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CORNELL
UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY
Cornell University Library
HM106 .M82
The universal kinship.
olin
3 1924 030 242 584
Cornell University
Library
The original of tliis book is in
tine Cornell University Library.
There are no known copyright restrictions in
the United States on the use of the text.
http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924030242584
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THE
UNIVERSAL KINSHIP
BY
J. HOWARD MOORE
INSTRUCTOR IN ZOOLOGY, CRANE MANUAL TRAINING HIGH SCHOOL,
CHICAGO
' A Sacred Kinship I would not forego
Binds me to all that breathes.'
BOYESEN.
LONDON
HUMANITARIAN LEAGUE
53 CHANCERY LANE
1906
TO
MY DEAR MOTHER AND FATHER
WHO HAVE DONE SO MUCH FOR ME IN THE
LONG YEARS
THAT ARE PAST AND GONE
PREFACE
The Universal Kinship means the kinship of all
the inhabitants of the planet Earth. Whether
they came into existence among the waters or
among desert sands, in a hole in the earth, in the
hollow of a tree, or in a palace ; whether they
build nests or empires ; whether they swim, fly,
crawl, or ambulate ; and whether they realise it
or not, they are all related, physically, mentally,
morally — this is the thesis of this book. But
since man is the most gifted and influential of
animals, and since his relationship with other
animals is more important and more reluctantly
recognised than any other, the chief purpose of
these pages is' to prove and interpret the kinship
of the human species with the other species of
animals.
The thesis of this book comes pretty squarely
in conflict with widely-practised and highly-prized
sins. It will therefore be generally criticised
where it is not passed by in silence. Men as a
rule do not care to improve. Although they have
Vlll
PREFACE
but one life to live, they are satisfied to live the
thing out as they have started on it.
Enthusiasm, which in an enlightened or ideal
race would be devoted to self-improvement, is used
by men in weaving excuses for their own inertia
or in singing of the infirmities of others.
But there is a Future. And the creeds and ideals
men bow down to to-day will in time to come
pass away, and new creeds and ideals will claim
their allegiance. Shrines change as the genera-
tions come and go, and out of the decomposition
of the old comes the new. The time will come
when the sentiments of these pages will not be
hailed by two or three, and ridiculed or ignored
by the rest ; they will represent Public Opinion and
Law.
M.
Chicago, 1905.
CONTENTS
THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
PAGE
I. MAN AN ANIMAL ----- 3
II. MAN A VERTEBRATE - - - - 7
III. MAN A MAMMAL - - - - - 12
IV. MAN A PRIMATE - - - • - 14
V. RECAPITULATION - - - - - 26
VI. THE MEANING OF HOMOLOGY - - - 28
VII. THE EARTH AN EVOLUTION - "30
VIII. THE FACTORS OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION - - 35
IX. THE EVIDENCES OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION - 38
X. THE GENEALOGY OF ANIMALS - - - 74
XL CONCLUSION - - - - - 97
THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
I. THE CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND TRADITION - I05
II. EVIDENCES OF PSYCHICAL EVOLUTION - - IIO
III. THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW - - - 146
IV. THE ELEMENTS OF HUMAN AND NON-HUMAN
MIND COMPARED - . - . 196
V. CONCLUSION - - - - - 232
ix
X CONTENTS
THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
PAGE
I. HUMAN NATURE A PRODUCT OF THE JUNGLE - 245
II. EGOISM AND ALTRUISM - - - - 247
III. THE ETHICS OF THE SAVAGE - - - 252
IV. THE ETHICS OF THE ANCIENT - - - 258
V. MODERN ETHICS ----- 267
VI. THE ETHICS OF HUMAN BEINGS TOWARDS NON-
HUMAN BEINGS - . - - 272
VII. THE ORIGIN OF PROVINCIALISM - - 282
VIIL UNIVERSAL ETHICS - - - - 291
IX. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ALTRUISM - - 296
X. ANTHROPOCENTRIC ETHICS - - - 314
XI. ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF EVOLUTION ■ 319
XII. CONCLUSION - - . . . 324
THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
PAGE
I. MAN AN ANIMAL ----- 3
II. MAN A VERTEBRATE .... 7
III. MAN A MAMMAL - - - - - 12
IV. MAN A PRIMATE - - - - - 14
V. RECAPITULATION - - - - - 26
VI. THE MEANING OF HOMOLOGY - - - 28
VII. THE EARTH AN EVOLUTION - - "30
VIII. THE FACTORS OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION - - 35
IX. THE EVIDENCES OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION - 38
X. THE GENEALOGY OF ANIMALS - - - 74
XI. CONCLUSION - - - - - 97
' Like the Roman emperors, who, intoxicated by their
power, at length regarded themselves as demigods, so the
ruler of the earth believes that the animals subjected to his
will have nothing in common with his own nature. Man is
not content to be the king of animals. He insists on having
it that an impassable gulf separates him from his subjects.
The affinity of the ape disturbs and humbles him. And,
turning his back upon the earth, he flies, with his threatened
majesty, into the cloudy sphere of a special " human
kingdom." But Anatomy, like those slaves who followed
the conqueror's car crying, " Thou art a man," disturbs him
in his self-admiration, and reminds him of those plain and
tangible realities which unite him with the animal world.' —
Broca.
THE UNIVERSAL KINSHIP
THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
I. Man an Animal.
It was in the zoology class at college. We had
made all the long journey from amoeba to coral,
from coral to worm, from worm to mollusk, from
moUusk to fish, from fish to reptile, and from
reptile to mammal — and there, in the closing pages
of faithfril old Packard, we found it. ' A mammal
of the order of primates,' the book said, with that
unconcern characteristic of the deliverances of
science. I was almost saddened. It was the
first intimation I had ever received of that trite
but neglected truth that man is an animal.
But the intimation was so weak, and I was at
that time so unconscious, that it was not till years
later that I began, through reflection, actually to
realise the truth here first caught sight of. During
these years I knew that man was not a mineral
nor a plant — that, indeed, he belonged to the
3 1—2
4 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
animal kingdom. But, like most men still, I
continued to think of him as being altogether
different from other animals. I thought of man
and the animals, not of man and the other animals.
Man was somehow sui generis. He had had, I
believed, a unique and miraculous origin ; for I
had not yet learned of organic evolution. The
pre-Darwinian belief that I had come down from
the skies, and that non-human creatures of all
kinds had been brought into existence as adjuncts
of the distinguished species to which I belonged,
occupied prominent place in my thinking. Non-
human races, so I had been taught, had in them-
selves no reason for existence. They were acces-
sories. A chasm, too wide for any bridge ever to
span, yawned between the human and all other
species. Man was celestial, a blue-blood barely
escaping divinity. All other beings were little
higher than clods. So faithfully and mechanically
did I reflect the bias in which I had grown up.
But man is an animal. It was away out there
on the prairies, among the green corn rows, one
beautiful June morning — a long time ago it seems
to me now — that this revelation really came to
me. And I repeat it here, as it has grown to
seem to me, for the sake of a world which is so
wise in many things, but so darkened and way-
ward regarding this one thing. However averse
to accepting it we may be on account of favourite
traditions, man is an animal in the most literal
and materialistic meaning of the word. Man has
not a spark of so-called ' divinity ' about him. In
MAN AN ANIMAL 5
important respects he is the most highly evolved
of animals ; but in origin, disposition, and form he
is no more ' divine ' than the dog who laps his
sores, the terrapin who waddles over the earth in
a carapace, or the unfastidious worm who dines
on the dust of his feet. Man is not the pedestalled
individual pictured by his imagination — a being
glittering with prerogatives, and towering apart
from and above all other beings. He is a pain-
shunning, pleasure-seeking, death-dreading organ-
ism, differing in particulars, but not in kind, from
the pain-shunning, pleasure-seeking, death-dread-
ing organisms below and around him. Man is
neither a rock, a vegetable, nor a deity. He
belongs to the same class of existences, and has
been brought into existence by the same evolu-
tional processes, as the horse, the toad that hops
in his garden, the firefly that lights its twilight
torch, and the bivalve that reluctantly feeds him.
Man's body is composed fundamentally of the
same materials as the bodies of all other animals.
The bodies of all animals are composed of clay.
They are formed of the same elements as those
that murmur in the waters, gallop in the winds,
and constitute the substance of the insensate rocks
and soils. More than two-thirds of the weight of
the human body is made up of oxygen alone, a
gas which forms one-fifth of the weight of the air,
more than eight-ninths of that of the sea, and
forty-seven per cent, of the superficial solids of
the earth.
Man's body is composed of cells. So are the
6 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
bodies of all other animals. And the cells in
the body of a human being are not essentially
different in composition or structure from the cells
in the body of the sponge. All cells are composed
primarily of protoplasm, a compound of carbon,
hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen. Like all other
animals, man is incapable of producing a particle
of the essential substance of which his body is
made. No animal can produce protoplasm. This
is a power of the plant, and the plant only. All
that any animal can do is to burn the compounds
formed in the sun-lit laboratories of the vegetable
world. The human skeleton, like the skeletons of
nearly all other animals, is composed chiefly of
ime — lime being, in the sea, where life spent so
many of its earlier centuries, the most available
material for parts whose purpose it is to furnish
shape and durability to the organism. Man grows
from an egg. So do all creatures of clay. Every
animal commences at the same place — in a single,
lowly, almost homogeneous cell. A dog, a frog,
a philosopher, and a worm cannot for a long
time after their embryonic commencement be
distinguished from each other. Like the oyster,
the ox, the insect, and the fish, like all that live,
move, and breathe, man is mortal. He increases
in size and complexity through an allotted period
of time; then, like all his kindred, wilts back into
the indistinguishable flux from which he came.
Man inhales oxygen and exhales carbon dioxide.
So does every animal that breathes, whether it
breathe by lungs, gills, skin, or ectosarc, and
MAN AN ANIMAL 7
whether it breathe the sunless ooze of the sea
floor or the ethereal blue of the sky. Animals
inhale oxygen because they eat carbon and
hydrogen. The energy of all animals is produced
mainly by the union of oxygen with the elements
of carbon and hydrogen in the tissues of animal
bodies, the plentiful and ardent oxygen being the
most available supporter of the combustion of
these two elements.
Man is, then, an animal, more highly evolved
than the most of his fellow-beings, but positively
of the same clay, and of the same fundamental
make-up, with the same eagerness to exceed and
the same destiny, as his less pompous kindred
who float and frolic and pass away in the seas and
atmospheres, and creep over the land-patches of a
common clod.
II. Man a Vertebrate.
Man is a vertebrate animal.* He has (anatomi-
cally at least) a backbone. He belongs to that
substantial class of organisms possessing an
articulating internal skeleton — the family of the
fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.
Most animals have some sort of skeleton, some
sort of calcareous contrivance, whose business it
is to give form and protection to the softer parts
of the organism. Some animals, as the star-
fishes, have plates of lime scattered throughout
the surface parts of the body ; others, as the corals
* See ' Classes of Animals,' p. 330.
8 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
and sponges, secrete plant-like frames, upon and
among the branches of which the organisms
reside ; and still others, as the clams, crustaceans,
and insects, have skeletons consisting of a shell
or sheath on the outside of, and more or less
surrounding, the softer substances of the body.
The limbs of insects are tiny tubes on the inside
of which are the miniature muscles with which
they perform their marvels of locomotion. The
skeleton of vertebrates, consisting of levers, beams,
columns, and arches, all skilfully joined together
and sunk deep within the muscular tissue, forms a
conspicuous contrast to the rudimentary frames of
other animals. The vertebrate skeleton consists
of a hollow axis, divided into segments and ex-
tending along the dorsal region of the body, from
the ventral side of which articulate, by means of
awkwardly-constructed girdles, an anterior and a
posterior pair of limbs. This dorsal axis ends in
front in a peculiar bulbous arrangement called the
head, which contains, among other valuables, the
brain and buccal cavern. The thoracic segments
of the backbone send off pairs of flat bones, which,
arching ventrally, form the chest for the protection
of the heart and other vitals. The limbs (except
in fishes) consist each of a single long bone,
succeeded by two long bones, followed by two
transverse rows of short, irregular wrist or ankle
bones, ending normally in five branching series of
bones called digits. This is essentially the skeleton
of all fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and
mammals. In short, it is the universal vertebrate
MAN A VERTEBRATE 9
type of frame. There are minor modifications to
suit the various kinds of environment, adaptations
to the necessities of aquatic, terrestrial, and aerial
locomotion and life, some parts being specialised,
others atrophied, and still others omitted, but
there is never anywhere, from iishes to philoso-
phers, any fundamental departure from the estab-
lished vertebrate type of skeleton.* The pectoral
fins of fishes correspond to the fore-limbs of frogs
and reptiles, the wings of birds, and the arms of
men. The pelvic fins of fishes are homologous
with the hind-limbs of frogs, reptiles, and quad-
rupeds, and the legs of birds, apes, and men.
The foot of the dog and crocodile, the hand of the
orang, and the flipper of the dolphin and seal, all
have the same general structure as the hand of
man ; and the wings of the bat and bird, the fore-
limbs of the lizard and elephant, and the comical
shovels of the mole and ornithorhynchus, notwith-
standing the great differences in their external
appearance and use, contain essentially the same
bones and the same arrangement of the bones as
do the arms of men and women. The human
body has two primary cavities in it. So have the
bodies of all vertebrates : a neural cavity con-
taining the brain and spinal cord, and a visceral
cavity containing the heart, liver, lungs, and
alimentary canal. Invertebrates have only one
* Snakes are limbless, and hind-limbs are lacking in
whales and other degenerates ; but rudimentary limbs are
found in the embryonic stages of these animals. Frogs, it
may be said also, have no ribs.
10 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
body cavity — the one corresponding to the visceral
cavity of vertebrates — and the main nerve trunk,
instead of extending along the back, as among
vertebrates, is in invertebrates located ventrally.
Vertebrates are the only animals on the earth that
have a highly developed circulatory system, a
system entirely shut off from the other systems,
and containing a heart, arteries, veins, and
capillaries. In all invertebrates the digestive and
circulatory systems remain to a greater or less
extent connected, the blood and food mingling
more or less in the general cavity of the body.
Worms and insects have pulsating tubes instead of
heart and arteries. Crustaceans have hearts with
one chamber, and mollusks have two or three cham-
bered hearts, but the blood, instead of returning
to the heart after its journey through the arteries,
passes into the body cavity. In man and other
vertebrates the circulating current is confined
strictly to the bloodvessels, no particle of it ever
escaping into the general body cavity. The heart
of vertebrates is distinguished from that of inver-
tebrates by being located ventrally. The heart of
invertebrates is in the back. The blood of verte-
brates differs from that of invertebrates in contain-
ing both red and white corpuscles. Invertebrates
have white corpuscles only. Worms have yellow,
red, or bright green blood. The blood of crusta-
ceans is bluish, that of mollusks is white, and that
of insects dusky or brown. The blood of all
vertebrates, excepting amphioxus, is red. All
backboned beings, whether they dwell in seas or
MAN A VERTEBRATE ii
cities, and whether they build nests or empires,
have two eyes, two ears, nose and mouth, all
located in the head, and always occupying the
same relative position to each other. Inverte-
brates may have their brains in their abdomen, as
do the mites ; hear with their legs or antennas, as
many insects do ; see with their tunics, like the
scallops ; and breathe with their skin, as do the
worms. The crayfish hears with its ' feelers,' the
cricket and katydid with their fore-legs, the grass-
hopper with its abdomen, the clam with its ' foot,'
and mysis and other low crustaceans have their
auditory organs on their tails.
Man is, then, like the fishes, frogs, reptiles, birds,
and quadrupeds, a vertebrate animal. Excepting
in his infancy, when he is a quadruped going on
all fours, he uses his posterior limbs only for
locomotion, and his anterior for prehension and
the like. His spinal axis is erect instead of hori-
zontal, and his tail is atrophied. But he possesses
all of the unmistakable qualities of the vertebrate
type of structure — a two-chambered body cavity, a
highly developed and dorsally located nerve trunk,
vertebrate vitals, a closed circulatory system, a
ventral heart, red blood, a head containing sense
organs and brain, and a well-ordered internal
skeleton, consisting of a vertebral column with
skull and ribs and two pairs of limbs, the limbs
consisting each of one long bone, two long bones,
two transverse rows of irregular bones, and five
branches at the end.
12 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
III. Man a Mammal.
Man is a mammal. He belongs to the most
brilliant and influential of the five classes of verte-
brates—the class to which belong so many of his
associates and victims, the class to which belong
the horse, the dog, the deer, the ox, the sheep, the
swine, the squirrel, the camel, the unattenuated
elephant, and the timid-hearted hare. To this
class belong also the lion, the tiger, the kangaroo,
the beaver, the bear, the bat, the monkey, the
mole, the wolf, the ornithorhynchus, and the
whale — in short, all animals that have hair. Fishes
and reptiles have scales ; birds have feathers ; all
mammals are covered to a greater or less extent
with hair. The aquatic habits of whales render
hair of no use to them. Hence, while the unborn
of these animals still cling to the structural tradi-
tions of their ancestors and are covered with hair,
the adults are almost hairless. The sartorial
habits of human beings and the selective influ-
ences of the sexes have had a similar effect on the
hairy covering of the human body. Hair exists
all over the human body surface, excepting on the
soles of the hands and feet, but in a greatly
dwarfed condition. It is only on the scalp and
on the faces of males, where it is scientifically
assisted for purposes of display, that it grows
luxuriantly. It is by no means certain that even
the hair on the masculine scalp will last forever.
For if the hermetical derby and other deadly
devices worn by men continue their devastations
MAN A MAMMAL 13
as they have in the past, we may expect to have,
in the course of generations, men with foreheads
reaching regularly to the occiput. Most animals
lay eggs. Man does not. Like the dog, the
horse, the squirrel, and the bat, man is viviparous,
the eggs hatching within the parental body.
Human young are born helpless, and are sus-
tained during the period of their infancy by the
secretions of the milk glands. So are all the sons
and daughters of mammals. Whether they come
into the world among the waters or among the
desert sands, in the hollow of a tree, in a hole in
the earth, or in a palace, the children of mammals
are frail and pitiful, and they survive to grow and
multiply only because they are the object of the
loving and incessant sacrifices of a mother.
Mammals are distinguished from all other
animals by the possession of two kinds of skin
glands — the sweat glands and the oil glands — and
by the development of certain of these glands in
the female into organs for the nourishing of the
young. Among reptiles and birds the lower jaw
is suspended from the skull by a bone called the
quadrate bone. Among men and other mammals
the lower jaw is joined directly to the skull, the
quadrate bone becoming, in the vicissitudes of
evolution, the hammer (malleus) of the mammalian
ear. Man has a four-chambered heart — two reser-
voirs which receive, and two pumps which propel,
the scarlet waters of the body. Fishes have two-
chambered hearts; frogs and most reptiles have
three-chambered hearts; all mammals and birds
14 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
have four-chambered hearts. The red corpuscles
in the blood of fishes, frogs, reptiles, and birds, are
discs, double-convex, nucleated, and in shape
oval or triangular. In man and in all other
mammals (except the archaic camel) the red
corpuscles are double-concave, non-nucleated, and
circular. Man has a diaphragm dividing the body
cavity into chest and abdomen, and a shining
white bridge of interlacing fibres, called corpus
callosum, uniting his cerebral hemispheres. And
man is a mammal because, like other mammals,
he has, in addition to the qualities already men-
tioned, these valuable and distinct characteristics.
IV. Man a Primate.
Man is a primate. There are four divisions in
the order of primates — lemurs, monkeys, apes,
and men. But the most interesting and important
of these, according to man, is man. Man is a
primate because, like other primates, he has arms
and hands instead of fore-legs. And these are
important characteristics. It was a splendid
moment when the tendencies of evolution,
pondering the possibilities of structural improve-
ment, decided to rear the vertebrate upon its
hind-limbs, and convert its anterior appendages
into instruments of manipulation. So long as
living creatures were able simply to move through
the airs and waters of the earth and over the
surface of the solids, they were powerless to
modify the universe about them very much. But
the moment beings were developed with parts of
MAN A PRIMATE 15
their bodies fitted to take hold of and move and
fashion and compel the universe around them,
that moment the life process was endowed with
the power of miracles. With the invention of
hands and arms commenced seriously that long
campaign against the tendencies of inanimate
nature which finds its most marvellous achieve-
ments in the sustained and triumphant operations
of human industry. None of the primates except-
ing man use their hind-limbs as a sole means of
changing their place in the universe, but in all of
them the fore-limbs are regularly used as organs
of manipulation. Man is a primate because his
fingers and toes, like those of other primates
(except the tiny marmosets of Brazil), end in
nails. Man has neither claws to burrow into the
earth, talons with which to hold and rend his
victims, nor hoofs to put thunder into his move-
ments. The human stomach, like that of all the
other primates, is a bagpipe. The stomach of the
carnivora is usually a simple sack, while rodents
have, as a rule, two stomachs, and ruminants
four. Man is a primate because his milk glands
are located on the breast and are two in number.
The mammary glands vary in number in the
different orders of mammals, from two in the
horse and whale to twenty-two in some insec-
tivora. Most ruminating animals have four, swine
ten, and carnivora generally six or eight. These
glands may be located in the region of the groin,
as in the horse and whale ; between the fore-
limbs, as in the elephant and bat ; or arranged in
i6 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
pairs extending from the fore to the hind limbs,
as in the carnivora and swine. In man and all
other primates (except lemurs) the mammary
glands are pectoral and two in number. All
primates, including man, have also a disc-shaped
placenta. The placenta is the organ of nutrition
in mammalian embryos. It is found in all young-
bearing animals above the marsupials, and con-
sists of a mass of glands between the embryo and
the parental body. In some animals it entirely
surrounds and encloses the embryo ; in others it
assumes the form of a girdle ; and in still others
it is bell-shaped. The primates are the only
animals in which this peculiar organ is in the
shape of a simple disc*
The nearest relatives by blood man has in this
world are the exceedingly man-like apes — the
tailless anthropoids — the gorillas and chimpanzees
of Africa, and the orangs and gibbons of southern
and insular Asia. The fact that man is an actual
relative and descendant of the ape is one of the
most disagreeable of the many distasteful truths
which the human mind in its evolution has come
upon. To a vanity puffed, as is that of human
beings, to the splitting, the consanguinity of gorilla
and gentleman seems horrible. Man prefers
to have arrived on the earth by way of a ladder
let down by his imagination from the celestial
concave. Within his own memory man has been
* The bat and a few other animals have a disc-like
placenta, but it develops into the disc shape by a different
route from what it does in the primates.
MAN A PRIMATE 17
guilty of many foolish and disgraceful things.
But this attempt by him to repudiate his ancestors
by surreptitiously fabricating for himself an origin
different from, and more glorious than, the rest is
one of the most absurd and scandalous in the
whole list. It is a shallow logic — the logic of
those who, without worth of their own, try to
shine with a false and stolen lustre. No more
masterly rebuke was ever administered to those in
the habit of sneering at the truth in this matter
than the caustic reply of Huxley to the taunt of
the fat-witted Bishop — that he would rather be
the descendant of a respectable ape than the
descendant of one who not only closed his eyes
to the facts around him, but used his official
position to persuade others to do likewise. Man's
reluctance to take his anatomical place beside his
simian kinspeople has been exceeded only by his
selfish and high-handed determination to exclude
all other terrestrial beings from his heaven.
Man is a talkative and religious ape. He is an
ape, but with a much greater amount of enterprise
and with a greater likelihood of being found in
every variety of climate. Like the anthropoid,
man has a bald face and an obsolete tail. But he
is distinguished from his arboreal relative by his
arrogant bearing, his skilled larynx, and especially
by the satisfaction he experiences in the con-
templation of the image which appears when he
looks in a mirror.
The man-like apes are from three to six feet tall,
and are all of them very strong, the gorilla, who
2
18 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
sometimes weighs over three hundred pounds,
being about the bravest and most formidable un-
armed animal on the planet. They are erect or
semi-erect, have loud voices, plantigrade feet, and
irritable dispositions— in all of these particulars
being strikingly like men. The gorilla, chim-
panzee, and gibbon are highlanders, preferring
the uplands and mountains. The orang is a low-
lander, living phlegmatically among the sylvan
swamps of Sumatra and Borneo. The gorilla
and chimpanzee are terrestrial, seldom going
among the trees except to get food or to sleep.
The orang and gibbon are arboreal, seldom
coming to the ground except to drink or bathe.
They all walk on their hind-limbs, generally in a
stooping posture, with their knuckles or fingers
touching the ground. But they sometimes walk
with their arms hanging down by their sides,
and sometimes with their hands clasped back of
their heads to give them balance. None of them
ever place their palms on the ground when they
walk — that is, none of them walk on four feet.
The anthropoid races, in the shape of their heads
and faces and in the general form and structure
of their bodies, and even in their habits of life,
resemble in a remarkable manner the lowest races
of human beings. This resemblance is recognised
by the negro races, who call the gorilla and chim-
panzee ' hairy men,' and believe them to be de-
scendants of outcast members of their own species.
There are differences in structure between man
and the apes, just as there are differences in
MAN A PRIMATE 19
structure between the Caucasian and the Caffre,
or even between individual Caucasians or individual
Caffres. There are differences in structure and
topography, often very noticeable differences, even
among members of the same family. But in all
of its essential characters, and extending often to
astonishing particulars, the structure of man is
identical with that of the anthropoid (i).*
In external appearances the man-like races differ
from men in having a luxuriant covering of natural
hair. But anthropoids differ very much among
themselves in this particular. The orang, usually
covered with long hair, is sometimes almost hair-
less. There are, too, races of human beings
whose bodies are covered with a considerable
growth of hair. The Todas (Australians) and
Ainus (aborigines of Japan) are noted for the
hairiness of their bodies, certain individuals among
them being covered with a real fur, especially on
the lower limbs (2).
Individuals also often appear in every race with
a remarkable development of the hair. Adrian
and his son Fedor, exhibited years ago over
Europe. as 'dog-men,' are examples. The father
was completely covered with a thick growth of fine
dirty-yellow hair two or three inches long. Long
tufts grew out of his nostrils and ears, giving him
a striking resemblance to a Skye terrier. Fedor,
and also his sister, were covered with hair like the
* Figures in parentheses ( ) at the close of borrowed ideas
refer to book numbers in the bibliography at the close of the
chapter.
2 — 2
20 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
father, but another son was like ordinary men.
The man-hke races have also longer arms in pro-
portion to the height of the body than man gene-
rally has. But this is also true of human infants
and negroes. The gibbon has relatively much
longer arms than the other anthropoids. It
differs from the chimpanzee in this respect more
than the chimpanzee differs from man. When
standing upright and reaching down with the
middle finger, the gibbon can touch its foot, while
the chimpanzee can reach only to the knee. Man
ordinarily reaches part way down the thigh, but
negroes have been known to have arms reaching
to the knee-pan (3).
The skeleton of the African races contains many
characters recognised by osteologists as ' pithe-
coid,' or ape-like. It is massive, the flat bones are
thick, and the pelvis narrow. In the manlike apes
the large toe is opposable to the other four, and
is used by them much as the thumb is used. But
this difference between the two races of beings is
just what might be expected from the differences
in their modes of life. Man has little need of this
opposability on account of his exclusively terrestrial
life, while to the ape it is indispensable on account
of his arboreal environment and life. ' But there
are,' says Haeckel, ' wild tribes of men who can
oppose the large toe to the other four just as if it
were a thumb, and even new-born infants of the
most highly-developed races of men can grasp as
easily with their hind-hands as with their fore-
hands. Chinese boatmen row with their feet,
MAN A PRIMATE 21
and Bengal workmen weave with them. The
negro, in whom the big toe is freely movable,
seizes hold of the branches of trees with it when
dimbing, just like the four-handed apes ' (4).
Many men have lost their arms by accident
and have learned to use their feet as hands with
wonderful skill. Not many years ago there died
in Europe an armless violinist who had during
his lifetime played to cultured audiences in most
of the capitals of the world. Some of the most
accomplished of penmen hold their pen between
their toes. The man-like apes live to about the
same age as man, and all of them, like man, have
beards. The anthropoid beard, too, like the
human, appears at the age of sexual maturity.
The human beard often differs in colour from the
hair of the scalp, and whenever it does it has
been observed to be invariably lighter — never
darker — than the hair on the scalp. This is true
among all races of men. The same rule and the
same uniformity exists among anthropoids. The
races of mankind are divided into two primary
groups depending upon the shape of the head and
the character of the hair : the short-headed races
(Brachycephali), such as the Malays, Mongols, and
Aryans, with round or oval faces, straight hair,
and vertical profiles ; and the long-headed races
(Dolichocephali), with woolly hair and progna-
thous faces, such as the Papuans and African
races. The skin of the short-headed races is
orange or white, while the skin and hair of the
long-headed races are glossy black.
22 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
It is, at least, interesting that the orang and
gibbon, who live in Asia and its islands, where
the brachycephalic races of men supposedly arose,
are themselves brachycephalic ; and that the
gorilla. and chimpanzee, who live in Africa, where
the dolichocephahc races chiefly live, are dolicho-
cephalic. The gorilla and chimpanzee also have,
like the men and women of Africa, black skin and
hair; while the hair of the orang is a reddish-
brown, and its skin sometimes yellowish-white.
The dentition of the anthropoids and men is in
all essentials identical. They all have two sets of
teeth : a set of milk-teeth, twenty in number, and
thirty-two permanent teeth, the permanents con-
sisting of two incisors, one canine, two premolars,
and three molars, in each half-jaw. Man has
ordinarily twelve pairs of ribs and thirty-two
vertebrae. So has the orang. The other anthro-
poids have thirteen pairs of ribs. But the number
of ribs in both human and anthropoid beings is
not uniform, man occasionally having thirteen
pairs, and the gorilla fourteen. Man has also the
same number of caudal vertebrae in his rudimentary
tail as the anthropoid has. The hands and feet
of anthropoids, bone for bone and muscle for
muscle, correspond with those of men, no greater
structural differences existing than among different
species of men. The human foot has three muscles
not found in the human hand — a short flexor
muscle, a short extensor muscle, and a long
muscle extending from the fibula to the foot.
All of these muscles are found in the anthropoid
MAN A PRIMATE 23
foot just as in the foot of man. There are also
the sanae differences between the arrangement of
the bones of the anthropoid wrist and ankle as
between the wrist and ankle bones of man. What-
ever set of anatomical particulars may be selected,
whether it be hands, arms, feet, muscles, skull,
viscera, ribs, or dentition, it is found that the
anthropoid races and men are in all essentials the
same. The differences are such as have arisen as
a result of different modes of life, and such as
exist between different tribes of either group of
animals.
' The structural differences which separate man
from the gorilla and chimpanzee,' says Huxley, in
summing up the conclusion of his brilliant inquiry
into ' Man's Place in Nature,' ' are not so great as
those which separate the gorilla from the lower
apes.'
' The body of man and that of the anthropoid
are not only peculiarly similar,' says Haeckel,
'but they are practically one and the same in
every important respect. The same two hundred
bones, in the same order and structure, make up
our inner skeleton ; the same three hundred
muscles effect our movements ; the same hair
clothes our skin ; the same four-chambered heart
is the central pulsometer in our circulation ; the
same thirty-two teeth are set in the same order in
our jaws ; the same salivary, hepatic, and gastric
glands compass our digestion ; the same repro-
ductive organs insure the maintenance of our
race ' (5).
24 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
' Not being able,' says Owen in his paper on
' The Characters of Mammalia,' ' to appreciate or
conceive of the distinction between the psychical
phenomena of a chimpanzee and of a Boschisman
or of an Aztec with arrested brain-growth, as
being of a nature so essential as to preclude a
comparison between them, or as being other than
a difference in degree, I cannot shut my eyes to
the significance of that all-pervading similitude of
structure — every tooth, every bone, strictly homo-
logous — which makes the determination of the
difference between Homo and Pithecus the anato-
mist's difficulty.'
' If before the appearance of man on the earth,'
says Ward in his ' Dynamic Sociology,' ' an
imaginary painter had visited it, and drawn a
portrait embodying the thorax of the gibbon, the
hands and feet of the gorilla, the form and skull
of the chimpanzee, the brain development of the
orang, and the countenance of Semnopithecus, giving
to the whole the average stature of all of these apes,
the result would have been a being not far removed
from our conception of the primitive man, and not
widely different from the actual condition of
certain low tribes of savages. The brain develop-
ment would perhaps be too low for the average
of any existing tribe, and would correspond better
with that of certain microcephalous idiots and
cretins, of which the human race furnishes many
examples.'
And it is not true, as is commonly supposed,
that, after all other resemblances between the
MAN A PRIMATE 25
human and anthropoid structures have been made
out, there still exists somewhere some undistin-
guishable difference in the organic structure of their
brains. All differences in structure from time to
time suspected or asserted to exist between the
brain of man and that of the man-like apes have
been one after another completely swept away.
And it is now known to all neurologists that the
human and anthropoid brains differ structurally in
no particulars whatever, both of them containing
the same lobes, the same ventricles and cornua,
and the same convolutional outline. Even the
posterior lobe, the posterior cornu, and the hippo-
campus minor, so long triumphantly asserted to
be characteristic features of the human brain, have
been pitilessly identified in all anthropoids by the
profound and terrible Huxley. There is not an
important fold or fissure in the brain of man that
is not found in the brain of the anthropoid. 'The
surface of the brain of a monkey,' says Huxley,
' exhibits a sort of skeleton map of man's, and in
the man-like apes the details become more and
more filled in, until it is only in minor characters
that the chimpanzee's or the orang's brain can be
structurally distinguished from man's ' (6) .
The great difference physically between man
and the anthropoids, aside from man's talented
larynx and erect posture, lies in man's abnormal
cranial capacity. The normal human cranium
never contains less than 55 cubic inches of space,
while the largest gorilla cranium contains only
34I cubic inches. This is a difference of zo^ cubic
26 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
inches. And 20J cubic inches of thinking matter
is an alarming amount to be lacking in a single
individual. But this cranial gap between gorilla
and man is deprived of some of its significance by
the fact that human crania sometimes measure
114 cubic inches, making a difference between the
smallest and largest human brains of 59 cubic
inches. The difference between the gorilla and
the savage -in cranial capacity is, therefore, only
about one-third as great as the cranial chasm between
the savage and the sage.
V. Recapitulation.
The anatomical gulf between men and apes does
not exist. There are, in fact, no gulfs anywhere,
only gradations. All chasms are completely
covered by unmistakable affinities, in spite of the
fact that the remains" of so many millions of
deceased races lie hidden beneath seas or ever-
lastingly locked in the limy bosoms of the conti-
nents. There are closer kinships and remoter
kinships, btit there are kinships everywhere. The
more intimate kinships are indicated by more
definite and detailed similarities, and the more
general relationships by more fundamental resem-
blances. All creatures are bound to all other
creatures by the ties of a varying but undeniable
consanguinity.
Man stands unquestionably in the primate order
of animals, because he has certain qualities of
structure which all primates have, and which all
other animals have not : hands and arms and
RECAPITULATION 27
nails, a bagpipe stomach, great subordination of
the cerebellum, a disc-like placenta, teeth dif-
ferentiated into incisors, canines, and molars, and
pectoral milk glands.
Man is more closely akin to the anthropoid apes
than to the other primates on account of his
immense brain, his ape-like face, his vertical spine,
and in being a true two-handed biped. The man-
like apes and men have the same number and
kinds of teeth, the same limb bones and muscles,
like ribs and vertebrae, an atrophied tail, the same
brain structure, and a suspicious similarity in looks
and disposition. Men and anthropoids live about
the same number of j-ears, both being toothless
and wrinkled in old age. The beard, too, in both
classes of animals appears at the same period of
life and obeys the same law of variation in colour.
Even the hairs on different parts of the bodies of
men and anthropoids, as on the arms, incline at a
like angle to the body surface. The hair on the
upper arm and that on the forearm, in both anthro-
poids and men, point in opposite directions —
toward the elbow. This peculiarity is found no-
where in the animal kingdom excepting in a few
American monkeys.
Man's mammalian affinities are shown in his
diaphragm, his hair, his four-chambered heart, his
corpus callosum, his non-nucleated blood-corpuscles,
and his awkward incubation.
The fishes, frogs, reptiles, birds, and non-human
mammals are human in having two body cavities,
segmented internal skeletons, two pairs of limbs,
28 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
skulls and spinal columns, red blood, brains, and
dorsal cords ; and in possessing two eyes, two ears,
nostrils, and mouth opening out of the head.
And finally all animals, including man, are
related to all other animal forms by the great
underlying facts of their origin, structure, com-
position, and destiny. All creatures, whether they
live in the sea, in the heavens, or in subterranean
glooms ; whether they swim, fly, crawl, or walk ;
whether their world is a planet or a water-drop ;
and whether they realise it or not, commence exist-
ence in the same way, are composed of the same
substances, are nourished by the same matters,
follow fundamentally the same occupations, all do
under the circumstances the best they can, and all
arrive ultimately at the same pitiful end.
VI. The Meaning of Homology.
The similarities and homologies of structure
existing between man and other animals, and be-
tween other animals and still others, are not acci-
dental and causeless. They are not resemblances
scattered arbitrarily among the multitudinous
forms of life by the capricious levities of chance.
That all animals commence existence as an egg
and are all made up of cells composed of the
same protoplasmic substance, and all inhale oxygen
and exhale carbon dioxide, and are all seeking
pleasure and seeking to avoid pain, are more than
ordinary facts. They are filled with inferences.
That vertebrate animals, differing in externals as
widely as herring and Englishmen, are all built
THE MEANING OF HOMOLOGY 29
according to the same fundamental plan, with
marrow-filled backbones and exactly two pairs of
limbs branching in the same way, is an astonishing
coincidence. That the wing of the bird, the fore-
leg of the dog, the flipper of the whale, and the
fore-limb of the toad and crocodile, have essentially
the same bones as the human arm has is a fact
which may be without significance to blind men,
but to no one else. The metamorphosis of the
firog from a fish, of the insect from a worm, and of
a poet from a senseless cell, are transformations
simply marvellous in meaning. And it is not
easy, since Darwin, to understand how such lessons
could remain long unintelligible, even to stones
and simpletons. Not many generations have
passed, however, since these revelations, now so
distinct and wonderful, fell on the listless minds
of men as ineffectually as the glories of the flower
fall on the sightless sockets of the blind.
It is hardly two generations since the highest
intelligences on the earth conceived that not
only the different varieties of men. — the black, the
white, and the orange — but all the orders and
genera of the animal world, and not only animals,
but plants, had all been somehow simultaneously
and arbitrarily brought into existence in some
indistinct antiquity, and that they had from the
beginning all existed with practically the same
features and in approximately the same conditions
as those with which and in which they are found
to-day. The universe was conceived to be a fixed
and stupid something, born as we see it, incapable
30 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
of growth, and indulging in nothing but repetitions.
There were no necessary coherencies and con-
sanguinities, no cosmical tendencies operating
eternally and universally. All was whimsical and
arbitrary. It was not known that anything had
grown or evolved. All things were believed to
have been given beginning and assigned to their
respective places in the universe by a potential and
all-clever creator. The serpent was limbless
because it had officiously allowed Eve to include
in her dietary that which had been expressly for-
bidden. The quadruped walked with its face
towards the earth as a structural reminder of its
subjection to the biped, who was supposed to be
especially skilled in keeping his eyes rolled heaven-
ward. The iiowers flung out their colours, not
for the benefit of the bugs and bees, and the stars
paraded, not because they were moved to do so by
their own eternal urgings, but because man had
eyes capable of being affected by them. Man was
an erect and featherless vertebrate because his
hypothetical maker was erect and featherless. (I
wonder whether, if a clam should conceive a
creator, it would have the magnanimity to make
him an insect or a vertebrate, or anything other
than a great big clam.)
