apes that were being pursued by dogs when a young ape was cut off from the rest and was about to be killed by the dogs. The chief of the band, seeing the peril of the young one, went deliberately back and rescued it.Many animals show that they possess a rudimentary sense of humour by the pranks and tricks which they play on each other and on human beings. The monkey is the prince of nonhuman jokers, but dogs, cats, horses, elephants, and other animals have enough of this sense to have books written about it. A monkey has been observed to slyly pass his hand back of a second monkey and tweak the tail of a third one, and then composedly enjoy himself while the resentment of the injured monkey expended itself on the innocent middle one. Many monkeys enjoy entertaining their friends with grimaces, by carrying a cane, putting a tin dish on their heads, or other droll antics. These intelligent animals have a sufficiently high appreciation of the ludicrous to dislike ridicule. Like human beings, they can’t endure being laughed at, and get mad if they are made the victims of a joke. Romanes’ monkey was one day asked to crack a nut for the amusement of a visitor. The nut turned out to be a bad one, and the melancholy look of disappointment on the monkey’s face caused the visitor to laugh. The insulted monkey flew into a rage, and hurled the nut at the offending scoffer, then the hammer, and finally the coffee-pot which simmered on the grate fire.[1c]Darwin tells of a baboon in the Zoological Gardens of London who always became infuriated every time his keeper took out a letter or book and read aloud to him. On one occasion when Darwin was present the baboon became so furious that he bit his own leg until it bled.[4b]The emotion variously known as shame, regret, repentance, and remorse, is not common among the non-human races. It is found sometimes in dogs and monkeys, and especially in educated anthropoids. But this emotion is exceedingly rare among savages, and is not at all universal even among civilised societies of men. Some animals manifest self-restraint, which is an exceedingly elite quality of mind, and one not so common as it might be even among the higher breeds of mankind. By restraint is meant the inhibition of a desire or instinct in the presence of circumstances tending to render the desire or instinct active—and this is obedience, and the beginning of morality. A dog that will not chase a hare in the presence of his master may do so in his absence. I taught my guinea-pigs to abstain from certain food in their presence which they wanted very much, and which they would have eaten if they had not been educated to let it alone. Sympathy is the most beautiful of all terrestrial emotions. It is manifested, sometimes to an exceedingly touching degree, by all the highest races of animals. No other instances than those already given can be mentioned here. It is sufficient to say that the difference between the savage—whose sympathies are so feeble that he has been known to knock his own child’s brains out for dropping a basket, and who puts his aged parents to death in order to avoid the burden of maintaining them, and whose sympathies seldom extend beyond his family or tribe—and civilised men and women, who feel actual pain when in the presence of those who suffer, and whose sympathies sometimes include all sentient creation, is much greater than that between the savage and many nonhuman animals. The frail, narrow, fantastic character of human sympathy is the most mournful fact in human nature. ‘Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn,’ and his inhumanity to not-men makes the planet a ball of pain and terror.Volitionis the power of the mind to act executively. Or, perhaps, it is the resultant of the impulses actuating a mind at any particular instant. Whatever volition is, it is the same thing in the insect as in the man. Non-human beings have been observed to pause and deliberate and to make wise and momentous decisions in the twinkling of an eye. A chased hare will decide to squat, to go straight ahead, or to do something else which the emergency demands, just as unmistakably as a human fugitive. In the sense of being the power to act differently from the manner in which a being actually does act, there is no such thing as freewill. The will of the worm is just as free as the will of the judge—not in the sense that it is as varied in the directions of its activity, but in the sense that the character of its activities is determined inevitably by the character of its antecedents. All will, whether human or non-human, invariably acts in the direction of the strongest motive, just as a stone or a river invariably moves, if it moves at all, in the direction of the strongest tendency or force. It is impossible that this should be otherwise. For, if the will in any case elects to overthrow this fact by arbitrarily discarding a stronger motive for a feebler, in the very motive of the election are concealed elements which transform the feebler motive into the stronger. All motion, voluntary and involuntary—the motion of bullets, beings, societies, and suns—takes place along the lines of least arrest. Every being is compelled to decide as he does decide and to act as he does act by the inherited tendencies of his own nature and the tendencies of the environment in which he exists. And if any being, after having passed through life, were again placed back at the beginning of life and endowed with the same nature as before, and were acted upon through life by surroundings identical with those he had previously met, he would act—that is, he would exercise his will—in precisely the same way in every particular as he had previously done. To deny these things is to assert that the conduct of living beings is without law, and that psychology and sociology are not sciences.Non-human beings, all of the higher ones, have the same brain and nervous apparatus as man, and in their involuntary phenomena they closely resemble human beings. Aim a pretended blow near the eyes of a dog or a horse and it will wink involuntarily, just as a human being does. Sever the spinal cord of a man or a frog, and irritate the feet of each, and they will each manifest the same phenomena of reflex action, drawing their feet away each time from the stimulus.Instinctandreasonare forms of intelligence. Intelligence is the adaptation of acts to ends. Intelligence is manifested by all organisms, both plants and animals, and may be either conscious or unconscious. Plant intelligence and reflex action are forms ofunconsciousintelligence. Plant intelligence, or the adaptation of acts to ends by plants, is manifested by plants in the shifting of their positions when in need of light in order to obtain as large a supply as possible of the essential sunshine; in devices, such as traps and flowers, for utilising the juices and services of insects; in germinating and growing away from, instead of toward, the centre of the earth; in discriminating between this and that kind of food; and in a thousand other ways. Plant intelligence is all explicable in terms of chemistry and physics, and is, so far as is known, unaccompanied by consciousness. Reflex action is chemical affinity aided by the co-ordinating powers of nerve tissue. The vital processes of all animals, from the lowest to the highest, and many other highly habitual and highly essential operations, are carried on by reflex action. Reflex action in animals, like plant intelligence, is unconscious.Instinct and reason areconscious. Instinct is inherited intelligence—intelligence manifested independently of, and prior to, experience and instruction. ‘Instinct,’ says Romanes, ‘is reflex action into which has been imported the element of consciousness’.[5a]It is exhibited by the babe when it nurses the mother’s breast; by the chick when it pecks its way out through the shell of the egg; by animals generally, including man, in their solicitude for their young; by the parent bird in incubation; and by all beings when they seek food in obedience to the impulse of hunger. Our conception of the mental processes of non-humans is as yet very primitive, owing to our limited means of information and the erroneous influence on our judgments of traditional ways of thinking; and much that is attributed by us to instinct is not instinct at all, but is acquired by the young through education imparted by the elders. Parent birds have often been seen teaching their young ones to fly, and no doubt a good deal of the migratory acumen manifested by birds is nothing but custom and tradition handed down to each younger generation by the old and experienced. A large part of the knowledge of mankind (or what passes for knowledge) consists of habits and hobbies, customs and traditions, impressed upon each new generation by the generation which produced it. Each generation of men seems to feel that whenever it creates a new generation it has got to pile on to this new generation all of the fool notions which have been acquired from the past, amplified by its own inventions. And when we come to know other animals better, there is practically no doubt that we shall find that a large part of what we now call instinct and look upon as congenital will, on closer and more rational examination, be found to be nothing but the pedagogical effects of early environment. Professor Poulton, of Oxford, who has made many experiments on just-born birds, says that young chicks learn to fear the hawk and to interpret the oral warnings of the mother. Cats teach their young to play with their prey in that cruel manner so characteristic of all the Felidae, as I have myself observed more than once. A mother cat will carry a live mouse into the presence of her kittens and lie down and play with it, tossing it playfully into the air, poking it with her paw when it does not move, and arresting it when it starts to run away, the kittens all the time looking on, but never once attempting to take the mouse. After awhile the mother hands the captive over to the kittens, who go through the same performance one after another. After they have practised on it until the unfortunate creature is almost dead, the old cat will probably walk over to where the mouse is and eat it up. The whole thing is aschool. The mouse is obviously not intended as food for the young, but to be used simply to impart instruction to them.‘In popular writings and lectures some or all of the following activities of ant-life are commonly ascribed to instinct: The recognition of members of the same nest; powers of communication; keeping aphides for the sake of their sweet secretions; collection of aphid eggs in October, hatching them out in the nest, and taking them in the spring to the daisies on which they feed, for pasture; slave-making and slave-keeping, which, in some cases, is so ancient a habit that the enslavers are unable even to feed themselves; keeping insects as beasts of burden—e.g.a kind of plant-bug to carry leaves; keeping beetles, etc., as domestic pets; habits of personal cleanliness—one ant giving another a brush-up, and being, brushed up in return; habits of play and recreation; habits of burying their dead; the storage of grain and nipping the budding rootlet to prevent further germination; the habit of Texan ants of preparing a clearing around their nest, and, six months later, harvesting the ant-rice—a kind of grass of which they are particularly fond—even seeking and sowing the grain which shall yield the harvest; the collection by other ants of grass to manure the soil, on which there grows a species of fungus upon which they feed; the military organisation of the ecitons of Central America; and so forth. But to class all of these activities of the ant as illustrations of instinct is a survival of an old-fashioned method of treatment.‘Suppose that the intelligent ant were to make observations on human behaviour as displayed in one of our great cities or in an agricultural district. Seeing so great an amount of routine work going on around him, might he not be in danger of regarding all this as evidence of hereditary instinct? Might he not find it difficult to obtain satisfactory evidence of the fact that this routine work has to some extent to be learned? Might he not say (perhaps not wholly without truth), “I can see nothing whatever in the training of these beings to fit them for their life-work. The training of their children has no more apparent bearing upon the activities of their after-life than the feeding of our grubs has on the duties of ant-life. They seem to fall into the routine of life with little or no preparatory training as the periods for the manifestation of the various instincts arrive. If learning thereof there be, it has so far escaped our observation. And such intelligence as their activities evince (and many of them do show remarkable adaptations to uniform conditions of life) would seem to be rather ancestral than of the present time, as is shown by the fact that many of the adaptations are directed rather to past conditions of life than to those which now hold good. In the presence of new emergencies to which their instincts have not fitted them, these poor creatures are often completely at a loss. We cannot but conclude, therefore, that, although acting under somewhat different and less favourable conditions, instinct occupies fully as large a space in the psychology of man as it does in that of the ant, while human intelligence is far less unerring and hence markedly inferior to our own.”‘Are these views much more absurd than the views of those who, on the evidence which we at present possess, attribute all the activities of ant-life to instinct?’[6]Reasonis the power of adapting means to ends which is acquired from experience or instruction. All animals that profit by experience, therefore, or that learn from instruction—that is, are teachable—exercise reason.The line of demarkation between instinct and reason is a mezzotint, reason being often instinctive, and instinct being as frequently flavoured with judgment, ‘Instinct is usually regarded as a special property of the lower animals, and contrasted with the conscious reason of man. But just as reason may be looked upon as a higher form of the understanding or intellect, and not as something essentially distinct from them, so a closer examination shows that instinct and the conscious understanding do not stand in absolute contrast, but rather in a complex relation, and cannot be sharply marked off from each other.’ It is instinct that urges the bird to build its nest; but when birds whose habit it is to build on the ground learn, on the introduction of cats into the neighbourhood, to change their nesting-places to the tree-tops, intelligence and thought are necessary. The first time Cavy (one of my guinea-pigs) smelled a cat, she was almost scared to death. She jumped back from it as if she had come in contact with a red-hot stove, and screamed and kept on screaming, and shot down under my coat as if she were about to be crucified. After a little while I tried to pull her out, but she refused, and kept hiding. The second time the kitten was presented to her the result was the same. But after two or three days of association, she paid little more attention to it than to the other guinea-pigs. She had never seen a cat before.It was the odour of the carnivorethat terrified her, and the effect was purely instinctive. But instinct was soon modified by intelligent experience. (Poor dear little Cavy! I wonder where she is now!)Both instinct and reason (and one, too, just as much as the other) are absolutely dependent upon processes that are purely mechanical—that is, upon brain processes; and brain processes depend upon brain structure, which is inherited. Hence, reason is, in a certain sense, as truly inherited as instinct is. A being must be born with the particular nervous apparatus by means of which reasoning is carried on, or with the power or disposition to develop this apparatus, or he will never reason. The genius of the partridge in cajoling the passer-by from her nest is called instinct, but it is not more inherited than was the genius of Shakspere. Experience simply calls into being that, whatever it is in each particular being, which is inherited. Sir Isaac Newton took to philosophy and Ole Bull to music not less inevitably than the duck takes to water or the hound to hunting. Reason is, hence, inherited by every man, who has it as truly as his erect posture and plantigrade feet. There is something in the past of all of us and of everything which has determined, and which may be used to account for, everything that to-day exists or happens, even to the style and behaviour of every leaf that flutters in the forest, and to the eccentricities of our opinions and handwritings.Reason, in the sense in which it is here used, is found feebly in the oyster. Oysters taken from a depth never uncovered by the sea open their shells, lose their water, and quickly perish. But oysters taken from the same depths, if kept where they are occasionally left uncovered for short intervals, learn to keep their shells closed and to live a much longer period out of the water. On the coast of France ‘oyster schools’ exist, where oysters intended for inland cities are educated to keep their shells closed when out of the water in order to enable them to survive the desiccating exposures of the overland journey.[1d]This act of the bivalve is probably the result of something like a vague form of reason. It is an act adapted to the accomplishment of a definite end, and the adapting power is acquired from experience. It is, moreover, reason which in its final analysis does not differ from the reason displayed by the wisest being that thinks. Judgment, forethought, common-sense, inference, ingenuity, genius, reason, and abstract thought, are all exercises of the cognitive or perceptive power of mind, and consist, all of them, in nothing more nor less than the discerning of relations among stimuli. The dog who adopts a cut-off in order to intercept a fleeing hare performs exactly the same kind of intellectual process as the mechanic who erects a windmill in order to divert the energies of the breeze, or the politician who adopts a particular platform to catch votes. ‘A perception is always in its essential nature what logicians term aconclusion, whether it has reference to the simplest memory of the past sensation or to the highest product of abstract thought. For, when the highest product of abstract thought is analysed, the ultimate elements must always be found to consist in material given directly by the senses; and every stage in the symbolic construction of ideas, in which the process of abstraction consists, depends on acts of perception taking place in the lower stages’.[5b]The difference among the perceptive acts of different individuals consists, not in the different kinds of intellectual exercise, but in differences among thematerialswith which the perceptive faculty deals. There are perceptions of simple sensations, and there are perceptions of composite sensations, or concepts—perceptions of elementary relations, and perceptions of compound and elaborate relations. But all displays of rational faculty, from the simple judgment of distance by the dimness and distinctness of definition and the size of the visual angle, which all higher animals are compelled to make, to the labyrinthic abstractions of the logician, consist in nothing in addition to discriminations among stimuli.Brehm one day gave one of his apes a paper bag with a lump of sugar and a wasp in it. The ape in getting the sugar was stung by the wasp. From that day, whenever Brehm gave that ape, or any other ape in that cage, a paper package, the animal, before opening it, took the precaution to shake the package at his ear and listen to find out whether or not there was a wasp inside.[7]Now, such an act of intelligence implies several inferences. A train of thoughts something like this must have passed through this ape’s mind: ‘Now, if one wasp can sting, so can another; and, if a man can deceive me once by wrapping a wasp in a paper with a lump of sugar, he may try it again; and, if one man will attempt such a thing, so may another; and, if men will attempt it on me, they may attempt it on my friends; so I will warn my friends to look out for those villainous chaps outside.’ These inferences of the ape are the same kind of generalisations exactly as are made by men everywhere in their daily lives. And the common-sense inferences made by ordinary people in their every-day affairs are precisely the same processes of reasoning as those used by scientists and philosophers. Many people, like the character in Moliere’s plays who was surprised and delighted to learn that he had been talking prose all his life, are surprised on hearing for the first time that they useinductionanddeductionevery hour almost of their waking lives. They imagine that philosophers must have some secret and superior way of acquiring their conclusions, different from what ordinary mortals have. ‘But there is no more difference,’ says Huxley, ‘between the mental operations of a man of science and those of an ordinary person than there is between the operations and methods of a grocer weighing out his goods in common scales and the operations of a chemist in performing a difficult and complex analysis by means of his balance and finely graduated weights. It is not that the scales in the one case and the balances in the other differ in the principles of their construction or manner of working; but the beam of the one is set on an infinitely finer axis than the other, and, of course, turns by the addition of a much smaller weight’.[8]And the difference in mental method between the man of learning and the ordinary man or woman is the same as the difference between mature men and children and between men generally and other animals. It is one ofdegree,notofkind. The philosopher, the clodhopper, and the ape, all use precisely the same methods of reasoning, differing only in exactness and in the materials of consciousness dealt with.Nearly all animals, from mollusks to men, reason—not once or twice in a lifetime, but the most of them every day and every hour of their existence. In fact, it would be impossible for any animal addicted to moving about, and with a delicate and easily wrecked organism, to long survive in a world like this without that elasticity of action which reason alone can impart. Since they live in the same world-conditions as human beings, and are seeking providence for substantially the same wants, non-human beings manifest reason in the same general directions as human beings do—in the location and construction of their homes and fortresses, in the arrest of their prey, in circumventing their enemies, in overcoming obstacles and surmounting dangers, in protecting and educating their young, in meeting the emergencies of food and climate, in the wooing of mates and the waging of wars, and in the thousand other cases where they are called upon in their daily wanderings and doings to deal with novel and unprecedented situations.When wild geese are feeding there is said to be always one of them that acts as sentinel. This one never takes a grain of corn while on duty. When it has acted awhile it gives the bird next to it a sharp peck and utters a querulous kind of cry, and the second one takes its turn. This is prudence, or forethought, which is a form of reason. When swans are diving there is generally one that stays above the water and watches. Sentinels have alarm sounds of various kinds, which they give to signify ‘enemy.’ ‘Ibex, marmots, and mountain-sheep whistle; prariedogs bark; elephants trumpet; wild geese and swans have a kind of bugle call; rabbits and sheep stamp on the ground; crows caw: and wild ducks utter a low, warning quack.’In thePopular Science Monthlyfor March, 1901, is an account of a series of experiments on the intelligence of the turtle made by Professor Yerkes, of Harvard. The turtle was placed in a labyrinth, at the farther end of which was a comfortable bed of sand. It took just thirty-five minutes of wandering for the turtle to reach the nest the first time. But in the second trial the nest was reached in fifteen minutes, and by the tenth trip the turtle was familiar enough with the route to go through in three and one-half minutes, making but two mistakes. The turtle was afterwards placed in a more complex labyrinth, containing, among other features, a blind alley and two inclines. The inclines were puzzles, and it took one hour and thirty-five minutes of aimless rambling for the wanderer to reach its nest the first time. But the fifth trip was made in sixteen minutes, and the tenth in four minutes, which was not far from direct.These experiments show that animals of almost proverbial density may learn with surprising quickness. English sparrows and other avian inhabitants of the city learn to live tranquilly along the busiest thoroughfares, exposed to all sorts of dangers, and subjected to what would be to many birds the most terrifying circumstances. Whizzing trolleys, tramping multitudes, and screaming engines have no terrors for them. They simply exercise the caution necessary to keep from being run over. They boldly build their nests right under passing elevated cars, where the roar is sufficient to scare the life out of an ordinary country bird. I have seen these testy little chaps sit and feed and jabber to each other in a perfectly unconcerned way within ten or fifteen feet of a thundering express train. They do not do these things from instinct: theylearnto do them. They know that a diabolical-looking locomotive is harmless, because they have seen it before; and they know that an insignificant urchin with a savage heart and a sling is not harmless, and they know it simply because they have previously had dealings with him. English sparrows will disappear completely from a neighborhood if a few of them are killed. Cats, dogs, horses—all animals, in fact—acquire during life a fund of information as to how to act in order to avoid harm and extinction. If they did not, they would not live long. And they do it just as man does it, by memory and discrimination, by retaining impressions made upon them, and acting differently when an impression is made a second, third, or thirteenth time.Animals of experience (including men) are more skilful in adjusting themselves to environmental exigencies than the young and inexperienced, because of their store of initial impressions. It is a matter of common observation that young animals are more easily caught or killed or otherwise victimised than the old and experienced. Many animals, however, (and a good many men) are able to profit by a single impression. One dose of tartar emetic is generally sufficient to cure an egg-sucking dog, and it is a very stupid canine indeed that does not understand perfectly after one or two experiences with a porcupine or an unsavory skunk. ‘The burnt child dreads the fire,’ but so does the burnt puppy. Rengger states that his Paraguay monkeys, after cutting themselves only once with any sharp tool, would not touch it again, or would handle it with the greatest caution.[1e]Older trout are more wary than young ones, and fishes that have been much hunted and deceived become suspicious of traps. Rats, martins, and other animals cannot long be trapped in the same way, and partridges and other birds seldom fly against telegraph-wires the second season after the wires are put up. These animals, however, cannot learn to avoid these dangers from experience, for only a few of them are ever caught or struck. They must learn it from observing their unfortunate companions. Everyone who has read the story of Lobo, the big gray wolf of the Carrumpaw, cannot but wonder at the remarkable shrewdness shown by this old leader in baffling for years the tigers that hung upon his tracks.