CHAPTER II.
COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY.
On one occasion, two monkeys were brought into the presence of the orang described by Grant, about which we spoke in the last chapter. They were led by a chain up to the animal, and were threatened with a stick. “During the whole interview,” says our informant, “the grave commanding attitude and bearing of the orang, compared to the levity and apparent sense of inferiority of the monkeys, was very striking, and it was impossible not to feel that he was a creature of a much more elevated order and capacity.”56
“The animal from Sumatra is neither a man nor an ape,” said the crowd before the orang at the Museum. The communications which were then made to the Institute by Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire may be, one of these days, a new triumph for him, the forerunner of a science which is not yet in existence,—the study of intellect in animals, based upon observation and experience; as for instance, in the passage where he proposes to submit the orang to a methodical education, in order to study the modifications which would be caused by such an alteration of method.57He who has discovered organic unity, will have placed us in the way of a discovery not less important, that of psychological unity.58A new science, which wouldonly date from the time of the reaction against Cartesian ideas,—a science still without a name, merely touched upon even by great minds which have the inestimable privilege of understanding everything; it has never beenstudied,—never thoroughly investigated,—never submitted to all our means of information.59We should call itComparative Psychology.
We should, then, re-enter into one greatUnity. The intellect of vertebrate animals would be identical, as their organism is identical; thus gradually descending, passing through the orang, from man himself to all the mammalia. It may be said that these propositions are not yet proved,—at least it will be allowed, seeing what has passed during a very few years, that the last word has not yet been said concerning the intellect of animals.
Has this question, then, made so much progress, either to the profit of animals or the detriment of mankind, that we should wish to stop it, when it has started already on so straight a path? Saint Chrysostom reproached the Gentile philosopher, it is said, with having always been inclined to assimilate that which they called the soul of animals with that of man himself.60The opinion of these Gentiles, nevertheless, is worth the trouble of being noticed. They were as well able to observe animals as ourselves. Since then, the means of study, as applied to intellect, have made little or no progress; observation and reflection are still the same; we have found no new process, no new method, by which we can more profoundly examine into this subject; we have, then, no reason to think that the solutions given by ourselves upon this point are at all preferable to those of the ancients. It may be rather the contrary. For their opinion has this much in its favour, that it was born free, in minds which did not restrain, even unwittingly, any new influence or theory which might bebrought forward.61The idea of the intellectual gradation from man to animals must have been necessarily offensive to Christianity, which promised a future existence; it was not so for these Gentiles, who were much more occupied with matters of the world.62
The principles which we are endeavouring to revive are not, however, completely those of Aristotle. In his treatise on the soul he admits this gradation, but as presenting in each degree a new manifestation beyond the manifestations existing in the inferior degrees. The principle of the soul is unity; but as we reascend the series, from plants to man, it invests itself with a greatly increased number of faculties. Porphyrius, resuming the ideas of the Stagyrite, seems to go even further, and to approach nearer the truth; it is not faculties joined one to another that he recognises in man and animals, but the same in all, only more or less developed.63
At the present day, if we have not returned to the ideas of Pythagoras and the Stoics, at least we are very far from Pereira and Descartes, with theiranimal machines, hydraulic-pneumatic machines, as one of the partisans of the Bréton philosopher (J. H. Crocius) calls them.64
We are really astonished at the infatuation for the opinions of Descartes which took possession of Germany during the latter half of the seventeenth century. They were pushed to the extreme point,—soul, reason, and intellect were denied to all animals. A person named Stahl,65who had at least the merit of being consistent to the last, brings forward a principle, that animals do not feel,bruta non sentire. This announcement is the conclusion of a very learned syllogism, and which one Gaspard Laugenhert had added to theCompendium Physicæof Arnold Geulinx.