VII. The Earth an Evolution.
The world now knows— at least, the scientific
part of it knows— that these things are not true,
that they are but the solemn fancies of honest but
simple-minded ancients who did the best they
THE EARTH AN EVOLUTION 31
could in that twilight age to explain to their
inquiring instincts the wilderness of phenomena
in which they found themselves. The universe is
a process. It is not petrified, but flowing. It is
going somewhere. Everything is changing and
evolving, and will always continue to do so. The
forms of life, of continents and oceans, and of
streams and systems, which we perceive as we
open our senses upon the world to-day, are not
the forms that have always existed, and they are
not the forms of the eternal future. There was a
time, away in the inconceivable, when there was
no life upon the earth, no solids, and no seas.
The world was an incandescent lump, lifeless and
alone, in the cold solitudes of the spaces. There
was a time — there miist have been a time — when
life appeared for the first time upon the earth,
simple cellules without bones or blood, and without
a suspicion of their immense and quarrelsome
posterity. There was a time when North America
was an island, and the Alleghany Mountains were
the only mountains of the continent. The time
was — in the coal-forming age — when the Missis-
sippi Valley, from the Colorado Islands to the Alle-
ghanies, was a vast marsh or sea, choked with
forests of equisetum and fern, and swarming with
gigantic reptiles now extinct. There was a time
when palms grew in Dakota, and magnolias waved
in the semi-tropical climate of Greenland and
Spitzbergen. There was a time when there were
no Rocky Mountains in existence, no Andes, no
Alps, no Pyrenees, and no Himalayas. And that
32 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
time, compared with the vast stretches of geo-
logical duration, was not so very long ago, for
these mountains are all young mountains. The
time was when Jurassic saurians — those repulsive
ruffians of that rude old time — represented the
highest intelligence and civilisation of the known
universe. There were no men and women in the
world, not even savages, when our ape-like fore-
fathers wandered and wondered through the awe-
some silences of primeval wilds ; there were no
railroads, steamboats, telegraphs, telephones, type-
writers, harvesters, electric lights, nor sewing
machines ; no billionaires nor bicycles, no social-
ists nor steam-heat, no ' watered stock ' nor
'government by injunction,' no women's clubs,
captains of industry, labour unions, nor 'yellow
perils ' — there was none of these things on the
earth a hundred years ago. All things have
evolved to be what they are — the continents,
oceans, and atmospheres, and the plants and
populations that live in and upon them.
There will come a time, too, looking forward
into the future, when what we see now will be
seen no more. As we go backward into the past,
the earth in all of its aspects rapidly changes ;
the continents dwindle, the mountains melt, and
existing races and species disappear one after
another. The farther we penetrate into the past,
the stranger and the more different from the
present does everything become, until finally we
come to a world of molten rocks and vapourised
seas without a creeping thing upon it. As it has
THE EARTH AN EVOLUTION 33
been in the past so will it be in time to come.
The present is not everlasting. The minds that
perceive upon this planet a thousand centuries in
the future will perceive a very different world from
that which the minds of this day perceive —
different arts, animals, events, ideals, geographies,
sciences, and civilisations. The earth seems fixed
and changeless because we are so fleeting. We
see it but a moment, and are gone. The tossing
forest in the wrath of the storm is motionless
when looked at by a ilash of lightning. The same
tendencies that have worked past changes are at
work to-day as tirelessly as in the past. By
invisible chisels the mountains are being sculp-
tured, ocean floors are lifting, and continents are
sinking into the seas. Species, systems, and
civilisations are changing, some crumbling and
passing away, others rising out of the ruins of the
departed. Mighty astronomical tendencies are
secretly but relentlessly at work, and immense
vicissitudes are in store for this clod of our
nativity. The earth is doomed to be frozen to
death. In a few million years, according to
astronomers, the sun will have shrunken to a
fraction of his present size, and will have become
correspondingly reduced in heat-giving powers.
It is estimated that in twelve or fifteen million
years the sun, upon whose mighty dispensations
all life and activity on the earth are absolutely
dependent, will become so enfeebled that no form
of life on the earth will be possible. The partially-
cooled earth itself is giving up its internal warmth,
3
34 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
and will continue to give it up until it is the same
temperature as the surrounding abysms, which is
the frightful negative of something like 270 centi-
grade degrees. These are not very cheerful facts
for those who inhabit the earth to contemplate.
But they that seek the things that cheer must
seek another sphere. No power can stay the
emaciation of suns or the thievery of enveloping
immensities. Old age is inevitable. It is far off,
but it is as certain as human decay, and as
mournful. In that dreadful but inevitable time
no living being will be left in this world ; there
will be no cities nor states nor vanities nor creep-
ing things, no flowers, no twilights, no love, only
a frozen sphere. The oceans that now rave
against the rocky flanks of the continents will be
locked in eternal immobility; the atmospheres,
which to-day drive their fleecy flocks over the
azure meads of heaven and float sweet sounds and
feathered forms, will be, in that terrible time,
turned to stone ; the radiant woods and fields,
the home of the myriads and the green play-places
of the shadows, will, like all that live, move, and
breathe, have rotted into the everlasting lumber
of the elements. There will be no Europe then,
no pompous philosophies, no hellish rich, and no
gods. All will have suffered indescribable refrigera-
tion. The earth will be a fluidless, lifeless, sunless
cinder, unimaginably dead and desolate, a decrepit
and pitiful old ruin falling endlessly among heart-
less immensities, the universal tomb of the
activities.
FACTORS OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION 35
The universe is an evolution. Change is as
extensive as time and space. The present has
come out of that which has been, and will enter
into and determine that which is to be. Every-
thing has a biography. Everything has evolved —
everything — from the murmur on the lips of the
speechless babe to the soul of the poet, and from
the molecule to Jehovah.
VIII. The Factors of Organic Evolution.
The animal kingdom represents one of the two
grand branches of the organic universe. It has
been evolved — evolved in a manner as simple and
straightforward as it is revolting. It has all been
brought about by partiality or selection. Genera-
tions of beings have come into existence. The
individual members of each generation have
differed from each other — differed in size, strength,
speed, colour, shape, sagacity, luck, and likelihood
of life. No two beings, not even those born from
the same womb, are in all respects identical.
Hardships have come. They have come from
the inanimate universe in the form of floods, fires,
frosts, accidents, diseases, droughts, storms, and
the like; from other species, who were competitors
or enemies ; and from unbrotherly members of
the same species. Some have survived, but the
great majority have perished. Only a fraction,
and generally an appallingly small fraction, of
each generation of a species have lived to maturity.
The lobster lays 10,000 eggs in a season, yet the
mortality is such that the number of lobsters do
3—2
36 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
not increase from one year to another. The
elephant is the slowest breeder of all animals, yet,
if they should all live, the offspring of a single
pair in 750 years would, according to Darwin,
number nearly 19,000,000. It has been shown
that at the normal rate of increase of English
sparrows, if none were to die save of old age, it
would take but twenty years for a single pair to
give one sparrow to every square inch in the State
of Indiana (7). A single cyclops (one of the
humbler crustaceans) may have 5,000,000 descen-
dants in a season. One aphis will produce 100
young, and these young will reproduce in like
manner for ten generations in a season, when, if
they should all live, there would be a quintillion
of young. A female white ant, when adult, does
nothing but lie in a cell and lay eggs. She lays
80,000 eggs a day regularly for several months.
An oyster lays 2,000,000 eggs in a season, and if
all these eggs came to maturity a few dozen
oysters might supply the markets of the world.
The tapeworm is said to produce the incredible
number of 1,000,000,000 ova, and some of the
humbler plants three times this number of spores.
If each egg of the codfish should produce an adult,
a single pair in twenty-five years would produce a
mass of fish larger than the earth. Lower forms
of life are even more prolific than the higher.
Maupas said that certain microscopic infusorians
which he studied multiplied so rapidly that, if
they should continue to multiply for thirty-eight
days, and all of them should live, any one of them
FACTORS OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION 37
would produce a mass of protoplasm as big as
the sun.
Those of each generation that have died have
been inferior, or unfitted to the environment
in which they found themselves. Those that
have survived have been superior, superior in
something — bigness, cunning, courage, virtue,
vitality, strength, speed, littleness, or ferocity —
something that has related them advantageously
to surrounding conditions. The surviving remnant
of each generation have become the progenitors
of the next generation, and have transmitted, or
tended to transmit, to their offspring the quahties
of their superiority. This winnowing has gone on
in each generation of living beings during many
millions of years — almost ever since life com-
menced to be on the earth. Some have continued
themselves, and others have died childless. The
environment of each species has been an immense
sieve, and only the superior have gone through it.
Different environments have emphasised different
qualities of structure and disposition, and have
thus given rise to permanent varieties in survival.
These varieties, through the accumulated effects
of many generations of selection, have diverged
into species ; species, after a still longer series of
selections, have evolved into genera ; genera have
evolved into families ; families into orders ; and so
on. In this simple, terrible manner have all the
branches of organic beings (thanks to the horrors
of a million ages) been brought into existence.
Variation, therefore, which furnishes variety in
38 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
offspring; Heredity, which tends to perpetuat
peculiarities by causing offspring to resembl
more or less the characters of their parents ; an(
Environment, which determines the character c
"^ the selections, are the three factors, and the onl;
three factors, in organic evolution.
IX. The Evidences of Organic Evolution.
That the forms of life to-day found on the eartl
have come into existence by the evolution of thi
more complex forms from the simpler, and of thesi
simpler forms from still simpler, through the ever
operating law of Selection, is a necessary conclusioi
from the following facts :
I. The existence in the animal world of al
grades of structures, from the humblest possibli
protozoan, whose body consists of a single simpL
speck, to the most powerful and complex o
mammals. There are estimated to be something
like a million species of animals living on thi
earth to-day. There may be several times thi
number. These species are linked together b;
millions of varieties, and are so related to eacl
other that they may be all gathered together intc
various genera ; these genera may be grouped int<
families, the families into orders, and the order
into seven or eight great primary phyla. B;
taking existing species and adding to them thi
extinct species of the rocks, and placing them a]
according to their structural affinities, it is pos
sible to arrange them in the form of a tree wit!
the various phyla, orders, families, genera, an(
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 39
species, branching and rebranching from the main
trunk. The existence of structures, so graduated
as to render such an arrangement possible, is in
itself suggestive of a common relationship and
origin.
2. Evolution is suggested by the similarities
and homologies of structure found throughout the
animal kingdom. Some of these similarities and
homologies have already been mentioned. They
are everywhere — remoter and more fundamental,
some of them, others closer and more detailed.
To the untrained mind, which sees surfaces only,
and not even surfaces well, the animal world is an
interminable miscellany of forms. But to the
biologist, who looks deeper and with immense
acumen over the whole field of animal life, there
are only seven or eight different types of structure
in the entire animal world. These seven or eight
types correspond with the primary classes, or
phyla, into which animals are divided, viz., pro-
tozoa, sponges, celenterates, echinoderms, worms,
mollusks, arthropods, and vertebrates. However
widely the members of each of these great groups
may differ among themselves in colour, size,
habits of life, and the like, the members of each
group all resemble each other fundamentally.
Moles differ from monkeys, bats from men, and
birds from crocodiles and toads. They differ
enormously. But they are all vertebrates with
red blood, double body cavities, backbones, two
pairs of limbs, and five fingers on each Hmb.
When they are looked at superficially, there is
40 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
not much similarity between a water-strider and
a butterfly or between a stag-beetle and a gnat.
But they are all, in reality, built according to the
same plan. Like all other insects, they have six
legs, a sheath-like skeleton, and bodies character-
istically divided into head, thorax, and abdomen.
It is the same with all other great classes of beings.
All worms resemble each other; and so do all
mollusks, although they may differ in particulars
as widely as nautiluses and clams, Echinoderms
have a radiate structure, celenterates and sponges
are vase-like in shape, and protozoa are one-celled.
The differences in structure among the members
of a group consist in different modifications of a
fundamental type. Among the vertebrates the
fore-limb may be an arm, a leg, a wing, a shovel, a
flipper, or a fin. But in all cases it is the same
organ — that is, the same implement modified to
serve different ends. Take the mouth-parts of
insects. In the grasshopper and cricket these
parts are fitted for grinding; in the moths and
butterflies they are fashioned into long tubes for
sucking the sweets of flowers; in the mosquito they
form an elaborate apparatus for drilling and drink-
ing; and in the mayfly the mouth-parts, though
present, are not used at all. In all of these animals
these parts are essentially the same, although differ-
ing so much in their forms and purposes that the
unscientific can scarcely be made to believe they
are fundamentally alike. There is no fact more
familiar to the biologist or more frequently met
with in the fields of animal morphology than the
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 41
fact that the same general type may be hammered
into dozens, or hundreds, or even thousands, of
different patterns by the incessant industry of its
surroundings, and that the same organic part may
be moulded into various implements serving totally
different ends by the environmental vicissitudes
of time and space. On the hypothesis that the
members of each group of animals possessing
common characteristics, whether the group be
large or small, have sprung from a common
ancestry, and that the differences in structure
have arisen as a result of differences in environ-
ment, the similarities and homologies of structure
existing among animals are perfectly intelligible.
But on any other supposition they are in-
explicable.
3. Evolution is suggested by the remarkable
series of phenomena presented by embryology.
There are at least four facts in the developmental
history of every creature vi^hich can hardly be
accounted for on any other supposition than that
of organic evolution.
First, the fact that every animal, above the
lowest, individually passes through an evolution
between the beginning of its existence and its
maturity. Terrestrial beings are not born, like
Minerva, full-grown. They grow. They evolve.
They commence close down to the very atoms.
And from this lowly genesis they rise, through
a series of marvellous changes, to that high state
of perfection and greatness from which they
descend to dissolution.
42 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
If we knew by actual observation as little con
cerning the evolution of individuals as we do c
the evolution of species — if we had always beei
used to seeing animals, including ourselves, in ful
bloom — had never watched the tadpole, the pupa
and the babe pass through their wonderful meta
morphoses on their way to maturity, it woul<
probably be just as hard for many minds t(
believe that animals evolve individually to h
what they are as it is for them to believe tha
species have grown to be what they are. In thi
case of individuals, however, the evolution take
place right before our eyes largely, while thi
evolution of species goes on so slowly and stretche
back so far into the past that it can only h
inferred.
Second, the fact that animals, no matter hov
much they may differ from each other at maturity
all begin existence at the same place. Ever
animal commences its organic existence as an egj
— as a one-celled animal — as an organism identica
in structure with the simplest protozoan. Thi
ova of whales ' are no larger than fern seeds.
The eggs of the coral, the crab, the ape, and thi
man are so precisely alike that the highest power
of the microscope cannot distinguish betweei
them.
Third, the fact that the members of the sami
great group of animals in their individual develop
ment pass through similar stages of evolution. Thi
' worm ' stage in the development of most insect
and the ' fish ' stage of frogs are well known
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 43
There are no more remarkable instances of in-
dividual evolution in the whole range of animal
life. The fish, the reptile, the bird, the dog, and
the human being — all vertebrates, in short —
cannot for some time after their embryonic com-
mencement be distinguished from each other.
' The feet of lizards and mammals, the wings and
feet of birds, and the hands and feet of men,' says
the illustrious Von Baer, as quoted by Darwin,
' all arise from the same fundamental form ' (8).
' It is quite in the later stages of development,'
saj-s Huxley, ' that the human being presents
marked differences from the ape, while the latter
departs as much from the dog in its development
as the man does ' (6).
Not only frogs, but reptiles, birds, and mammals,
including man, all have gills at a certain stage
in their embryonic development. Nearly all the
lower invertebrate animals are hermaphroditic —
that is, in the body of each animal is found the
two kinds of sex organs which in the higher
animals exist in distinct animals. And frogs,
birds, and other higher animals, which as adults
are unisexual, have, as an inheritance from these
primitive forms, hermaphroditic embryos (10).
Fourth, the fact that the structural stages through
which animals in embryo pass correspond in a
wonderful manner with the permanent structures
of those lower forms which extend serially back to
the beginnings of life. It is the proudest boast of
the embryologist that he is able to know the route
through which any species has come to be what it
44 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
is by a simple study of the individual evolution of
its members. Each animal repeats in its individual
evolution the evolution of its species. This re-
capitulation is not always complete — is, in fact,
frequently vague, sometimes circuitous, and often
broken or abbreviated. Processes requiring origin-
ally centuries or thousands of years to accomplish
are here telescoped into a iew months, or even
days. It is not strange that the process is im-
perfect. But so firmly is the belief in the cor-
respondence of ontogeny and phylogeny fixed in
the minds of modern biologists that, in determining
the classification and affinities of any particular
animal, more reliance is placed on the facts of
embryology than on those of adult structure.
The first thing that an animal becomes after it
is an egg — unless it is a one-celled animal, in
which case it remains always an egg — is two cells ;
these two cells become four ; these four become
eight ; and so on, until the embryo becomes a
many-celled ball, consisting of a single layer of
cells surrounding a fluid interior. A dimple forms
in the cell layer on one side of this ball, and, by
deepening to a hollow, changes the ball into a
double-walled sac. This is the gastnda— the per-
manent structure of the sponges and celenterates,
and an (almost) invariable stage in the larval deve-
lopment of all animals above the sponges and
celenterates. The gastrula becomes a worm (or
an insect or a fish through the worm) by elongation
and enlargement, and by the development of the
endoderm, which is the inner layer of the cell wall,
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 45
into organs of nutrition and reproduction, and by
the development of the ectoderm, which is the outer
cell layer, into organs of motion and sensation.
The embryonic development of a human being
is not different in kind from the embryonic de-
velopment of any other animal. Every human
being at the beginning of his organic existence
is a protozoan, about -j-w-g inch in diameter ; at
another stage of development he is a tiny sac-
shaped mass of cells without blood or nerves, the
gastrula ; at another stage he is a worm, with a
pulsating tube instead of a heart, and without
head, neck, spinal column, or limbs ; at another
stage he has, as a backbone, a rod of cartilage
extending along the back, and a faint nerve cord,
as in amphioxus, the lowest of the vertebrates ; at
another stage he is a fish with a two-chambered
heart, mesonephric kidneys, and gill-slits with gill
arteries leading to them, just as in fishes ; at
another stage he is a reptile with a three-chambered
heart, and voiding his excreta through a cloaca like
other reptiles ; and finally, when he enters upon
post-natal sins and actualities, he is a sprawling,
squalling, unreasoning quadruped. The human
larva from the fifth to the seventh month of
development is covered with a thick growth of hair
and has a true caudal appendage, like the monkey.
At this stage the embryo has in all thirty-eight
vertebrae, nine of which are caudal, and the great
toe extends at right angles to the other toes, and is
not longer than the other toes, but shorter, as in
the ape.
46 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
These facts are unmistakable. There is a reason
for everything, and there is a reason for these trans-
formations through which each generation of living
beings journeys. The individual passes through
them because the species to which he belongs has
passed through them. They represent ancestral
wanderings. As if to emphasise the kinship of all
of life's forms and to render incontrovertible the
fact of universal evolution, Nature compels every
individual to commence existence at the same
place, and to recapitulate in his individual evolu-
tion the phylogenetic journeyings of his species.
4. That existing forms of life have been evolved
from other forms, and that these ancestral forms
have been diiferent from those derived from them,
is shown by the occasional appearance of ante-
cedent and abandoned types of structure among
the offspring of existing species. Occasionally a
human child is born strangely unlike its parents,
but bearing an unmistakable resemblance in looks
and disposition to his great-grandfather or some
other remote ancestor. This is atavism, that
tendency to revert to ancestral types which is pre-
valent among all animals. We may think of it
figuratively as a flash of indecision when Nature
hesitates for a moment whether to adopt a new
form of structure or cling to the old and tried.
Horses and mules are sometimes born with three
toes on each foot, and zebra-like stripes on their
legs and shoulders ; and domestic pigeons, such as
are naturally black, red, or mottled, occasionally
produce offspring with blue plumage and two black
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 47
wing-bars, like the wild rock-dove, from which all
domestic breeds have sprung. In man the cheek-
bone and the frontal bone of the forehead consist
normally each of a single bone. But in children
and human embryos these bones are always double,
as is normally the case in adults among some of
the anthropoids and other mammals. Gills appear
regularly in the embryos of reptiles, birds, and
mammals, and human young are sometimes b'orn
with gill-slits on the neck. There are times when,
owing to inaccurate or incomplete embryological
development, these fish-like characteristics are so
perfect at birth as to allow liquids, on being
swallowed, to pass out through them and trickle
down on the outside of the neck. Many muscles
are occasionally developed in man which are
normal in the apes and other mammals. As
many as seven different muscular variations have
been found in a single human being, every one of
which were muscles found normally in the struc-
ture of the apes (8).
5. Closely akin to atavism, which is the occa-
sional persistence of ancestral types of character,
is the regular occurrence of vestigial organs or
structures, organs which in ancestral forms have
definite functions, but which in existing species,
owing to changed conditions, are rudimentary and
useless. On the back of each ankle of the horse
are two splints, the atrophied remains of the second
and fourth toes. Similar vestiges of two obsolete
toes are also found just back of the wrists and
ankles on all the two-toed ungulates, such as the
48 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
cow and sheep. In the body of the whale where
hind-limbs would naturally be, there are found the
anatomical ruins of these organs in the form of a
few diminutive bones. The same thing is true in
the sirenians. In the Greenland whale there are
remnants of both femur and tibia in the region of
the atrophied hind-limbs. The snakes are limb-
less, but the pythons and boas have internal
remnants of hind-limbs, and sometimes even clawed
structures representing toes. The so-called 'glass-
snake ' or 'joint-snake ' (which is really a limbless
lizard) has four 'complete internal limbs. Young
turtles, parrots, and whalebone whales have teeth,
but the adults of these animals are toothless.
Cows, sheep, deer, and other ruminants, never have
as adults any upper incisors, but these teeth are
found in the foetal stages of these animals just
under the gums. The female frog has rudimentary
male reproductive organs, and the male has cor-
responding vestiges of female organs. Similar
remnants of the reproductive structures exist in '
many other animals. They represent stages in
the transition from the hermaphroditism of primi-
tive animals to the unisexuality of the higher
forms, the separation of the sex organs into those
of male and female having come about through the
decay of one set of structures in each individual.
For reasons which it is not necessary to mention
here, biologists believe that insects all originated
from a common parental form, with two pairs of
wings and six legs. Insects all retain their original
allowance of legs, but in many species one or the
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 49
other pair of wings has become more or less
degenerated. In the whole order of flies the back
pair of wings is represented by a couple of insig-
nificant knobs. In the Strepsiptera, a sub-order of
beetles, the front-wings are similarly reduced,
being mere twisted filaments. Many parasites,
such as fleas and ticks, whose mode of life renders
organs of aerial locomotion unnecessary, are en-
tirely wingless. The insects of small isolated
islands are also largely without wings, the propor-
tion of wingless species being much larger than
among insects inhabiting continents. This is due
to their greater liability on small land masses of
being carried out to sea and drowned, owing to
the feebleness and uncertainty of insect flight.
On the island of Madeira, out of the 550 species
found there, 220 species no longer have the power
of flight.
Air-breathing animals — amphibians, reptiles,
birds, and mammals — have normally a pair of
lungs — a right one and a left one. But in
snakes and snake-like lizards, where the body is
very slender and elongated, only one lung, some-
times the right one, and sometimes the left, is fully
developed. The right ovary is likewise aborted in
all birds, the left one yielding all the eggs. The
swifts and frigate birds live almost their whole
lives long on the wing, and the legs of these birds
have grown so short and weak and rudimentary, as
a result of their constant life in the air, that they
can scarcely walk. The chimney swift is said
never to alight anywhere except on the sooty inner
4
50 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
walls of the chimney where its nest is. Its foo
consists of insects which it gathers in the air, an
the few dead twigs used in making its nest ar
nipped from the tree while the bird continues it
flight. The ostriches, cassowaries, and many othe
birds, have, on the other hand, developed their leg
at the expense of their wings. The ostrich is sail
to be able to outrun the horse, but it has no powe
of flight, although it has wings and wing muscles
and even the skin-folds covering the wings corre
sponding to those of birds that fly. But its whol
flying apparatus is in ruins. The rudimentar
hind-toe of birds is a vestigial organ, and so ar^
the claws which appear on the thumb and firs
finger of all young birds. So also are the rudi
ments of eyes in cave crickets, fishes, and othe
inhabitants of total darkness. The flounder an(
other so-called flat fishes swim straight up, a:
ordinary fishes do, when young. But as they grov
they incline more and more to one side, and finalh
swim entirely on their side, the eye on the lowe
side migrating around, and joining the other oi
the upper side of the head.
About the first thing a human infant does oi
coming into the world is to prove its arborea
origin by grasping and spitefully clinging to every
thing that stimulates its palms. A little peeper
less babe an hour old can perform feats of strengtl
with its hands and arms that many men anc
women cannot equal. It can support the entin
weight of its body for several seconds hanging b^
its hands. Dr. Robinson, an English physician
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 51
found as a result of sixty experiments on as many
infants, more than half of whom were less than an
hour old, that with two exceptions every babe was
able to hang to the finger or to a small stick, and
sustain the whole weight of the body for at least
ten seconds. Twelve of those just born held on
for nearly a minute. At the age of two or three
weeks, when this power is greatest, several suc-
ceeded in sustaining themselves for over a minute
and a half, two for over two minutes, and one for
two minutes and thirty-five seconds. The young
ape for some weeks after birth clings tenaciously
to its mother's neck and hair, and the instinct of
the child to cling to objects is probably a survival
of the instinct of the young ape. I believe it
is Wallace who relates somewhere an incident
which illustrates the instinct of the young simian
to cling to something. Wallace had captured
a young ape, and was carrying it to camp, when
the little fellow happened to get its hands on
the naturalist's whiskers, which it mistook, evi-
dently, for the hirsute property of its mother,
and, driven by the powerful instinct of self-pre-
servation, it hung on to them so desperately it
could scarcely be pulled loose. Many mammals
are provided with a well-developed muscular
apparatus for the manipulation of their ears. But
in man there does not exist the same necessity for
auricular detection of enemies, and while these
muscles still exist, and are capable of being used
to a slight extent by occasional individuals, they
are generally so emaciated as to be useless.
4—2
52 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
Another vestigial organ in the body of man, an(
one of significance from the standpoint of mor
phology, is the tail. The tail is an exceedingi;
unpopular part of the human anatomy, most mei
and women being unwilling to admit that the]
have such an appendage. But many a persoi
who has hitherto dozed in ignorance on this matte:
has learned with considerable dismay, when h(
has for the first time looked upon the undrapec
lineaments of the human skeleton, that mar
actually has a tail. It consists of three or foui
(sometimes five) small vertebras, more or les;
fused, at the posterior end of the spinal column
That this is really a rudimentary tail is provec
beyond a doubt by the fact that in the embryo ii
is highly developed, being longer than the limbs
and is provided with a regular muscular apparatus
for wagging it. These caudal muscles are gener-
ally represented in grown-up people by bands o;
fibrous tissue, but cases are known where the actual
muscles have persisted through life (g) .
The nictitating membrane, which in birds and
many reptiles consists of a half-transparent curtair
acting as a lid to sweep the eye, is in the human eye
dwindled to a small membranous remnant, draped
at the inner corner. The growth of hair over the
human body surface may be regarded, in view o:
the sartorial habits of man, as a vestigial inherit-
ance from hairy ancestors. One of the mos1
notorious of the vestigial organs of man is the
vermiform appendix, a small slender sac opening
from the large intestine near where the large
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 53
intestine is joined by the small intestine. In some
animals this organ is large and performs an
important part in the process of digestion. But
in man it is a mere rudiment, not only of no
possible aid in digestion, but the source of frequent
disease, and even of death.
There are in all, according to Darwin, about
eighty vestigial organs in the human body. But
these organs occur everywhere throughout the
animal kingdom. There is not an order of animals,
nor of plants either, without them. They are neces-
sary facts grovnng out of evolution. Organic struc-
tures are the result of adjustment to surrounding
conditions. The continual changes in environment
to which all organisms are exposed necessitate
corresponding changes in structure. And the
vestiges found in the bodies of all animals repre-
sent parts which in the previous existence were
useful and necessary to a complete adjustment of
the organism, but which, owing to a change of
emphasis in surroundings, have become useless,
and consequently shrunken. They are the
obsolete or obsolescent parts of animal structure
— parts which have been outgrown and super-
seded—the ' silent letters ' of morphology. They
sustain the same relation to the individual
organism as dead or dwindling species sustain to
a fauna. They furnish indisputable proof of the
kinship and unity of the animal world.
6. It is only on the supposition that the life of
the earth has evolved step by step with the evolu-
tion of the land masses, and that the forms of life
54 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
from which existing forms were evolved were
dispersed over the earth at a time when physio-
graphic conditions were very different from what
they are now, that it is possible to account for the
peculiar manner in which animals are distributed
over the earth. The cassowary is a flightless bird
of the ostrich order inhabiting Australia and the
islands to the north of it. This bird is found no-
where else in the world, and each area has its own
particular species. The same things are also true
of the kangaroo. It is found over a similar region,
with a different species occupying each land mass.
Now, on the hypothesis of special creation there
is no thinkable reason why these animals should
be divided, as they are, into distinct species, and
restricted to this particular region. But on the
hypothesis of evolution it is perfectly plain. All
of these regions at one time were united with one
another, and were subsequently submerged in part,
forming islands. Each group of animals, being
isolated from every other group and subjected to
somewhat different conditions, developed a style
of departure from the original type of structure
different from that of every other group in response
to the peculiar conditions operating upon it. This
has led, in the course of centuries of selection, to
the formation of distinct species such as exist
to-day.
Lombock Strait, a narrow neck of water between
Bali and Lombock Island, and Macassar Strait,
separating Celebes from Borneo, are parts of a
continuous passage of water which in remote times
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 55
separated two continents — an Indo-Malayan con-
tinent to which belonged Borneo, Sumatra, Java,
and the Malay Peninsula; and an Austro-Malayan
continent, now represented by Australia, Celebes,
the Moluccas, New Guinea, Solomon's Islands, etc.
Wallace first announced this ancient boundary,
and it has been called ' Wallace's line.' He was
led to infer its existence by the fact which he
observed as he travelled about from island to
island, that, while the faunas of these two regions
are as wholes very different from each other, the
faunas of the various land patches in each area
have a wonderful similarity. Australia is a verit-
able museum of old and obsolete forms of both
plants and animals. Its fauna and flora are made
up prevailingly of forms such as have on the other
continents long been superseded by more special-
ised species. No true mammals, excepting men
and a few rats, lived in Australia when English-
men first went there. The most powerful animals
were the comparatively helpless marsupials. The
explanation of these remarkable facts is probably
this : The Australian continent, which formerly
included New Guinea and other islands to the
north, has not been connected with the other land
masses for a very long period of time. The develop-
ment upon the other continents of the more
powerful mammals, especially of the ungulates
and the carnivora, resulted in the extermination
of the more helpless forms from most of the
earth's surface. But Australia, protected by its
isolation, has retained to this day its old-fashioned
56 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
forms of life, neither land animals nor plants
having been able to navigate the intervening
straits. This supposition is strengthened by the
fact that fossil remains of marsupials are to-day
found scattered all over the world, w^hile, with
the exception of the American opossums, living
marsupials are found only in Australia and its
islands. There is to-day not a single survivor of
these once-numerous races in either Europe, Asia,
or Africa. Similar facts of distribution are furnished
by the lemurs — those small, monkey-like animals
with fox faces, which are sometimes called ' half-
apes,' since they are supposed to be the link con-
necting the true apes with lower forms. Fossil
lemurs are found in both America and Europe,
but lemurs are now extinct in both continents.
Those of America were probably exterminated by
the carnivora, who are known to be very fond of
monkey meat of all kinds. The European lemurs
seem to have migrated southward into eastern
Africa at a time when Madagascar formed a part of
the mainland. ' There they have been isolated,
and have developed in a fashion comparable to
that which has occurred in the case of the
Australian marsupials. Of fifty living species,
thirty are confined to Madagascar, and the lemurs
are there exceedingly numerous in individuals.
Outside of Madagascar they only maintain a
precarious footing in forests or on islands, and are
usually few in number' (lo).
If the earth were peopled by migrations from
Ararat, it would require a good deal of intellectual
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 57
legerdemain to show why the sloths are confined
to South America and the monotremes to Australia
and its islands. The reindeer of northern Europe
and Asia, and the elk and caribou of Arctic
America, are so much alike they must have
descended from a common ancestry, and been
developed into distinct species since the separation
of North America and Eurasia. The same thing
is probably also true of the puma and jaguar, who
inhabit the middle latitudes of the New World,
and the lion, tiger, and leopard, occupying like
latitudes of the Old World. They all belong to
the cat family, and represent divergences from
a common feline type of structure. The camel
does not exist normally outside of northern Africa
and central and western Asia. And when the
camel-like llama of South America first became
known to zoologists, it was a problem how this
creature could have become separated so far from
the apparent origin of the camel family. But
since then fossil camels have been found all over
both North and South America. And it has even
been suspected that perhaps America was the
original home of the camel, and that, like the
horse, the camel migrated to the eastern hemi-
sphere at a time when the eastern and western
land masses were connected. The foxes, hares,
and other mammals of the upper Alps, also many
Alpine plants, are like those of the Arctic regions.
The most probable explanation of these resem-
blances is that these Alpine species climbed up
into these inhospitable altitudes, and were left
58 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
stranded here on this island of cold, when their
relatives, on the return of warmth at the close of
the glacial period, retreated back to the ice-bound
fastnesses around the pole. It is for a similar
reason, probably, that the flora of the upper
White Mountains resembles that of Labrador.
7. One of the' strongest pieces of evidence
bearing on evolution that is furnished by any
department of knowledge is that furnished by
geology. It is the evidence of the rocks. Geology
is, among other things, a history of the earth.
This history has been written by the earth itself
on laminae of stone. It is from these records that
we learn incontestably the order in which the
forms of life have made their appearance on the
earth.
Three-fourths of the surface of the earth is sea.
Over the surface of the remaining fourth, except-
ing in mountainous places, is a layer of soil, vary-
ing from a few feet to a few hundred feet in depth.
Beneath this coverlet of soil, extending as far
as man has penetrated into the earth, is rock.
Excepting in regions overflowed by lava poured
out from beneath, or along the backbones of
continents where the surface rocks have been
upheaved into folds and carried away by denuda-
tion, the rocks immediately beneath the soil, to
a thickness often of thousands of feet, are in the
form of layers, or sheets, arranged one above
another. These rocks are called sedimentary
rocks, as distinguished from the unlaminated
rocks of the interior. They have been formed
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 59
at the bottom of the sea, and have, hence, all
been formed since the condensation of the oceans.
They have been formed out of the detritus of
continents brought down by the rivers and the
accumulated remains of animal and vegetal forms
which have slowly settled down through the waters.
They are the successive cemeteries of the dead past.
Such rocks are now forming over the floors of all
oceans — forming just as they have formed through-
out the long eons of geological history. Along
the axes of ancient mountains and in deep-cut
canyons the rock layers are exposed to a thickness
of thousands of feet, in some cases thirty or forty
thousand feet. Here they lie, piled up, one on
top of another, the great, broad pages upon which
are written the long, dark story of our planet. It
is the mightiest and most everlasting of all annals
— the autobiography of a world. It is possible, by
studying these rock records, to know not only the
kind of life that lived in each age, but a good deal
regarding the conditions in which that life lived
and passed away. Just as the naturalist is able,
from a single bone of an unknown animal, to
reconstruct the entire animal and to infer some-
thing of its surroundings and habits of life, and as
the archeologist, by going back to the graves of
deceased races and digging up the dust upon
which these races wrought, is able to tell much
of their history and characteristics, so the geologist,
by studying the bones of those more distant
civilisations, the civilisations sandwiched among
the fossiliferous rocks, is able to know, not only
6o THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
just the kind of life that lived in each age, but, by
comparing the species of successive strata, can
construct with astonishing fulness the genealogi-
cal outline of the entire life process. The suc-
cession of life forms as they appear in the rocks,
with a sketch of their probable genealogy, is traced
elsewhere in this chapter. It is only necessary to
say here that the order in which the forms of life
appear in the sedimentary strata is that of a
gradually increasing complexity. The inverte-
brates appear first ; then the fishes, the lowest of
the vertebrates ; after these come the amphibians ;
following these the reptiles ; and finally the birds
and mammals.
8. There is another reason for a belief in evolu-
tion furnished by geology, but of a somewhat
different kind from that just stated. It consists
in the fact that there are found in the rocks series
or grades of structures, which fit with amazing
accuracy on to the structures of existing species.
Now, this is precisely what, according to the
evolutional hypothesis, is to be expected. For, if
evolution is true, existing species represent the
tops of things. They are the existing and visible
parts of processes which extend indefinitely back
into the past, and whose deceased stages may
reasonably be expected to be found fossil in the
earth. Considering the youth and inexperience
of paleontology and the torn and incoherent
character of the record, it is surprising that anat-
omists have been able to accomplish what they
have accomplished. In many cases — notably,
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 6i
those of man, the snail, the crocodile, and the
horse — antecedent forms of structure have been
found in almost unbroken gradations leading back
to types differing immensely from their existing
representatives. Bones and fossils of men have
been found buried beneath the alluvium of rivers,
under old lava-beds, and in caves, crusted over by
the deposits of percolating waters. Many such
fossils are found in quaternary rocks, along with
the bones of animals still living and some extinct.
Some of these remains indicate unmistakable
affinities vwth the ape. The most celebrated of
these discoveries is the fossil of an erect ape-man
{Pithecanthropus erecttcs), iound by a Dutch Governor
on the island of Java in 1894. This fossil, in the
shape and size of the head and in its general struc-
ture, strikes about as near as could be the middle
between man and ape. That it is the fossil of an
ambiguous form is indicated by the fact that, when
it was examined by a company of twelve special-
ists at Berlin soon after its discovery, three of them
declared it to be the remains of an individual
belonging to a low variety of man ; three others
thought it was a large anthropoid ; while the other
six held that it was neither man nor anthropoid,
but a genuine connecting link between them. It
is discussed at length by Haeckel in ' The Last
Link,' a paper read before the International Con-
gress of Zoology, at Cambridge, in i8g8. ' It is,'
says the veteran biologist, 'the much -sought
" missing link " supposed to be wanting in the
chain of primates which stretches unbroken from
62 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
the lowest catarhine to the most highly developed
man.' Associated with this fossil ape-man were
the fossils of the elephant, hyena, and hippo-
potamus, none of which any longer exist in that
part of the world, also the fossil remains of two
orders of animals now extinct. The genealogy of
the crocodile has been traced by Huxley, through
all intermediate stages, back to the giant reptiles
of the early Tertiary.* And the pedigree of the
horse has been even more completely worked out
by the indefatigable Marsh. In the museum of
Yale University may be seen the fossil history of
this splendid ungulate, from the time it was a
clumsy little quadruped only 14 inches high, and
with four or five toes on each foot, down to existing
horses. The earliest known ancestor of the horse,
the eohippus, lived at the beginning of the Eocene
epoch. It had five toes, almost equal, on each
front foot (four toes behind), and was about the
size of a fox. The orohippus, which lived a little
later, had four toes on each front- foot, and three
behind. The mesohippus, found in the Miocene,
had three toes and one rudimentary toe on each
front-foot, and three toes behind. It was about
the size of a sheep. The miohippus, which is
found later, had three toes on each of its four feet,
with the middle toe on each foot larger than the
other two. The pliohippus, living in the Pliocene
epoch, had one principal toe on each foot, and two
secondary toes, the two secondary toes not reach-
ing to the ground. It was about the size of a
* See table of geological ages, p. 79.