[9]Nansen states that the seals, before man invaded the Arctics, occupied the inner ice-floes to avoid the polar bear, but after man came they took to living on the outer floes in order to escape the persecutions of this new and more fearful enemy. Domestic animals, when first turned out in new regions, often die from eating poisonous weeds, but in some way soon learn to avoid them. Many animals, when pursuing other animals, or when being pursued, display a knowledge of facts very little understood by the majority of mankind, such as of places where scent lies or is obliterated, and the effects of wind in carrying evidence of their presence to their enemies. The hunted roebuck or hare will make circles, double on its own tracks, take to water, and fling itself for considerable distances through the air as cleverly as if it had read up all the theory of scent in a book. According to the LondonSpectatorone of the large African elephants in the Zoological Gardens of that city restores to its entertainers all the bits of food which on being thrown to him fall alike out of his reach and theirs. He points his proboscis straight at the food, and blows it along the floor to the feet of those who have thrown it. He clearly knows what he is about, for if he does not blow hard enough to land the food the first time, he blows harder and harder until he does. The cacadoos (parrots) of Australia, before descending upon a field or orchard in search of food, send out a scouting party to reconnoitre the region and see that ‘all is well.’ Sometimes a second party is sent. If the report is favourable, the whole band advance and plunder the field in short order. These birds are exceedingly wary and intelligent, and seldom make mistakes. But ‘if man once succeeds in killing one of them, they become so prudent and watchful that they henceforward baffle all stratagems’.[3c]A short time ago a parrot at Washington, New Jersey, saved the life of its owner by summoning the neighbours to his relief. Cries of ‘Murder!’ ‘Help!’ ‘Come quick!’ coming from the home of the parrot, attracted the attention of neighbours, who ran to the house to find out the cause. ‘They found the owner of the parrot lying on the floor unconscious, bleeding from a great gash in his neck. He had been repairing the ceiling, and had fallen and struck his head against the stove. It required six stitches to close the wound, and the surgeon said that in only a few minutes the injured man would have been dead. A few years ago this parrot’s screams awakened its owner in time to arouse his neighbours and save them from a fire which started in the house next door.’A friend of mine, who is thoroughly reliable, tells me that when he was a student at the University of Michigan a few years ago one of the professors of zoology there had a dog who was used by the department for experiments in digestion. The dog was compelled to wear a tube opening downward out of his stomach, and soon grew very weak and emaciated from the constant loss of food, which leaked out through this tube. After a time, however, the dog was observed to be growing unaccountably hale and strong. He was watched, and the poor creature was found to have struck upon an ingenious expedient to save his life. On eating his meal, he would go out to the barn, and, in order to prevent the artificial escape of the contents of his stomach, would lie down flat on his back between two boxes and remain there until his digested food had passed safely beyond the pylorus.A few months ago, John, one of the monkeys at Lincoln Park, Chicago, was suffering from a terrible abscess on the cheek, and an operation became necessary in order to save the little fellow’s life. It was a pathetic sight to see the look of trust in the monkey’s eyes when the surgeon was ready to begin the operation, and the courage and fortitude displayed by the sufferer were almost human. At the first touch of the knife the monkey pressed his head hard against the knee of the assistant and grabbed the forefinger of each of the assistant’s hands, just as a person does who is about to undergo a painful operation. The swelling was first cut open and washed with antiseptic, when the cheek-bone was scraped and a small piece of it removed. After being again washed in antiseptic, the wound was sewed up, and John was lifted gently back into his cage—not, however, until he had licked the hands of the surgeon and kissed his face in gratitude. The little hero never uttered a sound from the time the knife first touched his face until he was put back into his cage. A similar act of intelligence is recorded of an orang. Having been once bled on account of illness, and not feeling well some time afterward, this orang went from one person to another, and, pointing to the vein in his arm, signified his desire to have the operation repeated. Both of these instances are examples of reason of a very high order—of a higher order, indeed, than many children and some grown people exhibit in similar circumstances. The chimpanzee, Mafuca, learned how to unlock her cage, and stole the key and hid it under her arm for future use. After watching the carpenter boring holes with his brad-awl, she took the brad-awl and bored holes in her table. She poured out milk for herself at meals, and always carefully stopped pouring before the cup ran over.When baboons go on marauding expeditions, they show that they realise perfectly what they are doing by moving with great stealth. Not a sound is uttered. If any thoughtless youngster so far forgets the necessities of the occasion as to utter a single chatter, he is given a reminder in the shape of a box on the ear. ‘A certain Mr. Cops, who had a young orang, gave it half an orange one day, and put the other half away out of its sight on a high press, and lay down himself on the sofa. But the ape’s movements, attracting his attention, he only pretended to go to sleep. The creature came cautiously and satisfied himself that his master was asleep, then climbed up the press, ate the rest of the orange, carefully hid the peel among the shavings in the grate, examined the pretended sleeper again, and then went and lay down on his own bed.’ This incident is recorded by Tylor in his ‘Anthropology.’ ‘And such behaviour,’ he adds, ‘is to be explained only by supposing a train of thought to pass through the brain of the ape somewhat similar to what we ourselves call reason.’ These instances of undoubted intelligence and thought might be added to almost without number if there was room. Every person nearly who has been in the world any length of time, and has had occasion to associate with these so-called ‘machines,’ has seen for himself, often unexpectedly, many flashes of brightness among them.It has been said that man differs from other animals, and is superior to them in the fact that he modifies his environment while other animals do not, but are modified by environment. Mr. Lester F. Ward makes this distinction in his ‘Pure Sociology.’ The distinction is no nearer the truth than other distinctions of like character that have from time to time been drawn between men and other animals. It is not much more than half true, if it is that, and does not by any means deserve the italics awarded to it by this writer. Many races of non-human beings have a far greater influence on their environment than many races of men have. Many tribes of men wander about naked, build no habitations, make no weapons, and feed upon the fruits, roots, insects, and such other chance morsels as they can pick up from day to day in their wanderings. Such races are far inferior in constructive activity to the birds, who build elaborate houses, and to the beavers, who not only construct substantial dwellings, but dam rivers, and cut down trees and transport them long distances, and dig artificial waterways, to be used as aids in their engineering enterprises. Compare the elaborate compartments of the Australian bower-birds, surrounded with ornamented and carefully-kept grounds, with the lean-to of many savage tribes, made by sticking two or three palm-leaves in the ground and leaning them against a pole. Even ants plant crops, make clearings, build roads and tunnels, etc. It must be remembered, too, that, however affirmative and masterful a race of men may become, it never succeeds, and never can succeed, in emancipating itself from the influences of environment. It is true that with the growth of intelligence among organic forms there has been a constant transfer of influence from the environment to the organism; but this transfer began, not with man by any means, but low down in the scale of animal life.It has been said that man is the only animal that uses tools. But this is not true either, for animals as low in the scale of development as insects have been known to use tools. At least two different observers testify to having seen ground-wasps use small stones as hammers in packing the dirt firmly over their nests. Spiders use stones as weights to steady their webs in times of storm. Orangs throw sticks and stones at their pursuers, and certain tribes of Abyssinian baboons, when they go to battle with each other, carry stones as missiles. Monkeys often use stones to crack nuts with, and tame monkeys know very well how to use a hammer when it is given to them. In the London Zoological Gardens a monkey with poor teeth kept a stone hidden in the straw of its cage to crack its nuts with, and it would not allow any other monkey to touch the stone. ‘Here,’ says Darwin, in speaking of this case, ‘is the idea of property.’ Monkeys also use sticks as levers in prying open chests and lifting heavy objects. Cuvier’s orang used to carry a chair across the room and stand on it to lift the door-latch. Chimpanzees, who are very fond of making a noise, have been seen standing around a hollow log in the forest, beating it with sticks; and if we are to believe Emin Pasha, these ingenious parodies of men sometimes carry torches when they go at night on foraging expeditions. The Indian elephant, when travelling, will sometimes turn aside and break off a leafy branch from a roadside tree and carry it along in its trunk to sweep off the flies. As Dr. Wesley Mills says in his work on ‘The Nature and Development of Animal Intelligence,’ ‘It was formerly believed that animals cannot reason, but only those persons who do not themselves reason about the subject, with the facts before them, can any longer occupy such a position.’1a.1b.1c.1d.1e.Romanes:Animal Intelligence; New York, 1899.2.Cornish:Animals of To-day; London, 1898.3a.3b.3c.Kropotkin:Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution; New York, 1902.4a.4b.Darwin:Descent of Man, 2nd edit.; London, 1874.5a.5b.Romanes:Mental Evolution in Animals; New York, 1898.6.Morgan:Animal Behaviour; London, 1900.7.Brehm:Thierleben; Leipzig, 1880.8.Huxley:On the Origin of Species, lecture iii.9.Thompson: Wild Animals I have Known; New York, 1900.V. Conclusion.It is enough. The ancient gulf scooped by human conceit between man and the other animals has been effectually and forever filled up. The human species constitutes but one branch in the gigantic arbour of life. And all the merit and all the feeling and all the righteousness of the world are not, as we have been accustomed to aver, congested into this one branch. And all of the weakness and deformity are not, as we have also been anxious to believe, found elsewhere. The reluctance of wrinkles and deformities to appear in the pictures of men, and of strength and beauty to appear in the representations of the other races of the earth, is to be accounted for by the highly elucidative fact that man is the universal portrait-painter. There is no one to tell man what he is and how he strikes others, and hence he is the ‘paragon of creation’—the inter-stellar pet, half clay and half halo—the image and pride of the gods—the flower and gem of the eternal spheres. Man is the only professional linguist in the universe. And it is fortunate for him that he is. For, if he were not, his auditories would be compelled to carry to his perceptive centres a great many sentiments he now never hears. He would be likely to hear a good deal said, and said with a good deal of feeling, about perpendicular brigand—grandiloquent kakistocrat swelling with self-righteousness—rhetorical hideful wrapped in pillage and gorged with decomposition—a voluble and sanctimonious squash with two sticks in it. The definition of man as it appears in the dictionary of the donkey probably runs something like this: ‘Manis an animal that walks on its hind-legs, invents adjectives with which to praise itself, and displays its greatest utility in proving that all sharks are not aquatic.’ We know what a lion looks like when painted by a man, but human eyes have never yet been allumined by the sardonic lineaments of a man painted by a lion. Being boiled alive in order to look well as corpses in store-windows, and having wooden pegs thrust into our muscles and left there to rot for a week or two to keep us in our agony from doing something desperate—we know what these experiences are like when they are delegated to lobsters, and we take no more serious part in them than to insure their infliction, but we are too fervent barbarians to bother our heads about what they are like from the crustacean point of view.Let us be candid. Men are not all gentle men and humane, and not-men are not all inhuman. There are reptiles in broadcloth, and there are warm and generous hearts among those peoples who have so long suffered from human prejudice and ferocity. Let us label beings by what they are—by the souls that are in them and the deeds they do—not by their colour, which is pigment, nor by their composition, which is clay. There are philanthropists in feathers and patricians in fur, just as there are cannibals in the pulpit and saurians among the money-changers. The golden rule may sometimes be more religiously observed in the hearts and homes of outcast quadrupeds than in the palatial lairs of bipeds. The horse, who suffers and serves and starves in silence, who endures daily wrongs of scanty and irregular meals, excessive burdens and mangled flanks, who forgets cruelty and ingratitude, and does good to them that spitefully use him, and submits to crime without resistance, misunderstanding without murmur, and insult without resentment, is a better Christian, a better exemplar of the Sermon on the Mount, than many church-goers, in spite of the creeds and interdictions of men. And the animal who goes to church on Sundays, wearing the twitching skins and plundered plumage of others, and wails long prayers and mumbles meaningless rituals, and gives unearned guineas to the missionary, and on week-days cheats and impoverishes his neighbours, glorifies war, and tramples under foot the most sacred principles of morality in his treatment of his non-human kindred, is a cold, hard-heartedbrute, in spite of the fact that he is cunning and vainglorious, and towers about on his hinders.There are lessons that may be learned from the uncorrupted children of Nature—lessons in simplicity of life, straightforwardness, humility, art, economy, brotherly love, and cheerfulness—more beautiful, perhaps, and more true than may sometimes be learned from the stilted and Machiavellian ways of men. Would you learn forgiveness? Go to the dog. The dog can stand more abuse and forgive greater accumulations of wrong than any other animal, not even excepting a wife. About the only thing in the universe superior to the dog in willingness to undergo outrage is the human stomach. Would you learn wisdom and industry? Go to the ant, that tireless toiler of the dust. The ant can do that which no man can do—keep grain in a warm, moist atmosphere without sprouting. Would you learn art? Go to the bee or to the wild bird’s lodge. The art of the honeycomb and of the hang-bird’s nest surpasses that of the cranny of the savage as the Cathedral of St. Peter exceeds the cottage. Would you learn socialism, that dream of poets and the hope and expectation of wise men? It is actualised around you in thousands of insect communities. The social and economic relations existing in the most highly wrought societies of bees and wasps are fundamentally the ideal relations of living beings to each other, but it will require millenniums of struggle and bloodshed for men to come up to them. Would you learn curiosity—not the curiosity that gossips and backbites, but the curiosity of the explorer and searcher after knowledge? Go to the monkey. The monkey has been known to work two hours, without pause, utterly unconscious of everything but its purposes, trying to open a fettered trunk lock.