It is with much trouble that some strong minds have dared to raise their voices in this Cartesian concert, having taken good care to strengthen themselves by plenty of quotations gathered from the Old and New Testaments.66These were then proofs positive, and at times it was prudent to use them. The side of the animals has been successively strengthened by Buffon, and indeed by everybody. At the present day, M. Flourens refuses themthoughtalone, “this supreme faculty which the mind of man possesses, so that it may rely upon itself, and study its own mind.67There is here,” says the physiologist of whom we are speaking, “a strong line of demarcation; this thought which can reason about itself,—this intellect which beholds and studies itself,—this knowledge which is acquainted with itself,—evidently forms an order of determined phenomena of a clearly defined nature, and to which no animal would know how to attain.Thereis a purely intellectual world, if we may say so, and this world belongs only to man. In one word, animals feel, understand, think; but manis the only one among all created beings to whom the power has been given offeelingthat he feels, ofknowingthat he understands, and ofthinkingthat he has thepowerof thinking.”68
Such is the only difference. The question is now reduced to a more limited field than it has ever been before, and infinitely less vast. The thing which would be wanting in animals is a kind of internal knowledge; not the knowledge of oneself (they know this since theyfeel) but thescientific knowledge of oneself, which can bring reflecting and reasoning study to bear on all the interior phenomena which may occur to each. We desire fully that this may be a distinction, but solely a secondary one, and able at most to make certain races of men differ one from the other. In fact, if we form an absolute and fundamental character of humanity out of this faculty, this power of investigation into an interior world, we ought to find it in a powerful manner among all men. It will resist every other influence, it will be permanent, since, this being destroyed, man would be no longer a man, and would be lowered by this fact to the rank whence he is said to have come.
And do we consider that it may possibly be so? Does this reflected knowledge of oneself exist among inferior races, if it does not exist among animals? Certainly we shall never maintain that these last enjoy such a faculty, the source of all our legislation, and that which has made us what we are. But we ask if it is well proved whether all human races possess it. If we do not allow innate ideas to the orang, as F. Cuvier69would do, be it so, but let it be remembered that certain philosophers have refused them to man himself. We ourselves agree that an animal has no abstract notion of right or duty, or any idea of a divinity,70but it must also be remembered that certain people have not even a word for the purpose of expressing these things, and it is M. de Quatrefages himself who avows it.71
We refer these persons to the following account of animaleconomy, and we think that they will not deny their application to various African and Oceanic tribes. “Ideas, abstract ideas, arise from their own domain; the past, that which preceded their birth; the future, that which will follow their death, does not occupy their attention; the present is their only business in life. They do not demand ‘Whence do I come? What am I? Where am I going?’ And they have no idea whatsoever of a Divinity.”72Bayle, Maupertuis,73and M. Flourens have, one after another, declared how difficult it is to fix a limit, to say where the intellect of animals ceases, and where that of man commences. That limit escapes even ourselves; whilst separating two terms specifically distinct we only see one continued line from the other vertebrate animals to mankind, without any clearly defined demarcation,—the organism only of one mammifer as separated by an unbroken limit from the organism of another. It is a chain of which the links, if we wish, may go on increasing from one extremity to the other, following a given progression, but without ceasing to belike, and consequently comparable amongst themselves. A certain number of links may be wanting, but the mind re-establishes them, and the continuity, although an abstraction, is not the less real. It is even, if we may say so, the track of a hyperbolic curve, interrupted here and there, of which only the arcs remain, quite different, and all, however, reducible by the mind to one and the same system.
Unity of composition is the condition of all harmony, the necessary rule of nature. As to ourselves, we only see everywhere the same faculties, extended and developed among the superior vertebrate animals; having even acquired among mankind the singular property of aggrandising itself almostad infinitum, confined among other vertebrata, enclosed in a small circle, where they can even escape our own means of knowledge.
But there is everywhere the same nature, everywhere things are alike. Life is unity; we do not share it one with another;both the life of the body and the life of intellect, both matter and the mind, and the organism and the faculties,74belong to each one separately. Terms correlative one to the other, never independent. There is an immense space between the intellect of animals and that of a civilised European; we willingly recognise this, but encumbered by mean terms and numerous transitions; that these latter exist, or that they have finished their time upon our planet, we also allow. The question of language, so confused, and so full of obscurity, still remains.