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 63
donkey. Existing horses have one toe on each
foot — the digit corresponding to the big middle
finger — and the ruins of two others in the form of
spHnts on the back of each ankle. In the embryo
of the horse these sphnts are segmented, each of
them, into three phalanges. Fossil remains repre-
senting all stages in the development of the horse
have been found in the regions about the upper
vifaters of the Missouri River.
It is an important fact that the types of struc-
ture forming any series grow^ more and more
generalised as the distance from the present
increases, and that different lines of development,
vi^hen traced back into the past, often converge in
types which combine the main characters of
various existing groups. The horses, rhinoceroses,
and tapirs, great as are the differences among
them now, can be traced back step by step through
fossil forms, their differences gradually becoming
less marked, until 'the lines ultimately blend
together, if not in one common ancestor, at all
events into forms so closely alike in all essentials
that no reasonable doubt can be held as to their
common origin.' ' The four chief orders of the higher
mammals — the primates, ungulates, carnivora, and
rodents — seem to be separated by profound gulfs,
when we confine our attention to the representa-
tives of to-day. But these gulfs are completely
closed, and the sharp distinctions of the four orders
are entirely lost, when we go back and compare
their extinct predecessors of the Cenozoic period,
who lived at least three million years ago. There
64 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
we find the great sub-class of the placentals, which
to-day comprises more than two thousand five
hundred species, represented by only a small
number of insignificant pro-placentals, in which
the characters of the four divergent orders are so
intermingled and toned down that we cannot in
reason do other than consider them as the pre-
cursors of those features. The oldest primates,
the oldest ungulates, the oldest carnivora, and the
oldest rodents, all have the same skeletal structure
and the same typical dentition (forty-four teeth)
as these pro-placentals ; all are characterised by
the small and imperfect structure of the brain,
especially of the cortex, its chief part, and all
have short legs and five-toed, flat-soled (planti-
grade) feet. In many cases among these oldest
placentals it was at first very difficult to say
whether they should be classed with the primates,
ungulates, carnivora, or rodents, so very closely
and confusedly do these four groups, which diverge
so widely afterwards, approach each other at that
time. Their common origin from a single ances-
tral group follows incontestably ' (5).
g. Man is the most powerful and influential of
animals. He rules the world — rules it with a
sovereignty more despotic and extensive than that
hitherto exercised by any other animal. Many
races of beings are, and have been for centuries,
completely dominated by him. These races,
during their long subjection, have been changed
and transformed by man in a wonderful manner
through his control of their power to breed. All
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 65
domestic animals have come from wild animals ;
they have been derived by a process of selective
evolution conducted by man himself. By con-
tinually choosing as the progenitors of each
generation those with qualities best suited to his
whims and purposes, man has evolved races as
diiferent from each other in appearance and struc-
ture, and as different from the original species, as
many groups which, in the wild state, constitute
distinct species ; indeed, man has in some cases
created entirely new species, both of plants and
animals — species that breed true and are what
biologists call ' good ' — by his own selections.
There are something over 150 different varieties
of the domestic pigeon. Some of these varieties —
as many as a dozen, Mr. Darwin thinks — differ
from each other sufficiently to be reckoned, if
they are considered solely with reference to their
structures, as entirely distinct species. The
carrier, for instance, the giant of the pigeons,
measures 17 inches from bill-tip to the end of its
tail, and has a beak if inches long. Around each
eye is a large dahlia-like wattle, and another large
wattle is on the beak, giving the beak the appear-
ance of having been thrust through the kernel of
a walnut. The tumbler is small, squatty, and
almost beakless. It has the preposterous habit
of rising high in the air and then tumbling heels
over head. The roller, one of the many varieties
of the tumbler, descends to the ground in a series
of back somersaults, executed so rapidly that it
looks like a falling ball. The runt is large, weigh-
5 .
66 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
ing sometimes as much as the carrier. The fan-
tail has thirty or forty feathers in its tail, while all
other varieties have only twelve or fourteen, the
normal number for birds. The trumpeter, so
named on account of its peculiar coo, has an
umbrella-like hood of feathers covering its head
and face, and its feet are so heavily feathered that
they look like little wings. In the correct speci-
mens of this variety the feathers have to be clipped
from the face before the birds can see to feed
themselves. The pouter has the absurd habit of
inflating its gullet to a prodigious size, and the
Jacobin wears a gigantic ruff. The homing pigeon
has such a strong attachment for its cote that it
will travel hundreds of miles, sometimes as many
as 1,400 miles, in order to reach the home from
which it has been separated. But it is not simply
in their colour, size, habits, and plumage, that
pigeons vary. There are corresponding differences
in their structures, in the number of their ribs and
vertebrae, in the shape and size of the skull, in
the bones of the face, in the development of the
breast-bone, and in the length of the neck, legs,
and bill. Pigeons also differ in the shape and size
of their eggs, and in their dispositions and voice.
' There is,' says Huxley in summing up his dis-
cussion of the great variety in these birds, ' hardly
a particular of either internal econony or external
shape which has not by selective breeding been
perpetuated and become the foundation of a new
race ' (11).
All of the 150 different varieties of domestic
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 67
pigeons have been evolved by human selection
during the past three or four thousand years from
the blue rock-doves which to-day inhabit the sea-
coast countries of Europe.
What is true of pigeons is also true largely of
most of the other races associated with man — of
cats, cattle, horses, sheep, swine, goats, fowls,
and the like. All varieties of the domestic
chicken — the clumsy Cochin with its feather-
duster legs, the tall and stately Spanish, the great-
crested Minorca, the Dorking with its matchless
comb and wattle, the almost combless Polish, the
blue Andalusian, the gigantic Brahma, the tiny
Bantam, the Wyandottes in all colours (black,
white, buff, silver, and golden), the magnificent
Plymouth Rocks, and the exceedingly pugnacious
Game-cock — these and dozens of other varieties,
all flightless, have come from the jungle-bird
whose morning clarion still greets Aurora from
the wilds of distant India. The dog is a civilised
wolf, and the wild-boar is the progenitor of the
oleaginous swine. The Merino and South Down
breeds of sheep have come from the same stock in
the last century and a half. In 1790 a lamb was
born on the farm of Seth Wright in Massachusetts.
It had a long body and short, bowed legs. It was
noticed that this lamb could not follow the others
over the fences. The owner thought it would be
a good thing if all his sheep were like it. So he
selected it to breed from. Some of its offspring
were like it, and some were like the ordinary
sheep. By continual selection of those with long
5—2
68 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
bodies and short legs the ancon breed of sheep was
finally produced. In 1770 in a herd of Paraguay
cattle a hornless male calf appeared, and from
this individual in a similar way came the stock of
Muleys. The occasional appearance of horned
calves and lambs among the offspring of hornless
breeds of cattle and sheep are examples of atavism
indicating the presence of a vestigial tendency to
breed true to their horned ancestors. The Hereford
cattle originated as a distinct variety about 1769
through the careful selections of a certain English-
man by the name of Tompkins. All domesticated
quadrupeds, except the elephant, have come from
wild species with erect ears, the ears acting as
funnels to harvest the sound-waves. But there
are few of them in which there is not one or more
varieties with drooping ears— cats in China, horses
in parts of Russia, sheep in Italy, cattle in India,
and pigs, dogs, and rabbits in all long-civilised
lands. We are so accustomed to seeing dogs and
pigs with pendent ears that we are surprised to
know there are varieties with erect ears. The
goldfish is a carp, and in its native haunts in the
waters of China it has the colour of the carp. The
golden hue seen in the occupants of our aquaria
has been given to this fish by the Chinese through
the continual selection of certain kinds. The
goldfish, almost as much as the pigeon, has been
the sport of fanciers, and the strangest varieties
have resulted. Some have outlandishly long fins,
while others have no dorsal fin at all. Some are
streaked and splotched with gold and scarlet ■
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 69
others are pure albinos. One of the most monstrous
varieties has a three-lobed tail-fin, and its eye-
balls, without sockets, are on the outside of its
head. All of our common barnyard fowls —
turkeys, ducks, geese, and chickens — are flight-
less, but the varieties from which the domesticated
forms have come all have functional wings, two of
these varieties crossing continents in their annual
migrations.
Not only animals, but plants also, many of
them, have been greatly changed by man in his
efforts to adapt them to his uses as food, orna-
mentation, and the like. On the seaside cliffs of
Chili and Peru may still be found growing the
wild-potato — the small, tough, bitter ancestor of
the mammoth Burbank, Peerless, Early Rose,
and the nearly two hundred other varieties of this
matchless tuber found in the gardens of civilised
man. The cabbage, kale, cauliflower, and kohl-
rabi are all modifications of the same wild species
{Brassica oleracea), the cauliflower being the de-
veloped flower, kohlrabi the stalk, and kale and
cabbage the leaves. The peach and the almond,
Darwin thinks, have also come from a common
ancestral drupe, the peach being the developed
fruit, and the almond the seed. There are nearly
goo different varieties of apples, varying in the
most wonderful manner in size, colour, flavour,
texture, and shape, but all of them probably
derived from the little, sour, inedible Asiatic crab.
The many times ' double ' roses of our gardens
have come from the five-petalled wild-rose of the
70 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
prairies. The cultivated varieties of viburnum
and hydrangea have showy corymbs of infertile
flowers only, but the wild forms from which the
domestic varieties have been derived have only
a single marginal row of showy infertile flowers
surrounding a mass of inconspicuous fertile flowers.
It has been due to their efforts to please men that
bananas, pineapples, and oranges have got into
the habit of neglecting to produce seeds. There
are certain species of grapes that are seedless,
also seedless sugar-cane, and a seedless apple has
just been announced by horticulturists. The
development of domesticated plants is only in its
infancy, and it is probably impossible even for the
most agile imagination to dream of the miracles
the horticulturist is destined to work in the ages
to come. There is every reason to believe that
seedless varieties of all our common fruits will
ultimately be produced, and that in size, flavour,
nutrient constituents, and appearance, they will be
developed into forms utterly different from exist-
ing varieties. Just within the last few years the
U.S. Department of Agriculture has developed a
cotton-plant immune to the bacterial diseases
of the soil, which had completely driven the
cotton-raising industry out of large districts of the
South. The cultivation of many of the cereals
has gone on so long, and has proceeded so far,
that their origin is lost in antiquity.
Whether or not it is possible for new varieties
and species to be evolved is a question, therefore,
which does not need to depend for reply wholly
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 71
upon theory. It is known to have taken place ;
and the process by which the different varieties of
domestic animals and plants have been evolved —
domestic selection — is not different in principle
from the process of natural selection, the chief
operation by which life in general, both plant and
animal, is assumed to have been evolved.
10. There are other reasons for a belief in
organic evolution, but the last one I shall mention
is the fact that the theory of organic evolution
harmonises with the known tendencies of the
universe as a whole. The organic kingdoms of
the earth — animals and plants — are as truly parts
of the terrestrial globe as the inorganic kingdom
is ; and as such they share in, and are actuated
by, the same great tendency or instinct as that
which actuates the whole. Nine-tenths of the
substance of all animals and plants is oxygen,
hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen — the very elements
which make up the entire ocean and air, and
enter largely into the composition of the contin-
ents. The human body, which has essentially
the same chemical composition as the bodies of
animals in general, is made up of four solids, five
gases, and seven metals — in all, sixteen elements
of the something like seventy which constitute
the entire planet. ' In the past, man appeared to
be a creature foreign to the earth, and placed
upon it as a transitory inhabitant by some incom-
prehensible power. The more perfect insight of
the present day sees man as a being whose
development has taken place in accordance with
72 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
the same laws as those that have governed the
development of the earth and its entire organisa-
tion — a being not put upon the earth accidentally
by an arbitrary act. but produced in harmony
with the earth's nature, and belonging to it as do
the flowers and the fruits to the tree which bears
them.' Animals are not outside of, nor distinct
from, the universe, as one might suspect who has
listened much to the recital of tradition so long
accepted as science. They are more or less
detached portions of the planet earth which move
over its surfaces and through its fluids and
multiply, but which in their phenomena obey
the same laws of chemistry and physics as those
in accordance with which the rest of the uni-
verse acts. Animals are moulds through which
digressing matters from the soil, sea, and sky
pass on rounds of eternal itineracy.
Now, the earth as a planet is in process of
evolution. Not many things are more certain
than this. The earth has come out of fire. It
has grown to be what it is. Its mountains,
valleys, plains, seas, shores, islands, lakes, rivers,
and continents — these were not always here.
They have been evolved. Not only the earth,
but the entire family of spheres of which the
earth is a member — the solar system — are all
evolving. Mr. Spencer never did anything more
profound than when he demonstrated in his ' Law
and Cause of Progress ' the universal migration of
things from a condition of homogeneity toward a
condition of greater and greater heterogeneity.
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 73
The whole universe, or as much of it as can be
examined by terrestrial instruments, has probably
evolved out of the same primordial matters. The
organic part of the earth has evolved, therefore,
and is destined to continue to evolve, because it
is a part of a whole whose habit or ambition it is
to evolve.
The evidence is overwhelming. The theory of
organic evolution is sustained by a mass of facts
not less authoritative and convincing than that
which supports the Copernican theory of the
worlds. Evolution is, in fact, a doctrine so
apparent that it only needs to be honestly and
intelligently looked into to be accepted unre-
servedly. It is, indeed, more than a doctrine. It
is a known fact. It is a necessary effect of the
conditions known to exist among the animals and
plants of the earth. If beings vary among them-
selves generation after generation, if only the
fittest of each generation survive, and if the sur-
vivors tend to transmit to their offspring the
qualities of their superiority (and the animals and
plants of the earth are known to do continually
all of these things), then it follows with mathe-
matical certainty that evolution is going on, and
that it will continue to go on as long as these
conditions continue. It is inevitable. It could
not be otherwise. We would know that evolution
were going on among organisms where these con-
ditions existed, even though we had never ob-
served it.
The boldest and most enthusiastic opponents of
74 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
evolution have always been those with the least
information about it. But the evidence is accu-
mulating so rapidly, and is being drawn up in such
unanswerable array, that, if it is not already the
case, it will not be many years before it will be an
intellectual reproach for anyone to discredit, or to
be known to have discredited, this splendid and
inspiring revelation.
X. The Genealogy of Animals.
Life originated in the sea, and for an immense
period of time after it commenced it was confined
to the place of its origin. The civilisations of the
earth were for many millions of years exclusively
aquatic. It has, indeed, been estimated that the
time required by the life process in getting out of
the water — that is, that the time consumed in
elaborating the first species of land animals — was
much longer than the time which has elapsed
since then. I presume that during a large part of
this early period it would have seemed to one
living at that time extremely doubtful whether
there would ever be on the earth any other kinds
of life than the aquatic. And if those who to-day
weave the fashionable fabrics of human philosophy,
and who know nothing about anything outside the
thin edge of the present, had been back there,
they would no doubt have declared confidently, as
they looked upon the naked continents and the
uninhabited air and the sea teeming with its
peculiar faunas, that life upon solids or in gases,
life anywhere, in fact, except in the sea, where it
THE GENEALOGY OF ANIMALS 75
had always existed, and to which alone it was
adapted, was absolutely, and would be forever,
impossible ; and that feathered fishes and fishes
with the power to run and skip, and especially
' sharks ' competent to walk on one end and jabber
with the other, were unthinkable nonsense. Life
originated in the sea for the same reason that the
first of the series of so-called ' civilisations ' which
have appeared in human history sprang from the
alluvium of the Euphrates and the Nile, because
the conditions for bringing life into existence were
here the most favourable. The atmosphere was
incompetent to perform such a task as the invent-
ing oi protoplasm, and there was no land above the
oceans.
The first forms of life were one-celled — simple,
jelly-like dots of almost homogeneous plasm — the
protozoa. These primitive organisms were the
common grandparents of all beings. From them
evolved, through infinite travail and suffering, all
of the orders, families, species, and varieties of
animals that to-day live on the earth, and all
those that have in the past lived and passed
away. By the multiplication and specialisation
of cells, and the formation of cell aggregates, the
sponges, celenterates, and flat worms were de-
veloped from the protozoa.* The connecting links
between the one-celled and the many-celled animals
consist of a series of colonial forms of increasing
size and complexity, some of which may be
found in every roadside ditch and pool, while
* See ' Genealogy of Animals,' p. 331.
76 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
others are extinct. The development of these
many-celled organisms (metazoa) from one-celled
organisms was a perfectly natural process, a
process which takes place in the initial evolutions
of every embryo. There is no more mystery
about it than there is about any other act of
association. All association is simply a matter of
' business.' Many-celled organisms are colonies,
or societies, of more or less closely co-operating
one-celled organisms, and they have come into
existence in obedience to the same laws of economy
and advantage as have those more modern societies
of metazoa known as nations, communities, and
states, the organised bodies of men, ants, and
millionaires.
The sponges are the lowest of the many-celled
animals. They consist of irregular masses of
loosely associated cells, hopelessly anchored to
the sea-floor. They represent the social instinct
in embryo. The cells are but slightly specialised,
and each cell leads a more or less independent
existence. The sponge stands at about that stage
of social integration and intelligence represented
by those stupendous porifera which cover conti-
nents and constitute the ' social organisms ' of the
civilised world. The nutritive system of sponges
consists of countless pores opening from the sur-
face into a common canal within, through which
ever-waving cilia urge the alimental waters. In
the celenterates the cells arrange themselves in
the form of a cup with one large opening into and
from the vase-like stomach. The unsegmented
THE GENEALOGY OF ANIMALS '^^
worms are flat and sac-like, with bilateral sym-
metry and the power to move about, but not
tubular, as are the true worms. They are blood-
less, like the celenterates and sponges.
From the flat worms developed the annelid
worms, animals perforated by a food canal and
possessing a body cavity filled with blood sur-
rounding this canal. The body cavity is the space
between the walls of the body and the alimentary
canal, the cavity which in the higher animals
contains the heart, liver, lungs, kidneys, etc. The
worms and all animals above them have this
cavity. The worms and all animals above them
also have, as an inheritance from the flat worms,
bodies with bilateral symmetry — that is, bodies
with two halves similar. This peculiarity was
probably acquired by the flat worms, and so
fastened upon all subsequently evolved species, as
a result of pure carelessness. It probably arose
out of the habit of using continually, or over and
over again, the same parts of the body as fore and
aft. It has been facetiously said that if it had not
been for this habit, so inadvertently acquired by
these humble beings so long, long ago, we would
not to-day be able to tell our right hand from our
left. In the worm is found the beginning of
that wonderful organ of co-ordination, the brain.
The brain is a modification of the skin. It may
weaken our regard for this imperial organ to know
that it is, in its morphology, akin to nails and
corns. But it will certainly add to our admiration
for the infinite labours of evolution to remember
78 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
that the magnificent thinking apparatus of modern
philosophers was originally a small sensitive plate
developed down in the sea a hundred million years
ago on the dorsal wall of the mouths of primeval
worms.
From the worms developed all of the highest
four phyla of the animal kingdom — the echino-
derms, the mollusks, the arthropods, and the
chordate animals, the last of which were the
progenitors of the illustrious vertebrates. The
lowest of the mollusks are the snails, and from
these humble tenants of our ponds and shores
sprang the headless bivalves and the giant jawed
cuttles. The mollusks were for a long time after
their development the mailed monarchs of the
sea, and shared with the worms the dominion of
the primordial waters. But after the development
of the more active arthropods, especially the
crustaceans, the less agile worms and mollusks
rapidly declined. Existing worms and mollusks
are remnants of once powerful and populous
races.
From the worms also developed the arthropods,
the water-breathing crustaceans and the air-
breathing spiders and insects. The crustaceans
came early, away back in the gray of the Silurian
period, just about the time North America was
born. North America lay, a naked, V-shaped
infant, in the regions of Labrador and Canada.
The crustaceans rapidly superseded the mollusks
as rulers of the sea, attaining, in extreme species,
a length of four or five feet. The spiders and
THE GENEALOGY OF ANIMALS 79
insects came into existence toward the latter part
of the Silurian period,* probably contemporaneous,
or nearly so, with the appearance of land vegeta-
tion. The spiders and insects were the aborigines
of the land and air. They are the only races of
living beings, except the original inhabitants of
the sea, who ever invaded and settled an unoccu-
pied world. The earliest land fossils so far found
are the fossils of scorpions. But the existence of
a sting among the structural possessions of these
animals indicates that there were already others
who contended with them for supremacy in the
new world. The first insects were the masticating
insects, insects such as cockroaches, crickets, grass-
hoppers, dragon-flies, and beetles. They are found
abundantly in the Devonian and Carboniferous
rocks. The licking insects (bees) and the pricking
insects (flies and bugs) appeared first in the
* The following are the divisions and subdivisions of
geological history :
(Pleistocene period.
Pliocene „
Miocene „
Oligocene „
Eocene „
r Cretaceous period.
4. Mesozoic Era (Secondary) - j Jurassic „
vTriassic „
/Permian period.
Carboniferous period.
3. Paleozoic Era (Primary) - -! gihlrian " "
Ordovician „
V Cambrian „
2. Proterozoic Era - - - Algonkian period.
I. Archeozoic Era.
8o THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
Mesozoic Era, and the sipping insects (butter-
flies) in the Cenozoic. The flower-loving insects
(the bees and butterflies) came into the world at
the same time as did the flowers. The wings of
insects may be modifications of the gills used by
insect young in respiration during their aquatic
existence. They are, hence, very different in
origin from the wings of birds, which are the
modified fore-legs of reptiles.
The most important class of animals arising out
of the worms, on account of their distinguished
offspring, were the hypothetical cord animals.
The only existing species allied to these animals
is the amphioxus, a strange, unpromising-looking
creature, half worm and half fish, found in the
beach sands of many seas. It has white blood and
a tubular heart. It is without either head or
limbs, and looks very much like a long semi-
transparent leaf, tapering at both ends. But it
has two unmistakable prophecies of the vertebrate
anatomy : a cartilaginous rod, pointed at both
ends, extending along the back, and above this,
and parallel to it, a cord of nerve matter. These
are the same positions occupied by the spinal
column and spinal cord in all true vertebrates.
That the amphioxus is a genuine relative of the
ancestor of the vertebrates is also shown by the
fact that these simple forms of column and cord
possessed by amphioxus are precisely the forms
assumed by the spinal column and spinal cord in
the embryos of all vertebrates, including man.
From these quasi-vertebrates developed the fishes
THE GENEALOGY OF ANIMALS 8i
— first (after the scaleless, limbless lampreys) the
sharks with spiny scales and cartilaginous skeleton,
and after these the lung fishes and the bony fishes,
with flat, horny scales and skeletons of bone.
From the beginning of the Devonian age, when
fishes first came into prominence, till the rise of
the great reptiles in the Triassic time, fishes were
the dominant life of the sea. In the fishes first
appeared jaws, a sympathetic nervous system, red
blood, backbone, and the characteristic two pairs
of limbs of vertebrates.
The lung fishes (Dipneusta), a small order of
strange salamander-like creatures which live in-
geniously on the borderland between the liquid
and the land, may be looked upon as physiological,
if not morphological, links between the fishes and
the frogs. They combine the characters of both
fishes and frogs, and zoologists have been tempted
to make a separate class of them, and place them
between the two classes to which they are related.
They are like fishes in having scales, fins, per-
manent gills, and a fish-like shape and skeleton.
They resemble frogs in having lungs, nostrils, an
incipiently three-chambered heart, a pulmonary
circulation, and frog-like skin glands. There are
three genera with several species. One genus
(Neoceratodus) is found in two or three small
rivers of Queensland, Australia ; another (Protop-
terus) lives in the Gambia and other rivers of
Africa; and the third (Lepidosiren) inhabits the
swamps of the Amazon region. They all breathe
ordinarily by means of gills, like true fishes, but
6
82 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
have the habit of coming frequently to the surface
and inhahng air. The air-bladder acts as an
incipient lung in supplementing respiration by gills.
They all live in regions where a dry season regularly
converts the watercourses into beds of sand and
mud. During the season of drought these strange
animals build for themselves a cocoon or nest of
mud and leaves. This cocoon is lined with mucus,
and provided with a lid through which air is
admitted. Here they lie in this capsule through-
out the hot southern summer, from August to
December, breathing air by means of their lungs
and living upon the stored-up fat of their tails,
until the return of the wet season, when they
again live in the rivers and breathe water in true
piscatorial fashion. These capsules have often
been carried to Europe, and opened 3,000 miles
from their place of construction without harming
the life within.
Here, in these eccentric denizens of the southern
world, we find the beginnings of a grand trans-
formation — a transformation in both structure and
function, a transformation made necessary by the
transition from life in the water to life in the air,
a transformation which reaches its maturity in the
higher air-breathing vertebrates, where the simple
air-sac of the fish becomes a pair of lobed and
elaborately sacculated lungs, performing almost
exclusively the function of respiration, and the
gills change into parts of the ears and lower jaw.
The air-bladder of ordinary fishes, which is used
chiefly as a hydrostatic organ to enable the fish
THE GENEALOGY OF ANIMALS 83
to rise and fall in the water, is probably the
degenerated lung of the lung fishes.
From the lung fishes or allied forms developed
the amphibians, the well-known fish quadrupeds
of our bogs and brooks. The amphibians are
genuine connectives — living links between the life
of the sea and the life of the land. In early life
they are fishes, with gills and two-chambered
hearts. In later life they are air-breathing quad-
rupeds, with legs and lungs and three-chambered
hearts. Here is evolution, plenty of it, and of the
most tangible character. And it takes place right
before the eyes. The transformation from the fish
to the frog is, however, no more wonderful than
the embryonic transformations of other vertebrates.
It is simply more apparent, because it can be
seen. The lungs of amphibians and the lower
reptiles are simple sacks opening by a very short
passage into the mouth. Some amphibians, as the
axolotl of Mexican lakes, ordinarily retain their
gills through life, but may be induced to develop
lungs and adapt themselves to terrestrial life by
being kept out of the water. Others, as the newts,
which ordinarily develop lungs, may be compelled
to retain their gills through life by being forced to
remain uninterruptedly in the water. The black
salamander, inhabiting droughty regions of the
Alps, brings forth its young bearing lungs, and
only a pair at a time. But if the young are pre-
maturely removed from the body of the mother
and placed in the water, they develop gills in the
ordinary way. These are remarkable instances of
6—2
84 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
elasticity in the presence of a varying environ-
ment.
In the amphibians the characteristic five-toed or
five-fingered foot, which normally forms the ex-
tremities of the limbs of all vertebrates except
fishes, is first met -with. It vi^as this pentadactyl
peculiarity of the frog, inherited by men and women
through the reptiles and mammals, that gave rise
to the decimal system of numbers and other un-
handy facts in human life. The decimal system
arose out of the practice of early men performing
their calculations on their fingers. This method
of calculating is still used by primitive peoples all
over the world. The sum of the digits of the two
hands came, in the course of arithmetical evolu-
tion, to be used as a unit, and from this simple
beginning grew up the complicated system of tens
found among civilised peoples. It has all come
about as a result of amphibian initiative. Our
very arithmetics have been predetermined by the
anatomical peculiarities of the frog's foot. If these
unthinking foreordainers of human affairs had had
four or six toes on each foot instead of five, man
would no doubt have inherited them just as cheer-
fully as the number he did inherit, and the civilised
world would in this case be to-day using in all of
its mathematical activities a system of eights or
twelves instead of a system of tens. A system
of eights or twelves would be much superior in
flexibility to the existing system ; for eight is
a cube, and its half and double are squares ;
and twelve can be divided by two, three, four,
THE GENEALOGY OF ANIMALS 85
and six, while ten is divisible by two and five
only.
How helpless human beings are — in fact, how
helpless all beings are ! How hopelessly dependent
we are upon the past, and how impossible it is to
be really original ! What the future will be depends
upon what the present is, for the future will grow
out of, and inherit, the present. What the present
is depends upon what the past was, for the present
has grown out of, and inherited, the past. And
what the past was depends upon a remoter past
from which it evolved, and so on. There is no
end anywhere of dependence, either forward or
backward. Every fact, from an idea to a sun, is
a contingent link in an eternal chain.
From the amphibians (probably from extinct
forms, not from living) there arose the highest
three classes of vertebrates — the true reptiles, the
birds, and the mammals — all of whom have lungs
and breathe air from the beginning to the end of
their days. Gills, as organs of breathing, disappear
forever, being changed, as has been said, into
parts of the organs of mastication and hearing. In
the reptiles first appear those organs which in the
highest races overflow on occasions of tenderness
and grief, the tear glands. These organs are,
however, in our cold-blooded antecedents, organs
of ocular lubrication rather than of weeping.
There are but four small orders of existing reptiles
— snakes, turtles, lizards, and crocodilians. These
are the pygmean descendants of a mighty line, the
last of a dynasty which during the greater part of
86 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
the Mesozoic ages was represented by the most
immense and powerful monsters that have ever
lived upon the earth. Mesozoic civilisation was
pre-eminently saurian. Reptiles were supreme
everywhere — on sea and land and in the air. Their
rulership of the world was not so bloody and
masterful as man's, but quite as remorseless.
Imagine an aristocracy made up of pterosaurs
(flying reptiles), with teeth, and measuring 20 feet
between wing - tips ; great plesiosaurs (serpent
reptiles) and ichthyosaurs (fish reptiles), enormous
bandits of the seas; and dinosaurs and atlanto-
saurs, giant land lizards, 30 feet high and from
50 to 100 feet in length. A government of demagogs
is bad enough, as king-ridden mankind well know,
but dragons would be worse, if possible. The
atlantosaurs were the largest animals that have
ever walked upon the earth. They were huge
plant-eaters inhabiting North America. It has
been surmised that one of these behemoths * may
have consumed a whole tree for breakfast.' It was
the mighty saurians of the Mesozoic time who
brought into everlasting subordination the pisca-
torial civilisation of the Devonian and carboniferous
ages.
Toward the latter part of the Reptilian Age,
and somewhere along about the time of the ap-
pearance of hard-wood forests, came the birds,
those beautiful and emotional beings who, in spite
of human destructiveness, continue to fill our
groves and gardens with the miracles of beauty
and song. The bird is a ' glorified reptile.' How
THE GENEALOGY OF ANIMALS 87
the ' slow, cold-blooded, scaly saurian ever became
transformed into the quick, hot-blooded, feathered
bird, the joy of creation,' is a considerable mys-
tery, yet we know no reason for believing that the
transformation did not take place. Although in
their external appearance and mode of life birds
and reptiles differ so widely from each other, yet,
in their internal structure and embryology, they
are so much alike that one of the brightest
anatomists that has ever lived (Huxley) united
them both into a single class under the name
Sauropsida. It might naturally be supposed that
the birds are descendants of the flying reptiles,
the pterosaurs. But this may not be true. The
pterosaurs were structurally much further removed
from the birds than were certain extinct terrestrial
reptiles. The fact that birds and pterosaurs both
had wings has really nothing to do with the case.
For the wings of reptiles, we almost know, were
not homologous with the wings of birds. The
bird's vnng is a feathered fore-leg ; the wing of the
reptile was an expanded skin stretching from the
much- elongated last finger backwards to the hind-
leg and tail. Wings, it may be remarked in
passing, have had at least four different and
distinct beginnings in the animal kingdom, repre-
sented by the bats, the birds, the reptiles, and the
insects. This does not include the parachutes
of the so-called flying squirrels, lemurs, lizards,
phalangers, and fishes.
The first birds had teeth and vertebrated tails.
The archeopteryx, which is the earliest toothed
88 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
bird whose remains have yet been found, was
about the size of a crow. It had thirty-two teeth
and twenty caudal vertebrae. Two specimens
of it have been found in the Jurassic slates of
Bavaria. One of these fossils is in the British
Museum, and the other in the Museum of Berlin.
Other toothed birds have been found fossil by
Dr. Mudge in the cretaceous chalk of North
America. These last had short, fan tails like
existing birds.
From the toothed birds developed the beaked
birds — the keel-breasted birds (the group to which
most existing birds belong) and the birds with
unkeeled breasts, i.e., the ostrich-like birds. The
ostrich-like birds are runners. They have rudi-
mentary wings, and the keel of the breast-bone,
which in the keel-breasted birds acts as a stay
for the attachment of the wing muscles, is lacking.
The ostrich-like birds are probably degenerate
flyers, the flying apparatus having become obsolete
through disuse. The feathers of birds are gene-
rally supposed to be the modified scales of
reptiles.
The most brilliant offspring of the reptiles were
the mammals, animals capable of a wider distribu-
tion over the face of the earth than the cold-
blooded reptiles, on account of their hair and their
warm blood. Cold-blooded animals of great size
are able to inhabit but a small zone of the existing
earth's surface — the torrid belt. They cannot
house themselves during the seasons of cold, as
men can ; nor escape to the tropics on the wings
THE GENEALOGY OF ANIMALS 89
of the wind, as do the birds ; nor bury themselves
in subaqueous mud, as do the frogs, snakes,
and crustaceans. During the Mesozoic period,
when cold - blooded reptiles of gigantic size
flourished over a wide area of the earth's surface,
the planet was far warmer than now. Animals,
therefore, like the mammals (or birds), capable of
maintaining a fixed temperature regardless of the
thermal fluctuations of the surrounding media,
are the only animals of large size and power
capable of uninterrupted existence over the
greater part of the surface of the existing earth.
The pre-eminent life of the Cenozoic time was
mammalian. But the decline and fall of the
saurian power was not wholly due to the rise of
the more dynamic mammals. It was in part due,
no doubt, to adverse conditions of climate, and
also to the fact that mammals and birds guard
their eggs, and saurians do not.
The lowest of the mammals are the monotremes,
animals which blend in a marvellous manner the
characteristics of birds, reptiles, and mammals.
Only two families of these old-fashioned creatures
are left, the echidna and the duck-bill (ornitho-
rhynchus), both of them found on or near that
museum of biological antiquities, Australia. They
are covered with hair and suckle their young like
other mammals, but they have only the rudiments
of milk glands, and they lay eggs with large yolks
from a cloaca, like the reptiles and birds. The
duck-bill hides its eggs in the ground, but the
echidna hatches its eggs in a small external
go THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
brooding pouch, periodically developed for this
purpose. The young of the monotremes feed on
the oily perspiration which exudes from the body of
the mother. The monotremes first appear in the
fossiliferous rocks of the Triassic Age.
From the monotreme-like mammals developed
the marsupial mammals, animals possessing a
purse-like pouch on the after part of the abdomen,
in which they carry their young. The young of
marsupials are born in an extremely immature
state, and are carried in this pouch in order to
complete their development. The young of the
kangaroo, an animal as large as a man, are only
about an inch in length when they are born.
They are carried for nine months after their birth
in the marsupium of the mother, firmly attached
to the maternal nipple. The marsupials came
into existence during the Jurassic Age, and
during the next age, the Cretaceous, they arose
to considerable power. During this latter age
they were found on every continent. But they
have been almost exterminated by their more
powerful descendants.
From the marsupials developed the placental
mammals, animals so called because their young
are developed within the parental body in associa-
tion with a peculiar nourishing organ called the
placenta. From the herbivorous marsupials de-
veloped the almost toothless edentates, the rodents,
or gnawing animals, the sirenians, the cetaceans,
and the hoofed animals, or ungulates. The
sirenians are fish-like animals with two flippers,
THE GENEALOGY OF ANIMALS 91
and are often called sea-cows. They resemble
whales in many respects, and are sometimes
classed with them. They are plant-eaters ex-
clusively, and are found grazing along the bottoms
of tropical estuaries and rivers. They have tiny
eyes, teeth fitted for grinding (not spike-like as in
the whales), and a strong affection for their young,
the mother, when pursued, often carrying her little
one under her flippers. An immense sirenian,
known as Steller's manatee, was discovered on
the Behring Islands, along the Kamschatka coast,
in 1741. Twenty-seven years afterwards not one
of them was left, all having been murdered by the
Russian sailors. The sirenians are probably de-
generate forms of land quadrupeds, having lost
their hind-limbs and developed the fish-like shape
in adapting themselves to aquatic conditions.
They appear first in the Eocene Age.
Among the most interesting derivatives of the
herbivorous marsupials, because the most aberrant,
are the whales. They are true mammals — have
warm blood, breathe the air with lungs, and suckle
their young like other mammals. But, like the
sirenians, they live in the surface of the waters,
and have flippers and a fish-like tail and form.
They differ from the sirenians, however, in being
carnivorous, in having inguinal instead of pectoral
milk glands, and in being structurally less like
quadrupeds. They probably degenerated from
land quadrupeds during the Jurassic period, and,
owing to their longer residence in the waters, have
become further removed from the quadrupedal
92 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
type than the sirenians. Whales have two limbs,
the hind-limbs having disappeared as a result of
the pre-eminent development of the tail. The
tails of whales and sirenians are flattened horizon-
tally, not vertically, as in fishes.
Out of generalised forms of hoofed animals now
extinct developed the odd -toed and even -toed
races of existing ungulates. The original ungu-
lates had five hoofs on each foot, and were highly
generalised in their structure. From these original
five-toed forms have arisen the variously hoofed
and variously structured tribes of existing ungu-
lates : the five-toed elephant, the four-toed tapir
and hippopotamus, the three-toed rhinoceros, the
two -toed camel, sheep, swine, deer, antelope,
giraffe, and ox, and the one-toed horse and zebra.
The carnivorous branch of the placental animals
came from the carnivorous branch of the mar-
supials. From early forms of carnivorous pla-
centals developed the ape-like lemurs and those
generalised forms of rapacious animals from which
arose the insect-eaters, the bats, and the true
carnivora. The seals represent a by-development
from the main line of the carnivora, a third defec-
tion, and a comparatively recent one, from land
faunas. Seals live at the meeting of the land and
the waters rather than in or on the waters, as do
the cetaceans and sirenians. They have retained
their fur and their four limbs, but have almost lost
their power of land locomotion by the conversion
of their feet into flippers. The two front-limbs of
seals are the only ones used as ordinary limbs are
THE GENEALOGY OF ANIMALS 93
used. The hind-limbs in most seals stretch per-
manently out behind, the webbed digits spreading
out fan-shaped on either side of the stumpy tail,
and constituting a rowing apparatus functionally
homologous with the tail of fishes and whales.
According to Jordan, the fur seals and the hair
seals are descended from different families of land
carnivora, the former probably from the bears,
and the latter from the cats.
The lemurs are of especial interest to human
beings, because in them are found the first startling
approximation in looks and structure to the
' human form divine.' The lemurs are monkey-
like creatures living in trees, but differ enough
from true monkeys to be often placed in an order
by themselves. Their milk glands are abdominal
instead of pectoral, as in the monkeys, and the
second digit of each hand and foot ends in a claw.
The most of them live in Madagascar. They are
generally nocturnal in their habits, although some
species are diurnal. They appear first in the
Eocene rocks, and Haeckel thinks they may have
developed from opossum-like marsupials in the
late Cretaceous or early Eocene Age.
From lemurs or from some other similar sort of
semi-apes developed the true apes — the flat-nosed
(platyrhine) apes of the New World and the
narrow-nosed (catarhine) apes of the Old World.
There is considerable difference between the New
World apes and those of the Old World. The
differences between the two classes is, in fact, so
striking that they are thought by some to have
94 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
developed independently of each other from
distinct species of semi-apes. The apes of the
New World have flat noses, and the nostrils are
far apart and open in front of the nose, never
below. The Old World apes have narrow noses,
the nostrils being close together and opening
downwards as in man. The tail of (nearly) all
New World apes is prehensile, being used regularly
as a fifth limb, while among Old World apes the
tail is never so used. The Old World apes all
have the same number and kinds of teeth as man
has, while the New World apes (excepting the
Brazilian marmosets) have an additional premolar
in each half-jaw, making thirty-six in all. The
catarhine apes are, therefore, structurally much
nearer to man than their platyrhine cousins. All
tailed apes probably sprang originally from a
single stirp of semi-apes, and spread over the
earth at a time when the eastern and western
land masses of the southern hemisphere were con-
nected with each other. The earliest remains of
apes appear in the Miocene Age.