[1]Would you learn sobriety? Go not to the gilded hells of cities, where men die like flies in gin’s vile miasma. Go to the spring where the antelope drinks. Would you learn chastity? Go not to the foul dens and fiery chambers of men. Go to the boudoir of the bower-bird, or to the subterranean hollow where the wild wolf rears her litter.Man is not the surpassingly pre-eminent individual he so actively advertises himself to be. Indeed, in many particulars he is excelled, and excelled seriously, by those whom he calls ‘lower.’ The locomotion of the bird is far superior in ease and expedition to the shuffling locomotion of man. The horse has a sense which guides it through darkness in which human eyes are blind; and the manner in which a cat, who has been carried in a bag and put down miles away, will turn up at the back-door of the old home next morning dumfounds science. The eye of the vulture is a telescope. The hound will track his master along a frequented street an hour behind his footsteps, by the imponderable odour of his soles. The catbird, without atlas or geographic manuals, will find her way back over hundreds of trackless leagues, season after season, to the same old nesting-place in the thicket. Birds, thousands of them, journey from Mexico to Arctic America, from Algiers and Italy to Spitzbergen, from Egypt to Siberia, and from Australia and the Polynesian Islands to New Zealand, and build their nests and rear their young, year after year, in the same vale, grove, or tundra. The nightingale, who pours out his incomparable lovesong in the twilight of English lanes during May and June, winters in the heart of Africa; and some birds nest within the Arctic Circle and winter in Argentina. Some of the plovers travel the entire length of the American land mass every summer, from Patagonia to the Arctic Circle, in order to lay three or four pale-green eggs, and see them turn to birdlings by the shores of the Hudson Sea. Many animals have the power to foretell storms, and man, though he can weigh worlds, is ever glad to profit by their superior sense. When herons fly high above the clouds, when sea-birds dip and sport in the water and the bittern booms from the marshes, when swallows fly low and the sow repairs her bed, when horses scamper and cattle sniff the air, when ravens beat the air with their wings, make noises, and flock together, when the swan raises her eggs by additions to her nest and the prairie-dog scratches the dirt up around its hole, when beetles are not found in the air and caterpillars mass in their webs, when bees remain near their hives and ants carry their eggs to their innermost abodes, when frogs croak more loudly from their watery retreats and fishes seek the safety of the unharried deeps—look out for foul weather! Man has not the sweetness of the song-sparrow, the innocence of the fawn, nor the high relative brain capacity of the tomtit and the fice.Many animals have powers by which they are able to act in concert at times, vast numbers of them moving in unison over immense areas by signals or intuitions which man can neither imitate nor understand. Such are the mysterious migrations of the Norway lemming and of many birds and insects, and such were the memorable stampedes of the bison hordes on the American plains in years gone by. Kropotkin saw on the Siberian steppes one autumn ‘thousands and thousands’ of fallow deer come together from an area as large as Great Britain at a point on the Amur River in an unprecedented exodus to the lowlands on the other side.[2]How these scattered thousands knew when to start so as to arrive at the river at the same time, and how they knew the direction to travel and found their way so well, are mysteries which man can as yet only wonder at. More marvellous yet—more marvellous, perhaps, than the concurrent action of any other animal, for it implies the most accurate time-keeping extending over many years—are the annual festivals of thepalolo, an annelid living among the interstices of the coral reefs of some of the islands of the South Pacific. About three o’clock on the morning following the third quarter of the October moon, these worms invariably appear on the surface of the sea, swarming in great numbers. Just after sunrise their bodies begin to break to pieces, and by nine o’clock no trace of them is left. On the morning following the third quarter of the November moon they appear again, but usually in smaller numbers. After that they are seen no more till the next October. This annual swarming is a phenomenon connected with reproduction, the ova escaping from the broken bodies of the females and, after being fertilised by the free-floating sperms, sinking down among the coral reefs and hatching into a new generation. ‘Year after year these creatures appear according to lunar time. And yet in the long-run they keep solar time. They keep two cycles, one of three and one of twenty-nine years. In the three-year cycle there are two intervals of twelve lunations and one of thirteen lunations. These thirty-seven lunations bring lunar time somewhat near to solar time. But in twenty-nine years there is enough difference to require the addition of another lunation; the twenty-ninth year is therefore one of thirteen instead of twelve lunations. In this way they do not change their season in an entire century. So unfailing is their appearance that in Samoa they have given their name to the spring season, which is called “the time of the palolo.”’Instead of the highest, man is in some respects the lowest, of the animal kingdom. Man is the most unchaste, the most drunken, the most selfish and conceited, the most miserly, the most hypocritical, and the most bloodthirsty of terrestrial creatures. Almost no animals, except man, kill for the mere sake of killing. For one being to take the life of another for purposes of selfish utility is bad enough. But the indiscriminate massacre of defenceless innocents by armed and organised packs,justfor pastime, is beyond characterisation. The human species is the only species of animals that plunges to such depths of atrocity. Even vipers and hyenas do not exterminate for recreation. No animal, except man, habitually seeks wealth purely out of an insane impulse to accumulate. And no animal, except man, gloats over accumulations that are of no possible use to him, that are an injury and an abomination, and in whose acquisition he may have committed irreparable crimes upon others. There are no millionaires—no professional, legalised, lifelong kleptomaniacs—among the birds and quadrupeds. No animal, except man, spends so large a part of his energies striving for superiority—not superiority in usefulness, but that superiority which consists in simply getting on the heads of one’s fellows. And no animal practises common, ordinary morality to the other beings of the world in which he lives so little, compared with the amount he preaches it, as man.Let us be honest. Honour to whom honour is due. It will not emaciate our own glory to recognise the excellence and reality of others, or to come face to face with our own frailties. Weareour brother’s keeper. Our brethren are they that feel. Let us universalise. Our thoughts and sympathies have been too long wingless.The Universe is our Country, and our Kindred are the Populations that Mount.It is well—it is eminently well, for it is godlike—to send our Magnanimity to the Dusts and the Deeps,our Sunrises to the Uttermost Isles,and ourCharity to the Stars.1.Romanes:Animal Intelligence; New York, 1899.2.Kropotkin:Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution; New York, 1902.
Among some species of monkeys several individuals will join together in overturning a stone for the possible ants’ eggs under it; and, when a burying beetle has found a dead mouse or bird, it goes and gets its companions to help it in the interment.[3a]Crows show benevolence by feeding their blind and helpless companions, and monkeys adopt the orphans of deceased members of their tribe. Brehm saw two crows feeding in a hollow tree a third crow which was wounded. They had evidently been doing this for some time, for the wound was several weeks old. Darwin tells of a blind pelican which was fed upon fishes, which were brought to it by its friends from a distance of thirty miles.[4a]The devotion of cedar-birds to each other and their kindness to all birds in distress are well known to every student of ornithology. Olive Thorne Miller tells of a cedar-bird that raised a brood of young robins that had been left orphans by the accidental killing of the parents. Weddell saw more than once during his journey to Bolivia that when a herd of vicunas were closely pursued the strong males covered the retreat of the weaker and less swift members of the herd by lagging behind and protecting them.[3b]
A remarkable instance of altruism which he once saw exhibited by the king-crabs in a London aquarium is mentioned by Kropotkin in his work on ‘Mutual Aid a Factor in Evolution.’ One of these crabs had fallen on its back in a corner of the tank. And for one of these great creatures, with its saucepan carapace, to get on its back is, even in favourable circumstances, a serious matter. The seriousness was increased in this instance by an iron bar, which hindered the normal activities of the unfortunate crustacean. ‘Its comrades came to the rescue, and for one hour’s time I watched how they endeavoured to help their fellow-prisoner. They came two at once, pushed their friend from beneath, and after strenuous efforts succeeded in lifting it upright. But then the iron bar prevented them from achieving the work of rescue, and the crab again fell heavily on its back. After many attempts, one of the helpers went into the depth of the tank and brought two other crabs, who began with fresh forces the same pushing and lifting of their helpless comrade. We stayed in the aquarium for more than two hours, and, when leaving, came to cast a glance upon the tank. The work of attempted rescue still continued. Since I saw that I cannot refuse credit to the observation quoted by Dr. Erasmus Darwin that the common crab during the moulting season stations a sentinel, an unmolted or hard-shelled individual, to prevent marine enemies from injuring moulted individuals in their unprotected state.’ Walruses go to the defence of a wounded comrade when summoned by its cries for help. Romanes tells of a gander who acted as a guardian to his blind consort, taking her neck gently in his mouth and leading her to the water when she wanted to take a swim, and after allowing her to cruise for a time under his guidance and care, conducting her back home again in the same thoughtful manner. When goslings were hatched, this remarkable gander seemed to realise the inability of the mother to look after them, for he took charge of them as if they were his own, convoying them to the waterside, and lifting them carefully out of the ruts and pits with his bill whenever they got into difficulty.[1b]
The disposition to go to the aid of a fellow in trouble is one of the most characteristic traits in the psychology of the swine. A single squeal of distress from even the scrawniest member of a swine herd will bring down on the one who causes this distress the hair-raising wrath of every porker within hearing. This trait has been considerably reduced by domestication, and in those varieties in which degeneracy has gone farthest it scarcely exists. But it is exceedingly strong in all wild hogs. Animals as low in the scale of development and as proverbially cold as snakes have been known, when educated and treated with kindness, to manifest considerable affection for their friends and masters. Nearly all domestic animals display a good deal of affection, not only to their young, but to adult members of their own kind and to their human masters. The devotion of the dog to man is without a parallel anywhere. It has been said that ‘the dog is the only thing on this earth that loves you more than he loves himself.’ When dogs become so much attached to their masters or mistresses that they pine and die on being separated from them, they show beyond any question that they have feelings which, in intensity, are not inferior to those possessed by the more highly developed men and women. And this has happened time after time.