“Whatever resemblance there may be between the Hottentot and the monkey,” says Buffon, “the distance which separates them is immense, since internally it is filled by thought and outwardly by speech.”75We know how to consider the first of these appreciations. As to the second, let us see if we shall not there perceive a sort of gradation which would insensibly lead us from our own complicated languages to others of a much greater simplicity, so much so that they can scarcely be called by that name. Speech and language are two words often confounded, but in science we must give to each of them its own value.Speechis a language articulated by the respiratory channels.Languagemay be defined as “everything spoken by well known and understood means between two intellects.” It may be seen that we give the fullest acceptation possible to this word. It is alanguagethat the Abbé de l’Epée invented for the deaf and dumb. The writing of this language is another. A phonetic telegram is, as regards a stranger, merely a succession of sounds, like the song of a nightingale; a naval telegram is only an assemblage and a combination of colours like an arabesque, united the moment when the necessary arrangement forms these sounds or these colours into language.76
Speech alone being the habitual and natural language of mankind, endowed otherwise with special organic specificationsin order to produce it, we have been generally led to confound these two distinct things in speaking of mankind, viz.,speechandlanguage. This being allowed, the first question which we have to examine is this, “Has man always possessed the faculty of speech?”. A difficult question, but one which we have no right to proclaim as impossible to be solved, which is, perhaps, not the case, and of which the difficulty belongs principally to the very imperfect knowledge which we possess concerning the distant epoch which saw mankind in his cradle.77Let us first of all remember that man has, in common with animals, voice, cries, natural inflections (M. Flourens), that which we otherwise callnatural language. “Like a simple animal,” says Herder,78“man possesses the faculty of speech. All the most violent and painful sensations of his body, as well as the strong passions of his mind, are manifested immediately by cries or inflections of the voice, by natural and inarticulate sounds. The animal which suffers—as well as the hero Philoctetes—when it feels sorrow will moan and sigh, even when abandoned in a desert island, far from the sight of any friendly creature, without any hope of succour.” This language is intelligible between all animals, between animals and ourselves, and between ourselves and animals. We may affirm that man possesses it always, from the first hour of his birth. As to articulated language, asartificial languagehas been called in opposition to the preceding, the question is much more confused and much less clearly defined.
We think with Steinthal, with Jacob Grimm,79and with M. Renan,80that language is not innate in man, that is to say, it is not, as the Buddhist philosophy has already declared, anecessaryconsequence of active intelligence.81Further, it hasnot been revealed—this theory does not even deserve the honour of having been opposed by Jacob Grimm.82But we may admit that language is, if not a necessity, a least a direct consequence of an intellect such as existed amongst mankind at the time, whether long or short we know not, which preceded the appearance of language. “The moment,” says M. Renan, stating the theories of Steinthal,83“that language arises from the human soul and appears in the light of day and constitutes an epoch in the development of the life of the mind, is the moment when intuition is changed into idea. Things appear first to the mind in the complexity of the real, abstraction is unknown to the primitive man.” Here, then, are two well-characterised modes, two ways of being, entirely different from the intellect of man. The one, where this intellect only possesses intuition, the other where analysis sees the light, where the mind is abstracted, and where, by a mechanism more or less complicated, but at the same time by a real work,84it ends by calling every abstraction of mind by a name; then he speaks. But before the time when this revolution is accomplished, the state of man is completely comparable to that in which animals are placed. They have caught at certain relations by means of their intelligence, without usually feeling any necessity for explaining them, a relation of a much more elevated order of beings, for it has been truly remarked,85and it must not be forgotten, that the capital act of language is to “wish to speak.”
We have seen that certain abstract ideas, by reason of their nature, were so entirely foreign to certain races of men, that their intellects had neverwishedfor a word in order to express them. Well, if other ideas, expressing much more simple relations, have escaped animals, there is only, in fact, a gradation corresponding to what we have just said concerning intellectualphenomena among the human race. As for the specific difference which some have tried to establish under this head between man and animals, if it were correct it must be shown that language is completely unattainable by any mammalia, even within the most restricted limits.
And is it so? Will it be mooted that certain animals have not even a rudiment of language, whether articulated or not it does not much signify, in their state of nature? Will it be mooted that they never make any sort of sign in order to communicate anything to one another, to call them, or give an alarm, or express some peculiar sensation?86
Experience would entirely deny any such assertion. And this not only with reference to the superior animals, for this faculty appears to be extended even to the invertebrata. The well-known experiments of P. Huber seem to have proved in the most decisive manner that ants,87like bees, are able to transmit certain signs or indications from one to the other; even if the mere act of living in a republic, of joining together in one common work, did not offer the strongest presumption of a language peculiar to these creatures. If anyone dares to deny to animals the spontaneous exercise of a restricted language, limited in whatever way that may be desired, at least it cannot be denied that many of the vertebrate animals are not capable of receiving from it an equal education, of understanding the signification of certain sounds, of certain signs, and of producing in their turn such as may be understood by us, of communicating to us any of their thoughts, or any of their appreciations.
We are not speaking here of animals who can reproduce certain sounds belonging to the vocal organs of man; that is a fact of an entirely material character, and which has no reference to the question of language. It is evident that the animal which articulates any word whatsoever does not understand it a whit more than the man who imitates the cry of an animal, and, in a general way, neither comprehends its sense nor its signification.