From the Old World tailed apes were developed
the tailless, man-like, or anthropoid apes — the
gorillas and chimpanzees of Africa, and the orangs
and gibbons of Asia and the East Indies. The an-
thropoids arose from the tailed apes by the loss of
the tail, the thinning of the hairy covering, the
enlargement of the fore-brain, and by structural
adaptations to a more nearly vertical position.
No remains of anthropoids are found earlier than
the Pliocene Age.
THE GENEALOGY OF ANIMALS 95
The man-like apes are the nearest living rela-
tives of the human races. It is not probable that
man has been derived directly from any of the exist-
ing races of man-like apes. For no one of them in
all particulars of its structure stands closer to him
than the rest. The orang approaches closest to
man in the formation of the brain, the chimpanzee
in the shape of the spine and in certain character-
istics of the skull, the gorilla in the development
of the feet and in size, and the gibbon in the
formation of the throat and teeth. The earliest
human races probably sprang from man-like races
of apes now extinct, who lived in southern Asia
or in Africa during the Pliocene Age (possibly as
early as the Miocene), and who combined in their
structures the various man-like characters pos-
sessed by existing anthropoids.
The earliest races of men were speechless — the
ape-like ' Alali ' — beings, living wholly upon the
ground and walking upon their hind-limbs, but
without more than the mere rudiments of lan-
guage. The vertical position led to a much
greater development of the posterior parts, espe-
cially of the muscles of the back and the calves
of the leg. The great toe, which in the ape is
opposable, lost its opposability, or all except traces
of it, after the abandonment of arboreal life. It
must have been a sight fit to stir the soul of the
most leathern, these children of the night, with
low brows, stooping gait, and ape-like faces, armed
with rude clubs, clothed in natural hair, and
wandering about in droves without law, fire, or
96 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
understanding, hiding in thickets and in the holes
of the earth, feeding on roots and fruits, and con-
tending doubtfully with the species around them
for food and existence.
From the ' Alali ' — the speechless ape-men — we
may imagine the true men to have evolved — talk-
ing men, men with erect posture and mature
brain and larynx, the woolly-haired ulotrichi and
the 'straight-haired lissotrichi. There are four
existing species of woolly-haired men : the Papuans
of New Guinea and Melanesia, and the Hotten-
tots, Caffres, and Negroes of southern, equatorial,
and north central Africa respectively. They all
have long heads, slanting teeth, very dark skin,
and black, bushy hair, each individual hair in
cross-section being flat or oval in shape. In the
straight-haired races the skin is much fairer than
in the woolly-haired races, being seldom darker than
brown, and each individual hair in cross-section is
round like the cross-section of a cylinder. The
principal species of straight-haired men are the
sea-roving Malays of the East Indies and the
Pacific, the round-faced Mongols of eastern and
northern Asia, the aboriginal Americans of the
western hemisphere, and the incomparable Aryans,
including the ancient Greeks and Romans and the
modern peoples of India, Persia, and Europe.
Man is to-day the pre-eminent animal of the
planet. The successive ascendancies of the Worm,
the Mollusk, the Crustacean, the Fish, the Reptile,
and the Mammal, are followed triumphantly by
the ascendancy of the Children of the Ape.
THE GENEALOGY OF ANIMALS 97
A large part of the life of the earth has
remained steadfastly where it was cradled, beneath
the waves. But more restless portions have left
the sea and crept forth upon the land, or swarmed
into the air. One migration, the most numerous,
is represented by the insects. Another, the most
enterprising, was the amphibian. After ages of
evolution the amphibian branch divided. One
bfanch acquired wings and sailed off into the air.
The other divided and subdivided. One of these
subdivisions entered the forests, climbed and
clambered among the trees, acquired perpendicu-
larity and hands, descended and walked upon the
soil, invented agriculture, built cities and states,
and imagined itself immortal. Human society is
but the van — the hither terminus — of an evolu-
tional process which had its beginning away back
in the protoplasm of primeval waters. There is
not a form that creeps beneath the sea but can
claim kinship with the eagle. The philosopher is
the remote posterity of the meek and lowly
amoeba.
XL Conclusion.
The resemblances, homologies, and metamor-
phoses existing everywhere among animal forms
are, therefore, evidence of the most logical con-
sanguinities. It is all so perfectly plain. The
structures of organic beings have come about as a
result of the action and reaction of environment
upon these structures. Every being — and not
only every being, but every species, the whole
7
98 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
organic world — has come to be what it is as a
result of the incessant hammerings of its surround-
ings, the hammerings not only of the present, but
of the long-stretching past. By surroundings is
meant, of course, the rest of the universe. Those
animals belonging to the same stock resemble each
other because they have been subjected to the
same experiences, the same series of selections.
They have lain on the same great anvil, and felt
the down-comings of the same sledge. The simi-
larities among animal forms in general indicate
relationships, just as the similarities among the
races of men indicate racial consanguinities. All
men belong to the human species because they
are all fundamentally alike. But there are differ-
ences in the character of the hair, in the colour of
the skin, in the conformation of the skull, and in
the structure of the language, among the different
varieties of the species, indicating striking variety
in relationship and origin. An eminent biologist
has said that if Negroes and Caucasians were
snails they would be classed as entirely distinct
species of animals. Whether, as is thought by
some, the woolly-haired races are the descendants
of the African anthropoids, and the straight-
haired varieties are the posterity of the orangs
and gibbons, we may never know positively. But
we do know that these two great branches of
mankind must have different genealogies, extend-
ing to a remote antiquity, and that the varieties
belonging to each great group sustain to each
other the relations of a common kinship. English-
CONCLUSION 99
men look like each other, act like each other, and
speak the same language. So do Frenchmen and
Swedes and Chinese. Every people is peculiar.
This is not the result of accident or agreement,
but the result of law. Mongolians do not all have
short heads, yellow faces, slanting eyes, and promi-
nent malars because they have agreed to have
them, but as a result of a common pedigree.
Similarity of structure implies commonalty of
origin, and commonalty of origin means consan-
guinity.
And this is true whether you contemplate the
featural resemblances of brothers and sisters of
the same human parent, or those more funda-
mental characteristics which distinguish species,
orders, and sub-kingdoms. All animals are com-
posed of protoplasm, which is a compound of
clay, because all animals are descended from the
same first parents, protoplasmic organisms evolved
out of the elemental ooze. All vertebrates have
nerve-filled backbones with two pairs of ventrally
branching limbs, because the original ancestors of
the vertebrates had nerve-filled backbones with
two pairs of ventrally branching limbs. Insects
individually evolve from worms because worms
are their phylogenetic fathers and mothers. Man
has hands and a vertical spine, and walks on his
hind-limbs, not because he was fashioned in the
image of a god, but because his ancestors lived
among the trees. The habit of using the posterior
limbs for locomotion, and the anterior for pre-
hension, and the resulting perpendicular, are
7—2
100 THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP
peculiarities developed by our simian ancestors
wholly on account of the incentives to such
structure and posture afforded by '^oreal life.
These peculiarities would not likely have been
acquired by quadrupeds living upon and taking
their food from a perfectly level and treeless plain.
If there had been no forests on the earth, there-
fore, there would have been no incentive to the
perpendicular, and the ' human form divine ' would
have been inconceivably different from what it is
to-day. And if fishes had had three serial pairs
of Hmbs instead of two, and their posterity had
inherited them, as they certainly would have had
the foresight to do if they had had the opportunity,
the highest animals on the earth to-day, the
' paragons of creation,' would probably be two-
handed quadrupeds (centaurs) instead of two-
handed bipeds. And much more efficient and
ideal individuals they would have been in every
way than the rickety, peculiar, unsubstantial
plantigrades who, by their talent to talk, have
become the masters of the universe, and, by their
imaginations, ' divine.'
Kinship is universal. The orders, families,
species, and races of the animal kingdom are the
branches of a gigantic arbour. Every individual is
a cell, every species is a tissue, and every order is
an organ in the great surging, suffering, palpitat-
ing process. Man is simply one portion of the
immense enterprise. He is as veritably an animal
as the insect that drinks its little fill from his
veins, the ox he goads, or the wild-fox that flees
CONCLUSION loi
before his bellowings. Man is not a god, nor in
any imminent danger of becoming one. He is not
a celestial star-babe dropped down among mundane
matters for a time and endowed with wing possi-
bilities and the anatomy of a deity. He is a
mammal of the order of primates, not so lament-
able when we think of the hyena and the serpent,
but an exceedingly discouraging vertebrate com-
pared with what he ought to be. He has come
up from the worm and the quadruped. His
relatives dwell on the prairies and in the fields,
forests, and waves. He shares the honours and
partakes of the infirmities of all his kindred. He
walks on his hind-limbs like the ape ; he eats
herbage and suckles his young like the ox ; he
slays his fellows and fills himself with their blood
like the crocodile and the tiger ; he grows old and
dies, and turns to banqueting worms, like all that
come from the elemental loins. He cannot exceed
the winds like the hound, nor dissolve his image
in the mid-day blue like the eagle. He has not the
courage of the gorilla, the magnificence of the
steed, nor the plaintive innocence of the ring-dove.
Poor, pitiful, glory-hunting hideful ! Born into a
universe which he creates when he comes into it,
and clinging, like all his kindred, to a clod that
knows him not, he drives on in the preposterous
storm of the atoms, as helpless to fashion his fate
as the sleet that pelts him, and lost absolutely in
the somnambulism of his own being.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(i) Hartmann : Anthropoid Apes ; New York, 1901,
(2) QUATREFAGES : The Human Species ; New York,
1898.
(3) Tylor : Anthropology; New York, 1899.
(4) Haeckel : History of Creation, 2 vols. ; New York,
1896.
(5) Haeckel: The Riddle of the Universe; New York,
1901.
(6) Huxley : Man's Place in Nature ; New York, 1883.
(7) Jordan : Footnotes of Evolution ; New York, 1898.
(8) Darwin : Descent of Man, 2nd edit. ; London, 1874.
(9) Drummond : Ascent of Man; New York, 1894.
(10) Thompson: Outlines of Zoology, 3rd edit. ; Edinburgh,
1899.
(11) Huxley : On the Origin of Species, lecture iv.
THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
PAGE
I. THE CONFLICT OF SCIENCE AND TRADITION - I05
II. EVIDENCES OF PSYCHICAL EVOLUTION - - IIO
III. THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW - - - 1 46
IV. THE ELEMENTS OF HUMAN AND NON-HUMAN
MIND COMPARED - - - - 1 96
V. CONCLUSION . - . . . 232
103
' I SAW, deep in the eyes of the animals, the human soul
look out upon me.
' I saw where it was born down deep under feathers and
fur, or condemned for awhile to roam four-footed among the
brambles. I caught the clinging mute glance of the prisoner,
and swore that I would be faithful.
' Thee, my brother and sister, I see and mistake not. Do
not be afraid. Dwelling thus and thus for awhile, fulfilling
thy appointed time — thou too shalt come to thyself at last.
' Thy half-warm horns and long tongue lapping round my
wrist do not conceal thy humanity any more than the learned
talk of the pedant conceals his — for all thou art dumb we
have words and plenty between us. ' — EDWARD Carpenter.
104
THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
I. The Conflict of Science and Tradition.
The doctrine that on mankind's account all other
beings came into existence, and that non-human
beings are mere hunks of matter devoid of all
psychic qualities found in man, is a doctrine
about as sagacious as the old geocentric theory
of the universe. Conceit is a distinctly human
emotion. No other animal has it. But it has
been lavished upon man with a generosity suffi-
cient to compensate for its total absence from the
rest of the universe. Man has always overesti-
mated himself. In whatever age or province of
the world you look down on the human imagina-
tion, you find it industriously digging disparities
and establishing gulfs. Man, according to him-
self, has had great difficulty many times in the
history of the world in escaping the divine. Ac-
cording to the facts, he has only in recent bio-
logical times and after great labour and uncertainty
abandoned his tail and his all-fours. According
to himself, man was made ' in the image of his
maker,' and has been endowed with powers and
105
io5 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
properties peculiarly his own. According to the
facts, he has come into the world in a manner
identical with that of all other animals, and has
been endowed with like nature and destiny. Man
has never manifested a warmer or more indehcate
enthusiasm than the enthusiasm with which he
has appreciated himself. And with the same
ardour with which he has praised himself he has
maligned and misrepresented others. Man has
set himself up as the supreme judge and executive
of the world, and he has not hesitated to award to
himself the lion's share of everything. He has
ransacked his fancy for adjectives with which to
praise himself, and driven his inventive faculties
to the verge of distraction in search of justification
for his crimes upon those around him. Every
individual bent on deeds of darkness first seeks in
his own mind justification for his purposed sins.
And it is a caustic comment on the character of
human conviction that no enthusiastic criminal —
from the marauder of continents to the kitchen
pilferer— ever yet sought unsuccessfully at the
court of his conscience for a sinful permit. It
was an easy matter, therefore, for man — aided as
he was by such an experienced imagination — to
convince himself that all other animals were made
for him, that they were made without feeling or
intelligence, and that hence he was justified in
using in any way he chose the conveniences so
generously provided by an eccentric providence.
But Darwin has lived. Beings have come into
the world, we now know, through the operation of
THE CONFLICT OF SCIENCE T07
natural law. Man is not different from the rest.
The story of Eden is a fabrication, bequeathed to
us by our well-meaning but dimly-lighted ancestors.
There has been no more miracle in the origin of
the human species than in the origin of any other
species. And there is no more miracle in the origin
of a species than there is in the birth of a molecule
or in the breaking of a tired wave on the beach.
Man was not made in the image of the hypothetical
creator of heaven and earth, but in the image of
the ape. Man is not a fallen god, but a pro-
moted reptile. The beings around him are not
conveniences, but cousins. Instead of stretching
away to the stars, man's pedigree slinks down into
the sea. Horrible revelation ! Frightful anti-
thesis ! Instead of celestial genesis and a ' fall '
— long and doleful promotion. Instead of elysian
gardens and romance — the slime. Instead of a
god with royal nostrils miraculously animating an
immortal duplicate — a little lounging cellule, too
small to be seen and too senseless to distinguish
between midnight and noon. But the situation is
not half so horrible as it looks to be to those who
see only the skin of things. Is it not better, after
all, to be the honourable outcome of a straight-
forward evolution than the offspring of flunky-
loving celestials ? Are the illustrious children of
the ape less glorious than the sycophants of
irrational theological systems ? Darwin dealt in
his quiet way some malicious blows to human
conceit, but he also bequeathed to a misguided
world the elements of its ultimate redemption.
io8 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
The supposed psychical gulf between human
and non-human beings has no more existence,
outside the flamboyant imagination of man, than
has the once-supposed physical gulf. It is pure
fiction. The supposition is a relic of the rapidly
dwindling vanity of anthropocentricism, and is
perpetuated from age to age by human selfishness
and conceit. It has no foundation either in
science or in common-sense. Man strives to
lessen his guilt by the laudation of himself and
the disparagement and degradation of his victims.
Like the ostrich, who, pursued by death, impro-
vises an imaginary escape by plunging its head
into the desert, so man, pursued by the vengeful
correctives of his own conscience, fabricates a
fictitious innocence by the calumniation of those
upon whom he battens. But such excuses cannot
much longer hold out against the rising conscious-
ness of kinship. Psychology, like all other sciences,
is rapidly ceasing to attend exclusively to human
phenomena. It is lifting up its eyes and looking
about ; it is preparing to become comparative.
It has come to realise that the mind of man is but
a single shoot of a something which ramifies the
entire animal world, and that in order to under-
stand its subject it is necessary for it to familiarise
itself with the whole field of phenomenon. The
soul of man did not commence to be in the savage.
It commenced to be in the worm, whose life man
grinds out with his heel, and in the bivalve that
Bounders in his broth. The roots of conscious-
ness are in the sea. Side by side with physical
THE CONFLICT OF SCIENCE 109
evolution has gone on psychical evolution ; side
by side vi^ith the evolution of organs and tissues
has gone on the evolution of intellect, sensibility,
and will. Human nature and human mind are
no more sui generis than are human anatomy and
physiology. The same considerations that prove
that man's material organism is the cumulative
result of long evolution proclaim that human
mind, the immaterial concomitant of the material
organism, is also the cumulative result of long
evolution.
We might just as well recognise facts first as
last, for they will have to be recognised some time.
Truths are not put down by inhospitality — they
are simply put off. The universe has a policy, a
program. We may close our eyes to the facts
around us, hoping in this way to compel them to
pass away or be forgotten. But they do not pass
away, nor will they be forgotten. They simply
become invisible. They will live on and present
themselves to other minds or ages or climes more
hospitable or honest than our own. The only
proper attitude of mind to assume toward the
various doctrines existing among men is the
attitude of perfect willingness to believe anything
— anything that appeals to us as being reasonable
and right. The great majority of men, however,
are intellectual solids — unable to move and un-
willing to think. They have certain beliefs to which
they are determined to hold on, and everything that
does not fit in with these behefs is rejected as a
matter of course.
THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
Evidences of Psychical Evolution.
hat mind has evolved, and that there is a
;hical kinship, an actual consanguinity of
:ngs and ideas, among all the forms of animal
is proved incontestably by the following facts :
, The evolution of mind is implied by the fact
:he evolution of structures. ' I hold,' says
nanes, in the introduction to his great vi^ork
' Mental Evolution,' ' that, if the doctrine of
inic evolution is accepted, it carries with it,
L necessary corollary, the doctrine of mental
ution.' It makes no difference what theory
adopt regarding the essential natures of the
sical and the psychical — whether we agree with
materialist that mind is an attribute of matter,
I the idealist that matter is a creation of mind,
I the monist that mind and body are only
rent aspects of the same central entity, or
1 the dualist that body and soul are two distinct
temporarily dependent existences — we must
ny case recognise the fact, which is perceived
ill, that there is an ever-faithful parallel he-
rn the neural and psychical phenomena of
y organism. And if the elements which
r into and make up the physical structure of
have been derived from, and determined by,
eding forms of hfe, the elements which enter
and make up the psychical counterpart of
physical have also, without any doubt, been
rited from, and determined by, ancestral life
IS.
PSYCHICAL EVOLUTION iii
2. Closely allied to the foregoing reason for a
belief in the evolution of mind is that derived from
a comparative survey of the nervous system in
man and other animals. In man, mind is closely
associated with a certain tissue or system of
tissues — nerve tissue or the nervous system. That
mind is correlated with nerve structure, and that
mental anatomy may be learned from a study of
the anatomy of the nervous system, especially of
the brain, is the basic postulate of the science of
physiological psychology. Now, nerve cells exist
in all animals above the sponge, and a compara-
tively well-developed nervous system is found even
among many of the invertebrates, as the higher
worms, crustaceans, insects, and mollusks. The
nervous system of invertebrates, though composed
of the same kind of tissue, is constructed accord-
ing to a somewhat different plan of architecture
from that of the vertebrates. But in all of the
great family of backboned animals the nervous
system is built on the same general plan as in
man, with a cerebro-spinal trunk extending from
the head along the back and motory and sensory
nerves ramifying to all parts of the body. There
is also a sympathetic nervous system in all animals
down as far as the insects. The brain, which is
the most important part of the nervous system, and
which has been called the 'organ of consciousness,'
presents throughout the animal kingdom, from
its beginning in the worms to man, a graduated
series of increasing complication proceeding out
of the same fundamental type. This is especially
112 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
true of the vertebrates. Fishes, amphibians,
reptiles, birds, and mammals, all have in their
brains the same primary parts, the same five
fundamental divisions, as are found in the brain
of man. Hence, whatever may be thought about
the mental states of invertebrates, we have the
right, in the case of the vertebrate orders of life,
to infer, from the general similarity of their
nervous system to our own, that they have a
corresponding similarity to ourselves in mental
constitution and experience.
3. The evolution of mind is suggested by the
existence in the animal world of all grades of
intelligence, from almost mindless forms to forms
even exceeding in some respects the mental
attainments of men. The jelly-fish and the
philosopher are not mental aliens. They are
linked to each other by a continuous gradation of
intermediate intelligences. The existence of these
grades of mental development suggest psychical
evolution and kinship, just as the existence of like
grades of structural development suggest physical
evolution.
4. In the mental life of animals the same
factors of evolution exist as those by means of
which organic structures have been brought into
existence, and it is reasonable to suppose that the
operation of these factors have produced in the
mental world results analogous to those produced
by the operation of the same factors among organic
structures.
Men and other animals vary in their natures
PSYCHICAL EVOLUTION 113
and mental faculties quite as much as they do in
colour, size, and shape. It is commonly supposed
that the mental and temperamental variety existing
among individual men does not exist among indi-
vidual birds, quadrupeds, insects, etc. But a little
observation or reflection ought to be enough to
convince anyone that such a supposition belongs
to that batch of pre-Darwinian mistakes presented
to us by an over-generous past. We are not ac-
quainted with the inhabitants of our fields and
barn-yards. We are almost as ignorant of the
mental life and personality of these door-yard
neighbours and friends of ours as we would be if
they were the inhabitants of another continent.
That is why our obtuse minds lump them together
so indiscriminately — we do not know anything
about them. We never take the trouble, or think
it worth while, to get acquainted with them,
much less to study and know them. We have
grown up in the falsehood that they are altogether
different from what we are, and that it is really
not worth while to bother our gigantic heads
about them, except to use them when it comes
handy, or kick them to one side, or execute them,
when they get in the way. Everybody else looks
at the matter in about the same way, so we just
let it go at that.
There is a sameness about foreigners and other
classes of human beings with whom we are but
slightly, or not at all, acquainted, until we come
to know them and can discriminate one from
another, I remember once asking my sister, if
114 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
her baby, which looked to me like all other
babies I had ever seen, were mixed up with a lot
of other babies of about the same age, whether
she could pick hers out from all the rest, and she
gave me an unmistakable affirmative by answering,
* What a foolish question !'
There is less variety among the individuals of
non-human races than among individual men,
just as there is less variety among individual
savages than among the members of a civilised
community. But there is mental diversity among
all beings, and we only need to whittle our obser-
vation a little to recognise the fact. You never
hear the keeper of a menagerie or any intelligent
associate of dogs, horses, birds, or insects say
there is no individuality among these animals.
Brehm, the great German naturalist, assures us
that each individual monkey of all those he kept
tame in Africa had its own peculiar temper and
disposition. And this is no more than what
everyone who knows anything about it knows to
be true of dogs, horses, cats, cattle, birds, and
even fishes and insects. Any intelligent dog-
fancier or pigeon-fancier can tell you the personal
peculiarities of every one of the fifty or a hundred
dogs or pigeons in his charge. He has watched
and studied them since they came into existence,
and through this continuous association he has
come to know them. He simply makes discrimina-
tions that are not made by the casual or superficial
observer. The Laplander knows and names each
reindeer in his herd, though to a stranger they are
PSYCHICAL EVOLUTION 115
all as much alike as the multitudes on an ant-hill.
The Peckhams of Milwaukee, those indefatigable
investigators of spiders and insects, are constantly
telling us of the wonderful individuality possessed
by these lowly lessees of our fields and gardens.
In their work on ' The Habits and Instincts of the
Solitary Wasps,' speaking of the ammophiles, these
authors say : ' In this species, as in every one that
we have studied, we have found a most interesting
variation among the different individuals, not only
in methods, but in character and intellect. While
one was beguiled from her hunting by every sorrel
blossom she passed, another stuck to her work
with indefatigable perseverance. While one stung
her caterpillars so carelessly and made her nest in
so shiftless a way that her young could survive
only through some lucky chance, another devoted
herself to these duties not only with conscientious
earnestness, but with an apparent craving after
artistic perfection that was touching to see.' The
variation in the mental phenomena of animals,
including man, is partly innate, and partly the
result of environment or education.
Animals not only vary in their mental qualities,
but they also inherit these variations, just as they
do physical properties and peculiarities. Evidence
of this is furnished by every new being that
comes into the world. Insanity runs in fami-
lies, and so does genius and criminality. Even
the most trifling idiosyncrasies are often trans-
mitted, not only by men, but also by dogs, horses,
and other animals. Such qualities of mind as
8—2
ii6 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
courage, fidelity, good and bad temper, intelligence,
timidity, special tastes and aptitudes, are cer-
tainly transmitted in all the higher orders of
animal life.
Animals are also selected, are enabled to survive
in the struggle for life quite as much through the
possession by them of certain mental qualities as
on account of their physical characters. Whether
the selections are made by nature or by man, they
are not determined by the physical facts of size,
strength, speed, and the like, more than by cunning,
courage, sagacity, skill, industry, devotion, ferocity,
tractability, and other mental properties. The
fittest survive, and the fittest may be the most
timid or analytic as well as the most powerful.
No better illustration of this truth can be found
than that furnished by man himself. Man is by
nature a comparatively feeble animal. He is
neither large nor powerful. Yet he has been
selected to prosper over all other animals because
of his ingenuity, sympathy, and art. The great
feeling and civilisation of higher men have been
built up by slow accretion due to the operation of
the law of survival extending over vast measures
of time. Creeds and instincts, governments and
impulses, forms of thought and forms of expres-
sion, have struggled and survived just as have
cells and species. A struggle for existence is
constantly going on, as Max Miiller has pointed
out, even among the words and grammatical
forms of every language. The better, shorter,
easier forms are constantly gaining the ascendancy,
PSYCHICAL EVOLUTION 117
and the longer and more cumbrous expressions
grow obsolete.
If, therefore, the higher types of mind have not
come into existence as have the higher types of
structure, through evolution from simpler and
more generalised forms, it has not been due to
the absence of the factors necessary for bringing
about this evolution.
5. The presumption created by the existence of
the factors of psychic evolution is strengthened by
the facts of artificial selection. We know mind
can evolve, for it has done so in many cases. The
races of domesticated animals, the races whom
man has exploited and preyed upon during the
past several thousand years, have, many of them,
been completely changed in character and intelli-
gence through human selection. Old instincts
have been wiped out and new ones implanted. In
many instances the psychology has been not only
revolutionised, but remade.
Take, for instance, the dog. The dog is a
reformed bandit. It is a revised wolf or jackal.
It has been completely transformed by human
selection ; indeed, it may be said that the dog
in the last ten or fifteen thousand years has
made greater advances in sagacity and civilisation
than any other animal, scarcely even excepting
man. Man has made wonderful strides along
purely intellectual lines, but in the improvement
of his emotions he has not been so successful.
The rapid development of the dog in feeling and
intelligence has no doubt been due to the fact that
ii8 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
his utility to man has always depended largely on
his good sense and fidelity, and man has persis-
tently emphasised these quahties in his selection.
Fierceness and distrust — two of the most promi-
nent traits in the psychology of the primitive dog
— have been entirely eradicated in the higher races
of dogs. There is not anywhere on the face of
the earth a more trustful, affectionate, and docile
being than this one-time cut-throat. Whether
the dog has been derived from the wolf or from
some wild canine race now extinct, or from several
distinct ancestors, he must have had originally a
fierce, distrustful, and barbaric nature, for all of
the undomesticated members of the dog family —
wolves, foxes, jackals, etc. — have natures of this
sort.
There are about 175 different races of domestic
dogs. They represent almost as great a range of
development as do the races of men. Some of
them are exceedingly primitive, while others are
highly intelligent and civilised. The Eskimo dogs
are really nothing but wolves that have been
trained to the service of man. They look like
wolves, and have the wolf psychology. They are
not able to bark, like ordinary dogs ; they howl
like wolves, and their ears stand up straight, like
the ears of all wild Canids. Some of the more
advanced of the canine races — like the sheep-dogs,
pointers, and St. Bernards — are animals of great
sympathy and sensibility. When educated, these
dogs are almost human in their impulses and in
their powers of discernment. In patience, vigi-
PSYCHICAL EVOLUTION iig
lance, and devotion to duty, they are superior to
many men. At a word, or even a look, from its
master, the loyal collie will gather the sheep scat-
tered for miles around to the place designated,
and do it with such tact and expedition as to
command admiration. It has been said that if it
were not for this faithful and competent canine
the highlands of Scotland would be almost useless
for sheep-raising purposes, because of the greater
expense that would be entailed if men were em-
ployed. One collie will do the work of several
men, and will do it better, and the generous-
hearted creature pours out its services like water.
It requires no compensation except table refuse
and a straw bed. In South America sheep-dogs
are trained to act as shepherds and assume the
whole responsibility of tending the flock. ' It is a
common thing,' says Darwin, ' to meet a large
flock of sheep guarded by one or two dogs, at a
distance of some miles from any house or man.'
When the dogs get hungry, they come home for
food, but immediately return to the flock on being
fed. ' It is amusing,' remarks this writer, ' to
observe, when approaching a flock, how the dog
immediately advances barking, while the sheep
all close in his rear as around the oldest ram.'
Romanes relates an incident which well illus-
trates the high character and intelligence of the
dog and its wonderful devotion to a trust. ' It
was a Scotch collie. Her master was in the habit
of consigning sheep to her charge without super-
vision. On this particular occasion he remained
120 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
behind or proceeded by another road. On arriving
at home late in the evening, he was astonished to
learn that his faithful animal had not made her
appearance with the drove. He immediately set
out in search of her. But on going out into the
streets, there she was coming with the drove, not
one missing, and, marvellous to relate, she was
carrying a young puppy in her mouth. She had
been taken in travail on the hills, and how the
poor creature had contrived to manage her drove
in her condition is beyond human calculation, for
her road lay through sheep all the way. Her
master's heart smote him when he saw what she
had suffered and effected. But she was nothing
daunted, and after depositing her young one in a
place of safety she again set out full speed for the
hills, and brought another and another, till she
brought the whole litter, one by one ; but the last
one was dead'(i).
What a wonderful transformation in canine
character ! The very beings whose blood the dog
once drank with ravenous thirst it now protects
with courage and fidelity. And this transforma-
tion in character is not due to education simply.
It is innate. Young dogs brought from Tierra
del Fuego or Australia, where the natives do not
keep such domestic animals as sheep, pigs, and
poultry, invariably have an incurable propensity
for attacking these animals.
The feeling of ownership possessed by so many
dogs is an entirely new element in canine char-
acter, a trait implanted wholly by human selection.
PSYCHICAL EVOLUTION 121
Bold and confident on his own premises, the dog
immediately becomes weak and apologetic when
placed in circumstances in which he feels he has
no rights.
The pointers and setters have been developed
as distinct breeds by human selection during the
past 150 or 200 years.
What is true of the dog is true also, to a large
extent, of the cat, cow, horse, sheep, goat, fowl,
and other domestic animals. Serene and peaceful
puss is the tranquillised descendant of the wild
cat of Egypt, one of the most untamable of all
animals. The migratory instinct, so strong in
wild water-fowl, is almost absent from our geese
and ducks, as is the fighting propensity (prominent
in the Indian jungle-bird) from most varieties of
the domesticated chicken. There are now as
many as a hundred different kinds of domesticated
animals, and there is scarcely one of these animals
that has not been profoundly changed in character
during the period of its domestication. There are
much greater changes in some races than in others.
Some races have been much longer in captivity
than others. And then, too, there is great differ-
ence in the degree of plasticity in different races,
the races of ancient origin being much more fixed
in their psychology than those of more recent
beginnings. In some races, too — as in the sheep
— the selections made by man have been made
primarily with reference to certain physical
qualities, and in these cases the mental qualities
have been only incidentally affected. In Poly-
122 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
nesia, where it is selected for its flavour instead of
for its fleetness or intelligence, the dog is said to
be a very stupid animal. But in most cases of
domestication the changes wrought by selection
in the mental make-up of the race have been fully
as great as the changes in body, and in some
instances much greater. And the process by
which these great changes in psychology have
been effected is in principle identically the same
as that by which mental evolution in general is
assumed to have been brought about.
6. The evolution of mind in the animal world
in general is suggested by the fact that mind in
man has evolved. The rich, luminous intellect
of civilised man, with its art, science, law, litera-
ture, government, and morality, has been evolved
from the rude, raw, demon-haunted mind of the
savage. Evidence of this evolution is furnished
by the recorded facts of human history, by the
antiquarian collections of our museums, and by
a study of existing savages.
History everywhere has come out of the night,
out of the deep gloom of the unrecorded. But it
has not leaped forth like lightning out of the
darkness. It has dawned, night being succeeded
by the amorphous shadows of legend and tradition,
and these in turn by the attested events of true
history. Almost every civilised people can trace
back its genealogy to a time when it was repre-
sented on the earth by one or more tribes of
savage or half- savage ancestors. The Anglo-
Saxons go back to the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes,
PSYCHICAL EVOLUTION 123
three semi-savage tribes who came to England
from the borderlands of the Baltic fourteen or
fifteen centuries ago. The French are the de-
scendants of the Gauls, who formed the scattered
population of warring and superstitious tribes
referred to by Julius Caesar in the opening lines
of his ' Commentaries.' The blue-eyed Germans
came from the Cimbri, the Goths, and the Vandals,
those bold, wild hordes who charged out of the
north to battle with the power of Rome. And all
of the Aryan races — English, German, Italian,
Scandinavian, Russian, Roman, Greek, and Persian
— trace their ancestry back, by means of common
languages and legends, to a time when they were
wandering tribes of nomads tenting somewhere
on the plains of transcaspian Asia.
In all our museums there are collections of the
relics of prehistoric peoples. These collections
consist of objects upon which men in distant ages
of the world have wrought — their weapons, orna-
ments, utensils, implements, and playthings —
which have been saved from the teeth of Time
by their durability. The character of the minds
which operated on these objects, which produced
and used them, may be inferred from the character
of the objects, just as the life and surroundings of
an ancient animal or plant may be inferred from
its fossil. These relics are of stone, bone, bronze,
and iron. They are found in almost every region
of the earth — all over Europe and its islands, in
western and central Asia, in China and Japan, in
Malay, Australia, and New Zealand, in the islands
124 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
of the Pacific, and throughout the length and
breadth of America. They antedate human history
by thousands of years. They are the ruins of the
Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age of
mankind. In all of these remains there is evidence
of a slow but gradual improvement as we approach
the present. There are places on the earth where
the evolution of human implements, from the
rudest chipped stones to the comparatively finished
products of historic peoples, is epitomised in the
deposits of a few feet in depth. One of these
occurs at Chelles, a suburb of Paris, and was
made the subject of a paper by Professor Packard
in the Popular Science Monthly for May, 1902.
Here three distinct layers, containing human
remains entirely different in character from each
other, appear within a depth of 30 feet from the
surface. The lowest bed, a layer of pebbles and
sand, and probably preglacial in origin, contains
the famous Chellean ' axes,' rude almond-shaped
implements of chipped flint, and used by these
ancient inhabitants by being held in the hand.
In this bed are also found the bones of the straight-
tusked elephant, cave-bear, big-nosed rhinoceros,
and other species now extinct. The next bed is
the interglacial, and contains implements entirely
different from the one below it, among which are
skin-scrapers and lance-points. The animal re-
mains of this bed are also different from those
found in the bed below, and include animals like
the musk-ox and the reindeer, which were probably
driven to this southern clime from more northern
PSYCHICAL EVOLUTION 125
regions by the excessive cold of the time. The
third bed, which lies just below the surface soils,
contains polished stone axes and other remains of
human industry cotemporaneous with the Swiss
lake-dwellers. From the swamps and loams are
sometimes dug up the remains of Gallo-Roman
civilisations — Gallic coins, serpentine axes, and
bronzes of the time of the Antonines.
No one can fully realise the vast advance that
has been made by the human mind until he has
looked upon a savage — has seen the savage in his
native haunts attacking the problems of his daily
life, and has tasted of his philosophy and disposi-
tion. The savage is the ancestor of all higher men.
When we look upon the savage, we look upon the
infancy of the human world. All of the laws,
languages, sciences, governments, religions, and
philosophies of civilised man, or nearly all of them
at any rate, are the exfoliated laws, languages,
sciences, governments, religions, and philosophies
of savages. It is impossible to understand the
laws of civilised societies without a knowledge of
the laws of savage societies. The same thing is
true of government, religion, and philosophy —
and of human nature itself. Human nature as
exhibited by civilised men and women — I mean
men and women with a veneering of civility, not
really civilised folks, for there are none of them
on the earth — is a perpetual enigma unless it is
illumined by restrospection, by a comparative
study of human nature, by a study of human
nature as seen in more and more primitive men
126 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
and women. The mind of the savage, as com-
pared with that of civiHsed man, is exceedingly
primitive. The picture drawn by Gilbraith of the
North American Sioux is a typical picture of
savage life and character. Gilbraith lived among
these tribes for several years, and was thoroughly
acquainted with them. He says :
' They are bigoted, barbarous, and exceedingly
superstitious. They regard most of the vices as
virtues. Theft, arson, rape, and murder are re-
garded by them as the means of distinction. The
young Indian is taught from childhood to regard
killing as the highest of virtues. In their dances
and at their feasts, the warriors recite their deeds
of theft, pillage, and slaughter as precious things ;
and the highest, indeed the only, ambition of the
young brave is to secure " the feather," which is
but the record of his having murdered, or partici-
pated in the murder of, some human being —
whether man, woman, «r child, it is im-
material' (19).
'Conscience,' says Burton, 'does not exist in
East Africa, and " repentance " simply expresses
regret for missed opportunities for crime. Robbery
makes an honorable man ; and murder, the more
atrocious the crime the better, makes the hero ' (2).
Many things appear natural and self-evident to
the savage which seem to us actually revolting.
When the Fuegians are hard pressed by want,
they kill their old women for food rather than
their dogs, saying : ' Old women no use ; dogs
kill otters.' 'What!' said a negro to Burton,
PSYCHICAL EVOLUTION 127
' am I to starve while my sister has children
whom she can sell ?'
Lubbock, in his great work on ' The Origin of
Civilisation,' cites hundreds of instances of savage
rudeness and simplicity which seem almost in-
credible to one accustomed all his life to types of
human character such as are found in Europe and
America. For instance, ' when the natives of the
Lower Murray first saw pack-oxen, some of them
were frightened and took them for demons with
spears on their heads, while others thought they
were the wives of the settlers, because they carried
the baggage.' Speaking of the wild men in the
interior of Borneo, this writer says : ' They live
absolutely in a state of nature, neither cultivating
the ground nor living in huts. They eat neither
rice nor salt, and do not associate with each
other, but rove about the woods like wild beasts.
The sexes meet in the jungle. When the children
are old enough to shift for themselves, they usually
separate, neither one afterwards thinking of the
other. At night they sleep under some large
tree whose branches hang low. They fasten the
children to the branches in a kind of swing, and
build a fire around the tree to protect them from
snakes and wild beasts. The poor creatures are
looked on and treated by the other Dyaks as wild
beasts.' Lubbock sums up his conclusions on the
morality of savages in the following pathetic
acknowledgment : ' I do not remember a single
instance in which a savage is recorded as having
shown any symptoms of remorse ; and almost the
128 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
only case I can call to mind in which a man
belonging to one of the lower races has accounted
for an act by saying explicitly that it was right,
was when Mr. Hunt asked a young Figian why
he had killed his mother ' (3).