A pathetic story of love and of its tragic close came last year out of the Maine woods. Two moose, who had been tracked all day by a couple of human tigers, were finally overtaken, when one of them fell pierced by two rifle-balls. The remaining moose, instead of dashing off into the forest, stood still, lowered its head, and sniffed at its fallen companion. Then, raising its antlers high into the air, it bellowed loudly. As the cry of the great creature echoed through the forest, it also fell at the discharge of the rifles. It was found on examination afterwards that the first moose was blind, and that the second one, which had neglected to leave it for safety, was its pilot.
My father once owned a cow who contracted a strong affection for my sister. This cow, who showed on many occasions and in many ways her highly developed emotional nature, would scarcely allow anyone else than my sister to milk her. She always presented herself to my sister as soon as she was let into the lot in order to be milked first, and she was so jealous of this privilege that if it were not accorded to her she would stand with her head down and give vent to her unhappiness in low moans. After she was milked she would follow her human friend around from one cow to another, in order to be as near her as possible. She knew my sister’s voice from that of everyone else, and would always low a response and come to her when called by name, even though she were a quarter of a mile away in the pasture. Romanes tells somewhere of a band of apes that were being pursued by dogs when a young ape was cut off from the rest and was about to be killed by the dogs. The chief of the band, seeing the peril of the young one, went deliberately back and rescued it.
Many animals show that they possess a rudimentary sense of humour by the pranks and tricks which they play on each other and on human beings. The monkey is the prince of nonhuman jokers, but dogs, cats, horses, elephants, and other animals have enough of this sense to have books written about it. A monkey has been observed to slyly pass his hand back of a second monkey and tweak the tail of a third one, and then composedly enjoy himself while the resentment of the injured monkey expended itself on the innocent middle one. Many monkeys enjoy entertaining their friends with grimaces, by carrying a cane, putting a tin dish on their heads, or other droll antics. These intelligent animals have a sufficiently high appreciation of the ludicrous to dislike ridicule. Like human beings, they can’t endure being laughed at, and get mad if they are made the victims of a joke. Romanes’ monkey was one day asked to crack a nut for the amusement of a visitor. The nut turned out to be a bad one, and the melancholy look of disappointment on the monkey’s face caused the visitor to laugh. The insulted monkey flew into a rage, and hurled the nut at the offending scoffer, then the hammer, and finally the coffee-pot which simmered on the grate fire.[1c]Darwin tells of a baboon in the Zoological Gardens of London who always became infuriated every time his keeper took out a letter or book and read aloud to him. On one occasion when Darwin was present the baboon became so furious that he bit his own leg until it bled.[4b]
The emotion variously known as shame, regret, repentance, and remorse, is not common among the non-human races. It is found sometimes in dogs and monkeys, and especially in educated anthropoids. But this emotion is exceedingly rare among savages, and is not at all universal even among civilised societies of men. Some animals manifest self-restraint, which is an exceedingly elite quality of mind, and one not so common as it might be even among the higher breeds of mankind. By restraint is meant the inhibition of a desire or instinct in the presence of circumstances tending to render the desire or instinct active—and this is obedience, and the beginning of morality. A dog that will not chase a hare in the presence of his master may do so in his absence. I taught my guinea-pigs to abstain from certain food in their presence which they wanted very much, and which they would have eaten if they had not been educated to let it alone. Sympathy is the most beautiful of all terrestrial emotions. It is manifested, sometimes to an exceedingly touching degree, by all the highest races of animals. No other instances than those already given can be mentioned here. It is sufficient to say that the difference between the savage—whose sympathies are so feeble that he has been known to knock his own child’s brains out for dropping a basket, and who puts his aged parents to death in order to avoid the burden of maintaining them, and whose sympathies seldom extend beyond his family or tribe—and civilised men and women, who feel actual pain when in the presence of those who suffer, and whose sympathies sometimes include all sentient creation, is much greater than that between the savage and many nonhuman animals. The frail, narrow, fantastic character of human sympathy is the most mournful fact in human nature. ‘Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn,’ and his inhumanity to not-men makes the planet a ball of pain and terror.
Volitionis the power of the mind to act executively. Or, perhaps, it is the resultant of the impulses actuating a mind at any particular instant. Whatever volition is, it is the same thing in the insect as in the man. Non-human beings have been observed to pause and deliberate and to make wise and momentous decisions in the twinkling of an eye. A chased hare will decide to squat, to go straight ahead, or to do something else which the emergency demands, just as unmistakably as a human fugitive. In the sense of being the power to act differently from the manner in which a being actually does act, there is no such thing as freewill. The will of the worm is just as free as the will of the judge—not in the sense that it is as varied in the directions of its activity, but in the sense that the character of its activities is determined inevitably by the character of its antecedents. All will, whether human or non-human, invariably acts in the direction of the strongest motive, just as a stone or a river invariably moves, if it moves at all, in the direction of the strongest tendency or force. It is impossible that this should be otherwise. For, if the will in any case elects to overthrow this fact by arbitrarily discarding a stronger motive for a feebler, in the very motive of the election are concealed elements which transform the feebler motive into the stronger. All motion, voluntary and involuntary—the motion of bullets, beings, societies, and suns—takes place along the lines of least arrest. Every being is compelled to decide as he does decide and to act as he does act by the inherited tendencies of his own nature and the tendencies of the environment in which he exists. And if any being, after having passed through life, were again placed back at the beginning of life and endowed with the same nature as before, and were acted upon through life by surroundings identical with those he had previously met, he would act—that is, he would exercise his will—in precisely the same way in every particular as he had previously done. To deny these things is to assert that the conduct of living beings is without law, and that psychology and sociology are not sciences.
Non-human beings, all of the higher ones, have the same brain and nervous apparatus as man, and in their involuntary phenomena they closely resemble human beings. Aim a pretended blow near the eyes of a dog or a horse and it will wink involuntarily, just as a human being does. Sever the spinal cord of a man or a frog, and irritate the feet of each, and they will each manifest the same phenomena of reflex action, drawing their feet away each time from the stimulus.
Instinctandreasonare forms of intelligence. Intelligence is the adaptation of acts to ends. Intelligence is manifested by all organisms, both plants and animals, and may be either conscious or unconscious. Plant intelligence and reflex action are forms ofunconsciousintelligence. Plant intelligence, or the adaptation of acts to ends by plants, is manifested by plants in the shifting of their positions when in need of light in order to obtain as large a supply as possible of the essential sunshine; in devices, such as traps and flowers, for utilising the juices and services of insects; in germinating and growing away from, instead of toward, the centre of the earth; in discriminating between this and that kind of food; and in a thousand other ways. Plant intelligence is all explicable in terms of chemistry and physics, and is, so far as is known, unaccompanied by consciousness. Reflex action is chemical affinity aided by the co-ordinating powers of nerve tissue. The vital processes of all animals, from the lowest to the highest, and many other highly habitual and highly essential operations, are carried on by reflex action. Reflex action in animals, like plant intelligence, is unconscious.
Instinct and reason areconscious. Instinct is inherited intelligence—intelligence manifested independently of, and prior to, experience and instruction. ‘Instinct,’ says Romanes, ‘is reflex action into which has been imported the element of consciousness’.[5a]It is exhibited by the babe when it nurses the mother’s breast; by the chick when it pecks its way out through the shell of the egg; by animals generally, including man, in their solicitude for their young; by the parent bird in incubation; and by all beings when they seek food in obedience to the impulse of hunger. Our conception of the mental processes of non-humans is as yet very primitive, owing to our limited means of information and the erroneous influence on our judgments of traditional ways of thinking; and much that is attributed by us to instinct is not instinct at all, but is acquired by the young through education imparted by the elders. Parent birds have often been seen teaching their young ones to fly, and no doubt a good deal of the migratory acumen manifested by birds is nothing but custom and tradition handed down to each younger generation by the old and experienced. A large part of the knowledge of mankind (or what passes for knowledge) consists of habits and hobbies, customs and traditions, impressed upon each new generation by the generation which produced it. Each generation of men seems to feel that whenever it creates a new generation it has got to pile on to this new generation all of the fool notions which have been acquired from the past, amplified by its own inventions. And when we come to know other animals better, there is practically no doubt that we shall find that a large part of what we now call instinct and look upon as congenital will, on closer and more rational examination, be found to be nothing but the pedagogical effects of early environment. Professor Poulton, of Oxford, who has made many experiments on just-born birds, says that young chicks learn to fear the hawk and to interpret the oral warnings of the mother. Cats teach their young to play with their prey in that cruel manner so characteristic of all the Felidae, as I have myself observed more than once. A mother cat will carry a live mouse into the presence of her kittens and lie down and play with it, tossing it playfully into the air, poking it with her paw when it does not move, and arresting it when it starts to run away, the kittens all the time looking on, but never once attempting to take the mouse. After awhile the mother hands the captive over to the kittens, who go through the same performance one after another. After they have practised on it until the unfortunate creature is almost dead, the old cat will probably walk over to where the mouse is and eat it up. The whole thing is aschool. The mouse is obviously not intended as food for the young, but to be used simply to impart instruction to them.