Maupertuis alleges88that if animals were capable of understanding we could teach them to make themselves understood by other signs in default of a voice. A strange aberration of intellect for such a studious and learned man. This is the man who makes an impossibility out of an everyday occurrence; for, first of all, most animalshavesome sort of voice, and if they had it not, there are few persons who are ignorant of the way in which certain mute dogs make themselves understood when they particularly desire it. What would really be absurd would be the hope of imparting ideas to animals, matters relating, indeed, to a higher order, since we see that even allmenare not capable of grasping them. Man has been able to train animals, and to train implies precisely the idea of communicating a thought from man to an animal, and from the animal to man. “Jump,” says the shepherd to his dog, and the dog knows that this vocal articulation orders him to make a given muscular effort. The man hasspokento the dog. During the night some one opens the gate of the farm-yard, and the watch-dog barks; he thustellshis master that something unusual is happening.89
That which proves besides that the barking of the dog is merely a conventional sign, anartificial language, so to say, is the fact, that in certain countries the dogs do not bark; jackals and wolves learn how to bark when in company with the dogs who can talk in this manner, and that the same dogs lose the power, or rather the habit of barking, if they return to a savage state.90
We have already spoken of those inferior races which seem to have borrowed from their better endowed neighbours a rudiment of civilisation, which, for a long time they did not knowhow to develope in any way. Does it not seem that there is here some comparison with what has just been stated? that under a civilising influence, in contact with a superior being, the dog has learnt a language; but that not understanding its general application (a more complex, and more highly elevated idea), he has not known how to transmit the use of it to his own race, or has himself forgotten it, from not having any occasion to exercise this power?91
The language of animals is still a question full of obscurity, but which may eventually, we believe, become fruitful in new facts.92
If Apollonius of Tyana and the ancient philosophers did not understand the language of animals so well as has sometimes been believed, at least they did not do wrong in directing their inquiries towards this matter. We have no doubt but that in carefully studying animals, we shall arrive at a scientific explanation of this well-known truth, recognised by all those who live with them; which is that they can understand us, that they make themselves understood by us, and that they understood one another within certain limits.93
For a long time it was believed that intellect and thought belong to man alone, and that he had only organic instinct in common with animals.94This opinion tends each day towardsa change; we hope that we have proved so much. Something of the same sort will take place, we think, for the best studied language. There, as with intellect, as with organism, we shall doubtless be able to prove a unity which may be regarded by analogy as necessary, offering alone degrees of gradation in reference to organism and intellect. Every living being (we are only speaking here of vertebrate animals) will appear to be composed of the same constituent parts, but unequally developed, and of which some have only been taken by us for dissimilarities or new parts, on account of our own want of sufficiently deep study. As they formerly tried to discover new bones in the heads of fishes, until the time when their relations, connexions, and development were better studied; so unity of composition has been there recognised and proved where it was least suspected.
We cannot do better, in order to sum up our ideas on this subject, than quote a passage from the works of a learned man, who in our days has gone most deeply into the study of organic homology, Professor Richard Owen; it is the last step which has been taken, and indeed the most decisive one, in the momentous question concerning man’s place in nature.
“Not being able to appreciate or conceive of the distinction between thepsychicalphenomena of a chimpanzee and of a Bosjesman, or of an Aztec with arrested brain-growth, as being of a nature so essential as to preclude a comparison between them, oras being other than a difference of degree, I cannot shut my eyes to the significance of that all-pervading similitude of structure—every tooth, every bone, strictly homologous—which makes the determination of the difference betweenHomoandPithecusthe anatomist’s difficulty. And therefore,with every respect for the author of theRecords of Creation,95I follow Linnæus96and Cuvier in regarding mankind as a legitimate subject of zoological comparison and classification.97” Is not the admission of gradation the means of binding more firmly together the great chain of human beings, a thing quite impossible, which could not exist, or rather, which would only be a caprice,—an artificial method or system,—if the classified beings were only thus classified by creatures of their own description? Does it not confirm, even more strongly, the continuous series in which Aristotle, Leibnitz, Bonnet, Linnæus, and de Blainville have believed? We shall proclaim, then, the law, shaped by M. Flourens, who, however, does not receive it, as we do, without reservation:—
Law.—From animals to man everything is but a chain of uninterrupted gradation; therefore, there is no human kingdom. Then comes this other conclusion,—one and the same method is applicable both to mankind and animals.