A few pages further on, the same author adds,
regarding the deplorable state of morality among
savages : ' That there should be races of men so
deficient in moral feeling was altogether opposed
to the preconceived ideas with which I com-
menced the study of savage life, and I have
arrived at the conviction by slow degrees, and
even with reluctance. I have, however, been
forced to this conclusion, not only by the direct
statements of travellers, but also by the general
tenor of their remarks, and especially by the
remarkable absence of repentance and remorse
among the lowest races of men.' Among ourselves
the words used to distinguish right and wrong are
metaphors. Right originally meant ' straight,' and
wrong meant 'twisted.' Language existed, there-
fore, before morality ; for if moral ideas had
preceded language, there would have been original
words to stand for them. ReHgion, according to
Lubbock, has no moral aspect or influence except
among the more advanced races of men. 'The
deities of savages are evil, not good ; they may be
forced into compliance with the wishes of man ;
they generally delight in bloody, and often require
human, sacrifices ; they are mortal, not immortal ;
they are to be approached by dances rather than
by prayers ; and often approve what we call vice
PSYCHICAL EVOLUTION 129
rather than what we esteem as virtue. In fact,
the so-called religion of the lower races of man-
kind bears somewhat the same relation to religion
in its higher forms as astrology does to astronomy
or alchemy to chemistry ' (3).
Savages have few general ideas of any kind, as
is evidenced by the almost total absence among
them of words denoting general ideas. Many savage
races cannot comprehend numbers greater than
five or six, and are unable to make the simplest
mathematical computations without using the
fingers. The languages of savages are extremely
rude, words being freely pieced out with panto-
mime. Savages talk with difficulty in the dark,
because of their great reliance on gesture in con-
versation. The rich vocabularies of the languages
of Europe and America have grown up step by
step with the evolution of European and American
mind. Every language is an evolution. The
languages of many primitive peoples lack the verb
to be entirely, and all nouns are proper nouns.
Words are often little more than grunts or clucks,
and are without the euphony and articulation found
in the languages of the civilised. Darwin says
that the language of the Fuegians sounds like a
man clearing his throat. Not only every language,
but every word, both in its form and meaning,
is in process of evolution. Spirit, for instance,
originally meant 'blov/ing,' understanding meant
' getting beneath,' and development the physical act
of 'unfolding.' Words are continually drifting
from their original meanings under the stress of
9
130 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
incessant use, as ships drag their anchors in a
gale. Those words that are exposed to common
use undergo the most rapid changes, while words
sheltered from the rush of human affairs, like
harboured ships, hold to their moorings forever.
Let, for instance, once meant ' hinder ' ; now it
means ' allow.' Bisect, on the other hand, a
word of rare and technical use, has remained
unaltered in significance for twenty centuries.
Even our alphabet has been evolved. The
twenty-six symbols composing it have been eroded
into the peculiar forms in which they appear at
present by the various peoples through whose hands
they have come to us. The originals were picto-
graphs such as are still found on the aged monu-
ments of earth's earliest civilisations. The English
got their alphabet from the Romans, who obtained
it, along with almost everything else they had,
from the Greeks. The Greeks received it from the
Phenicians, and the Phenicians from the papyrus
writers of Egypt, who in turn procured it from
those hieroglyph chiselers who carved their curious
literatures on the granite tombs of the Nile in the
remotest dawn of human history. A, the first
letter of our alphabet, is a figure which has been
evolved, as the result of long wear and tear, from
the picture of an eagle; B was originally the
picture of a crane ; C represents a throne ; D a
hand ; F an asp ; H a sieve ; K a bowl ; L a
lioness ; M an owl ; N a water-line ; R a mouth ;
S a garden ; T a lassoo ; X a chairback ; and Z
a duck.
PSYCHICAL EVOLUTION 131
The psychology of civihsed man, though derived
from that of the savage, and hence resembhng it
fundamentally, is, nevertheless, very different from
it, both in character and in what it contains.
The mind of the savage is rude, unresourceful,
vicious, and childlike, while that of the civilised
man or woman may be overflowing with wisdom
and benignity. This gulf has not been covered
by a stride, but by the slow operation of the
same laws of Inheritance, Variation, and Selec-
tion by which all progress has been brought
about.
7. Degeneration is a necessary part of the pro-
cess of organic evolution. All progress, whether
anatomical, intellectual, or social, takes place
through selection, and selection means the pining
and ultimate passing away of that which is left. In
individual evolution it is organs, ideas, and traits
of character that are eliminated, and in social
evolution it is customs and institutions. One of
the reasons given in the preceding chapter for
the belief in the evolution of structures is the
existence in man and other animals of vestigial
organs, organs which in lower forms of life are
useful, but which in higher forms are represented
by useless or even injurious remnants. Similar
remnants are found in the psychology of man and
other animals. These vestiges of mind are not so
easily recognised as the vestiges of structure,
but they are everywhere. We find them in the
antiquated instincts of man and the domestic
animals, in the silent letters and worn-out words
9—2
132 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
of languages, and in the emaciated remains of
abandoned beliefs and institutions.
The hunting and fishing instinct of civilised
man is a vestigial instinct, normal in the savage,
but without either sense or decency among men
devoted to industrial pursuits. The savage hunts
and fishes because he is hungry, never for pastime ;
civilised men and women do so because they are
too mechanical to assort their impulses. Civilised
man is a mongrel, a cross between a barbarian
and a god. His psychology is a compound of the
jungle and the sky. In their loftier moments,
many men are able to obscure the cruder facts of
their origin and to put into temporary operation
those more splendid processes of mind which
characterise their ideals. But even the most civil-
ised are forever haunted by the returning ghosts
of departed propensities — propensities which grew
up in ages of hate, which are now out-of-date, but
which in the trying tedium of daily life come
back and usurp the high places in human nature.
Revenge, hate, cruelty, pugnacity, selfishness,
vanity, and the like, are all more or less vestigial
among men who have entered seriously on the
life of altruism. Like the vermiform appendix
and the human tail, these old obsolete parts of the
human mind are destined, in the ripening of the
ages, to waste away and disappear through disuse.
The practice of the dog of turning round two or
three times before lying down is in response to an
instinct which was no doubt beneficial to it in its
wild life, when it was wont to make its bed in the
PSYCHICAL EVOLUTION 133
grasses, but which is now a pure waste of time.
Darwin records it as a fact, that he has himself
seen a simple-minded dog turn round twenty times
before lying down. The sheep-killing mania,
which sometimes comes over dogs when three or
four of them get together and become actuated by
the ' mob ' spirit, is a vestige of the old instinct of
the carnivore which centuries of domestication
have not yet quite erased. Goodness, if too
prolonged, becomes irksome to dogs for the same
reason that it does to men. Dogs have come
from savages just as men have, and, while the
civilised nature of the dog is more constitutional
than that of civilised man, the old deposed instincts
mount to the throne once in awhile, and the faith-
ful collie is for the time being a wolf again. The
instinct of domestic sheep to imitate their leader
in leaping over obstacles is another probable
survival of wild life. If a bar or other obstacle
be placed where the leader of a flock of sheep is
compelled to leap over it, and the obstacle is then
removed, the entire band of followers will leap at
the same place regardless of the fact that the
obstruction is no longer there. No other animals
do this. The instinct is probably a survival of
wild life, when these animals, pursued by their
enemies over chasms and precipices, were com-
pelled to imitate in the flight those in front of
them in order to live. Darwin thinks the donkey
shows its aboriginal desert nature in its aversion
for crossing the smallest stream, and its relish for
rolling in the dust. The same aversion for every-
134 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
thing aquatic exists also in the cameh Quails kept
in captivity, I am told, persist in scratching at
the pan when they are feeding, just as they would
need to do, and were accustomed to do, among the
leaves and grasses of the groves. The restlessness
of cage-birds and domestic fowls at migrating
time, the mimic dipping and sporting of ducks
when confined to a terrestrial habitat, the grave
marshalling of geese by the chief gander of the
band, the ferocity of cows, ewes, and the females
of other domestic animals during the first few
days of motherhood, the hunting instinct of dogs
kept as shepherds and pets, the squatting of
young pigs when suddenly alarmed — all of these
are vestigial instincts, functional in the wild state,
but now useless and absurd.
The silent letters and superannuated words and
phrases found everywhere in literature are the
vestigial parts of language. Every silent letter
was originally sounded, and every obsolete word
was at one time used. In the French word, temps,
for instance, which means 'time,' neither the ^
nor the s is sounded. But in the Latin word
tempus, from which the French word is derived,
all of the letters are sounded.
Man has been defined as a creature of habit.
As he has done a thing once, or as his ancestors
have done a thing, so he does it again. By
precept and example he transmits to each new
generation the customs, beliefs, and points of
view which he has invented. Social changes take
place with extreme moderation. The drowsy ages
PSYCHICAL EVOLUTION 135
take plenty of time to get anywhere. Civilisation
is lazy, deliberate, unimpassioned. It loafs and
hesitates. It holds on to the past. Living civilisa-
tions always drag behind them a trail of traditions
from dead civilisations. Religions and philosophies
change, and creeds and governments flow into
strange and undreamed-of forms ; but their person-
alities survive, their souls live on, their remnants,
transmitted as traditions from generation to
generation, defy the meddlings of innovators.
Hence in every society there are forms and cere-
monies, laws and customs, games and symbols,
etc., which have been completely diverted from
their original purposes, or which have become
so reduced in importance as to be of no use.
Spencer has shown that the forms of salutation in
vogue among civilised societies are the vestiges of
primitive ceremonial used to denote submission.
The May Day festivals with which the opening
spring is usually hailed are the much-modified
survivals of pagan festivals in honour of plant and
animal fecundity. Superstition and folklore are
vestigial opinions. The gorgeous Easter egg is a
survival of a dawn myth older than the Pyramids,
and our Christmas dinner is a reminiscence of a
cannibal carnival celebrating the turning back
of the sun at the winter solstice (Brinton). In
the English government, where democracy has
in recent centuries made such inroads on the
monarchy, there are numerous examples of vesti-
gial institutions — institutions which continue to
exist purely because they have existed in the past,
136 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
but which were functional a few centuries ago.
The supreme office itself is one of these. The
King represents the petered-out tail-end of a privi-
lege which in the time of the early Stuarts was
almost unlimited. Similar vestiges exist in the
United States, where the national spirit during
the last century and a half has so completely
wiped out colonialism. Such are the Town
Meetings of Boston and of New Haven. The
earliest form of human marriage was marriage by
capture. The man stole the woman and carried her
away by force. This form of marriage was in the
course of evolution succeeded by marriage through
purchase. A man anxious to become a husband
could do so by paying to the father a stipulated
amount of cash or cattle for his daughter. This
second form of marriage finally evolved into mar-
riage arranged by direct and peaceful negotiation
between the prospective husband and wife. This
is the form most commonly employed at the
present time among the more advanced societies
of men. But in the ceremonies which surround
the nuptial event among civilised peoples survive
vestiges of many of the facts associated with
aboriginal marriages. A marriage in high life is
a sort of epitome of the evolution of the institu-
tion. The coyness and hesitancy of the woman
in accepting the offers of her proposed spouse are
the lineal descendants of the original reluctance
of her savage sisters. The wedding-ring is the
old token accepted by the woman when she
gave her pledge of bondage. The coming of the
PSYCHICAL EVOLUTION 137
groom with his aids to the marriage is a figura-
tive marauding expedition. The honeymoon is
the abduction. And the charivari and missile-
throwing indulged in by friends and relatives on
the departure of the wedded twain is a good-
humoured counterfeit of the armed protest made
by relatives of old when a bride-snatcher came
among them (4).
The vestiges found everywhere in the mental
and social phenomena of man and other animals
have arisen as necessary facts in the process of
mental evolution. They are the vermiform appen-
dices of the mind.
8. One of the strongest reasons for a belief in
the physical evolution of animal species is that
furnished by individual evolution. Each individual
animal recapitulates in a wonderful manner the
phylogenesis of its species. Now, it is extremely
significant that a similar parallel exists in the
case of mental evolution. Each individual mind
ascends through a series of mental faculties which
epitomises in a remarkable manner the psycho-
genesis of the animal kingdom.
The human child is not born with a full-grown
mind any more than with a full-grown body. It
grows. It exfoliates. It ripens with the years.
It begins in infancy at the zero-point, and in
manhood or womanhood may blaze with genius
and philanthropy.
But the mind of the child not only unfolds : it
unfolds in a certain order, the more complex
parts and the more civilised emotions invariably
138 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
appearing last. The initial powers of the new-
born babe are those of sensation and perception.
The babe cannot think. It has no feeling of
fear, no affection, no sympathy, and no shame.
It can see, and hear, and taste, and feel pain
and satisfaction — and these are about all. Even
these are vague and confused. In a week the
perceptions are more sharp and vivid, more
distinct and orderly. Memory arises. Memory
is the power of reproducing past impressions. At
three weeks the emotions begin to sprout. The
first to make their appearance are fear and
surprise. When the babe is seven weeks old the
social affections show themselves, and the simplest
acts of association are performed. At the age of
twelve weeks jealousy and anger may be expected,
together with simple exhibitions of association
by similarity. At fourteen weeks affection and
reason dawn. Sympathy germinates at about the
age of five months ; pride and resentment ger-
minate at eight months ; grief, hate, and benevo-
lence at ten months ; and shame and remorse at
fifteen months.
Now, the remarkable thing about this is that
this is the order, or very much like the order, in
which mind in the animal kingdom as a whole
has apparently evolved. The lower orders of
animal life have none of the higher emotions and
none of the more complicated processes of mind.
There is no shame in the reptile, no dissimulation
in the fish, no sympathy in the moUusk, and no
memory in the sponge. Memory dawns in the
PSYCHICAL EVOLUTION 139
echinoderms, or somewhere near the radiate stage
of development, and fear and surprise in the
worms. Pugnacity makes its appearance in the
insects, imagination in the spiders, and jealousy
in the fishes. Pride, emulation, and resentment
originate in the birds ; grief and hate in the
carnivora ; shame and remorse among dogs and
monkeys; and superstition in the savage (i).
It is also an important fact bearing on the
general problem of evolution, that the civilised
child, from about the age of one on, is a sort of
synopsis, rude but unmistakable, of the historic
evolution of the human race. The child is a
savage. It has the emotions of the savage, the
savage's conceptions of the world, and the desires,
pastimes, and ambitions of the savage. It hates
work, and takes delight in hunting, fishing, fight-
ing, and loafing, like other savages. The hero of
the child is the bully, just as the demigod of primi-
tive man is a blood-letting Caesar or Achilles.
The children of the civilised are savages — some
more so than others — and if they ever become
civilised — some do, and some do not — they do so
through a process of rectification and selection
similar to that through which the Aryan races
have passed during the ages of human history.
There is a similar evolution in the young of
other animals, especially of the higher animals.
Each individual begins in a perfectly mindless
form, and grows mentally as it develops physically.
The young puppy has a very different thinking
and feeling apparatus from the grown-up mastiff.
140 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
It is controlled almost exclusively by sense and
instinct. It is devoid of common-sense, and
divides its time impartially betvi'een play and
sleep. It is easily frightened, and cries at every
little thing. It has the rollicking, awkward,
irresponsible personality of a boy of six. About
the same thing is true of kittens, colts, calves,
bear cubs, the whelps of wolves, and other young
quadrupeds. A kitten will chase shadows, try to
catch flies crawling on the other side of a window-
pane, sit and watch in wonder the moving objects
about it, and do many other things which it never
thinks of doing when it has grown to be a wise
and sophisticated puss trained in the ways of
the world about it. Doghood, cathood, and
horsehood, like manhood and womanhood, are
the ripened products of long processes of growth
and exfoliation.
The parallel is, of course, imperfect. There are
many abbreviations, many breaks and ambiguities,
in the summary presented by the individual mind
of the evolution of the race. And, in the present
state of psychogeny, only the barest outline can be
traced. But enough is known to render the fact
unquestionable.
g. If human mind has been evolved, it is logical
to expect to find in other animals, especially in
those more closely resembling ourselves in struc-
ture, mind elements similar to those we find in
ourselves.* And this is precisely what we do find.
* This topic is more fully presented in section IV. of this
chapter.
PSYCHICAL EVOLUTION 141
The same great trunk impulses that animate men
animate also those more rudimentary but not less
real individuals below and around men. The
great primary facts of sex, of self-preservation, of
pleasure and pain, of life and death, of egoism and
altruism, of motherhood, of alimentation, etc. —
all of these are found everywhere, down almost to
the very threshold of organic life. And they are
the antecedents of the same great tendencies as
those that control the lives of men. It is often
supposed by the superficial that the facts of sex
and alimentation, which are so prominent in other
animals, have been relegated to a very subordinate
place in the nature of man. But nothing could
be much farther from the truth. It has been said
that there are only two things that will induce the
typical African or Australian to undergo prolonged
labour — hunger and the sex appetite. It is probable
that men — not only primitive men, but the most
evolved races, including even poets and philoso-
phers — will do more desperate and idiotic things
and undergo more trying experiences when
actuated by the sex impulse than from the effects
of any other impulse in human nature. This
impulse is especially overmastering in races like
the Italian and Spanish, and has been mentioned
by ethnologists as a probable factor in the deteri-
oration of these races. The sentiments of love,
marital affection, and family life control mankind
more completely than any other motives. And
next to these comes hunger. Let anyone who
imagines that only the non-human creatures are
142 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
carnal observe with what uniformity almost every
function in both savage and civilised life gravitates
toward eating and drinking. If it is a picnic,
a convention, a national holiday, a Christmas
celebration, a meeting of a fraternal society, a
thanksgiving ceremony, or what not, eating is one
of the main things, and the one exercise into
which four-fifths of those present probably enter
with the greatest enthusiasm.
The human soul is the blossom, not the
beginning, of psychic evolution. Mother - love
compassionated infancy long before a babe came
from the stricken loins of woman. The inhabitants
of the earth had been seeking pleasure and seeking
to avoid pain, and seeking ever with the same sad
futility, long before man with his retinue of puny
philosophies strutted upon the scene. Hate
poisoned the cisterns of the sea and dropped its
pollutions through the steaming spaces ages before
there was malice among men. Altruism is older
than the mountains, and selfishness hardened the
living heart before the continents were lifted.
There was wonder in the woods and in the wild
heart of the fastnesses before there were wailings
in synagogues and genuflections about altar piles.
The frogs, crickets, and birds had been singing love
a thousand generations and more when the first
amoroso knelt in dulcet descant to a beribboned
Venus. Human nature is not an article of divine
manufacture, any more than is the human form.
It came out of the breast of the bird, out of the
soul of the quadruped. The human heart does
PSYCHICAL EVOLUTION 143
not draw back from the mysterious dissolutions of
death more earnestly than does the hare that flees
before resounding packs or the wild-fowl that
reddens the reeds with its flounderings. Bower-
birds build their nestside resorts, decorate them
with gay feathers, and surround them with grounds
ornamented with bright stones and shells, for
identically the same reason as human beings
design drawing-rooms, hang them with tapestries,
and surround them with ornamented lawns. The
scarlet waistcoat of the robin and the flaming
dresses of tanagers and humming-birds, which
seem, as they flash through the forest aisles, like
shafts of cardinal-fire, serve the same vanities and
minister to the same instincts as the plumage of
the dandy and the tints and gewgaws of gorgeous
dames. Art is largely a manifestation of sex, and
it is about as old and about as persistent as this
venerable impulse. How did Darwin's dog know
his master on his master's return from a five-years'
trip around the world ? Just as the boy remembers
where the strawberries grow and the philosopher
recalls his facts — by that power of the brain to
retain and to reproduce past impressions. Why
does the thinker search his soul for new theories
and the spaces for new stars ? For the same
reason that the child asks questions and the
monkey picks to pieces its toys. What is reason ?
A habit of wise men — an expedient of ants — a
mania the fools of all ages are free from. All
of the activities of men, however imposing or
peculiar, are but elaborations in one way or
144 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
another of the humble doings of the animalcule,
whose home is a water-drop and whose existence
can be discovered by human senses only by the
aid of instruments.
10. Mind has evolved because the universe has
evolved. Whether mind is a part of the universe,
or all of it, or only an attribute of it, it is, in any
case, inextricably mixed up with it. And, since the
universe as a whole has evolved, it is improbable
that any part of it or anything pertaining to it
has remained impassive to the general tendency.
There are no solids. Nothing stands. The whole
universe is in a state of fluidity. Even the
' eternal hills,' the ' unchanging continents,' and
the ' everlasting stars,' are flowing, flowing ever,
slowly but ceaselessly, from form to form. So
is mind. Indeed, if there is anywhere in the folds
of creation a being such as the one whom man
has long accused of having brought the universe
into existence, we may rest assured that even he
is not sitting passively apart from the enormous
enterprise which he has himself inaugurated.
The evidence is conclusive. The evolution of
mind is supported by a series of facts not less
incontrovertible and convincing than that by
which physical evolution is established. The
data of mental evolution are not quite so definite
and plentiful as those of physical evolution. But
this is due to the greater intangibility of mental
phenomena and to the backward condition of the
psychological sciences, especially of comparative
psychology. Mental phenomena are always more
PSYCHICAL EVOLUTION 145
difficult to deal with than material phenomena,
and hence are always more tardily attended to in
the application of any theory. But taking every-
thing into account, including the close connection
between physical and psychical phenomena, it
may be asserted that it is not more certain that
the physical structure of man has been derived
from sub-human forms of life than it is that the
human mind has also been similarly derived.
Man is the adult of long evolution. The human
soul has ancestors and consanguinities just as the
body has. It is just as reasonable to suppose
that the human physiology, with its definitely
elaborated tissues, organs, and systems, is unrelated
to the physiology of vertebrates in general, and
through vertebrate physiology to the physiology
of invertebrates, as to suppose that the states
and impulses constituting human nature and con-
sciousness began to exist in the anthropic type of
anatomy and are unrelated to the states and im-
pulses of vertebrate consciousness in general, and
through vertebrate consciousness to those remoter
types of sentiency lying away at the threshold
of organic life. Human psychology is a part of
universal psychology. It has been evolved. It
has been evolved according to the same laws of
heredity and adaptation as have physiological
structures. And it is just as impossible to under-
stand human nature and psychology unaided by
those wider prospects of universal psychology as
it is to understand the facts of human physiology
unaided by analogous universalisations,
10
146 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
III. The Common-sense View.
But it is not necessary to be learned in
Darwinian science in order to know that non-
human beings have souls. Just the ordinary
observation of them in their daily lives about us
— in their comings and goings and doings — is
sufficient to convince any person of discernment
that they are beings with joys and sorrows, desires
and capabilities, similar to our own. No human
being with a conscientious desire to learn the
truth can associate intimately day after day with
these people — associate with them as he himself
would desire to be associated with in order to
be interpreted, without presumption or reserve,
in a kind, honest, straightforward, magnanimous
manner; make them his friends and really enter
into their inmost lives — without realising that
they are almost unknown by human beings, that
they are constantly and criminally misunderstood,
and that they are in reality beings actuated by
substantially the same impulses and terrorised by
approximately the same experiences as we our-
selves. They eat and sleep, seek pleasure and try
to avoid pain, cling valorously to life, experience
health and disease, get seasick, suffer hunger and
thirst, co-operate with each other, build homes,
reproduce themselves, love and provide for their
children, feeding, defending, and educating them,
contend against enemies, contract habits, remem-
ber and forget, learn from experience, have friends
and favourites and pastimes, appreciate kindness.
THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW 147
commit crimes, dream dreams, cry out in distress,
are aifected by alcohol, opium, strychnine, and
other drugs, see, hear, smell, taste, and feel, are
industrious, provident and cleanly, have languages,
risk their lives for others, manifest ingenuity,
individuality, fidelity, affection, gratitude, heroism,
sorrow, sexuality, self-control, fear, love, hate,
pride, suspicion, jealousy, joy, reason, resent-
ment, selfishness, curiosity, memory, imagination,
remorse — all of these things, and scores of others,
the same as human beings do.
The anthropoid races have the same emotions
and the same ways of expressing those emotions
as human beings have. They laugh in joy, whine
in distress, shed tears, pout and apologise, and get
angry when they are laughed at. They protrude
their lips when sulky or pouting, stare with wide-
open eyes in astonishment, and look downcast
when melancholy or insulted. When they laugh,
they draw back the corners of their mouth and
expose their teeth, their eyes sparkle, their lower
eyelids wrinkle, and they utter chuckling sounds,
just as human beings do (5). They have strong
sympathy for their sick and wounded, and manifest
toward their friends, and especially toward the
members of their own family, a devotion scarcely
equalled among the lowest races of mankind.
They use rude tools, such as clubs and sticks, and
resort to cunning and deliberation to accomplish
their ends. The orang, when pursued, will throw
sticks at his pursuers, and when wounded, and
the wound does not prove instantly fatal, will
10 — 2
148 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
sometimes press his hand upon the wound or
apply grass and leaves to stop the flow of blood.
The children of anthropoids wrestle with each
other, and chase and throw each other, just as do
the juveniles of human households. The gorilla,
chimpanzee, and orang all build for themselves
lodges made of broken boughs and leaves in which
to sleep at night. These lodges, rude though they
are, are not inferior to the habitations of many
primitive men. The Puris, who live naked in the
depths of the Brazilian forests, do not even have
huts to live in, only screens made by setting up
huge palm-leaves against a cross-pole (5). Some
of the African tribes are said to live largely in
caves and the crevices of rocks. This is the case
with many primitive men. According to a writer
in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute
of Great Britain and Ireland (January, 1902),
' common forms of dwelling among the wild tribes
of the Malay Peninsula are rock-shelters (some-
times caves, but more commonly natural recesses
under overhanging ledges) and leaf-shelters, which
are sometimes formed on the ground and some-
times in the branches of trees. The simplest
form of these leaf-shelters consists of a single
palm-leaf planted in the ground to afford the
wanderer some slight shelter for the night.'
When they sleep, the anthropoids sometimes lie
stretched out, man-like, on their backs, and some-
times they lie on their side with their hand under
their head for a pillow. The orang retires about
five or six o'clock in the evening, and does not rise
THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW 149
until the morning sun has dissipated the mists of
the forest. The gorilla and chimpanzee seem to
mate for life. The former lives, as a rule, in
single families, each family consisting of a male
and a female and their children. During the day
this primitive family roams through the forests of
equatorial Africa in search of food. They live on
fruits and nuts and the tender shoots and leaves
of plants. They are especially fond of sugar-cane,
which they eat in small-boy fashion by chewing
and discarding the juiceless pulp. Among the
foods of the gorilla is a walnut-like nut which it
cracks with stones. As evening comes on, the
head of the family selects a sleeping-place for the
night. This is usually some low tree with a
dense growth at the top, and protected as much as
possible by higher trees from the chilly night
wind. Here, on a bed of broken branches and
leaves, the mother and little ones^ go to sleep,
while the father devotedly crouches at the foot of
the tree, with his back against the trunk to guard
his family from leopards and other nocturnal
cut-throats who eat apes (7). When the weather
is stormy, they cover themselves with broad
pandanus leaves to keep off the rain. Koppenfels
relates an incident of a gorilla family which makes
one think of things he sometimes sees among men.
The family consisted of the parents and two
children. It was meal-time. The head of the
family reposed majestically on the ground, while
the wife and children hustled for fruits for him
in a near-by tree. If they were not sufficiently
150 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
nimble about it, or if they were so wanton as to
take a bite themselves, the paterfamilias growled
and gave them a cuff on the head (7). Notwith-
standing the sensational tales of the ferocity of
this being, the gorilla never attacks anyone at
any time unless he is molested (7). He much
prefers to attend to his own business. But if he
is not allowed to do so, if he is attacked, he
is as fearless as a machine. He approaches his
antagonist walking upright and beating his breast
with his fists. He presents one of the most
terrifying of all spectacles, as, with gleaming
eyes, hair erect, and resounding yells, he bears
down on the object of his resentment. The
natives fear the gorilla more than they fear any
other animal.
The chimpanzee in his native wilds lives in
small tribes consisting of a few families each.
Like the gorilla, it passes the most of its time on
the ground, going among the trees only for food
or sleep. It builds a sleeping-place at night in
the trees, as in the case of the gorilla. Brehm,
who brought up a number of chimpanzees in his
own home as comrades and playmates of his
children, and who studied them and associated
with them for years, says: 'The chimpanzee is
not only one of the cleverest of all creatures, but
a being capable of deliberation and judgment.
Everything he does is done consciously and
deliberately. He looks upon all other animals,
except man, as very inferior to himself. He
treats children entirely different from grown-up
THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW 151
people. The latter he respects; the former he
looks upon as comrades and equals. He is not
merely inquisitive: he is greedy for knowledge.
He can draw conclusions, can reason from one
thing to another, and apply the results of experi-
ence to new circumstances. He is cunning, even
wily, has flashes of humour, indulges in practical
jokes, manifests moods, and is entertained in one
company and bored in another. He is self-willed
but not stubborn, good-natured but not wanting
in independence. He expresses his emotions like
a human being. In sickness he behaves like one
in despair, distorts his face, groans, stamps, and
tears his hair. He learns very easily whatever is
taught him, as, for instance, to sit upright at
table, to eat with knife and fork and spoon, to
drink from a glass or cup, to stir the sugar in his
tea, to use a napkin, to wear clothes, to sleep in
a bed, and so on. Exceedingly appreciative of
every caress, he is equally sensitive to blame and
unkindness. He is capable of deep gratitude, and
he expresses it by shaking hands or kissing with-
out being asked to do so. He behaves toward
infants with touching tenderness. The behaviour
of a sick and suffering chimpanzee is most pathetic.
Begging piteously, almost humanly, he looks into
his master's face, receives every attempt to help
him with warm thanks, and soon looks upon his
physician as a benefactor, holding out his arm to
him, stretching out his tongue whenever told, and
even doing so of his own accord after a few
visits from his physician. He swallows medicines
152 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
readily, and even submits to surgical operations —
in short, behaves very like a human patient in
similar circumstances. As his end approaches,
he becomes more gentle, and the nobler traits of
his character stand out prominently ' (8).
The New York Herald, in its issue of July 2,
igoi, contained an account of the death of Charle-
magne, a chimpanzee who died a short time before
at Grenoble, France. This anthropoid at the
time of his death was the most popular inhabitant
of the town. His popularity was due to his
good-nature and intelligence, and especially to the
fact that a few years before his death he had saved
a child from drowning in a well. The ape saw
the child fall, and without a moment's hesitation
climbed down the rope used for the buckets, seized
the child, and climbed out again by the same rope
by which he had descended. The people of the
town thought so much of him that they followed
his remains to the grave, and the municipal council
voted to erect a bronze statue to his memory.
A heartless hunter — maybe one of those assassins
who fill the wilds with widows and orphans in the
name of Science — tells of the murder of a mother
chimpanzee and her baby in Africa. The mother
was high up in a tree with her little one in her
arms. She watched intently, and with signs of
the greatest anxiety, the hunter as he moved about
beneath, and when he took aim at her the poor
doomed thing motioned to him with her hand
precisely in the manner of a human being, to have
him desist and go away.
THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW 153
According to Emin Pasha, who was for a
number of years Governor of an Egyptian pro-
vince on the Upper Nile, and whom Stanley made
his last expedition to ' rescue,' chimpanzees some-
times make use of fire. He told Stanley that,
when a tribe of chimpanzees who resided in a
forest near his camp came at night to get fruit
from the orchards, they always came bearing
torches to light them on their way. ' If I had not
seen it with my own eyes,' he declares, ' I never
could have believed that these beings have the
power of making fire' (g). This same authority
relates that on one occasion a band of chimpanzees
descended upon his camp and carried off a drum.
The marauders went away in great glee, beating
the drum as they retreated. He says he heard
them several times after that, at night, beating
their drum, in the forest.
The monkeys are little inferior to the man-like
races in their intelligence and in the general simi-
larity of their feelings and instincts to those of
men. Monkeys live in tribes, and at the head of
each tribe is an old male chief who has won
his place by his strength, courage, and ability.
Monkeys have excellent memories and keen ob-
servation, and are able to recognise their friends
in a crowd even after long absences. They are
proverbially imitative, have a strong desire for
knowledge, and are exceedingly sensitive and
sympathetic in their natures. Sympathy and
curiosity, the two most prominent traits in simian
psychology, are, significantly, the two most impor-
154 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
tant facts in the psychology of man. Sympathy and
curiosity lie at the foundation of human civilisa-
tion, sympathy at the foundation of morals, and
curiosity of invention and science. The monkey
whose diary appears in the closing pages of
Romanes' * Animal Intelligence ' was possessed of
an almost ravenous desire to know. He spent
hour after hour in exploration, examining with
the indomitable patience of a scientist everything
that came within the bounds of his little horizon.
And when he had found out any new thing, he was
as delighted over it as a boy who has solved a
hard problem, repeating the experiment over and
over until it was thoroughly familiar to him.
Among the many things he discovered for himself
was the use of the lever and the screw. Monkeys
are the most affectionate of all animals excepting
dogs and men. This affection reaches its culmina-
tion, as among men, in the love of the mother for
her child. The mother monkey's little one is the
object of her constant care and affection. She
nurses and bathes it, licks it and cleans its coat,
and folds it in her arms and rocks it as if to lull
it to sleep, just as human mammas do. She
divides every bite with her little one, but does not
hesitate to chastise it with slaps and pinches when
it is rude. The monkey child is generally very
obedient, obedient enough for an example to
many a human youngster.
' Very touching,' says Brehm, from whom many
of the foregoing facts are gleaned, ' is the conduct
of the mother when her baby is obviously suffer-
THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW 155
ing. And if it dies she is in despair. For hours,
and even for days, she carries the little corpse
about with her, refuses all food, sits indifferently
in the same spot, and often literally pines to
death' (8).
Orphan monkeys, according to Brehm, are often
adopted by the tribe, and carefully looked after by
the other monkeys, both male and female. The
great mass of human beings, who know about as
much about the real emotional life of monkeys
as wooden Indians do, are inclined to pass over
lightly all displays of feeling by these people of
the trees. But the poet knows, and the prophet
knows, and the world will one day understand,
that in the gentle bosoms of these wild woodland
mothers glow the antecedents of the same impulses
as those that cast that blessed radiance over the
lost paradise of our own sweet' childhood. The
mother monkey who gathered green leaves as she
fled from limb to limb, and frantically stuffed them
into the wound of her dying baby in order to
stanch the cruel rush of blood from its side, all
the while uttering the most pitiful cries and
casting reproachful glances at her human enemy,
until she fell with her darling in her arms and a
bullet in her heart, had in her simian soul just as
genuine mother-love, and love just as sacred, as
that which burns in the breast of woman.
The affection of monkeys is not confined to the
love of the mother for her child, but exists among
the different members of the same tribe, and extends
even to human beings, especially to those who
156 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
make any pretensions to do to them as they would
themselves be done by. The monkey kept by
Romanes, already referred to, became so attached
to his master that he went into the wildest
demonstrations of joy whenever his master, after
an absence, came into the room. Standing on
his hind-legs at the full length of his chain, and
reaching out both hands as far as he could reach,
he screamed with all his might. His joy was so
hysterical that it was impossible to carry on any
kind of conversation until he had been folded in
his master's arms, when he immediately grew
quiet.
' After I took this monkey back to the Zoological
Gardens,' says Romanes, 'and up to the time of
his death, he remembered me as well as the day
he was returned. I visited the monkey-house
about once a month, and whenever I approached
his cage he saw me with astounding quickness —
indeed, generally before I saw him — and ran to
the bars, through which he thrust both hands with
every expression of joy. When I went away he
always followed me to the extreme end of the
cage, and stood there watching me as long as I
remained in sight.'
The following account of the attachment of a
male monkey for his murdered consort is a pitiful
tale of human inhumanity and of simian tender-
ness and devotion :
' A member of a shooting-party killed a female
monkey, and carried her body to his tent under a
banyan-tree. The tent was soon surrounded by
THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW 157
forty or fifty of the tribe, who made a great noise
and threatened to attack the aggressor. When
he presented his fowling-piece, the fearful effects
of which they had just witnessed, and appeared
perfectly to understand, they retreated. The
leader of the troop, however, stood his ground,
threatening and chattering furiously. At last,
finding threats of no avail, the broken-hearted
creature came to the door of the tent and began a
lamentable moaning, and by the most expressive
signs seemed to beg for the dead body of his
beloved. It was given to him. He took it
sorrowfully in his arms and bore it away to his
expecting companions (10).
The chattering of monkeys is not, as is vulgarly
supposed, meaningless vocalisation. It is language.
It is meaningless to human ears for the same
reason that the chattering of Frenchmen is mean-
ingless to Americans — because human beings are
foreigners. The conversation of monkeys is to
convey thought. Every species that thinks and
feels has means for conveying its thoughts and
feelings, and the means for this exchange, whether
it be sounds, symbols, gestures, or grimaces, is
language. As Wundt somewhere says : ' If
psychologists of to-day, ignoring all that an
animal can express through gestures and sounds,
limit the possession of language to human beings,
such a conclusion is scarcely less absurd than that
of many philosophers of antiquity who regarded
the languages of barbarous nations as animal
cries.' Mr. Garner, who has so long and so
158 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
sympathetically associated with monkeys, has
been able to translate a number of their words
and to enter into slight communication with them.
Among the words he has been able to understand
are the words for 'alarm,' 'good- will,' 'listen,'
' food,' ' drink,' ' monkey,' and ' fruit.' According
to him, the simian tongue has about eight or nine
sounds which may be changed by modulation into
three or four times that number, and each
different species or kind has its own peculiar
tongue slightly shaded into dialects. There may
be more discriminating students than Garner, but
few certainly who have approached their favourite
problem with more feeling and humanity. Every
one should read his beautiful book on ' The Speech
of Monkeys.' ' Among the little captives of the
simian race,' says he tenderly, in closing his
chapter on the emotional character of these
people, ' I have many little friends to whom I am
attached, and whose devotion to me is as warm
and sincere, so far as I can see, as that of any
human being. I must confess that I cannot
discern in what intrinsic way the love they have
for me differs from my own for them ; nor can I
see in what respect their love is less divine than is
my own.'
Dogs are distinguished for their great intelli-
gence, the pre-eminence of the sense of smell,
fidelity to duty, nobleness of nature, patience,
courage, and affection. In all of these particulars
many individual dogs are superior to whole races
of men. Dogs are more sensitive to physical
THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW 159
suffering than savages, and will cry piteously from
slight wounds or other injuries. Dogs of high life
have genuine feelings of dignity and self-respect,
and are easily wounded in their sensibilities.
Such dogs have considerable sense of propriety,
and suffer, like sensitive children, from disappro-
bation. Romanes had a dog that was so sensitive
that he resented insult, and so sympathetic that
he always fought in defence of other dogs when
they were punished or attacked. When out
driving with his master, this dog always caught
hold of his master's sleeve every time the horse
was touched with a whip (10). Romanes also
tells of a Scotch terrier who, having grown old
and useless, and been supplanted by a younger
dog. Jack, became painfully jealous, and imitated
his rival in everything that he did, even to ridicu-
lous details, in order to retain the attentions of
the household. When Jack was tenderly caressed,
the old dog would watch for a time, and then
burst out whining as if in the deepest distress (10).
Dogs communicate their ideas to each other and
to human beings, generally by means of sounds
and gestures. They growl in anger, yelp in eager-
ness, howl in despair, bark in joy or warning, bay
in wonder, wail in bitterness and pain, whine in
supplication, and prostrate themselves in sub-
mission or apology. It has been said that there
never was a man who possessed the stateliness of
a St. Bernard, the unerring sagacity of the collie,
or the courage and tenacity of the bulldog. The
vainest dandy is not more delicate in his ways
i6o THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
than the Italian greyhound, nor more soft and
affectionate than the Blenheim. Many a deed of
heroism has been done by dogs which would, if
done by men, have been honoured by the Order of
the Victoria Cross. The St. Bernards belonging
to the monks on the passes between Switzerland
and Italy are especially celebrated for their
devotion to the business of saving human hfe.