‘In popular writings and lectures some or all of the following activities of ant-life are commonly ascribed to instinct: The recognition of members of the same nest; powers of communication; keeping aphides for the sake of their sweet secretions; collection of aphid eggs in October, hatching them out in the nest, and taking them in the spring to the daisies on which they feed, for pasture; slave-making and slave-keeping, which, in some cases, is so ancient a habit that the enslavers are unable even to feed themselves; keeping insects as beasts of burden—e.g.a kind of plant-bug to carry leaves; keeping beetles, etc., as domestic pets; habits of personal cleanliness—one ant giving another a brush-up, and being, brushed up in return; habits of play and recreation; habits of burying their dead; the storage of grain and nipping the budding rootlet to prevent further germination; the habit of Texan ants of preparing a clearing around their nest, and, six months later, harvesting the ant-rice—a kind of grass of which they are particularly fond—even seeking and sowing the grain which shall yield the harvest; the collection by other ants of grass to manure the soil, on which there grows a species of fungus upon which they feed; the military organisation of the ecitons of Central America; and so forth. But to class all of these activities of the ant as illustrations of instinct is a survival of an old-fashioned method of treatment.
‘Suppose that the intelligent ant were to make observations on human behaviour as displayed in one of our great cities or in an agricultural district. Seeing so great an amount of routine work going on around him, might he not be in danger of regarding all this as evidence of hereditary instinct? Might he not find it difficult to obtain satisfactory evidence of the fact that this routine work has to some extent to be learned? Might he not say (perhaps not wholly without truth), “I can see nothing whatever in the training of these beings to fit them for their life-work. The training of their children has no more apparent bearing upon the activities of their after-life than the feeding of our grubs has on the duties of ant-life. They seem to fall into the routine of life with little or no preparatory training as the periods for the manifestation of the various instincts arrive. If learning thereof there be, it has so far escaped our observation. And such intelligence as their activities evince (and many of them do show remarkable adaptations to uniform conditions of life) would seem to be rather ancestral than of the present time, as is shown by the fact that many of the adaptations are directed rather to past conditions of life than to those which now hold good. In the presence of new emergencies to which their instincts have not fitted them, these poor creatures are often completely at a loss. We cannot but conclude, therefore, that, although acting under somewhat different and less favourable conditions, instinct occupies fully as large a space in the psychology of man as it does in that of the ant, while human intelligence is far less unerring and hence markedly inferior to our own.”
‘Are these views much more absurd than the views of those who, on the evidence which we at present possess, attribute all the activities of ant-life to instinct?’[6]
Reasonis the power of adapting means to ends which is acquired from experience or instruction. All animals that profit by experience, therefore, or that learn from instruction—that is, are teachable—exercise reason.
The line of demarkation between instinct and reason is a mezzotint, reason being often instinctive, and instinct being as frequently flavoured with judgment, ‘Instinct is usually regarded as a special property of the lower animals, and contrasted with the conscious reason of man. But just as reason may be looked upon as a higher form of the understanding or intellect, and not as something essentially distinct from them, so a closer examination shows that instinct and the conscious understanding do not stand in absolute contrast, but rather in a complex relation, and cannot be sharply marked off from each other.’ It is instinct that urges the bird to build its nest; but when birds whose habit it is to build on the ground learn, on the introduction of cats into the neighbourhood, to change their nesting-places to the tree-tops, intelligence and thought are necessary. The first time Cavy (one of my guinea-pigs) smelled a cat, she was almost scared to death. She jumped back from it as if she had come in contact with a red-hot stove, and screamed and kept on screaming, and shot down under my coat as if she were about to be crucified. After a little while I tried to pull her out, but she refused, and kept hiding. The second time the kitten was presented to her the result was the same. But after two or three days of association, she paid little more attention to it than to the other guinea-pigs. She had never seen a cat before.It was the odour of the carnivorethat terrified her, and the effect was purely instinctive. But instinct was soon modified by intelligent experience. (Poor dear little Cavy! I wonder where she is now!)
Both instinct and reason (and one, too, just as much as the other) are absolutely dependent upon processes that are purely mechanical—that is, upon brain processes; and brain processes depend upon brain structure, which is inherited. Hence, reason is, in a certain sense, as truly inherited as instinct is. A being must be born with the particular nervous apparatus by means of which reasoning is carried on, or with the power or disposition to develop this apparatus, or he will never reason. The genius of the partridge in cajoling the passer-by from her nest is called instinct, but it is not more inherited than was the genius of Shakspere. Experience simply calls into being that, whatever it is in each particular being, which is inherited. Sir Isaac Newton took to philosophy and Ole Bull to music not less inevitably than the duck takes to water or the hound to hunting. Reason is, hence, inherited by every man, who has it as truly as his erect posture and plantigrade feet. There is something in the past of all of us and of everything which has determined, and which may be used to account for, everything that to-day exists or happens, even to the style and behaviour of every leaf that flutters in the forest, and to the eccentricities of our opinions and handwritings.
Reason, in the sense in which it is here used, is found feebly in the oyster. Oysters taken from a depth never uncovered by the sea open their shells, lose their water, and quickly perish. But oysters taken from the same depths, if kept where they are occasionally left uncovered for short intervals, learn to keep their shells closed and to live a much longer period out of the water. On the coast of France ‘oyster schools’ exist, where oysters intended for inland cities are educated to keep their shells closed when out of the water in order to enable them to survive the desiccating exposures of the overland journey.[1d]This act of the bivalve is probably the result of something like a vague form of reason. It is an act adapted to the accomplishment of a definite end, and the adapting power is acquired from experience. It is, moreover, reason which in its final analysis does not differ from the reason displayed by the wisest being that thinks. Judgment, forethought, common-sense, inference, ingenuity, genius, reason, and abstract thought, are all exercises of the cognitive or perceptive power of mind, and consist, all of them, in nothing more nor less than the discerning of relations among stimuli. The dog who adopts a cut-off in order to intercept a fleeing hare performs exactly the same kind of intellectual process as the mechanic who erects a windmill in order to divert the energies of the breeze, or the politician who adopts a particular platform to catch votes. ‘A perception is always in its essential nature what logicians term aconclusion, whether it has reference to the simplest memory of the past sensation or to the highest product of abstract thought. For, when the highest product of abstract thought is analysed, the ultimate elements must always be found to consist in material given directly by the senses; and every stage in the symbolic construction of ideas, in which the process of abstraction consists, depends on acts of perception taking place in the lower stages’.[5b]
The difference among the perceptive acts of different individuals consists, not in the different kinds of intellectual exercise, but in differences among thematerialswith which the perceptive faculty deals. There are perceptions of simple sensations, and there are perceptions of composite sensations, or concepts—perceptions of elementary relations, and perceptions of compound and elaborate relations. But all displays of rational faculty, from the simple judgment of distance by the dimness and distinctness of definition and the size of the visual angle, which all higher animals are compelled to make, to the labyrinthic abstractions of the logician, consist in nothing in addition to discriminations among stimuli.
Brehm one day gave one of his apes a paper bag with a lump of sugar and a wasp in it. The ape in getting the sugar was stung by the wasp. From that day, whenever Brehm gave that ape, or any other ape in that cage, a paper package, the animal, before opening it, took the precaution to shake the package at his ear and listen to find out whether or not there was a wasp inside.[7]
Now, such an act of intelligence implies several inferences. A train of thoughts something like this must have passed through this ape’s mind: ‘Now, if one wasp can sting, so can another; and, if a man can deceive me once by wrapping a wasp in a paper with a lump of sugar, he may try it again; and, if one man will attempt such a thing, so may another; and, if men will attempt it on me, they may attempt it on my friends; so I will warn my friends to look out for those villainous chaps outside.’ These inferences of the ape are the same kind of generalisations exactly as are made by men everywhere in their daily lives. And the common-sense inferences made by ordinary people in their every-day affairs are precisely the same processes of reasoning as those used by scientists and philosophers. Many people, like the character in Moliere’s plays who was surprised and delighted to learn that he had been talking prose all his life, are surprised on hearing for the first time that they useinductionanddeductionevery hour almost of their waking lives. They imagine that philosophers must have some secret and superior way of acquiring their conclusions, different from what ordinary mortals have. ‘But there is no more difference,’ says Huxley, ‘between the mental operations of a man of science and those of an ordinary person than there is between the operations and methods of a grocer weighing out his goods in common scales and the operations of a chemist in performing a difficult and complex analysis by means of his balance and finely graduated weights. It is not that the scales in the one case and the balances in the other differ in the principles of their construction or manner of working; but the beam of the one is set on an infinitely finer axis than the other, and, of course, turns by the addition of a much smaller weight’.[8]And the difference in mental method between the man of learning and the ordinary man or woman is the same as the difference between mature men and children and between men generally and other animals. It is one ofdegree,notofkind. The philosopher, the clodhopper, and the ape, all use precisely the same methods of reasoning, differing only in exactness and in the materials of consciousness dealt with.
Nearly all animals, from mollusks to men, reason—not once or twice in a lifetime, but the most of them every day and every hour of their existence. In fact, it would be impossible for any animal addicted to moving about, and with a delicate and easily wrecked organism, to long survive in a world like this without that elasticity of action which reason alone can impart. Since they live in the same world-conditions as human beings, and are seeking providence for substantially the same wants, non-human beings manifest reason in the same general directions as human beings do—in the location and construction of their homes and fortresses, in the arrest of their prey, in circumventing their enemies, in overcoming obstacles and surmounting dangers, in protecting and educating their young, in meeting the emergencies of food and climate, in the wooing of mates and the waging of wars, and in the thousand other cases where they are called upon in their daily wanderings and doings to deal with novel and unprecedented situations.
When wild geese are feeding there is said to be always one of them that acts as sentinel. This one never takes a grain of corn while on duty. When it has acted awhile it gives the bird next to it a sharp peck and utters a querulous kind of cry, and the second one takes its turn. This is prudence, or forethought, which is a form of reason. When swans are diving there is generally one that stays above the water and watches. Sentinels have alarm sounds of various kinds, which they give to signify ‘enemy.’ ‘Ibex, marmots, and mountain-sheep whistle; prariedogs bark; elephants trumpet; wild geese and swans have a kind of bugle call; rabbits and sheep stamp on the ground; crows caw: and wild ducks utter a low, warning quack.’
In thePopular Science Monthlyfor March, 1901, is an account of a series of experiments on the intelligence of the turtle made by Professor Yerkes, of Harvard. The turtle was placed in a labyrinth, at the farther end of which was a comfortable bed of sand. It took just thirty-five minutes of wandering for the turtle to reach the nest the first time. But in the second trial the nest was reached in fifteen minutes, and by the tenth trip the turtle was familiar enough with the route to go through in three and one-half minutes, making but two mistakes. The turtle was afterwards placed in a more complex labyrinth, containing, among other features, a blind alley and two inclines. The inclines were puzzles, and it took one hour and thirty-five minutes of aimless rambling for the wanderer to reach its nest the first time. But the fifth trip was made in sixteen minutes, and the tenth in four minutes, which was not far from direct.