They often lose their own lives in their efforts
to rescue travellers baffled and overcome by
storm. One particularly sagacious individual,
who lost his life in this way some 3'ears ago, wore
a medal stating that he had been the means of
saving twenty-two human lives. In devotion the
dog is superior to all other animals, not even
excepting man. ' How could one get relief from
the endless dissimulation, falsity, and malice of
mankind,' exclaimed Schopenhauer in one of his
inspired moments, ' if there were no dogs into
whose honest faces he could look without distrust?'
A dog will follow a handful of rags wrapped
around a homeless beggar, day after day, through
heat and cold and storm and starvation, just as
faithfully as he will follow the purple of a king.
The dog who stood over the lifeless body of his
master, grieving for recognition and starting at
every flutter of his garments, till he himself died
of starvation, had in his faithful breast a nobler
heart than that which beats in the bosom of most
men. And the devotion of Greyfriars Bobby,
who every night for twelve years, in all kinds of
weather, slept on his master's grave, was well
THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW i6i
worthy the marble tribute which to-day stands in
Edinburgh to his memory. There has never been
recorded in the history of the world an instance
of more extravagant trust and devotion than that
told of the canine companion of a certain vivi-
sector, which licked the hand of his master while
undergoing the crime of being cut to pieces.
Such deeds of self-sacrifice remind one of the
tales told of imaginary saints. But they are the
deeds of only dogs — of beings whom half the
world look upon with indifference and contempt,
and whom the other half would feel, if they came
within reach, under the strictest obligations to
kick.
' When some proud son of man returns to earth,
Unknown to glory but upheld by birth,
The sculptor's art exhausts the pomp of woe.
And storied urns record who rests below ;
When all is done, upon the tomb is seen,
Not what he was, but what he should have been ;
But the poor dog, in life the firmest friend.
The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is still his master's own.
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes, for him alone,
Unhonoured falls, unnoticed all his worth —
Denied in heaven the soul he had on earth.'
I am not one of those who regard the evidence
for the post-mortem existence of the human soul
as being either abundant or conclusive. But of
one thing I am positive, and that is, that there
are the same grounds precisely for believing in the
immortality of the bird and the quadruped as there
are for the belief in human immortality. And it
II
i62 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
is delightful to find great thinkers like Haeckel,
great biologists and philosophers, holding the
same conviction. Haeckel is the giant of the
Germans, and in his brilliant book ' The Riddle
of the Universe ' appears this rather poetical para-
graph : ' I once knevi' an old head-forester, who,
being left a widower and without children at an
early age, had lived alone for more than thirty
years in a noble forest of East Prussia. His only
companions were one or two servants, with whom
he exchanged merely a few necessary words, and a
great pack of different kinds of dogs, with whom
he lived in perfect psychic communion. Through
many years of training this keen observer and
friend of nature had penetrated deep into the indi-
vidual souls of his dogs, and he was as convinced
of their personal immortality as he was of his own.
Some of his most intelligent dogs were, in his
impartial estimation, at a higher stage of psychic
development than his old stupid maid and his
rough and wrinkled man-servant. Any unpre-
judiced observer who will study the psychic
phenomena of a fine dog for a year, and follow
attentively the processes of its thought, judgment,
and reason, will have to admit that it has just as
valid a claim to immortality as man himself.'
Fido was a shaggy terrier who lived years ago
in the old home on the farm by the beautiful brook.
He was one of the very first acquaintances the
writer of these lines made on coming into exist-
ence. In his earher years, before age had dimmed
his mind and rheumatism had fastened upon him.
THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW 163
he was an exceedingly agreeable and clever canine,
active in all the affairs of the farm. He knew the
old homestead by heart, and he took about as
much interest in having everything go right as
anybody — more, perhaps, even than we boys did.
He chased the pigs out of the orchard without
being asked to do so, and guarded the house at
night with the vigilance of a hired watchman. He
seemed to realise the demands of everyday situa-
tions about as well as any of us. He could dis-
tinguish between neighbours who were accustomed
to come on the premises and strangers who were
not. He always knew when company came, for
he invariably attempted to profit by the fact. He
had been taught early the propriety of keeping in
the background when his tyrants were feeding,
and ordinarily on such occasions he slept dutifully
by the kitchen stove. But just as sure as a guest
sat at table, Fido would turn up, and, tapping the
visitor gently to get his attention, would sit up
perfectly straight, with his paws pendent and a
peculiar grin on his face, in expectation of a
morsel. Dear old Fido ! How much he thought
of all of us ! And how meagerly, as I know now,
were his matchless love and services requited !
On Sundays sometimes the human members of
the household would go away and stay all day,
and Fido and the cat would be left alone to get
along the best way they could. He knew as well
as any of us when these days came around, and
he dreaded them. I suppose he had learned from
experience to associate cessation of farm work and
II — 2
i64 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
peculiar preparations with a day alone. The long,
lonely hours probably affected him somewhat as
they do a human being who is compelled to stay
alone all day with nothing to do. But what a
welcome he gave us in the evening when we came
back ! This was indubitable evidence of his lone-
liness. The first familiar object we would see in
the evening, on coming in sight of home, was
faithful Fido, sitting out in the road on the hill
above the house — sitting straight up in that
peculiar way of his — watching and waiting for
our home-coming. He knew, or seemed to know,
the direction firom which to expect us, and was
able to recognise us a long way off. The years
have been many, and Fido's dust has long been
scattered by'the gusts over the farms of north-west
Missouri ; but now, in fancy, I can see this faithful
creature bounding down the road in the sunset to
meet us, as he used to do in the golden long-ago,
leaping and smiling and wagging his tail, and
wriggling and barking in a perfect ecstasy of
gladness.
Well, I know Fido could feel and think, that
he loved and feared and longed and dreaded and
dreamed and hated and grieved and sympathised
and reasoned and rejoiced — in short, that he was
moved by about the same passions and considera-
tions as human beings usually are. He gave the
same evidence of it precisely as a human being
does.
The dog is the oldest of human associates.
Long before the historical period the dog was
THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW 165
domesticated in Europe, Asia, and Africa. No
race of men is too primitive to be without the dog.
The bones of the dog are found in the middens
of the Baltic, and rude representations of it are
chiseled on the oldest monuments of Egypt and
Assyria. The dog was the servant of man away
in paleolithic times, when the mastodon was on
earth, and man was a naked troglodyte, and
Europe extended westward to the Azores. And
he has been a faithful friend, a tireless ally, and
an enthusiastic slave of a thankless and inhuman
master ever since.
Birds are pre-eminently emotional and artistic.
This is shown by their fondness for singing, their
fine dress, their pining for their dead, their dainty
architecture, their pretty forms and manners of
life, their joyousness, and their love for their
young. Birds are the most beautiful and engaging
of all terrestrial beings. Endowed with the power
of flight, eminently active, light-hearted and free,
attired in all the colours of the rainbow, and with
voices of unrivalled richness and melody, birds are
the admiration and envy of all of those that dwell
on the earth. Birds possess naturally and in mar-
vellous perfection that power of locomotion which
has been so long sought for by slow-shuffling man.
Birds are also incomparable musicians, no other
animals, not even men, approaching them in the
surpassing brilliancy and sweetness of their song.
No human musician in high-sounding hall can
equal the artless lay of the wild bird ringing melo-
diously through the leafy colonnades of the woods.
i66 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
Like men, birds sing chiefly of love ; but they also
sing for pastime or pleasure. Their singing is
sweetest during the season of courtship, and attains
its highest development in the males. Birds are
ardent lovers. To win their brides, the males
contend with each other, and display their charms
of plumage and song with the wildness of human
Romeos.
The song of birds is generally acquired by in-
heritance from the species, but is sometimes bor-
rowed by imitation from other birds, or even from
other animals. Birds taken from their species
when young, before they have heard their native
song, sing generally the song of their kind, but it
is likely to be interspersed with notes and phrases
from the birds around them. Birds thus isolated
have been known to adopt entirely the song of
their surroundings. Olive Thorne Miller vouches
for the fact that an English sparrow she once
knew grew up in company with a canary, and
came in time to sing the song of its more talented
companion to perfection. It must have been a
Shakspere of a bird, however, to have soared so
high above the excruciating accomplishments of
the generality of its species.
The songs of birds can be set to music just as
the melodies of men can. The songs of several
birds were published in the American Naturalist a
few years ago. And Winchell, the well-known
English student of birds, has written a clever
book on the ' Cries and Call-notes of Wild Birds,'
in which he prints the calls and songs of most of
THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW 167
the native birds of England. According to this
writer, who has perhaps studied the music of birds
more critically than anyone else, the song of the
nightingale, when printed in the notation of
ordinary human music, is like a piano solo. It
is made up of a score or so of different strains,
with trills and crescendos, and all executed in so
inimitable a manner that it is unrecognisable when
repeated on a musical instrument or the human
voice. One of these strains, curiously enough, is
identical with the song of a certain bush-warbler
of western Canada— as if the English vocalist had
plagiarised the song of its humbler cousin in com-
piling its incomparable repertoire. The song of
the mocking-bird is a magnificent medley, made
up of the calls, trills, twitters, warbles, warnings,
and love-songs, of a score or more of other birds.
I have heard this bird along the Solomon and
Arkansas valleys repeat in the most perfect manner
the notes and songs of the pewee, purple martin,
kingbird, flicker, blue jay, catbird, canary, crow,
English sparrow, red-headed woodpecker, quail,
cardinal, cuckoo, robin, red-wings, grackle, meadow-
lark, night-hawk, whip-poor-will, besides many
other calls and notes, perhaps of birds I did not
know. In the case of some of these birds the
mocker made all of the different sounds of each
bird. The song of the mocking-bird is delivered
at any time, day or night, and generally in a state
of high ecstasy and excitement, the performer
flying from tree to tree and from house-top to
barn-top, occasionally throwing himself into the
i68 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
air in the most absurd manner, and all the time
pouring forth such a stream of melody that one
would think all the birds in the neighbourhood
had suddenly come together and let loose in a
grand festival of song.
According to Chapman, many of the notes of
birds are language notes rather than sounds ex-
pressive of sentiment. Of the robin this well-
known student of birds says : ' The song and
call-notes of this bird, while familiar to everyone,
are in reality understood by no one, and offer
excellent subjects for the student of bird language.
Its notes express interrogation, suspicion, alarm,
and caution, and it signals to its companions to
take wing. Indeed, few of our birds have a more
extended vocabulary.' Winchell says that the
common English sparrow has as many as seven
different notes, which it uses to express the
thoughts and feelings passing through its rather
active but not very highly honoured head : (i) The
common note of address of the male to the female;
(2) a note of alarm used by both male and female
adults, but never by the young ; (3) an emphatic
alarm note, always uttered by sentinels when a
hawk is near or when a man approaches with a
gun ; (4) the note of the female when surrounded
by several noisy and contending male rivals;
(5) an autumn cry uttered by the iirst one of the
company perceiving danger and flying up from
the hedges and fields — never uttered by young,
but by adults of both sexes ; (5) the love note of
both male and female, used mostly by the female,
THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW 169
and generally with a fluttering or shaking accom-
paniment of her wings ; (7) a curious note some-
times heard in London — meaning not well under-
stood, but supposed to be a sort of chuckle or
sign of contentment. Each one of these several
different notes may be used to stand for various
ideas depending on the circumstances by being
given different emphasis and inflection, just as in
the languages of many primitive races of men a
small vocabulary of words is used to stand for a
much larger number of ideas by being pronounced
differently. In the Chinese language, for instance,
the words are increased to three or four times the
original number by modulation ; but the same
thing is observed in all languages, both human
and non-human. Verbal poverty is pieced out
by verbal variation. We say ac'-cent or ac-cent',
depending on whether we wish to express the idea
of a noun or a verb.
The memory of birds is well developed. Many
of them remember the very grove or meadow, and
even the very knot-hole or bush, in which they
built their nest the season before, although in the
meantime they have journeyed over lands and
seas and sojourned thousands of miles away.
Every year, for several seasons past, in late summer
and early fall, after the nesting-time is over and
the young ones are all grown, the purple martins
have gathered in large numbers about the Field
Columbian Museum, in Jackson Park, Chicago.
They stay here for a few weeks, foraging the sur-
rounding air for insects by day, and sleeping on
170 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
the great dome of the Museum by night, finally-
flying away to be seen no more in such numbers
till next year. These birds, many of them any-
way, must remember from one yeaS: to another
this annual assembly here by the big waters, else
why would they come together at this particular
spot from all over the country ? I have no doubt
that some of them, having sojourned here year
after year for some time, remember well the great
ugly building where they meet, and are more or
less familiar with the surrounding locality from
having searched it so often. I wonder what led
to the establishing of the custom in the first place.
Customs do not fall from the skies. And what
advantage is there in the practice ? What are
they up to as they chirp and wheel in the air, and
flutter up the slopes and sail down again, and
perch on the pinnacles and twitter ? Maybe it is
a sort of Saratoga for, them, where they all come
together ostensibly to dip their bills in the blue
waves, but where sons swell in their new feathers,
and sly mammas find prospects for unmarketable
misses.
A parrot has been known to remember the voice
of its mistress after an absence of a year and a
half — a very remarkable feat even for the grey
matter of a bird. A flock of geese mentioned by
Romanes showed their knowledge of the arrival
of market-day, which came every two weeks, by
assembling regularly on such days, early in the
morning, in front of the town inn where the
market was held, to pick up the corn. They never
THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW 171
came on the wrong day; and on one occasion,
when the market was omitted on account of a
holiday, here came the unfaihng fowls cackling
and shouting as usual in merry anticipation of
their fortnightly feast, but ignorant of the national
necessities which had doomed them to be disap-
pointed (10).
Parrots remember and call for their absent
friends, and mumble phrases in their dreams
which have been taught to them. These gifted
birds learn long poems by heart, and sing songs
with considerable art. A parrot belonging to the
canon of the Cathedral of Salzburg was given
instruction regularly two hours every day for ten
years, from 1830 to 1840. The bird became very
proficient in speech and exceedingly intelligent.
It took part in conversations, whistled tunes,
and was able to sing a number of popular songs,
among them an entire aria from Flotow's opera
of 'Martha' (11).
Educated birds though, like educated dogs,
horses, cats, mice, men, and everything else, are
very different beings from the uneducated. Culti-
vation is a key that unlocks all sorts of miracles.
Cats are cultivated tigers ; and the richest grains
that ripen in the fields of men, and the loveliest
flowers that blow, are only educated weeds. Even
the flea may be taught to exchange leaping for
walking, to draw a tiny wagon, to ride on the
seat, to fire a toy cannon, and do many other
feats.
There is one family of birds in which the
172 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
superior size, gorgeousness, and vivacity, usual to
the males, are found in the other sex, the females
being the larger and more brightly coloured — the
Phalarope family. Indeed, the members of this
small family not only reverse the usual arrange-
ment of the sexual characters of birds, but com-
pletely upset many of the most cherished tradi-
tions of the avian household. The female does the
wooing, and takes the lead in selecting the nest
site. And while she lays the eggs, the privilege of
incubation she hands over magnanimously to her
dull-coloured mate.
Birds have a keen observation and a good deal
of that invaluable faculty known as common-
sense. It is wonderful how quickly they learn to
avoid telegraph-wires when these invisible but
deadly gossamers are first stretched across a
country, and how unerringly they keep at safe
distances when hunted with firearms. An ex-
perienced crow can tell a cane from a gun-barrel
almost as far as he can see it.
Nearly all birds build nests of some kind in
which to cradle their eggs and young. The
cow-bird and cuckoo (European), however, are
exceptions. These birds have the rather human
practice of turning their cares and labours over to
somebody else. They are loafers and parasites.
They lay their eggs secretly in the nests of other
birds, where their eggs are hatched and their
young cared for by an alien mother. I have seen
a mother song-sparrow hustling about among the
shrubs and grasses for an hour at a time almost,
THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW 173
gathering food for a young cow-bird nearly twice
as big as she was, while her foundling sat
phlegmatically at the foot of a tree chirping and
fluttering its wings, and acting as a thankless and
apparently bottomless receptacle for the morsel
after morsel laboriously harvested for it by its
tireless little foster-mother. Sand-martins and
kingfishers burrow in the earth and rear their
broods in subterranean cradles ; gulls and game-
birds build on the ground; the flamingoes and
barn-swallows build mud nests ; the woodpeckers
mine holes in trees ; doves and eagles make plat-
forms of sticks ; the tailor-bird bastes living leaves
together ; the social weavers construct great straw
roofs covering the top of a tree, and build their
nests on the limbs beneath ; most singing birds
build daintily-lined baskets, and swing them in
trees and bushes.
It is often said that all the birds of a species
build their nests in precisely the same way, and
that, while men change and improve their dwelling-
places from generation to generation, birds build
their abodes in the same old way, just as their
ancestors built theirs centuries and centuries ago.
This is a favourite thought with the fogies, with
those who change not in their thinking from the
ways hacked out for them centuries and centuries
ago. Birds are like men. Some of them — some
races and some individuals — are much more given
to initiative than others. There is as wide a
difference between the hang-bird and the auk in
the construction of their domiciles as between the
174 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
millionaire and the savage. And the hang-bird has
come by her home-making art through centuries
of improvement, just as the millionaire has arrived
at his. It is believed by ornithologists that the
first nests of birds were the niches of rocks or
simple hollows scooped in the sand and soil, such
as are still seen among the more primitive bird
races, and that from these aboriginal beginnings
have come, through ages of evolution, the elaborate
creations of the cotton-bird, weaver-bird, tailor-
bird, oven-bird, the baya-sparrow, the finches, and
the orioles. The savage who lives unmolested
generation after generation in the same land and
country builds his simple hut in just the same
way as his ancestors built theirs, and thinks the
same things his ancestors thought a thousand
years before him. Sir Samuel Baker, in a paper
on ' The Races of the Nile Basin,' points out that
each tribe of men in eastern Africa, like each
species of bird, has its own peculiar style of hut,
and that the huts of the various tribes are as
constant in their types as are the nests of
birds. The same thing is true of their head-
dresses as of their huts ; and this fixed character
exists also in their languages, customs, and re-
ligions. It is only some races of men that are
given to growth and fluidity, and only some men
of these special races.
Right in our own country, among the remote
mountain recesses of Appalachia, surrounded on
all sides by the most wonderful development,
material and intellectual, the world has ever seen,
THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW 175
lives a race of rude mountain folk almost as
aboriginal in their ways and views of life, and as
unaffected by civilisation, as if they were in the
heart of Africa. They live huddled together in
one-room log-cabins without windows or floors,
eat bacon and cornmeal, carry on almost constant
wars, and execute the deputies of civilisation who
happen to stray into their illicit dominions, just
as they have done from the time these mountain
silences were first broken by them 150 or 200
years ago.
Birds, as a rule, use a great deal of care and
thought in the location of their nests. After they
have selected a certain grove or field as the one
best suited to their purposes, or as the one around
which cluster the happiest memories, it usually
requires several days of flying and peeping about,
of spying and exploration, before the exact spot
for the precious domicile is finally settled upon.
It is a delicate matter for many birds, for security
from sun, storm, and enemies must all be taken
into account. Old birds, as has been frequently
observed, build better nests and select more clever
locations for their nests than the young and
inexperienced. The nest-building habits of many
birds are known to have changed during the past
few hundred years. The American house-swallow
did most certainly not build under the eaves of
human houses 300 years ago, nor did the hair-bird
ine her nest with horsehair as she invariably
does now. The fact that wrens, swifts, and
martins now build almost altogether in boxes and
176 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
chimneys shows that birds are able and willing to
adapt themselves to new conditions. The chimney-
swift and purple martin, it is said, still cling to
their aboriginal custom of rearing their young in
hollow trees in the unsettled parts of America. The
indomitable house-sparrow builds its nest almost
anywhere, from knot-holes and tin cans to electric-
light globes and tree-tops. Its original dwelling
was probably an arboreal affair, like that of other
sparrows, and different nesting-places have been
adopted as a result of its association with man.
Not only in its architecture, but in several other
ways,'this bird has departed from the traditions of
its tribe. The Fringillidse (the sparrow family
of birds) are seed-eaters, both in structure and
practice. But the house-sparrow, since it left the
fields and groves to become a gamin on human
streets, has learned to eat almost anything, and
one thing, too, about as cheerfully as another.
The varied habits of this bird are probably due to
its natural elasticity in the first place, supple-
mented by the unsettling influences of its rather
kaleidoscopic experiences during the past few
hundred years.
The fear of birds for man is an acquired trait
due to ages of persecution. If man would treat
birds kindly, they would act toward him as they
do toward any other friendly animal. When
unfrequented islands are first visited by man, the
birds are found to be perfectly fearless of him,
flying about him, feeding from his hand, and
manifesting no more timidity than if he were a
THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW 177
big-hearted bird himself. Darwin states that,
when he stopped at the Galapagos Islands on his
famous trip around the world in the Beagle, he
found the birds there so tame that he could push
them from the branches of the trees with his gun-
barrel. Professor Cutting, of the State University
of Iowa, in an article in the Popular Science Monthly
for August, 1903, tells of the almost absolute
fearlessness of the birds on the island of Laysan,
an isolated atoll in the Pacific west of the Hawaian
Islands, which he visited during that summer.
The island swarms with bird life — petrels, alba-
trosses, and tropical birds of various kinds — and
these birds betray no more fear in the presence of
man than if he were a cow. The albatrosses were
so numerous and so indifferent to the presence of
man that it was necessary to shove them aside
with one's foot to keep from stepping on them
when one went for a walk along the sand-stretches
of the shore. Professor Cutting took photographs
of birds which literally posed for him in all sorts
of positions, and half-savage jackies amused them-
selves by going about and pulling the pretty tail
feathers from the tropical birds as they sat on
their nests. I have known of two cases where
persons, by going to the same place day after day
with food and kindness, have in the course of a
few weeks taught robins, sparrows, and other
birds, to lose all fear of them, so much so as to sit
on their shoulders and arms and eat out of their
hands. This is the spirit all birds would show all
the time toward their featherless lords if these
12
178 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
featherless ones would only treat them with half
the consideration they merit.
The love of a bird for the treasures of her nest
is one of the most beautiful things of this world.
Mother-like, the parent bird will do anything
almost for the sake of her little ones. Who has
not seen the kildeer strive with all the tact of her
clever little soul to allure some big giant of a
human being, who has wandered into her neigh-
bourhood, away from her nest of precious young ?
Many a time as a boy on the farm I have followed
one of these birds limping and tumbling and
fluttering along on the ground a few feet ahead of
me, utterly disabled, as I supposed, but always
managing to keep just a little beyond the reach of
my eager hands. And when the artful mother
has led me far from the sacred spot where lay all
there was in this world to her, how triumphantly
she has lifted herself on her unharmed wings and,
to my utter astonishment, sailed away. The
partridge and the mourning-dove are, if possible,
even more artful in their acting than the kildeer.
After I became a large boy and had been told the
meaning of these exhibitions by parent birds, I
often followed the mourning-dove, thinking the
bird must be really wounded after all, so perfectly
did it pretend. But the cunning of the kildeer is
not confined to luring one away from the nest.
If by some accident one finds her nest (and the
nest is so cleverly concealed that, if it is discovered
at all, it will be by pure accident), the resourceful
mother is ready with other expedients to outwit
THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW 179
you. She watches you all the time from the
proper distance, and knows by your conduct the
moment you have found her nest. And before
you have even had time to admire the skill
displayed by the mother in blending so perfectly
her abode with its surroundings, a single peculiar
note from her has caused the whole nestful of
cuddling young ones to dart out of their cradle
and disappear among the surrounding clods as if
by magic. No amount of searching can find one
of them. They have vanished as effectually as if
they had evaporated. And it is enough to touch
the heart of the most indifferent to see the anxious
mother bird, as I have seen her from the cranny
of a neighbouring rock-pile, come back to her
nest and call her scattered children together again
after they have once dispersed at her command.
Circling around the nest two or three times to
assure herself that no one is nigh, she alights and
begins a low clucking sound like that of a hen
calling her brood. The little ones come out of their
hiding-places one after another as mysteriously
as they vanished. You can't see for the life of
you where they come from. They seem to just
emanate. And if one of them fails to come at her
call — for the devoted mother knows very well just
how many she has — she extends her search farther
out from her nest, looking all around and keeping
up that peculiar little cluck, until the half-scared-
to-death little slyboots finally comes creeping out
from his improvised snuggery somewhere. If a
kildeer's nest has once been found, and the mother
12 — 2
i8o THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
feels that it is in danger of future visits, she will
move her family at night to some other locality,
and it is practically impossible ever to find it
again. The family relations of the ring-dotterels
are said to be ' so charming and touching that
even hunters recoil from shooting a female sur-
rounded by her young ones.'
Human beings, true to their instinct never to
call into action their ability to think if they can
employ their faculty for nonsense instead, call this
love of the mother bird ' machinery.' But there
are some of us (and our numbers are increasing)
who are disposed to put off the adoption of this
conclusion until we go mad. The bird builds her
nest, weaving it of the rarest fibres. She hides it
in the copse or prudently hangs it far out on some
inaccessible bough. She lays her beautiful eggs,
and hatches them with the warmth and life of her
own breast. She tends her young, bringing them
food and drink, and watching /Dver them with a
tender and tireless vigilance. She protects them
in storm with her own little body, worries about
them when danger lurks, and dreams of them, no
doubt, as she rocks and sleeps under the silent
stars. She sings to them in the overflow of her
gladness and hope, and risks her very existence to
shield them from harm. She teaches them to fly,
to find their food, and to detect their enemies.
She is true to her mate, and her mate is true and
kind to her. As the days of summer shorten, and
the cool, long nights warn of approaching autumn,
she leads her children away from the old place,
THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW i8i
she and her faithful mate, out into the wide old
world. And I say there is love in the heart of
that mother as truly as in the heart of woman,
and there are joy and genuineness and sorrow and
fidelity in that sylvan home more sacred than
may sometimes bloom in the cold mansions of
men.
Conjugal love is also very strong in many of
the feathered races, especially among those in
which the wedding is for successive seasons or
for life. The pining of love-birds for their dead
sweethearts is well known. The mandarin duck
is proverbial for its marital faithfulness, and a
pair of these fowls is carried by the Chinese in
their marriage processions as an emblem of con-
stancy. Many instances are recorded of birds,
after having been deprived of their mates, refusing
steadfastly the attentions of other birds, and even
sometimes separating themselves entirely from the
society of their kind. The following account of
the devotion of a widowed pigeon for her deceased
consort sounds like a tale of human woe :
' A man set to watch a field much patronised
by pigeons shot an old male pigeon who had long
been an inhabitant of the farm. His mate,
around whom he had for many a year cooed,
whom he had nourished with his own crop and
had assisted in rearing numerous young ones,
immediately settled on the ground by his side.
She refused to leave him, and manifested her grief
in the most expressive manner. The labourer took
up the dead bird and hung it on a stake. The
i82 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
widow still refused to forsake her husband, and
continued day after day slowly walking around the
stake on which his body hung. The kind-hearted
wife of the farmer heard of the matter, and went
to the relief of the stricken bird. On arriving at
the spot, she found the poor bird still watching at
the side of her dead, and making an occasional
effort to get to him. She was much spent with
her long fasting and grief. She had made a
circular beaten path around the corpse of her
companion ' (12).
And these are the beings whose bones men jest
over at their feasts, and brutes shoot for pastime
on human holidays. Much has been said of the
sorrow of birds for their deceased mates, but not
too much. For the avian soul may be smothered
by the gloom and loneliness that come upon the
heart, when the great light of love and com-
panionship has gone out, quite as completely as
the soul of a bereaved human. In not many
human homes where loved ones lie sick and dying
are felt the pangs of more genuine grief than those
sometimes suffered by birds when their friends
and companions are stricken in death. The follow-
ing incident, vouched for by Dr. FrankHn, who
observed it, is only one among many such instances
recorded in the literature on birds :
A pair of parrots had lived together on the most
loving terms for four years, when the female was
taken with a serious attack of gout. She grew
rapidly worse, and was soon so weak as to be
unable to leave her perch for food, when the male,
THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW 183
faithful and tender as a human spouse, took it
upon himself to carry food to her regularly in his
beak. ' He continued feeding her in this way for
four months, but the infirmities of his companion
increased day by day, until at last she was no
longer able to support herself on the perch. She
remained cowering down in the bottom of the
cage, making from time to time ineffectual efforts
to regain her perch. The male was always near
her, and did everything in his power to aid the
feeble efforts of his dear better-half. Seizing the
poor invalid by the beak or the upper part of her
wing, he tried his best to enable her to rise, and
repeated his efforts several times. His constancy,
his gestures, and his continued solicitude, all
showed in this affectionate bird the most ardent
desire to relieve the sufferings and assist the weak-
ness of his sinking companion. But the scene
became still more affecting when the female was
d5ang. Her unhappy consort moved about her
incessantly, his attentions and tender cares re-
doubled. He even tried to open her beak to give
some nourishment. He ran to her, and then
returned with a troubled and agitated look. At
intervals he uttered the most plaintive cries ; then,
with his eyes fixed on her, kept a mournful silence.
At length his companion breathed her last. From
that moment he pined away, and in the course of
a few weeks died ' (10).
Even the rough-looking ostrich has sensibility
enough to die of a broken heart, as was the case in
the Jardin des Plantes at Paris a few years ago.
i84 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
There is many a heart with a slabless grave far
from the haunts of men, and many a tear in secret
brews that never wets the eye.
The individual who has never acquired the
enthusiasm for a knowledge of the birds and a
love for their presence and association has omitted
some of the richest emotions of life. ' The sight
of a bird or the sound of its voice is at all times
an event of such significance to me,' says Chap-
man, ' a source of such unfailing pleasure, that
when I go afield with those to whom birds are
strangers I am deeply impressed by the compara-
tive barrenness of their world, for they live in
ignorance of a great store of enjoyment that might
be theirs for the asking.'
' I cannot love the man who does not love,
As men love light, the song of happy birds.'
I have seen a mother mouse in a moment of
peril flee from her home among the falling pieces
of a cord-wood pile, and disappear under the roots
of a neighbouring oak. I have seen her a little
later, recovered from her initial dismay, making
her way back again, clambering along among the
tangled timbers, stopping now and then to look
and listen, her eyes wild and anxious, and her
whole little body quaking with excitement. I
have seen her go among the ruins of her dwelling,
take a poor little squeaking young one in her
mouth, and hurry away with it to the gloomy
refuge in the roots of the oak. I have watched
her return again and again, each time taking in
THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW 185
her careful teeth the tiny body of a babe, until five
mouthfuls of precious pink were safely lodged
within the fortress of the oak. And I could as
soon believe that woman, when she saves her
children from some fearful harm, is a soulless
machine as think that that brave little wood-
mother, out there alone under the trees, snatching
her darlings from the jaws of death, was a heroine
without sense or feeling. That little hairy mother
with four feet and bead-like eyes loved her young
ones in just the same way and for just the same
reason as a human mother loves her young ones.
She looked upon her babies, in all probability,
with the same mother-love and tenderness as
a human mother looks upon hers, and felt in
miniature, with evil hovering above them, the
same consternation a woman feels when destruc-
tion reaches out after those that are nearest and
dearest. And when it was all over, when the good
angel of deliverance had finally spread its healing
white wings over that afilicted family, the heart of
that little rodent was doubtless soothed by the
same joy as that which, in the hour of deliverance,
calms the hearts of humankind.
Ants tend their fields, gather their harvests,
domesticate other insects, and keep slaves. They
help each other bear heavy burdens, extricate each
other from misfortune, speak to each other when
they meet, and bury their dead. They build roads
and bridges, and manifest wonderful engineering
skill in their construction. They even tunnel
under rivers. They go far from home, and find
i86 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
their way back again. They inhabit towns, and
build splendid and spacious palaces. Each ant
knows every other citizen of its own town, and an
ant from any other town is immediately recognised
as a foreigner. Ants have their overseers of indus-
trial enterprises, and regular hours for work and
sleep. The ant is the most pugnacious of all
animals, and the most muscular compared with
its size. It will boldly attack the biggest creature
that walks if this creature invades its home It
will fasten its mandibles into an enemy, and allow
itself to be torn to pieces without relaxing its hold.
Among some savage tribes, certain species of ants
ire said to be used as surgeons. Infuriated ants are
illowed to fasten their mandibles on the opposite
sdges of a gash, and in this way the wound is
:losed. The ants are decapitated, and their bodi-
less heads with their relentless jaws serve as
stitches to the wound. Ants have holidays and
ithletic festivals. On such occasions they romp
md chase each other and play hide-and-seek like
;hildren. They stand on their hind-legs, embrace
jach other with their fore-limbs, grasp each other
oy the feet or antennae, pull each other down the
jntrances to their towns, wrestle and roll over on
;he sand, and so on — all in the friendliest manner,
[t is greatly to the credit of these little people that
10 observer has ever yet known them to become
io inventively helpless or so athletically hard up
IS to play slug-ball. Ants educate their young,
md practise the fundamental principles of human
states and societies. Forel, the great Swiss student
THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW 187
of ants, says that several hundred nests are some-
times united into a single confederation. Each
ant knows every other ant of the entire con-
federation, and they all take part in the common
defence. Haeckel says, speaking of social evolu-
tion in ants, that the aboriginal ants of the Chalk
Age had as little idea of the division of labour and
organisation of modern ant states as paleolithic
flint-chippers had of the complexity and organisa-
tion of twentieth-century civilisation. ' If we take
an ant's nest, we not only see that work of every
description — rearing of progeny, foraging, build-
ing, rearing of aphides, and so on — is performed
according to the principles of voluntary mutual
aid, but we must also recognise, with Forel, that
the fundamental feature of the life of many species
of ants is the obligation of every ant to share its
food, already swallowed and partly digested, with
every member of the community which may apply
for it. Two ants belonging to the same nest or
to the same confederation of nests will approach
each other, exchange a few movements with the
antennae, and if one of them is hungry or thirsty
— and especially if the other has its crop full — it
immediately asks for food. The individual thus
requested never refuses. It sets apart its man-
dibles, takes a proper position, and regurgitates a
drop of transparent fluid, which is licked up by
the hungry ant. Regurgitating food for others is
so prominent a feature in the life of the ants, and
it so constantly recurs both for feeding hungry
comrades and for feeding larvae, that Forel con-
i88 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
siders the digestive tube of ants to consist of two
different parts, one of which — the posterior — is for
the special use of the individual, and the other —
the anterior part — is chiefly for the use of the
community. If an ant which has its crop full has
been selfish enough to refuse to feed a comrade, it
will be treated as an enemy. If the refusal has
been made while its kinsfolks were fighting with
some other species, they will fall upon the greedy
individual with greater vehemence even than upon
the enemies themselves. All this has been con-
firmed by the most accurate observations and
experiments ' (20).
Ants keep slaves. And the slaves, in some in-
stances, carry their masters about, feed them,
groom them, and attend to their every want,
just as human lackeys do helpless aristocrats.
In some species the institution of slavery is so
old that the physical structures of the masters
have been modified until the masters are phy-
sically unable to feed themselves, and will perish
from hunger, though surrounded by food, if they
are left to themselves. The brain of the ant, as
Darwin says, is one of the most wonderful bits
of matter in the universe. It is scarcely one-
fourth the size of the head of a pin, yet it is the
seat of the most astonishing wisdom and activity.
If human intelligence were as great, compared
with the mass of the human brain, as is the ant's,
man would be several hundred times as wise as he
is now, and would then probably not fall far short
of that state of erudition which the average man
THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW i8g
imagines he already represents. Ants remember,
and a fact becomes impressed by repetition, show-
ing that the faculty of memory in ants is governed
by the same laws as is this faculty in man. Sir
John Lubbock found it necessary to teach his ants
the way by repeating the lesson where the way
was long or unusual. * Sensation, perception, and
association follow in the social insects, on the
whole, the same fundamental laws as in the verte-
brates, including ourselves. Furthermore, atten-
tion is surprisingly developed in insects ' (Forel).
Ants keep standing armies, make alliances, and
maraud neighbouring states. They have their
wars, civil and foreign, and their massacres and
enslavements of the conquered. But they have
never got so low yet, so far as anyone knows, as
to hypocritically prosecute their conquests in the
name of God and humanity. The battlefields of
ants resemble the carnage-plains of men, strewn
with ghastly corpses and covered with the head-
less and dying. And the accounts of their expedi-
tions — their going forth in regular columns, with
captains, scouts, and skirmish lines, their battles,
"and their return laden with plunder and captives
— read like the grisly tales of human history.
Ants perform, in short, about all the antics of
civilised man, except maltreating the females and
drinking gin. And shall we say their civilisation
is less real because it is miniature and because it
is carried on far below the Brobdingnagian con-
templations of man ? ' When we see an ant-hill
tenanted by thousands of industrious inhabitants,
igo THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
excavating chambers, forming tunnels, making
roads, guarding their home, gathering food, feeding
the young, tending their domestic animals, each
one fulfilling its duties industriously and without
confusion, it is difficult altogether to deny them
the gift of reason or to escape the conviction that
their mental powers differ from those of men not
so much in kind as in degree ' (Lubbock).
The industrious and gifted bee, with its wonder-
ful social system, in advance even of that of the
most enlightened societies of men ; the generous
horse, who thinks and feels so much more than
the clowns who maul him ever suspect ; the artful
spider, that confirmed waylayer lurking in his lair
of silk ; the soft and predaceous cat ; the timid-
hearted hare, poor hounded little dweller of the
fields and stream-sides ; the beautiful and vivacious
squirrel ; the lowly lady-bug ; the cautious fox ;
the irascible serpent, so cruelly misunderstood by
men ; the patient camel ; the scornful peafowl ;
the indomitable goat; the grave and vindictive
elephant ; the ingenious beaver, the woodman of
the primeval wilderness ; the lordly and polygamous
cock ; the maternal hen ; the wary trout, beset
everywhere by the villainous traps of impostors ;
the bride-like butterfly ; the delicate antelope and
deer; and the sturdy, incorruptible ox— all of
these beings have within them souls composed
primarily of the same elements as those that
compose the souls of men.
Ground-wasps have been observed to use tiny
stones as hammers in packing the dirt firmly over
THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW 191
their nests — a very remarkable act of intelligence,
since the use of tools is not common even among
the higher mammals (13). Fishes have been
taught to assemble at the ringing of a bell, and
toads and tortoises to come at the call of their
favourite friends. An alligator which was kept
tame for several years became so much attached
to its master that ' it followed him about the
house like a dog, scrambling up the stairs after
him, and showing much affection and docility.'
The favourite friend and companion of this
alligator was the cat ; and, whenever the cat
stretched herself on the floor in front of the fire,
the alligator would lie down beside her, with its
head on the cat, and go to sleep. ' When the cat
was absent, the alligator was restless, but it always
appeared happy when the cat was near it ' (12).
Wolves and foxes sometimes cooperate with
each other in their hunting expeditions, somewhat
as men do in theirs. One of their number will
crouch in ambush by the side of a road known to
be used by hares or other small animals, and leap
on the unsuspecting fugitives when driven that
way by others of the hunting band. Many animals
post sentinels when they eat or sleep or engage in
other hazardous undertakings, and these sentinels
show a good deal of discrimination in distinguish-
ing between animals that are friendly and those
that are not. Beavers not only build lodges to
live in, but also construct dams to keep the water
in which the villages are located at a certain height.
The outlet of these dams is carefully regulated,
192 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
being regularly lessened and enlarged to suit the
supply of water in the stream. The trees used by
the beavers in their enterprises are felled by them
along the margins of the stream, and floated to
the place where they are used. In old com-
munities, where the supply of timber near the
stream has been exhausted, artificial canals are
cut by these indomitable engineers for use in the
transportation of their materials. These excava-
tions are made at a great cost of labour and for
the deliberate purpose of enabling the builders to
accomplish that which they could not accomplish
in any other way. ' In executing this purpose,'
says Romanes, ' there is sometimes displayed a
depth of engineering forethought over details of
structure required by the circumstances of special
localities which is even more astonishing than the
execution of the general idea' (lo). When, for
instance, a canal has been carried so far from the
original water-supply that, owing to the rising
ground, it cannot be continued without a very
great expenditure of effort in digging, a second
dam is built higher up-stream, and with water
drawn from this the canal is continued on at
a higher level. Sometimes a third dam is built
above the second, and the canal again continued
at a still higher level before the valuable timber of
the higher grounds is reached. These enterprising
rodents also carve sometimes enormous channels
across the necks of land formed by winding rivers,
to serve as cut-offs in travel and transportation.
And yet all of these things — all of the intelli-
THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW 193
gence, feeling, and ingenuity displayed by the
non-human races — are still lumped together by
belated psychologists under the head of ' instinct,'
by which is meant a blind, unconscious knack of
doing the right thing without in any way realising
what is being done or what it is being done for !
The principle in accordance with which mind is
denied to non-human beings would, if carried to
its legitimate conclusions, make machines out of
all of us, and limit the possession of conscious
intelligence to the individual who promulgates
the theory. The attitude assumed by many
psychologists toward the mental faculties of
inferior races reminds one of Heine's interview
with the old lizard at Lucca. In the discussion
which ensued between the poet and the reptile,
the poet dropped the words, ' I think.' ' Think !'
snapped the lizard with a sharp, aristocratic tone
of profound contempt — ' think ! Which of you
thinks ? For 3,000 years, wise sir, I have investi-
gated the spiritual functions of animals, and I
have made men and apes the special objects of
my study. I have devoted myself to these queer
creatures with as great zeal and diligence as
Lyonnet to his caterpillars. And as the result of
my researches, I can assure you no man thinks.
Now and then something occurs to him, and
these accidentally occurring somethings he calls
thoughts, and the stringing of them together he
calls thinking. But you can take my word for it,
no man thinks — no philosopher thinks. And, so
far as philosophy is concerned, it is mere air and
13
194 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
water, like pure vapours in the sky. There is,
in reality, only one true philosophy, and that
is engraven in eternal hieroglyphics on my own
tail ' (ii).
This attitude of the lordly saurian toward the
human race is a stinging burlesque on the anthro-
pocentric conceit which perverts all of man's views
of the other orders of life.
It is not contended that non-human beings are
psychically identical with human beings. The
races of men are not psychically identical with
each other. The difference between the intel-
lectual splendours of a Spencer evolving volumes
of the profoundest philosophy and the mind of an
Australian who cannot count six, or between the
understanding of an Edison, the wizard of the
electrical world, and that of the South Sea
islanders, who, when Captain Cook gave them
some English nails, planted them in the hope of
raising a new crop, is almost infinite. The lowest
races of men have neither superstition nor the
power of abstract thought as have the higher
races. They have a word for black stone, white
stone, and brown stone, but no word for stone;
for elm-tree, oak-tree, and the like, but no word
for tree. As Kingsley says, ' It is difficult to
believe that a dog does not form as clear an
abstract idea of a tree as these people do.' There
are human beings living in the forests of Asia,
Africa, and Australasia that wander about from
place to place in herds without chief, law, weapons,
or fixed habitations. They go naked, mate by
THE COMMON-SENSE VIEW 195
chance, and climb trees like monkeys. Some of
these races know nothing of fire, religion, or a
moral world, chatter to each other like apes, and
live on such natural products as roots, fruits,
serpents, mice, ants, and honey. One of these
creatures, we are told, will lie flat on his front for
an hour by the runway'of a field-mouse, waiting
for a chance to snatch up the little creature when
it comes along and eat it. Dozens of such de-
graded races are mentioned by Buchner in his
' Man : Past, Present, and Future,' and by Sir
John Lubbock in his ' Origin of Civilisation.'
Non-human beings have, as a rule, neither the
psychic variety nor the intensity of higher humans.
And it is not contended that in language, science,
and superstition they are capable of being com-
pared with the foremost few of civilised societies,
any more than savages, especially the lowest
savages, are capable of such comparison. But it
is maintained that the non-human races of the
earth are not the metallic and soulless lot of
fixtures they are vulgarly supposed to be ; that
they are just as real living beings, with just as
precious nerves and just as genuine feelings, rights,
heartaches, capabilities, and waywardnesses, as we
ourselves ; and that, since they are our own kith
and kindred, we have no right whatever, higher
than the right of main strength (which is the
right of devils), to assume them to be, and to
treat them as if they were, our natural and legiti-
mate prey.
13—2
196 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
IV. The Elements of Human and Non-human
Mind Compared.
The analysis of human mind and the compari-
son of its elements or powers with the powers
of non-human mind corroborate the conclusions
already arrived at through observation and deduc-
tive inference. The chief powers of the mind of
man are sensation, memory, emotion, imagination,
voUtion, instinct, and reason. All of these faculties
are found in non-human beings, some of them
developed to a much higher degree than they are
in man, and some of them to a much lower.
Sensation is the effect produced on the mind
when a sense organ is affected in some way by
external stimuli. Sensation is the lumber of the
mind, the raw material out of which are elaborated
all other forms of consciousness. The chief species
of sensation are those of sight, sound, smell, taste,
and feeling. The original sense was feeling, and
out of this sense were evolved the other four.
The organs of seeing, hearing, smelling, and
tasting are therefore modifications of the skin,
which is the organ of original sense. The fact
that in all animals, down almost to the very
beginnings of life, sense organs exist, suggests that
sensation may be almost, if not quite, coextensive
with animal life. All mammals, birds, reptiles,
amphibians, and fishes have the same special sense
organs as man, and the organs of sight, sound,
taste, and smell occupy in all vertebrates the same
relative positions in the head. Birds see better
THE ELEMENTS OF MIND 197
than any other animals, and carnivora smell
better. Ruminants see, hear, and smell with
great acuteness. Fishes also see and hear well ;
and the wings of the bat are so exceedingly sen-
sitive that it will move about blindfolded and with
ears stopped with cotton almost as unerringly as
when aided by sight and sound. Insects have
smell, sight, and taste well developed, as is shown
by their keen appreciation of the colours, perfumes,
and flavours of flowers. They also hear. Stridu-
lation proves this. Worms have eyes and ears,
and land-leeches scent the approach of their prey
at a long distance. The starfish and the medusa
respond to all the five classes of stimuli which
affect the five senses of man, and nervous sub-
stance is found in all animals above the sponge.
Memory is the power of retaining or recognising
past states of consciousness. The power to retain
impressions follows in origin close upon the power
to receive impressions. Memory is the historic
faculty of the mind — the power of the mind to
store up its experiences — and is found in nearly
all animals. The lowly limpet, whose world is a
seaside rock, will come back from its little roam-
ings time after time to the same rude lodge from
which it set out. Bees remember where they get
honey or sugar months afterwards, and when it is
necessary will sometimes go back to the old home
hive which they left the year before. Ants retrace
their steps after making long journeys from their
nest, and are able in some way to recognise their
friends after months of separation. The stickle-
igS THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
back (fish) knows the way back to his nest, although
he has been absent several hours. Fishes return
and hatch their young year after year in the same
waters; birds come back to their old nesting-
places ; and horses remember their way along
devious roads over which they have not been for
years. Horses used in the delivery of milk, or in
other occupations in which they are accustomed
to travel daily over about the same route, come in
time to remember every alley, street, and stopping-
place of the whole round almost as accurately
as their drivers. Darwin's dog remembered and
obeyed him after an absence of five years. The
power of dogs, squirrels, and other animals of
remembering where they have long before cached
food is indeed wonderful. A squirrel will come
down out of a tree when the earth is covered to
a depth of several inches with lately fallen snow
and hop away, without the slightest hesitancy or
mistake, to the exact spot where it has months
before stored its mid-winter acorns. A lion has
been known to recognise its keeper after seven
years of separation, and an elephant obeyed all
his old words of command on being recaptured
after fifteen years of jungle life. The similarity of
memory in other animals to the same faculty in
man is shown by the fact that memory everywhere
is governed by the same laws. In all animals,
including man, memory is strengthened by repe-
tition — that is, impressions are always deepened
and confirmed by being made over and over. A
parrot or a raven masters a new sentence by
THE ELEMENTS OF MIND 199
working at it and saying it over and over again,
just as a boy memorises his rules and catechisms.
Imagination is the picturing power of the mind.
In its lowest stages of manifestation it is akin to
memory. Imagination, however, in its higher
reaches, not only reimages previous impressions,
but combines them in new and original relations.
Imagination is displayed in dreams, images, de-
lusions, anticipation, and sympathy. It also fur-
nishes wings for speculation and reason. Spiders,
when they attach stones to their webs to steady
them during anticipated gales, probably exercise
imagination. The tame serpent which was carried
away from its master's house and found its way
back again, though the distance was one hundred
miles, no doubt carried in its imagination vivid
pictures of its old home (10). Cats, dogs, horses,
and other animals dream, and parrots talk in their
sleep. Horses and cattle sometimes stampede at
imaginary objects, and often distort real objects
into imaginary monsters. When a horse at night
takes firight at a big black stump by the roadside,
he no doubt imagines it to be some terrible creature
ready to eat him up if he should go near it, just
as a timid child does in the same circumstances.
There is a great difference in horses in this respect,
just as there is among children and men, some of
them taking fright at every unusual thing, while
others are more bold or stolid. The cat playing
with a ball of yarn converts it by means of its
imagination into an object of prey, just as a girl
converts a doll into a baby, or a boy changes a
200 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
stick into a steed. Sympathy is the putting or
picturing of one's self in the place of another, and
by means of the imagination sharing or simulating
the psychic conditions of that other. This high
and holy exercise of the imagination is exhibited
by horses, cattle, dogs, deer, elephants, monkeys,
and birds — in fact, by nearly all animals as far
down as the fishes and insects.
Emotion is the stirring of the sensibilities by
way of the intellect or the imagination. Thfe
following emotions are found in non-human
beings : fear, surprise, affection, pugnacity, play,
pride, anger, jealousy, curiosity, sympathy, emula-
tion, resentment, appreciation of the beautiful,
grief, hate, cruelty, joy, benevolence, revenge,
shame, remorse, and appreciation of the ludicrous.
Excepting the emotions of conscience and religion,
which are really compounds, with fear as the main
ingredient, this list of non-human emotions is co-
extensive with the list of human emotions. Many
of these emotions germinate low down in the
animal kingdom, fear, anger, sexuality, and
jealousy all being found in fishes and in the
higher invertebrates. In the higher vertebrates
many of these emotions are almost as strong as
they are in men. Does anyone who has felt the
throbbing sides of a frightened puppy or hare
have any doubt that these creatures suffer the
keenest agony of fear ? Apes have been known to
fall down and faint when suddenly confronted by
a snake, so great is their instinctive horror of
serpents ; and gray parrots, which are extremely
THE ELEMENTS OF MIND 201
nervous birds, have been known to drop from their
perch unconscious under the influence of great
fear (14).
The horse is, perhaps, of all animals, the one
which occasionally, gives itself over most com-
pletely to the emotion of fear, as everyone who
has witnessed the terrible abandon of a runaway
team can testify. Ants, fishes, birds, cats, dogs,
horses, monkeys, porpoises, and many other
animals play. Young kittens, colts, and puppies
enjoy a scuffle about as well as boys do. Pugnacity
originates among the spiders and insects, and is
highly developed in the ant, cock, and bulldog.
This emotion is strong in the males of nearly all
vertebrates. Anyone who has observed the vigi-
lance displayed by fishes in protecting their nests
can have little doubt that these comparatively
primitive beings possess pugnacity. I was one
evening floating in a boat by the edge of a Long
Island pond just over a village of perches. Each
nest was guarded by an assiduous male, who
hovered over it vigilantly, or darted this way and
that to drive off the piscatorial hoi polloi hanging
about the neighbourhood, ready to slip in at the
first opportunity and eat the eggs. Just to see
what would happen, I put my hand down into
the water and moved it slowly toward one of the
nests. To my surprise, the guardian of the nest,
instead of fleeing in alarm, proceeded to show
fight. It chased my hand away time after time,
and when the hand was not removed it would nip
it vigorously, not once simply, but two or three
202 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
times if necessary, and each time with increasing
energy. It contended with the courage of a little
hero. I pushed it and jostled it about, and even
took it in my hand and Hfted it clear out of the
water. To my amazement, on getting back into
the water, it returned promptly to the attack. It
fought until it was really fagged, for its onsets
were at last much feebler than at first. I came
away after twenty minutes, leaving the little hero
in triumphant possession of his charge.
Among some species of monkeys several indi-
viduals 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 (20). 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 (15). 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
THE ELEMENTS OF MIND 203
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 (20).
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 achiev-
ing 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 help-
less 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
204 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
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 sanie 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 water-
side, and lifting them carefully out of the ruts
and pits with his bill whenever they got into
difficulty (lo).
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,
THE ELEMENTS OF MIND 205
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 hap-
pened 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 ot 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
2o6 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
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 unhappi-
ness 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 rudi-
mentary sense of humour by the pranks and
tricks which they play on each other and on
human beings. The monkey is the prince of non-
human 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
THE ELEMENTS OF MIND 207
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 ludi-
crous 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 disap-
pointment 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 (10). 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 (15).
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 ex-
ceedingly 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
2o8 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
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 morahty. 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 suffi-
cient 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 maintain-
ing 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 some-
times include all sentient creation, is much greater
than that between the savage and many non-
human animals. The frail, narrow, fantastic
character of human sympathy is the most mourn-
ful 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.
Volition is the power of the mind to act execu-
THE ELEMENTS OF MIND 209
tively. 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 tvfcfinkling 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
14
210 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
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 begin-
ning of life and endowed with the same nature as
before, and were acted upon through life by sur-
roundings 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.
Instinct and reason are 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 of unconscious intelligence. 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 hght in order to
THE ELEMENTS OF MIND 211
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 conscious-
ness. 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 intel-
ligence, is unconscious.
Instinct and reason are conscious. Instinct is
inherited intelligence — intelligence manifested in-
dependently of, and prior to, experience and
instruction. ' Instinct,' says Romanes, ' is reflex
action into which has been imported the element
of consciousness ' (i). 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;
14 — 2
212 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
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
Felidas, 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
THE ELEMENTS OF MIND 213
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 a school. 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 secre-
tions ; collection of aphid eggs in October, hatch-
ing 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 recrea-
tion ; habits of burying their dead ; the storage of
grain and nipping the budding rootlet to prevent
further germination ; the habit of Texan ants of
214 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
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 displaj^ed 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
3ur grubs has on the duties of ant-life. They
seem to fall into the routine of life with little or
ao preparatory training as the periods for the
manifestation of the various instincts arrive. If
[earning thereof there be, it has so far escaped
our observation. And such intelligence as their
activities evince (and many of them do show
THE ELEMENTS OF MIND 215
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 con-
ditions 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 ?' (21)
Reason is 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 instinc-
tive, and instinct being as frequently flavoured
with judgment. ' Instinct is usually regarded as
a special property of the lower animals, and con-
trasted 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
2i6 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
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 neces-
sary. 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 pre-
sented 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 carnivore that 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
THE ELEMENTS OF MIND 217
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
2i8 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
exposures of the overland journey (lo). 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 dis-
cerning 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
:atch votes. ' A perception is always in its
essential nature what logicians term a conclusion,
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 ' (i). The difference among the perceptive
acts of different individuals consists, not in the
different kinds of intellectual exercise, but in
THE ELEMENTS OF MIND 219
differences among the inatcriak with 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 defini-
tion 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 (18).
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
220 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
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 Molifere's plays who was sur-
prised and delighted to learn that he had been
talking prose all his life, are surprised on hearing
for the first time that they use induction and
deduction every hour almost of their waking lives.
They imagine that philosophers must have some
secret and superior way of acquiring their con-
clusions, different from what ordinary mortals
have. ' But there is no more difference,' says
Huxley, ' between the mental operations of a man
Df science and those of an ordinary person than
there is between the operations and methods
Df a grocer weighing out his goods in common
scales and the operations of a chemist in perform-
ing a difficult and complex analysis by means
Df 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
:he beam of the one is set on an infinitely finer
ixis than the other, and, of course, turns by
■he addition of a much smaller weight ' (i6).
(\nd the difference in mental method between
the man of learning and the ordinary man or
?ifoman is the same as the difference between
nature men and children and between men
THE ELEMENTS OF MIND 221
generally and other animals. It is one of degree,
not of kind. 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 moUusks 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 over-
coming obstacles and surmounting dangers, in
protecting and educating their young, in meet-
ing 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
222 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
t a sharp peck and utters a querulous kind of
:ry, 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
Dne 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; prarie-
iogs bark ; elephants trumpet ; wild geese and
Bwans have a kind of bugle call ; rabbits and
sheep stamp on the ground ; crows caw ; and
wild ducks utter a low, warning quack.'
In the Popular Science Monthly for 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 wander-
ing 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.
THE ELEMENTS OF MIND 233
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 : they learn to 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 im-
pressions made upon them, and acting differently
224 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
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 other-
wise 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 suificient 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 them-
selves only once with any sharp tool, would not
touch it again, or would handle it with the greatest
caution (lo). 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
THE ELEMENTS OF MIND 225
Carrumpaw, cannot but wonder at the remarkable
shrewdness shown by this old leader in baffling
for years the tigers that hung upon his tracks (17).
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 dis-
tances through the air as cleverly as if it had read
up all the theory of scent in a book. According
to the London Spectator, one 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
15
6 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
:hard in search of food, send out a scouting
rty to reconnoitre the region and see that ' all
well.' Sometimes a second party is sent. If
e report is favourable, the whole band advance
d plunder the field in short order. These birds
2 exceedingly wary and intelligent, and seldom
ike mistakes. But ' if man once succeeds in
ling one of them, they become so prudent and
Ltchful that they henceforward baffle all strata-
ms ' (20). A short time ago a parrot at Wash-
;ton, New Jersey, saved the life of its owner by
mmoning the neighbours to his relief. Cries of
[urder!' 'Help!' 'Come quick!' coming from
2 home of the parrot, attracted the attention of
ighbours, who ran to the house to find out the
use. ' They found the owner of the parrot lying
the floor unconscious, bleeding from a great
sh in his neck. He had been repairing the
iling, and had fallen and struck his head against
3 stove. It required six stitches to close the
)und, and the surgeon said that in only a few
nutes the injured man would have been dead,
few years ago this parrot's screams awakened
owner in time to arouse his neighbours and
/e them from a fire which started in the house
xt door.'
A friend of mine, who is thoroughly reliable, tells
I that when he was a student at the University
Michigan a few years ago one of the professors
zoology there had a dog who was used by the
partment for experiments in digestion. The dog
lS compelled to wear a tube opening downward
THE ELEMENTS OF MIND 227
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, how-
ever, the dog was observed to be growing unac-
countably 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 con-
tents 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 swell-
ing 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
15—2
228 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
kissed his face in gratitude. The Httle 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
THE ELEMENTS OF MIND 229
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 be-
haviour,' 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 our-
selves 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
230 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
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 dwell-
ings, 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 diff'erent observers testify to having seen
ground-wasps use small stones as hammers in
packing the dirt firmly over their nests. Spiders
THE ELEMENTS OF MIND 231
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 in-
genious parodies of men sometimes carry torches
when they go at night on foraging expeditions.
The Indian elephant, when travelling, will some-
times 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.'
232 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
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, con-
gested into this one branch. And all of the weak-
ness 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 kakis-
tocrat swelling with self-righteousness — rhetorical
hideful wrapped in pillage and gorged with decom-
position — a voluble and sanctimonious squash with
CONCLUSION 233
two sticks in it. The definition of man as it
appears in the dictionary of the donkey probably
runs something Hke this : ' Man is 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
234 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
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-hearted brute, 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 Machia-
vellian ways of men. Would you learn forgiveness?
Go to the dog. The dog can stand more abuse
CONCLUSION 235
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 rela-
tions 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 (10). 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 ?
236 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
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 indi-
vidual 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 cat-
bird, 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
CONCLUSION 237
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
238 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
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 (20). How these scat-
tered 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 marvel-
lous, 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 the palolo, 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
CONCLUSION 239
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 nesir 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 hypo-
critical, 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 psicks, just for pastime, is beyond charac-
terisation. 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
240 THE PSYCHICAL KINSHIP
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. We
are our brother's keeper. Our brethern 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 Mourn. 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 Utter-
most Isles, and our Charity to the Stars.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(i) Romanes : Mental Evolution in Animals ; New York,
1898.
(2) Burton : First Footsteps in East Africa ; London,
1856.
(3) Lubbock : Origin of Civilisation ; New York, 1898.
(4) Demoor : Evolution by Atrophy ; New York, 1899.
(5) Darwin : Expression of Emotions in Men and Animals ;
New York, 1899.
(6) Starr : Human Progress ; Meadville, Pennsylvania,
1895-
(7) Hartmann : Anthropoid Apes ; New York, 1901.
(8) Brehm : From North Pole to Equator ; London, 1896.
(9) Stanley: In Darkest Africa, vol i. ; New York, 1890.
(10) Romanes : Animal Intelligence ; New York, 1899.
(11) Evans: Evolutional Ethics and Animal Psychology;
New York, 1898.
(12) Jesse: Gleanings in Natural History, vol. i. ; London,
1832.
(13) Peckham and Peckham : Instincts and Habits of the
Solitary Wasps ; Madison, Wisconsin, 1898.
(14) Cornish: Animals of To-day ; London, 1898.
(15) Darwin: Descent of Man ; London, 1874.
(16) Huxley: On the Origin of Species, lecture iii.
(17) Thompson : Wild Animals I have Known ; New York,
1900.
(18) Brehm: Thierleben ; Leipzig, 1880.
(19) Gilbraith : Ethnological Journal, 1869, p. 304.
(20) Kropotkin: Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution; New
York, 1902.
(21) Morgan : Animal Behaviour ; London, 1900.
241 16
THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
PAGE
I. HUMAN NATURE A PRODUCT OF THE JUNGLE- 245
II. EGOISM AND ALTRUISM - - - - 247
III. THE ETHICS OF THE SAVAGE - - - 252
IV. THE ETHICS OF THE ANCIENT - - - 258
V. MODERN ETHICS ----- 267
VL THE ETHICS OF HUMAN BEINGS TOWARD NON-
HUMAN BEINGS .... 272
VII. THE ORIGIN OF PROVINCIALISM- - - 282
VIII. UNIVERSAL ETHICS - - - - 291
IX. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ALTRUISM - - 296
X. ANTHROPOCENTRIC ETHICS - - "314
XI. ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF EVOLUTION - 3 19
XII. CONCLUSION ..... 324
243 16—2
One of the wisest things ever said by one of the pro-
foundest philosophers of all time was the warning to the
seeker after truth to beware of the influence of the ' idols
(or illusions) of the tribe/ by which he meant that body of
traditional prejudices which every sect, family, nation, and
neighbourhood has clinging to it, and in the midst of which
and at the mercy of which every human being grows up.
244
THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
I. Human Nature a Product of the Jungle.
The Golden Rule is not exemplified by the
conduct of any considerable number of the in-
habitants of the earth. To be civilised or even
half-civilised is, to the children of this world,
neither instinctive nor easy. To preserve a
certain pretence or appearance of virtue, especially
when encouraged to do so by an uplifted cudgel
in the hands of the community, is a possible and
not uncommon accomplishment. But to be at
heart and in reality as considerate of others as we
are of ourselves is, unfortunately, not natural.
Human beings are not children of the sun, so-
journing for a season on this spheroid of clay, and
needing only pinions to be angels. Human nature
did not come, pure and shining, down from the
glittering gods. It came out of the jungle.
Civilised peoples are the not very remote posterity
of savages, and savages are the posterity of indi-
viduals who laid eggs and had literally cold blood
in their veins. Civilised men and women are
troglodytes with a veneering of virtue. In the
245
246 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
heart of every ' civilised ' man and woman is an
unconverted core, large or small, of barbarism.
Humanity is only a habit. Against it, and tend-
ing ever to weaken and subvert it, are the power-
ful inertias of animalism. Like the ship in Ibsen's
' Rhymed Epistle,' civilisation carries a corpse in
its cargo — the elemental appetites and passions
which have been implanted in all sentient nature
by the laws in accordance with which organic
forms have been fashioned. Moral progress is
simply the sloughing off of this inherited animality.
To the initiated, therefore, it is not strange
that we civilised folk in our conduct display so
freely the phenomena of the savage. There is
nothing more inevitable in the life of the convert
than the haunting inclination to give way to
original impulses. It is not strange that we are
powerless to be as good and beautiful and true as
we would like to be, that our divine efforts are our
half-hearted efforts, and that the only time we get
terribly in earnest and put forth really titanic
energies is when we are dominated directly or
indirectly by the instincts of the pack. Human
aspiration is fettered by the fearful facts of human
origin. It is not strange that we are continually
conscious of being torn by contending tendencies,
conscious of ghastly masteries, and of horrible
goings on in our innermost beings. The human
heart is the gladiatorial meeting-place of gods and
beasts.
EGOISM AND ALTRUISM 247
II. Egoism and Altruism.
Everything has been evolved — everything — from
daffodils to states and from ticks to religion.
Every organic thing is the result of long and
incessant survival of the advantageous — advanta-
geous from the standpoint of the organism itself
or from the standpoint of its kind, not necessarily
so from the standpoint of the universe. That
which is true of everything is true also of egoism
and altruism. Egoism and altruism exist as facts
in the natures of human and other beings for the
same reason that the various physical facts exist
in the structures of human and other beings,
because they have been advantageous in the
struggle for life. There is just as definite an
explanation for the existence of egoism and
altruism in this world, and for their existence in
the particular form and ratio in which they do
exist, as there is for the fact that the human hand
has five fingers, the rose odour, and the eggs of the
kildeer the mottled markings of the clods among
which they lie.
Egoism is preference for self, partiality toward
that part of the universe bounded by one's own
skin. It may consist simply of regard for self,
but with regard for self is usually associated
enmity toward others. Egoism manifests itself
in such qualities of mind as selfishness, cruelty,
intolerance, hate, hardheartedness, savagery, rude-
ness, injustice, narrowness, and the like. It is the
primal impulse of the living heart. Enmity is
248 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
older and more universal than love. Enmity con-
stituted the very loins from vi^hich long ago came
the original miscreants of this world.
' I saw the fishes playing there ;
I saw all that was in the whole world round ;
In wood, and bower, and marsh, and mead, and field,
All things which creep and fly,
And put a foot to earth.
All these I saw, and say to you,
That nothing lives among them without hate.'
Life has been developed through selection. This
selection has been brought about largely through
war — war between individuals and between groups
of individuals. War and competition are struggle
between living beings, and the soul of competition
is selfishness. Egoism is the primal and most
powerful of terrestrial impulses, because beings
hated and exterminated each other before they
tolerated and loved, and because struggle has
far overshadowed cooperation as a factor in life
evolution.
There are those who believe that mutual aid
has been a more dynamic factor in the develop-
ment of terrestrial life than competition. Co-
operation has been an important element in the
evolution of animal life, and it has operated
among nearly all animals, from the humblest to
the highest. Far down near the beginning of
organic existence we find the one-celled forms
huddling together in colonies, giving rise in the
course of time to the many-celled animals. But
to conclude that cooperation is the chief factor in
EGOISM AND ALTRUISM 249
animal development is to shut one's eyes to one of
the most obvious and overwhelming facts of organic
evolution. Individualism antedates mutualism,
both among the one-celled forms and among the
many-celled metazoa. Cooperation everywhere is
the sequence of a long preliminary of individual
contention. And cooperation does not mean
cessation of struggle, either among those co-
operating or among the groups themselves, as
Kropotkin and other exaggerators of the mutual
aid factor seem to assume. It usually does little
more than transfer the struggle from individuals
to groups. When a lot of pelicans or wolves get
together and work together in order that they may
thereby the better defend themselves or slay others,
it is hard to see how such facts can be placed to
the credit of cooperation any more than to that
of competition. Then, too, excepting in a few
societies of insects, cooperation has not gone so
far as to do more than slightly alleviate the
competition even among the members of a co-
operating group. Competition is a much more
common and influential fact in the phenomena of
life than cooperation, for it involves a large part
of the activity of individual life, and is also promi-
nent in all social activities.
The preponderance of egoism in the natures of
living beings is the most mournful and immense
fact in the phenomena of conscious life. It has
made the world the kind of world it would have
been had the gods actually emptied their wrath
vials upon it. Brotherhood is anomalous, and,
250 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
even in its highest manifestations, is but the
expression of a veiled and calculating egoism.
Inhumanity is everywhere. The whole planet is
steeped in it. Every creature faces an inhospi-
table universeful, and every life is a campaign. It
has all come about as a result of the mindless and
inhuman manner in which life has been developed
on the earth. It has been said that an individual
of unlimited faculties and infinite goodness and
power made this world and endowed it with ways
of acting, and that this individual, as the world's
executive, continues to determine its phenomena
by inspiring the order of its events. But one
cannot help thinking sometimes, when, in his
more daring and vivid moments, he comes to
comprehend the real character and condition of
the world, what a discrepancy exists between the
reputation of this builder and his works, and
cannot help wondering whether an ordinary
human being with only common-sense and insight
and an average concern for the welfare of the
world would not make a great improvement in
terrestrial affairs if he only had the opportunity
for a while.
Altruism is the recognition of, and regard for,
others. It shows itself in feelings of justice, good-
will, tenderness, charity, pity, public spirit, sym-
pathy, fraternity and love, and in acts of kindness,
humanity, mercy, generosity, politeness, philan-
thropy and the like. Altruism is a graft. The
stock is selfishness and brutality. Altruism (the
form of altruism to which I here refer : there are
EGOISM AND ALTRUISM 251
several distinct species of altruism) has come into
the world as a result of cooperation and con-
sanguinity. It has grown out of the cooperation
of individuals in families and tribes against their
cooperating enemies. Altruism — at least, in its
initial stages — is a sort of tribal egoism. Men and
other animals have learned to stand by each other
and help each other against their common foes
because it was the only way in which they were
able to stand. Those aggregates that have had
strongest this feeling of fraternity have prospered
and prevailed, while the less fraternal have gone
down.
The altruism manifested by men in their rela-
tions with each other is not different in kind from
the altruism and cooperation displayed by other
social animals. Human gregariousness — the gather-
ing together of human beings into tribes and
communities for purposes of companionship and
defence — is a part of the phenomena of animal
gregariousness in general. The inhabitants of a
human town, however much they may think so, are
not impelled to associate with each other and to
cooperate with each other in the affairs of life by
causes or considerations different from those which
actuate a society of ants or apes, of wasps or
wolves, who do the same things. The ante-
cedents of human ethics and society are, there-
fore, to be looked for in the ant-hill and the
jungle.
The fact that altruism has been evolved by the
cooperation of individuals with each other and
252 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
against others is a significant fact in the analysis
and understanding of the ethical phenomena of
the earth. To this fact is due the restricted and
illogical character of all altruism. The ethical
systems of all peoples are, and have always been,
to a greater or less extent, provincial and contra-
dictory. Ethical feeling and practice are not
extended universally — that is, to all beings — but
are maintained only among those associating
more or less closely as a group, and having
interests that are more or less nearly the same.
Among men of primitive mind, morality is a thing
to be practised toward only a few thousand or
even a few hundred individuals, and then in a
very half-awake and half-hearted manner. But
as the perceptions sharpen and vivify and the
horizon of knowledge widens — as commerce and
imagination cause the mind to overflow the narrow
bounds of the community into larger dimensions
of time and space — as the myriad influences
operating as race experience and race selection
enable men to realise the wider and wider oneness
of their origin, natures, interests, and destiny —
an increasing consistency characterises the con-
duct among the members of the group, and an
increasingly larger number of individuals are
admitted to ethical consideration and kinship.
III. The Ethics of the Savage.
The ethics of the savage is, almost without
exception, purely tribal in its extent. A marked
distinction is everywhere made by primitive peoples
THE ETHICS OF THE SAVAGE 253
between injuries to persons inside the tribe and
injuries to those outside the tribe. Crimes which
are looked upon as felonious when committed by
a savage against the members of his own tribe
may be regarded as harmless, or even highly com-
mendable, when perpetrated on those outside the
tribe. Acts are not judged according to their
intrinsic natures or results, but wholly as to
whether they are performed on outsiders or on
insiders. The Balantis (Africa) punish with death
a theft committed against a fellow-tribesman, but
encourage and reward thieving from other tribes.
The Afridi (Afghanistan) mother prays that her
son may be a successful robber — not a robber of
her own people, but of other peoples — and in
order that he may become proficient in crime
teaches him to creep stealthily through a hole in
the wall. By certain Bedouin tribes the * strenu-
ous life ' is held in such high honour that ' it is
considered a disgrace to die in bed ' ; and among
the man-eating Fijians ' men who have not slain
an enemy suffer the most degrading of all punish-
ments ' (i). In the paradise of the Kukis (India)
the cut-throats who have in life killed the largest
number of aliens not only inherit the highest
places, but these adepts of the knife are supposed
to be attended in their celestial comings and
goings by their victims as slaves (i). In his
dealings with the other members of his tribe, the
savage observes a certain rude code of morals,
this code being usually, as in the case of the
civilised code, an inglorious mixture of equity and
254 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
brutality, superstition and sanity, honesty and
hypocrisy. But the savage recognises no moral
obligations to any being outside of his tribe,
clan, or family. Anthropology teaches nothing
more positively than this. Consanguinity and
self-interest are the only bases of savage friend-
ship. Outsiders are outlaws. They may be
attacked, robbed, deceived, murdered, eaten, or
enslaved, with perfect propriety. It was this
general hostility of foreigners that Cain feared
when he was turned out from his countrymen
after his crime upon Abel. He knew that he was
liable to be set upon by the first stranger that
came upon him. So the Lord is said to have set
a mark upon him, ' lest any finding him should
kill him.'
' There was no brotherhood recognised by our
savage forefathers,' says Sir Henry Maine, in
speaking of the ancestors of the Aryan and
Semitic races, 'except actual consanguinity re-
garded as a fact. If a man was not of kin to
another, there was nothing between them. He
was an enemy to be hated, slain, or despoiled as
much as the wild beasts upon which the tribe
made war, as belonging, indeed, to the craftiest
and cruelest of wild animals. It would scarcely
be too strong to assert that the dogs which
followed the camp had more in common with it
than the tribesmen of an alien and unrelated tribe '
(2). Among some tribes of savage men the ethical
code is reversed in dealing with outsiders, and
enmity toward aliens is considered a duty.
THE ETHICS OF THE SAVAGE 253
This same senseless hostility toward every one
from abroad, so spitefully exhibited by primitive
men, is also manifested by ants, who immediately
recognise and pounce upon an individual intro-
duced from a foreign colony, but welcome with
every demonstration of joy, even after a lapse of
weeks or months, a returning member of their
own society. The same spirit of exclusiveness
is found also in elephants. If by accident an
elephant becomes separated from his herd, he
becomes an outcast and a fugitive, never being
permitted in any circumstances to attach himself
to another herd (3).
That the savage should entertain feelings of
friendship for those belonging to the same social
unit as himself is, considering the circumstances
in which it takes place, a perfectly natural phe-
nomenon. The members of his tribe are, to the
savage, the beings among whom he has come
into existence, and in the midst of whom he has
grown up. He knows and understands them,
and is known and understood by them. They
speak the same language as himself, and cherish
the same customs and traditions. They have
the same sacred trees, the same gods, the same
experiences day after day, and the same memories,
as he himself They are his associates in the
chase, his allies in war, and his comrades in
sorrow and success. They are the only beings
into whose lives he has ever entered. They
constitute his world, and are to him the only
real beings in the universe.
256 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
The members of his tribe are, moreover, to the
savage, for the most part, his kinspeople. If
they are not actually related to him by blood,
they are usually conceived by him to be so related.
The co-villagers of an Indian community call
each other brothers. It is a characteristic of all
the Aryan and Semitic races when in the tribal
state to conceive that the tribes themselves, and
all subdivisions of them, are descended each from
a single male ancestor. The savage sees the
living family of which he forms a part descended
from a single living man and his wife or wives.
This family group with which he is familiar and
other similar groups make up the tribe. And the
process by which each family has been brought
about is in his mind identical with the process
by which the community as a whole has been
formed (2). It is a conception of this kind,
handed down as a tradition from ancient tribal
times, which causes the Jews even to-day to regard
themselves as the ' seed ' of that venerable sheik
who, so many centuries ago, led them as a band
of nomads in their memorable migration westward
from the plains of Mesopotamia. It is not strange,
therefore, considering all of the circumstances in
the midst of which the savage lives and moves,
that he should look upon his fellow-tribesmen as
beings to be distinguished by him from all other
beings in the universe.
Nor is it strange, when we consider the mental
sterility of the savage, his lack of travel and
imagination, the meagerness of his experiences,
THE ETHICS OF THE SAVAGE 257
and his utter ignorance of the world beyond the
community in which he Hves, that he should look
upon and treat all outsiders as nobodies — as beings
without any claims whatever upon his humanity
or mercy. The imagination is the picturing power
of the mind, the power by which beings are able
to get out of themselves and into the places of
others, the power which enables us to view the
world comparatively — that is, from different points
of view. This power of mind, which imparts to
the higher types of intelligence their mobility and
sympathy, is rudimentary in the savage. This
has been proved by Tylor in his study of the
comparative mythology of savages. It is this
lack of imagination in the savage, combined with
his ignorance and his simplicity of life, which
gives to him his ferocity, and which renders him
inaccessible to those higher sentiments of justice
and righteousness which are — well, which are, at
least, dreamed about and theorised about by the
more evolved savages of the 'civilised world.'
The world, to the simple mind of the sayage, is, as
it is to the mind of the child, the world in which
he lives and moves — the world which he feels,
hears, tastes, and sees. The horizon is the boun-
dary of the universe. Beings beyond his tribe are
outside of the world. If they exist at all, it is as
a very different order of beings from him and his
people. They are not of kin to him, speak a
strange tongue, and have monstrous customs and
superstitions. How could they be in any way
related to him ? They are his enemies — vague,
17
258 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
villainous apparitions who appear to him only in
the horrible ordeals of battle. His chief occupa-
tion is the waging of war against them, and his
keenest gratification is felt in laying them low.
The accounts of all travellers testify that the
intertribal relations of savages are, with few
exceptions, those of chronic feud and hostility.
The irreconcilable antagonism between the savage
and those around him begets in the savage nature
its dominating impulse — hate, hatred and hostility
toward other men, as well as toward all other
beings. In fact, the savage makes no moral
distinction between man and the other animals,
but regards them all indiscriminately as his foes,
whom he must either use or remove from the face
of the earth. The savage hunts men about as he
hunts other animals, and for a like purpose. The
Troglodytes hunted the Ethiopians in four-horse
chariots with as little compunction as Americans
hunt antelopes to-day.
IV. The Ethics of the Ancient.
But the doctrine that each petty tribe is the
centre of the world and the only real and impor-
tant people in the universe, and that all others
are mere nobodies, is not peculiar to primitive
peoples. Ethnocentric ethics — the ethics of amity
toward their own tribe or state, their own clique
or kind, and the ethics of enmity toward outsiders —
has been manifested to a greater or less extent by
the peoples of all times and of all degrees of
enlightenment. Every people that has ever existed
THE ETHICS OF THE ANCIENT 259
has had its own particular point of view, its own
bias, its own knot-hole, large or small, through
which it has looked at life and the world. This is
inevitable. It arises as a necessary sequence out
of the fact that all peoples above savages are
the descendants of savages, and as such have
inherited the limitations, mental and environ-
mental, of those from whom they have evolved.