These experiments show that animals of almost proverbial density may learn with surprising quickness. English sparrows and other avian inhabitants of the city learn to live tranquilly along the busiest thoroughfares, exposed to all sorts of dangers, and subjected to what would be to many birds the most terrifying circumstances. Whizzing trolleys, tramping multitudes, and screaming engines have no terrors for them. They simply exercise the caution necessary to keep from being run over. They boldly build their nests right under passing elevated cars, where the roar is sufficient to scare the life out of an ordinary country bird. I have seen these testy little chaps sit and feed and jabber to each other in a perfectly unconcerned way within ten or fifteen feet of a thundering express train. They do not do these things from instinct: theylearnto do them. They know that a diabolical-looking locomotive is harmless, because they have seen it before; and they know that an insignificant urchin with a savage heart and a sling is not harmless, and they know it simply because they have previously had dealings with him. English sparrows will disappear completely from a neighborhood if a few of them are killed. Cats, dogs, horses—all animals, in fact—acquire during life a fund of information as to how to act in order to avoid harm and extinction. If they did not, they would not live long. And they do it just as man does it, by memory and discrimination, by retaining impressions made upon them, and acting differently when an impression is made a second, third, or thirteenth time.
Animals of experience (including men) are more skilful in adjusting themselves to environmental exigencies than the young and inexperienced, because of their store of initial impressions. It is a matter of common observation that young animals are more easily caught or killed or otherwise victimised than the old and experienced. Many animals, however, (and a good many men) are able to profit by a single impression. One dose of tartar emetic is generally sufficient to cure an egg-sucking dog, and it is a very stupid canine indeed that does not understand perfectly after one or two experiences with a porcupine or an unsavory skunk. ‘The burnt child dreads the fire,’ but so does the burnt puppy. Rengger states that his Paraguay monkeys, after cutting themselves only once with any sharp tool, would not touch it again, or would handle it with the greatest caution.[1e]Older trout are more wary than young ones, and fishes that have been much hunted and deceived become suspicious of traps. Rats, martins, and other animals cannot long be trapped in the same way, and partridges and other birds seldom fly against telegraph-wires the second season after the wires are put up. These animals, however, cannot learn to avoid these dangers from experience, for only a few of them are ever caught or struck. They must learn it from observing their unfortunate companions. Everyone who has read the story of Lobo, the big gray wolf of the Carrumpaw, cannot but wonder at the remarkable shrewdness shown by this old leader in baffling for years the tigers that hung upon his tracks.[9]Nansen states that the seals, before man invaded the Arctics, occupied the inner ice-floes to avoid the polar bear, but after man came they took to living on the outer floes in order to escape the persecutions of this new and more fearful enemy. Domestic animals, when first turned out in new regions, often die from eating poisonous weeds, but in some way soon learn to avoid them. Many animals, when pursuing other animals, or when being pursued, display a knowledge of facts very little understood by the majority of mankind, such as of places where scent lies or is obliterated, and the effects of wind in carrying evidence of their presence to their enemies. The hunted roebuck or hare will make circles, double on its own tracks, take to water, and fling itself for considerable distances through the air as cleverly as if it had read up all the theory of scent in a book. According to the LondonSpectatorone of the large African elephants in the Zoological Gardens of that city restores to its entertainers all the bits of food which on being thrown to him fall alike out of his reach and theirs. He points his proboscis straight at the food, and blows it along the floor to the feet of those who have thrown it. He clearly knows what he is about, for if he does not blow hard enough to land the food the first time, he blows harder and harder until he does. The cacadoos (parrots) of Australia, before descending upon a field or orchard in search of food, send out a scouting party to reconnoitre the region and see that ‘all is well.’ Sometimes a second party is sent. If the report is favourable, the whole band advance and plunder the field in short order. These birds are exceedingly wary and intelligent, and seldom make mistakes. But ‘if man once succeeds in killing one of them, they become so prudent and watchful that they henceforward baffle all stratagems’.[3c]A short time ago a parrot at Washington, New Jersey, saved the life of its owner by summoning the neighbours to his relief. Cries of ‘Murder!’ ‘Help!’ ‘Come quick!’ coming from the home of the parrot, attracted the attention of neighbours, who ran to the house to find out the cause. ‘They found the owner of the parrot lying on the floor unconscious, bleeding from a great gash in his neck. He had been repairing the ceiling, and had fallen and struck his head against the stove. It required six stitches to close the wound, and the surgeon said that in only a few minutes the injured man would have been dead. A few years ago this parrot’s screams awakened its owner in time to arouse his neighbours and save them from a fire which started in the house next door.’
A friend of mine, who is thoroughly reliable, tells me that when he was a student at the University of Michigan a few years ago one of the professors of zoology there had a dog who was used by the department for experiments in digestion. The dog was compelled to wear a tube opening downward out of his stomach, and soon grew very weak and emaciated from the constant loss of food, which leaked out through this tube. After a time, however, the dog was observed to be growing unaccountably hale and strong. He was watched, and the poor creature was found to have struck upon an ingenious expedient to save his life. On eating his meal, he would go out to the barn, and, in order to prevent the artificial escape of the contents of his stomach, would lie down flat on his back between two boxes and remain there until his digested food had passed safely beyond the pylorus.
A few months ago, John, one of the monkeys at Lincoln Park, Chicago, was suffering from a terrible abscess on the cheek, and an operation became necessary in order to save the little fellow’s life. It was a pathetic sight to see the look of trust in the monkey’s eyes when the surgeon was ready to begin the operation, and the courage and fortitude displayed by the sufferer were almost human. At the first touch of the knife the monkey pressed his head hard against the knee of the assistant and grabbed the forefinger of each of the assistant’s hands, just as a person does who is about to undergo a painful operation. The swelling was first cut open and washed with antiseptic, when the cheek-bone was scraped and a small piece of it removed. After being again washed in antiseptic, the wound was sewed up, and John was lifted gently back into his cage—not, however, until he had licked the hands of the surgeon and kissed his face in gratitude. The little hero never uttered a sound from the time the knife first touched his face until he was put back into his cage. A similar act of intelligence is recorded of an orang. Having been once bled on account of illness, and not feeling well some time afterward, this orang went from one person to another, and, pointing to the vein in his arm, signified his desire to have the operation repeated. Both of these instances are examples of reason of a very high order—of a higher order, indeed, than many children and some grown people exhibit in similar circumstances. The chimpanzee, Mafuca, learned how to unlock her cage, and stole the key and hid it under her arm for future use. After watching the carpenter boring holes with his brad-awl, she took the brad-awl and bored holes in her table. She poured out milk for herself at meals, and always carefully stopped pouring before the cup ran over.
When baboons go on marauding expeditions, they show that they realise perfectly what they are doing by moving with great stealth. Not a sound is uttered. If any thoughtless youngster so far forgets the necessities of the occasion as to utter a single chatter, he is given a reminder in the shape of a box on the ear. ‘A certain Mr. Cops, who had a young orang, gave it half an orange one day, and put the other half away out of its sight on a high press, and lay down himself on the sofa. But the ape’s movements, attracting his attention, he only pretended to go to sleep. The creature came cautiously and satisfied himself that his master was asleep, then climbed up the press, ate the rest of the orange, carefully hid the peel among the shavings in the grate, examined the pretended sleeper again, and then went and lay down on his own bed.’ This incident is recorded by Tylor in his ‘Anthropology.’ ‘And such behaviour,’ he adds, ‘is to be explained only by supposing a train of thought to pass through the brain of the ape somewhat similar to what we ourselves call reason.’ These instances of undoubted intelligence and thought might be added to almost without number if there was room. Every person nearly who has been in the world any length of time, and has had occasion to associate with these so-called ‘machines,’ has seen for himself, often unexpectedly, many flashes of brightness among them.
It has been said that man differs from other animals, and is superior to them in the fact that he modifies his environment while other animals do not, but are modified by environment. Mr. Lester F. Ward makes this distinction in his ‘Pure Sociology.’ The distinction is no nearer the truth than other distinctions of like character that have from time to time been drawn between men and other animals. It is not much more than half true, if it is that, and does not by any means deserve the italics awarded to it by this writer. Many races of non-human beings have a far greater influence on their environment than many races of men have. Many tribes of men wander about naked, build no habitations, make no weapons, and feed upon the fruits, roots, insects, and such other chance morsels as they can pick up from day to day in their wanderings. Such races are far inferior in constructive activity to the birds, who build elaborate houses, and to the beavers, who not only construct substantial dwellings, but dam rivers, and cut down trees and transport them long distances, and dig artificial waterways, to be used as aids in their engineering enterprises. Compare the elaborate compartments of the Australian bower-birds, surrounded with ornamented and carefully-kept grounds, with the lean-to of many savage tribes, made by sticking two or three palm-leaves in the ground and leaning them against a pole. Even ants plant crops, make clearings, build roads and tunnels, etc. It must be remembered, too, that, however affirmative and masterful a race of men may become, it never succeeds, and never can succeed, in emancipating itself from the influences of environment. It is true that with the growth of intelligence among organic forms there has been a constant transfer of influence from the environment to the organism; but this transfer began, not with man by any means, but low down in the scale of animal life.
It has been said that man is the only animal that uses tools. But this is not true either, for animals as low in the scale of development as insects have been known to use tools. At least two different observers testify to having seen ground-wasps use small stones as hammers in packing the dirt firmly over their nests. Spiders use stones as weights to steady their webs in times of storm. Orangs throw sticks and stones at their pursuers, and certain tribes of Abyssinian baboons, when they go to battle with each other, carry stones as missiles. Monkeys often use stones to crack nuts with, and tame monkeys know very well how to use a hammer when it is given to them. In the London Zoological Gardens a monkey with poor teeth kept a stone hidden in the straw of its cage to crack its nuts with, and it would not allow any other monkey to touch the stone. ‘Here,’ says Darwin, in speaking of this case, ‘is the idea of property.’ Monkeys also use sticks as levers in prying open chests and lifting heavy objects. Cuvier’s orang used to carry a chair across the room and stand on it to lift the door-latch. Chimpanzees, who are very fond of making a noise, have been seen standing around a hollow log in the forest, beating it with sticks; and if we are to believe Emin Pasha, these ingenious parodies of men sometimes carry torches when they go at night on foraging expeditions. The Indian elephant, when travelling, will sometimes turn aside and break off a leafy branch from a roadside tree and carry it along in its trunk to sweep off the flies. As Dr. Wesley Mills says in his work on ‘The Nature and Development of Animal Intelligence,’ ‘It was formerly believed that animals cannot reason, but only those persons who do not themselves reason about the subject, with the facts before them, can any longer occupy such a position.’
1a.1b.1c.1d.1e.Romanes:Animal Intelligence; New York, 1899.2.Cornish:Animals of To-day; London, 1898.3a.3b.3c.Kropotkin:Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution; New York, 1902.4a.4b.Darwin:Descent of Man, 2nd edit.; London, 1874.5a.5b.Romanes:Mental Evolution in Animals; New York, 1898.6.Morgan:Animal Behaviour; London, 1900.7.Brehm:Thierleben; Leipzig, 1880.8.Huxley:On the Origin of Species, lecture iii.9.Thompson: Wild Animals I have Known; New York, 1900.
It is enough. The ancient gulf scooped by human conceit between man and the other animals has been effectually and forever filled up. The human species constitutes but one branch in the gigantic arbour of life. And all the merit and all the feeling and all the righteousness of the world are not, as we have been accustomed to aver, congested into this one branch. And all of the weakness and deformity are not, as we have also been anxious to believe, found elsewhere. The reluctance of wrinkles and deformities to appear in the pictures of men, and of strength and beauty to appear in the representations of the other races of the earth, is to be accounted for by the highly elucidative fact that man is the universal portrait-painter. There is no one to tell man what he is and how he strikes others, and hence he is the ‘paragon of creation’—the inter-stellar pet, half clay and half halo—the image and pride of the gods—the flower and gem of the eternal spheres. Man is the only professional linguist in the universe. And it is fortunate for him that he is. For, if he were not, his auditories would be compelled to carry to his perceptive centres a great many sentiments he now never hears. He would be likely to hear a good deal said, and said with a good deal of feeling, about perpendicular brigand—grandiloquent kakistocrat swelling with self-righteousness—rhetorical hideful wrapped in pillage and gorged with decomposition—a voluble and sanctimonious squash with two sticks in it. The definition of man as it appears in the dictionary of the donkey probably runs something like this: ‘Manis an animal that walks on its hind-legs, invents adjectives with which to praise itself, and displays its greatest utility in proving that all sharks are not aquatic.’ We know what a lion looks like when painted by a man, but human eyes have never yet been allumined by the sardonic lineaments of a man painted by a lion. Being boiled alive in order to look well as corpses in store-windows, and having wooden pegs thrust into our muscles and left there to rot for a week or two to keep us in our agony from doing something desperate—we know what these experiences are like when they are delegated to lobsters, and we take no more serious part in them than to insure their infliction, but we are too fervent barbarians to bother our heads about what they are like from the crustacean point of view.
Let us be candid. Men are not all gentle men and humane, and not-men are not all inhuman. There are reptiles in broadcloth, and there are warm and generous hearts among those peoples who have so long suffered from human prejudice and ferocity. Let us label beings by what they are—by the souls that are in them and the deeds they do—not by their colour, which is pigment, nor by their composition, which is clay. There are philanthropists in feathers and patricians in fur, just as there are cannibals in the pulpit and saurians among the money-changers. The golden rule may sometimes be more religiously observed in the hearts and homes of outcast quadrupeds than in the palatial lairs of bipeds. The horse, who suffers and serves and starves in silence, who endures daily wrongs of scanty and irregular meals, excessive burdens and mangled flanks, who forgets cruelty and ingratitude, and does good to them that spitefully use him, and submits to crime without resistance, misunderstanding without murmur, and insult without resentment, is a better Christian, a better exemplar of the Sermon on the Mount, than many church-goers, in spite of the creeds and interdictions of men. And the animal who goes to church on Sundays, wearing the twitching skins and plundered plumage of others, and wails long prayers and mumbles meaningless rituals, and gives unearned guineas to the missionary, and on week-days cheats and impoverishes his neighbours, glorifies war, and tramples under foot the most sacred principles of morality in his treatment of his non-human kindred, is a cold, hard-heartedbrute, in spite of the fact that he is cunning and vainglorious, and towers about on his hinders.
There are lessons that may be learned from the uncorrupted children of Nature—lessons in simplicity of life, straightforwardness, humility, art, economy, brotherly love, and cheerfulness—more beautiful, perhaps, and more true than may sometimes be learned from the stilted and Machiavellian ways of men. Would you learn forgiveness? Go to the dog. The dog can stand more abuse and forgive greater accumulations of wrong than any other animal, not even excepting a wife. About the only thing in the universe superior to the dog in willingness to undergo outrage is the human stomach. Would you learn wisdom and industry? Go to the ant, that tireless toiler of the dust. The ant can do that which no man can do—keep grain in a warm, moist atmosphere without sprouting. Would you learn art? Go to the bee or to the wild bird’s lodge. The art of the honeycomb and of the hang-bird’s nest surpasses that of the cranny of the savage as the Cathedral of St. Peter exceeds the cottage. Would you learn socialism, that dream of poets and the hope and expectation of wise men? It is actualised around you in thousands of insect communities. The social and economic relations existing in the most highly wrought societies of bees and wasps are fundamentally the ideal relations of living beings to each other, but it will require millenniums of struggle and bloodshed for men to come up to them. Would you learn curiosity—not the curiosity that gossips and backbites, but the curiosity of the explorer and searcher after knowledge? Go to the monkey. The monkey has been known to work two hours, without pause, utterly unconscious of everything but its purposes, trying to open a fettered trunk lock.[1]Would you learn sobriety? Go not to the gilded hells of cities, where men die like flies in gin’s vile miasma. Go to the spring where the antelope drinks. Would you learn chastity? Go not to the foul dens and fiery chambers of men. Go to the boudoir of the bower-bird, or to the subterranean hollow where the wild wolf rears her litter.
Man is not the surpassingly pre-eminent individual he so actively advertises himself to be. Indeed, in many particulars he is excelled, and excelled seriously, by those whom he calls ‘lower.’ The locomotion of the bird is far superior in ease and expedition to the shuffling locomotion of man. The horse has a sense which guides it through darkness in which human eyes are blind; and the manner in which a cat, who has been carried in a bag and put down miles away, will turn up at the back-door of the old home next morning dumfounds science. The eye of the vulture is a telescope. The hound will track his master along a frequented street an hour behind his footsteps, by the imponderable odour of his soles. The catbird, without atlas or geographic manuals, will find her way back over hundreds of trackless leagues, season after season, to the same old nesting-place in the thicket. Birds, thousands of them, journey from Mexico to Arctic America, from Algiers and Italy to Spitzbergen, from Egypt to Siberia, and from Australia and the Polynesian Islands to New Zealand, and build their nests and rear their young, year after year, in the same vale, grove, or tundra. The nightingale, who pours out his incomparable lovesong in the twilight of English lanes during May and June, winters in the heart of Africa; and some birds nest within the Arctic Circle and winter in Argentina. Some of the plovers travel the entire length of the American land mass every summer, from Patagonia to the Arctic Circle, in order to lay three or four pale-green eggs, and see them turn to birdlings by the shores of the Hudson Sea. Many animals have the power to foretell storms, and man, though he can weigh worlds, is ever glad to profit by their superior sense. When herons fly high above the clouds, when sea-birds dip and sport in the water and the bittern booms from the marshes, when swallows fly low and the sow repairs her bed, when horses scamper and cattle sniff the air, when ravens beat the air with their wings, make noises, and flock together, when the swan raises her eggs by additions to her nest and the prairie-dog scratches the dirt up around its hole, when beetles are not found in the air and caterpillars mass in their webs, when bees remain near their hives and ants carry their eggs to their innermost abodes, when frogs croak more loudly from their watery retreats and fishes seek the safety of the unharried deeps—look out for foul weather! Man has not the sweetness of the song-sparrow, the innocence of the fawn, nor the high relative brain capacity of the tomtit and the fice.
Many animals have powers by which they are able to act in concert at times, vast numbers of them moving in unison over immense areas by signals or intuitions which man can neither imitate nor understand. Such are the mysterious migrations of the Norway lemming and of many birds and insects, and such were the memorable stampedes of the bison hordes on the American plains in years gone by. Kropotkin saw on the Siberian steppes one autumn ‘thousands and thousands’ of fallow deer come together from an area as large as Great Britain at a point on the Amur River in an unprecedented exodus to the lowlands on the other side.[2]How these scattered thousands knew when to start so as to arrive at the river at the same time, and how they knew the direction to travel and found their way so well, are mysteries which man can as yet only wonder at. More marvellous yet—more marvellous, perhaps, than the concurrent action of any other animal, for it implies the most accurate time-keeping extending over many years—are the annual festivals of thepalolo, an annelid living among the interstices of the coral reefs of some of the islands of the South Pacific. About three o’clock on the morning following the third quarter of the October moon, these worms invariably appear on the surface of the sea, swarming in great numbers. Just after sunrise their bodies begin to break to pieces, and by nine o’clock no trace of them is left. On the morning following the third quarter of the November moon they appear again, but usually in smaller numbers. After that they are seen no more till the next October. This annual swarming is a phenomenon connected with reproduction, the ova escaping from the broken bodies of the females and, after being fertilised by the free-floating sperms, sinking down among the coral reefs and hatching into a new generation. ‘Year after year these creatures appear according to lunar time. And yet in the long-run they keep solar time. They keep two cycles, one of three and one of twenty-nine years. In the three-year cycle there are two intervals of twelve lunations and one of thirteen lunations. These thirty-seven lunations bring lunar time somewhat near to solar time. But in twenty-nine years there is enough difference to require the addition of another lunation; the twenty-ninth year is therefore one of thirteen instead of twelve lunations. In this way they do not change their season in an entire century. So unfailing is their appearance that in Samoa they have given their name to the spring season, which is called “the time of the palolo.”’
Instead of the highest, man is in some respects the lowest, of the animal kingdom. Man is the most unchaste, the most drunken, the most selfish and conceited, the most miserly, the most hypocritical, and the most bloodthirsty of terrestrial creatures. Almost no animals, except man, kill for the mere sake of killing. For one being to take the life of another for purposes of selfish utility is bad enough. But the indiscriminate massacre of defenceless innocents by armed and organised packs,justfor pastime, is beyond characterisation. The human species is the only species of animals that plunges to such depths of atrocity. Even vipers and hyenas do not exterminate for recreation. No animal, except man, habitually seeks wealth purely out of an insane impulse to accumulate. And no animal, except man, gloats over accumulations that are of no possible use to him, that are an injury and an abomination, and in whose acquisition he may have committed irreparable crimes upon others. There are no millionaires—no professional, legalised, lifelong kleptomaniacs—among the birds and quadrupeds. No animal, except man, spends so large a part of his energies striving for superiority—not superiority in usefulness, but that superiority which consists in simply getting on the heads of one’s fellows. And no animal practises common, ordinary morality to the other beings of the world in which he lives so little, compared with the amount he preaches it, as man.
Let us be honest. Honour to whom honour is due. It will not emaciate our own glory to recognise the excellence and reality of others, or to come face to face with our own frailties. Weareour brother’s keeper. Our brethren are they that feel. Let us universalise. Our thoughts and sympathies have been too long wingless.The Universe is our Country, and our Kindred are the Populations that Mount.It is well—it is eminently well, for it is godlike—to send our Magnanimity to the Dusts and the Deeps,our Sunrises to the Uttermost Isles,and ourCharity to the Stars.
1.Romanes:Animal Intelligence; New York, 1899.2.Kropotkin:Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution; New York, 1902.