Aliens had no legal rights in ancient times —
none whatever. International cooperation, such
as exists among the political societies of Europe
and America to-day, was absolutely unknown.
International relations were everywhere those of
hostility. States and races looked upon each
other as foes, as objects of plunder and victim-
isation, not as friends.
Caesar says of the ancient Germans that
depredations committed beyond the boundaries
of each state bore no infamy, and that stealing
from aliens was even encouraged as a means of
teaching their young men adroitness.
The ancient Jews are an excellent illustration
of a narrow and self-centred people. Not-
withstanding their insignificance, politically and
intellectually, as compared with the Egyptians,
Greeks, and Persians, the Jews believed them-
selves to be the only people of the first class
inhabiting the earth. They conceived that they
had been selected as favourites by the gods
themselves, and that around their little district
in half-arid Palestine revolved the interests of the
entire world. Their chief city was supposed to
17 — 2
26o THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
be the sacred and central city of the world, and
heaven itself only a new and idealised edition of
their metropolis. Every Jew was bound to every
other Jew by high-wrought ceremony and obliga-
tion. But all non-Jews were ' Gentiles,' chaff-like
'pagans,' who possessed no rights which a 'child
of Abraham ' was bound to respect. Their tribal
god is said to have been so indulgent toward them
as his ' chosen people ' that he allowed them to
exact usury from foreigners, to sell them diseased
meats, and to borrow jewels from them and after-
wards run away with them. He even permitted
them to make war upon weak peoples and dis-
possess them of their lands. ' Whomsoever the
Lord our God shall drive out from before us,
them will we possess' (Judg. xi. 24).
The kings of the ancient Assyrians were so
accustomed to cruelties upon non-Assyrians, and
were so proud of these cruelties, that they recorded
them in stone as a claim to immortality among
men. Assurbanipal, in speaking of the conquered,
says : ' I pulled out their tongues and cut off their
limbs, and caused them to be eaten by dogs, bears,
eagles, vultures, birds of heaven.' Assur-natsir-pal,
another wonderful fellow, boasts similarly : ' I
flayed the nobles and covered the pyramid with
their skins, and their young men and maidens I
burned as a holocaust.' ' Their carcasses covered
the valleys and the tops of the mountains,' says
Tiglath-Pileser in his account of the slain Mus-
kayans ; and Sennacherib informs us proudly that
he drove his chariot over the dead bodies of his
THE ETHICS OF THE ANCIENT 261
victims until ' its wheels were clogged with flesh
and blood.' ' Evidently,' remarks Spencer, in
speaking of these monstrous inscriptions, 'the
expectation was that men of after-times would
admire these merciless destructions; for we cannot
assume that these Assyrian kings intentionally
made themselves eternally infamous ' (i).
To the ancient Greeks there were two classes of
human beings in the world : Greeks and ' barbar-
ians.' The Greeks were the inhabitants of Hellas,
which was believed to be the central region of
the world, and the ' barbarians ' were the godless
denizens of the less-favoured and less centrally
located remainder of the earth. The world was
believed to be flat or shield-shaped, and in its
exact centre stood Mount Olympus in northern
ThessaJy. This mountain, which is 9,700 feet
high, was supposed to be the highest elevation on
the earth, and was the awful abode of the gods.
The Greeks called themselves Hellenes. According
to their fabled genealogy, they were the descend-
ants of Hellen, son of Deucalion, the Greek Noah.
While they were often at war with each other,
they spoke a common language, and always
regarded themselves as members of a single
family. All non-Greeks were ' barbarians,' in-
cluding the Romans, who were called ' barbarians '
down to the time of Augustus. While the Greeks
themselves traced their ancestry back to the bright
blood of the gods, the ' barbarians ' were generally
supposed to have originated from stones and trees.
The ' barbarians ' were looked upon and treated
252 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
by the Greeks everywhere as a different order of
beings from themselves. Those taken by them in
war were regularly reduced to slavery. The slave
population created in this way was increased by
the slave traffic carried on with the East until the
slave population of Greece was several times as
great as the free population. The whole Hellenic
world, in fact, even in the days of its greatest
magnificence, was one vast pen of slaves. Almost
every freeman of Attica was a slave-owner. Out
of a population of about five hundred thousand,
four hundred thousand were slaves. It was con-
sidered a real hardship by the Greeks to be com-
pelled to get along with less than a half-dozen
slaves. In Corinth and ^gina there were ten
slaves to one freeman. In Sparta the slaves were
the vanquished Helots, the original inhabitants
of the Peloponnesus, whom the Spartans had
conquered and reduced to chains in early times.
Their lot was particularly horrible. They were
the property of the state, and were distributed to
the Spartan lords by lot. ' They practically had
no rights which their masters felt bound to re-
spect. If one of their number displayed unusual
powers of either body or mind, he was secretly
assassinated, as it was deemed unsafe to allow
such qualities to be fostered in the servile class.
It is affirmed [by Thucydides] that, when the Helots
grew too numerous for the supposed safety of the
state, their numbers were thinned by deliberate
massacre of the surplus population ' (4). The
conception of human slavery entertained by the
THE ETHICS OF THE ANCIENT 263
:ommon mass of Greeks may be inferred from the
Fact that philosophers Hke Aristotle taught that
' slaves were simply domestic animals possessed
of intelligence.' It is this fact, this utter lack of
justice and humanity manifested by the Greeks in
their treatment of non-Hellenic mankind, which
gives to Greek 'civilisation' its seamy side. Greek
society has been appropriately likened to a pyra-
mid, its apex gleaming with light and splendour,
while its base was sunk in darkness.
N on- Romans were called ' barbarians ' also by
the Romans, and were considered by the Romans
to be an entirely different order of beings from
themselves. Any splinter of a Roman was,
according to the Romans, superior to the most
illustrious ' barbarian.' Men were not treated
nor estimated according to their intrinsic quali-
ties, but wholly as to whether they were or were
not ' Roman citizens.' To be a ' Roman citizen '
was to be entitled to everything ; to be a ' barbarian'
was not to be entitled to anything necessarily,
except to serve in some way the all-glorious
Romans. The elaborate legal and ethical codes
formulated by these masters of the Mediterranean
were reserved religiously for themselves. The
business of the ' barbarians ' was to furnish fields
for pillage and conquest, to impart magnitude to
triumphal pageants, to act as slaves, and to die
by ignominiously butchering each other for the
amusement of their bloodthirsty masters. ' Bar-
barian ' lands were looked upon simply as game-
preserves where ambitious captains from the Tiber
254 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
went to refresh their reputations by hunting and
victimising the inhabitants. The history of Rome
is the history of infamy on a colossal, almost
world-wide, scale. There has never been dis-
played by any people pretending to be civilised
such shameless savagery as that displayed by the
Romans in their gladiatorial arenas, where men
(generally the captives of war) were ' butchered to
make a Roman holiday.' These tragedies, in their
magnitude and atrocity, seem almost frightful
when we read of them on the pages of history.
They were generally celebrated by victorious cap-
tains and emperors at the close of some unusual
outrage against the ' barbarians,' or upon the
departure of Roman legions for the field of activity.
The celebrations sometimes lasted weeks, or even
months. The Emperor Trajan celebrated his
victories over the Dacians with shows that lasted
more than a hundred days. During this horrible
festival ten thousand men fought upon the arena,
and more than ten thousand wild animals were
slain. The gladiators in these ancient combats
fought in chariots, on horseback, on foot — in all
the ways in which soldiers fought in actual battle.
They fought with swords, lances, daggers, tridents,
and every other manner of weapon. Some had
nets and lassoes with which they entangled their
adversaries, and then slew them. The life of a
wounded gladiator was in the hands of the
spectators, who showed their clemency or their
lack of it by turning their thumbs respectively
down or up. The thirst of the populace for blood
THE ETHICS OF THE ANCIENT 265
was sometimes such that the dying were aroused
and forced on to the fight by burning with a
hot iron. The dead bodies were dragged from
the arena with hooks, like the carcasses of
animals, and the pools of blood soaked up with
dry sand (5). There was an occasional Roman,
like Seneca, sane enough to realise the real char-
acter of these performances, and brave enough
to denounce them as crimes. But by the great
mass of all classes of Romans, even by those who
pretended to think, they were regarded with per-
fect moral indifference. The excuse offered by
Pliny was generally concurred in by his country-
men, that these bloody shows were necessary for
the cultivation of manliness and for keeping
awake the strenuous and red-handed instincts in
the young.
Scarce less revolting than the gladiatorial arena,
in its violation of every principle of humanity,
was the institution of human slavery. During the
later republic and the earlier empire, one -half
the population of the Roman state was slaves.
The slave population was recruited chiefly, as in
Greece, by war and by slave-hunting. Slave-
traders and slave-markets flourished both in the
capital itself and in all the great ports visited by
Roman ships. Some of the outlying provinces of
Asia and Africa were almost depopulated by the
slave-hunters. Greek slaves were the highest-
priced, because the most intelligent. Among the
wealthy, who, like the illiterate rich of every age,
dawdled their time in ostentation, there were
266 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
slaves for each different function in the house-
hold. There were the cubicularii, who acted as
housemaids ; the triclinarii, who waited at table ;
the culinarii, who acted as kitchen drudges ; and
the balnearii, who looked after the baths. Then
there were tonsores, or barbers ; criniflores, or hair-
crimpers ; calceatores, who took care of the feet ;
and lectores, whose business it was to read aloud
to their masters at meals, in the bath, or in bed.
The ostiarius, who was sometimes chained in the
vestibule like a dog, was the porter; the invitator
summoned the guests ; and the serviis ab hospitiis
looked after their lodgment. There was the slave
called the sandalio, whose sole duty was to care for
his master's sandals ; and another, called the nomen-
clator, whose exclusive business it was to accom-
pany his master when he went upon the street,
and give him the names of such persons as he
ought to recognise. The common punishment
for a refractory slave was beating. If the runaway
were caught, as he could hardly fail to be, since
there were extremely heavy penalties for harbour-
ing or assisting him, he was either branded or had
an iron collar like a dog's welded around his neck,
or his legs were fettered, or, in exaggerated or
repeated cases of offence, he was at once turned
into the arena or otherwise put to death. If he
attempted to take personal vengeance upon his
master for any wrong whatsoever, his whole family
shared his fate, and the regular form of capital
punishment for a slave was crucifixion under the
most ignominious and agonising circumstances (6).
THE ETHICS OF THE ANCIENT 267
' In many cases, as a measure of precaution, the
slaves were forced to work in chains and to sleep
in subterranean prisons. The feeling entertained
toward this unfortunate class in the later repub-
lican period is illustrated by Varro's classification
of slaves as " vocal agricultural implements," and
by Cato the Elder's recommendation that old and
worn-out slaves be sold, as a matter of economy.
Sick and hopelessly infirm slaves were taken to
an island in the Tiber, and there left to die of
starvation and exposure' (5). Slaves were prac-
tically without any rights whatever to the world
in which they lived. A Roman could take the Hfe
of his Gallic slave with as complete impunity as
an American can slay his bovine servant to-day.
Romans, in short, looked upon and treated non-
Romans about as human beings to-day look upon
and treat non-humans — as mere prey.
V. Modern Ethics.
But the peoples of the ancient world are not
the only human beings who have suffered from
the psychological bequests of savages. Modern
states and peoples, notwithstanding their far-flung
professions of righteousness, manifest, though in a
somewhat weakened form, the same ethnic preju-
dices and the same senseless antipathies as those
displayed by the ancients. Remnants of the
primitive tribal morality are found in the moral
habits and conceptions of every people, however
emancipated they may imagine themselves to be.
Many a person who would not think of swindling
268 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
one of his neighbours will not hesitate to swindle
a foreigner, especially if the foreigner happens to
be of a nationality much removed in language,
colour, manners, or interests from his own.
Morality is genetic. It is not a consistent some-
thing — something reasoned out and framed accord-
ing to the facts. It has grown up. It is essentially
tribal — whether it is confined to a family, as is
done by some, to a corporation or trade, to a
nation, to an artificial fraternity, or to a species.
We are, in fact, all of us, even the broadest and
most illuminated, simply savages more or less
leafed out. We all suffer, as men have always
suffered, from the over-vividness of the presenta-
tive powers of the mind (sensation and perception)
compared with the representative powers (memory
and imagination). We all exaggerate out of their
proper perspective in the phenomena of a universe
the things that are around us and about us — the
events we witness or take part in, the things that
are ours, and the aifairs of the street, city, state,
neighbourhood, world, and time, in which we live.
Every human being (the sage less than the savage,
but the sage to some extent) is inclined to lump
together as foreign to him, and as more or less
useless and shadowy in themselves, the things,
beings, and events that are distant, and to con-
sider' them of less reality than those with which
he is directly concerned, and of which his know-
ledge is immediate. The evolution of consciousness
in its social and ethical aspects consists in the evolution
of the ability to make real and vivid the phenomena
MODERN ETHICS 269
that are more and more distant in both space and
time.
The Chinese call their country 'the flower of
the middle,' and believe it to be the central and
choicest portion of the earth's surface. All those
beyond the bounds of ' The Heavenly Flower
Kingdom ' are, by those on the inside, venomously
lumped together as ' foreign devils.' The people
of Spain look upon themselves in much the same
way as the Chinese look upon themselves, although
they are in reality the most belated of all peoples
to-day pretending to be civilised. There are a
few travelled and educated Spaniards who realise
the pitiful place held by their country in the
family of reputable states. ' But the great mass
of the people are not only perfectly satisfied with
their condition, but consider themselves the most
fortunate of all God's creatures. They never go
outside of their country and never read a foreign
newspaper or book. Like the Chinese, they con-
sider other nations barbarians, and point to Madrid
as the centre of civilisation.' The French, down
to the nineteenth century, confiscated the property
of all aliens who died within the realm ; and the
savage practice of punishing one alien for the
crimes of another alien was sanctioned by the
laws of England down to the middle of the
fourteenth century. It has been only a day
in the history of the world since Caucasians
hunted their dusky brothers in Africa like ' wild
animals,' and sold and loaned and lashed them
as we do horses to-day. Men now living can
270 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
remember when it made no difference how exalted
in character men might be: if a certain pigment of
their bodies was dark, they were ' niggers.' They
had no 'souls' as pale men had, and no more
chance of paradise than cattle. At the beginning
of the nineteenth century, incredible as it may
seem, every country of Europe and America held
slaves, and was engaged in the soulless avocation
of man-hunting in Africa. Tens of thousands of
Africa's children were annually seized by prowling
pirate bands and exported to distant lands to
wear their lives out in disgrace and drudgery. It
was not until the latter part of the nineteenth
century that civilised nations, following the initia-
tive of England, finally abolished human slavery,
the United States and Brazil being the last to act.
The Christian sneers at all who do not bow down
to his deities and worship according to his ritual,
as ' heathens ' or ' freethinkers,' and to the Mos-
lem all who are not followers of 'the True
Prophet ' are ' infidel dogs.' The history of these
two religions is a chronicle of almost unparalleled
crimes upon disbelievers.
But it is not necessary to go to Arabia or
Cathay, nor even necessary to read history, in
order to find examples of bigotry and provincial-
ism. It is only necessary to open our eyes.
Americans are not a peculiar people — unless it be
in the unbridled character of their conceit. All
the barbarism is not behind us nor around us.
History looks dark and discouraging to us, as we
turn its terrible pages, but we would see some-
MODERN ETHICS 271
thing just as discouraging if we would look into a
mirror. The old savage spirit still circulates in
our veins. The ' foreigner ' is not an enemy, but
he is still an individual whose chief significance is
in his ' fleece.' If the ' foreigner ' did not ease
our economic theories by benevolently ' paying
the tax,' it would be hard to tell what would
become of him. Those who suffer from a different
government, speak a different language, or laud
other gods are regarded by us as distinctly inferior
to ourselves. Millions of dollars are annually
squandered by self-righteous societies in sending
missionaries to the other side of the planet to
peoples who need evangels of mercy and humanity
far less than we do ourselves. In these times of
ecclesiastical enterprise, however, missionaries are
being superseded, as agents of evangelisation, by
the more effective inventions of Messrs. Maxim
and Krupp. ' American ' is regarded by us as the
synonym of perfection, and to be ' patriotic ' is to
give unthinking enthusiasm to every scheme in-
cubated by wolfish spoilsmen. Crimes of conquest
carried on by others become, when undertaken by
us, shining masterpieces of ' benevolent assimila-
tion.' We are not so far from the naked and
unkempt contemporaries of the cave-bear and
sabre-toothed lion as we imagine we are. To
carry a bayonet, and especially to redden it with
an alien's blood, is here in this degenerate
land of Jefferson, more glorious than to create
a book. Captains particularly competent as
butchers, though their characters be as coarse as a
272 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
savage chief's, are hailed as heroes by thousands
besides silly women, and held up, like the cut-
throats of the Kukis, as the highest exemplars of
right-doing. Old Rameses, holding by their hair
a half-dozen dwarfs, and ostentatiously cutting off
their heads with a single sweep of his sword, finds
his modern counterpart in miserable Americans
pompously gloating over the offhand slaughter of
the children of distant archipelagoes.
VI. The .Ethics of Human Beings toward Non-
Human Beings.
But the most mournful instance of provincial
ethics afforded by the inhabitants of the earth is
not that furnished by the varieties of the human
species in their conduct toward each other, but
that afforded by the human race as a whole in
its treatment of the non-human races. Human
nature is nowhere so hideous, and human con-
science is nowhere so profoundly inoperative, as in
their disregard for the life and happiness of the
non-human animal world. With the develop-
ment of the representative powers of the mind,
the widening and mutualising of human activities,
and the consequent enlargement of the human
horizon, the feeling of amity has spread and
intensified, until to-day, notwithstanding all that
is true of human sectionalism, the ethical systems
of civilised peoples include, theoretically at least,
and more or less seriously, all human beings
whatsoever. Ethical consciousness has extended
from individual to family, from family to clan,
THE ETHICS OF HUMAN BEINGS 273
from clan to tribe, from tribe to confederac)',
from confederacy to kingdom, from kingdom to
race, from race to species, until, in the case of
many millions of men, ethical feeling has reached,
with greater or less vividness and consistency, the
anthropocentric stage of evolution. The fact that
an individual is a man — that is, that he belongs to
the human species of animals — entitles him in all
civilised lands to the fundamental rights and
privileges of existence. The rights to life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness are believed to-day, by
all exalted minds, to be the inalienable properties
of every human being who comes into the world.
But, except by occasional individuals here and
there whose emotions are more civilised than the
rest, or whose conceptions are more ample and
clear, ethical relations are not extended by human
beings beyond the bounds of their own species.
Non-human millions are outsiders. They are
looked upon and treated by human beings as if
they were an entirely different order of existences,
with entirely different purposes and susceptibilities,
from human beings. They are not considered to
be living beings at all, as human beings are,
who are here in the world to enjoy life and
all that life holds that is dear to a living being.
They belong to the same class of existences as
the waves of the sea and the weeds of the field.
They are looked upon as mere things — mere
moving, multiplying objects, without the slightest
equity in the world in which they find themselves.
They may be set upon, beaten, maimed, starved,
18
274 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
assassinated, eaten, insulted, deceived, imprisoned,
robbed, tormented, skinned alive, shot down foi
pastime, cut to pieces out of curiosity, or com-
pelled to undergo any other enormity or victimisa-
tion anybody can think of or is disposed to visit
upon them. It is enough almost to make knave;
shudder, the cold-blooded and business-like man-
ner in which we cut their throats, dash out theii
brains, and discuss their flavour at our cannibal-
istic feasts. As Plutarch says, ' Lions, tigers
and serpents we call savage and ferocious, yel
we ourselves come behind them in no species o:
barbarity.' Accustomed from our cradle up tc
look upon violence and assassination, we have
become so habituated and hardened to these thing;
that we perpetrate them and see them perpetrated
with the same indifference as that with which wf
watch waves die on the beach. Human beings
are, in fact (' paragons ' though they pretend tc
be), the most predatory and brutal of all animals
— the great bone - breakers and bone - pickers o
the planet.
It is scarcely possible, astounding as it is, tc
commit crimes upon any beings in this world
except men. There are no beings in the universe
according to human beings, except themselves
All others are commodities. They are of conse
sequence only because they have thighs and cai
fill up the unoccupied places of the human alimen
tary. Human beings are 'persons,' and hav(
souls and gods and places to go to when they die
But the hundreds of thousands of other races o
THE ETHICS OF HUMAN BEINGS 275
terrestrial inhabitants are mere ' animals,' mere
' brutes,' and ' beasts of the field,' ' livestock ' and
' vermin.' Every crime capable of being perpe-
trated by one being upon another is day after day
rained upon them, and with an equanimity that
would do honour to the managers of an inferno.
Human beings preach as the cardinal rule of
morality — and they seem never to tire of its
reiteration — that they should do unto others as
they would that others would do unto them ; but
they hypocritically confine its application to the
members of their own crowd, notwithstanding
there are the same reasons identically for extending
it to all creatures. The happiness of the human
species is assumed to be so much more precious
than that of others that the most sacred interests
of others are unhesitatingly sacrificed in order
that human desires may all be fastidiously catered
to. Even for a tooth or a feather or a piece of
skin to wear on human vanity, forests are depopu-
lated and the land filled with the dead and
dying. Assassination is the commonest and most
fashionable of human pastimes. Jaded systems
are regularly recuperated by massacre. Men arm
themselves — men who roar about 'rights,' and
even ministers of mercy — and go out on killing
expeditions with as little compunction as savages
put on war-paint. They come back from their
campaigns of crime like the cut-throats of old
Rome, trailing their victims as trophies, and
expecting to be hailed as heroes for the hells they
have established. Barbarians preponderate, and
18—2
276 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
morality is turned inside out. Cruelty is lionised,
and broad-mindedness is rewarded with a sneer.
Compassion is a disease, and to be fashionable
is to be a fiend. If non-human peoples had no
nerves and no choice of emotions, and were utterly
indifferent to life, they could scarcely be treated
more completely as personal nonentities.
The denial by human animals of ethical rela-
tions to the rest of the animal world is a
phenomenon not differing either in character or
cause from the denial of ethical relations by a
tribe, people, or race of human beings to the rest
of the human world. The provincialism of Jews
toward non-Jews, of Greeks toward non-Greeks, of
Romans toward non- Romans, of Moslems toward
non-Moslems, and of Caucasians toward non-Cau-
casians, is not one thing, and the provincialism of
human beings toward non-human beings another.
They are all manifestations of the same thing.
The fact that these various acts are performed by
different individuals and upon different individuals,
and are performed at different times and places,
does not invalidate the essential sameness of their
natures. Crimes are not classified (except by
savages or their immediate derivatives) according
to the similarity of those who do them or those
who suffer from them, but by grouping them
according to the similarity of their intrinsic quah-
ties. All acts of provincialism consist essentially
in the disinclination or inability to be universal,
and they belong in reality, all of them, to the
same species of conduct. There is, in fact, but
THE ETHICS OF HUMAN BEINGS 277
one great crime in the universe, and most of the
instances of terrestrial wrong-doing are instances
of this crime. It is the crime of exploitation — the
considering by some beings of themselves as
ends, and of others as their means — the refusal to
recognise the equal, or the approximately equal,
rights of all to life and its legitimate rewards — the
crime of acting toward others as one would that
others would not act toward him. For millions
of years, almost ever since life began, this crime
has been committed, in every nook and quarter of
the inhabited globe.
Every being is an end. In other words, every
being is to be taken into account in determining
the ends of conduct. This is the only consistent
outcome of the ethical process which is in course
of evolution on the earth. This world was not
made and presented to any particular clique for
its exclusive use or enjoyment. The earth belongs,
if it belongs to anybody, to the beings who inhabit
it — to all of them. And when one being or set of
beings sets itself up as the sole end for which the
universe exists, and looks upon and acts toward
others as mere means to this end, it is usurpation,
nothing else and never can be anything else, it
matters not by whom or upon whom the usurpa-
tion is practised. A tyrant who puts his own
welfare and aggrandisement in the place of the
welfare of a people, and compels the whole people
to act as a means to his own personal ends, is not
more certainly a usurper than is a species or
variety which puts its welfare in the place of the
278 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
welfare of all the inhabitants of a world. The
refusal to put one's self in the place of others and to
act toward them as one would that they would
act toward him does not depend for its wrongful-
ness upon who makes the refusal or upon whether
the refusal falls upon this or that individual or set.
Deeds are right and wrong in themselves ; and
whether they are right or wrong, good or evil,
proper or improper, whether they should be done
or should not be done, depends upon their effects upon
the welfare of the inhabitants of the universe. The
basic mistake that has ever been made in this
egoistic world in the judging and classifying of
acts has been the mistake of judging and classify-
ing them with reference to their effects upon
some particular fraction of the inhabitants of the
universe. In pure egoism conduct is judged as
good or bad solely with reference to the results,
immediate or remote, which that conduct pro-
duces, or is calculated to produce, on the self.
To the savage, that is right or wrong which affects
favourably or unfavourably himself or his tribe. And
this sectional spirit of the savage has, as has been
shown, characterised the moral conceptions of the
peoples of all times. The practice human beings
have to-day — the practice of those (relatively)
broad and emancipated minds who are large enough
to rise above the petty prejudices and 'patriotisms'
of the races and corporations of men, and are able
to view ' the world as their country ' (the world of
human beings, of course) — the practice such minds
have of estimating conduct solely with reference
THE ETHICS OF HUMAN BEINGS 279
to its effects upon the human species of animals is
a practice which, while infinitely broader and more
nearly ultimate than that of the savage, belongs
logically in the same category with it. The par-
tially emancipated human being who extends his
moral sentiments to all the members of his own
species, but denies to all other species the justice
and humanity he accords to his own, is making
on a larger scale the same ethical mess of it as the
savage. The only consistent attitude, since Darwin
established the unity of life (and the attitude we
shall assume, if we ever become really civilised) , is
the attitude of universal gentleness and humanity.
'The world is my country,' said Thomas Paine,
and every man, woman, and child capable of
appreciating the exalted sentiment applauded.
But ' the world ' of the great freethinker was
inhabited by men only.
The following lines were written by Robert
Whitaker, and first printed in a San Francisco
newspaper :
' My Country is the world ! I count
No son of man my foe,
Whether the warm life currents mount
And mantle brows like snow,
Or whether yellow, brown, or black,
The face that into mine looks back.
' My Native Land is Mother Earth,
And all men are my kin.
Whether of rude or gentle birth,
However steeped in sin ;
Or rich or poor, or great or small,
I count them brothers one and all.
28o THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
' My Flag is the star-spangled sky,
Woven without a seam,
Where dawn and sunset colours lie.
Fair as an angel's dream.
The Flag that still unstained, untorn,
Floats over all of mortal born.
' My Party is all humankind.
My Platform, brotherhood ;
I count all men of honest mind
Who work for human good,
And for the hope that gleams afar.
My comrades in the holy war.
' My Country is the world ! I scorn
No lesser love than mine,
But calmly wait that happy morn
When all shall own this sign.
And love of country, as of clan.
Shall yield to love of Man.'
Robert Whitaker, you are a grand improvement
on the 'jingo.' But you are still too small.
There are conceptions as much more prophetic
and exalted than yours as your conception is
superior to that of the Figian.
Broad as he is who can look upon all men as
his brethren and countrymen — broad as he is
compared with those groundlings called 'patriots,'
who can see nothing clearly beyond the bounds of
the political unit to which they belong — he is not
broad enough. He is still a sectionalist, a partialist.
He represents but a stage in the process of ethical
expansion. He is, in fact, small compared with
the universalist, just as the savage is small
compared with the philanthropist. ' Mankind,'
THE ETHICS OF HUMAN BEINGS 281
' humanity,' ' all men,' ' the whole human family '
— these are big conceptions, too big for the poor
little nubbins of brains with which most millions
make the effort to think. But they are pitifully
small compared with that grand conception of
kinship which takes in all the races that live and
move upon the earth. Smaller yet are these
conceptions compared with that sublime and
supreme synthesis which embraces not only the
present generation of terrestrial inhabitants, but
which extends longitudinally as well as laterally,
extends in time as well as in space, and embraces
the generations which shall grow out of the exist-
ing generation and which are yet unborn — that
conception which recognises earth-life as a single
process, world-wide and immortal, every part related
and akin to every other part, and each generation
linked to an unending posterity.
Every individual, therefore, emancipated enough
to judge of acts of conduct according to their
intrinsic natures and consequences rather than
according to some local or traditional bias, cannot
help knowing that the exploitation of birds and
quadrupeds for human whim or convenience is an
offence against the laws of morality, not different
in kind from the offences denounced in human
laws as robbery and murder. The creophagist
and the hunter exemplify the same somnambulism,
are the authors of the same kind of conduct, and
belong literally in the same category of offenders,
as the cannibal and the slave-driver. To take the
life of an ox for his muscles, or to kill a sheep for
282 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
his skin is murder, and those who do these things
or cause them to be done are murderers just as
actually as highwaymen are who blow oif the heads
of hapless wayfarers for their guineas. If these
things seem untrue, it is not because they are untrue,
but because those to whom they seem so are unable
to judge conduct from the quadrupedal point of view.
If there were in this world beings as much more
clever than Caucasians as Caucasians are more
clever than cows and sheep, and these beings
should regard themselves as the darlings of the
gods and should attach a fictitious dignity and
importance to their own lives, but should look
upon Caucasians as simply so much ' beef and
' mutton,' these bleached terrorists of the world
would in the course of a few generations of ex-
perience probably become sufficiently illumined
to realise that current human conceptions of cows
and sheep are not only preposterous, but fiendish.
VII. The Origin of Provincialism.
Human provincialism, all of it, is the conse-
quence of a common cause — the provincialism of the
savage. Back of the provincialism of the savage
is, of course, the antecedent fact of primordial
egoism. The savage is the common ancestor of
all men, and as such has imparted to all men
their general characters of mind and heart.
Everything that grows, whether it be a tree, a
human being, a grass blade, or a race, grows from
something. This something, this germ or embryo
from which each thing springs, imparts to the
THE ORIGIN OF PROVINCIALISM 283
thing its fundamental characters. However far
anything may evolve, and however much it may
come to differ superficially from its original, it
will always remain at heart more or less faithful
to the facts of its genesis. This hereditary
tendency of everything, this tendency toward
invariability, is the conservative, or inertial ten-
dency of the universe. All races, colours, and
conditions of men — civilised, slightly civilised,
and barbarous — extend back to, and take root in,
savages, just as all savages have probably sprung
in some still more remote period of the past from
a single stirp of anthropoids. The savage is,
therefore, the author of human nature and
philosophy. Just as the fish, which is the com-
mon ancestor of all amphibians, reptiles, birds,
and mammals, has predetermined the general
structural style of all subsequently evolved verte-
brates, so the savage, as the original ancestor of
mankind, has predetermined the general mental
and dispositional make-up of all higher men.
That civilised and semi -civilised men are naturally
narrow and revengeful, selfish and superstitious,
and find it next to impossible to feel and act
toward others as they would like to have others
feel and act toward them, is, therefore, not more
mysterious than that vertebrates have red blood,
two eyes, two pairs of limbs, and a backbone with
a bulging brain-box at the hither end of it. Just
as the habits, beliefs, and conceptions of the child
persist, often but slightly modified, in the full-
grown man or woman, so the habits, beliefs, and
284 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
conceptions, formed by the race in its childhood,
continue, under the influence of the same laws of
inertia, on into the more mature stages of racial
development. Human nature changes with great
reluctance, and only in its superficial aspects at
that. There are cave-men, men with the primitive
ideas and practices of the Stone Age, and men in
the pastoral and hunting stages of mankind, in
all the highest societies of men. There is scarcely
a habit, vice, occupation, amusement, crime, or
trait of character, found among men of the
past but may be seen still among our contem-
poraries.
Altruism (other-love) is just as natural as
egoism (self-love) is. There is not so much of it
in the world as there is of egoism. But that is
simply the misfortune of our place of existence.
There is no reason why there might not have been
as much, or even more, under different conditions.
With the same antecedents, nothing can, of course,
happen differently from what does happen. But
with different antecedents, different causes, the
results are bound to be different. Civilised men
are not beings of altruism, because they are not
the effects of that kind of causes. But there is no
reason why there might not be a world — several of
them, in fact, or even a universeful — where the
inhabitants have never known or heard of such an
indelicate thing as of beings preferring themselves
to others — where it is as natural for them to act
toward each other according to what we call the
Golden Rule as it is for us terrestrial heathens to
THE ORIGIN OF PROVINCIALISM 285
violate it. It is possible to conceive of beings
with even too much altruism. The ideal condition
is one of balanced egoism and altruism — one in
which each thinks as much of others as he does of
himself, no more and no less. And if beings were
endowed with natures rendering them not only
willing but determined to act primarily in the
interests of others, and this condition of things
were universal, there would be about as much
discord and strife as if everyone acted in the
interest of himself. The Golden Rule among a
lot of hypothetical otherists like this would be the
opposite of ours, for, instead of emphasising the
importance of others as we do, they would need
to encourage regard for self. Wouldn't it seem
original to live in a world where men were sent to
gaol for over- benevolence, and where sermons had
to be preached on such texts as, ' Love thyself as
thy neighbour ' ; ' It is more blessed to receive
than to give ' ; ' Avoid doing to yourself that which
you do not like when done to others ' ; ' The Lord
loves a cheerful taker ' ; and the like ?
The persistence with which savage ideas and
instincts continue to influence men long after
those ideas and instincts have really become
anachronistic and vestigial is well illustrated by
civilised men and women everywhere. The sun
continues to ' rise ' and ' set ' in all civilised lands
just as it used to do to the savage, although men
have long since learned that it does not do either.
Hell, as originally conceived, was an actual sub-
terranean region, and heaven was an abode
286 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
located a few hours' journey above the supposedly
flat earth. To-day we continue to say ' up to
heaven,' and 'down to hell' (never 'down to heaven'
and 'up to hell'), and always think of these
places as being thus relatively located, although it
is extremely doubtful whether any really sane mind
continues to believe that hell is on the inside of
the earth (or any place else, for that matter), and
although up means simply away from the centre
of the earth, and away from the centre of a ball
means literally every possible direction. The
theological theories of the origin, nature, and
destiny of man and of the universe in general,
all of which originated in savage or semi-savage
minds, and all of which bear the unmistakable
traces of their origin, continue to cling to the
minds of the masses of civilised men, notwith-
standing the inherent absurdity of these theories,
and notwithstanding the fact that their unsound-
ness is vouched for by the most positive and
unanimous assurances from the scientific world.
Why should civilised men and women, any of
them, be indifferent to the sufferings of others, or
find delight in such loathsome avocations as the
fishing and hunting of their fellow-creatures ?
Because their ancestors were savages, and they are
not yet sufficiently evolved to be independent of the
instincts of their savage sires. There is no other
explanation. No human being could enjoy seeing
a pack of hounds hunt down and rend to pieces a
poor harmless hare — unless he were a savage. No
human being could go out to the abodes of the
THE ORIGIN OF PROVINCIALISM 287
squirrel and quail, and shoot murderous balls into
their beautiful bodies for food or fun — unless he
were a savage. No human being would lounge
all day about the margins of a brook, blind to
the beauties of the stream and the glories of forest
and sky, in order to thrust brutal hooks into the
lips of those whom he deceives, and drag them
from their waters to suffocate in the sun — unless
he were a savage. No human being would have
palaces and parks and yachts and equipages,
townships of lands, packs of hounds, and studs of
horses, troops of lackeys and nothing to do, when
all around him are the men and women who made
this wealth, half clad and half starved, suffocating
in shanties and working like wretches from morn-
ing till night — unless he were a savage. All of
these deeds are savage deeds, deeds of exceeding
thoughtlessness and brutality, and, instead of
being enjoyable, are to every emancipated mind
positively painful.
Hunting, fishing, and fighting are the chief
occupations of savage life. Back of the activities
displayed in these occupations are powerful in-
stincts prompting and sustaining them. Civilised
peoples are devoted primarily to the arts of in-
dustry and peace. But there are enough savages
in every civilised society, and enough of the savage
spirit in those who pretend to approximate the
civilised state, to give to civilised life a decidedly
barbaric aspect. War is a more or less regular
exercise, and killing and competing and torturing
enter largely into the pastimes of all peoples.
288 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
Next to eating, fighting, in one form or another,
is the favourite pursuit of men nearly everywhere
on holy days and days of leisure. Whenever
human beings have any energy or time left over
from what they are required to spend in maintain-
ing their existence, they use it in fighting some-
body or in watching somebody else fight. And
generally the more brutal and sanguinary the
conflict, the more popular and satisfying it is.
Witness the bull-fights and cock-fights of Spain
and Mexico, the fisticuffs of Anglo-Saxons, and
the baseball and slugball battles of the Americans,
where eager thousands gather and roar for hours
like hysterical idiots simply to see one animal or
set of animals punish or discredit another. If
there are no pigeons to shoot, or if the community
is ruled by men and women who are too eman-
cipated to allow such things, we make glass birds
and heroically bang away at them, supplying by
our imaginations the blood and agony of real
carnage. And if we can't do anything else, we
take some poor pig, that never did anyone any
harm in the world, and grease it and turn it loose,
and then take after it with knives, as Chicago
butchers do on vacation days, and see who can
cut its throat the quickest. This amusement, in
pure barbarity, certainly stands pretty near the
top in the list of human pastimes so far invented.
Maybe it is outclassed by that other contest some-
times advertised as a feature of butchers' bar-
becues, in which a band of professional cut-
throats compete to see who can kill, skin, and
eviscerate the largest number of their fellow-
beings in a given time.
Games and other performances in which interest
is aroused by contending or killing are all of them
entertainments gotten up primarily for the amuse-
ment of the under-exercised savage within us.
The bloody carnivals of the ancient Romans,
which seem so incomprehensible to the people of
to-day, find their diabolical parallels right here in
our high-sniffing civilisation. The bull-pen, where
poor quadrupeds are baited by gorgeous assassins
for the amusement of Castilian communities, and
the cockpit and the prize-ring, where irate fowls
and naked thugs peck and pound each other to
insensibility for the entertainment of blood-loving
mobs, are the legitimate succcessors of the gladia-
torial arena of the Romans, The gladiatorial
horror is not changed, either in its nature or
functions, by changing the combatants to cocks
and bulls. The ringside roars that rise to-day
beside the Tagus and the Hudson over the fatal
thrust of the matador or the knockout lunge of
the pugilist are howls of barbaric elation arising
from the satisfaction of the same instincts as those
which seventeen centuries ago made amphitheatres
thunder at the spectacle of gutted Gauls. The
ability to enjoy strife and suffering in one form is
not different in kind from the ability to be enter-
tained by strife and suffering in any other form.
Beings who can follow in riotous glee the terrified
form of a fleeing stag, or shout ecstatically at
sight of the death-stagger of a mangled ox, are
19
290 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
psychologically equipped to go into raptures over
the blood-curdling combustions of a literal hell.
Few pastimes indulged in by civilised peoples
are more horrible to an emancipated mind than
that of bull-fighting. It is the national amusement
of Spain, and is carried on among all peoples who
have acquired their natures and institutions from
the Spanish. ' Every Sunday afternoon, when-
ever the weather permits, 14,000 or 15,000 men
and women, representing every class of society,
mothers and grandmothers, priests and monks,
assemble at the Plaza de Toros in Madrid to
witness the most brutal spectacle the human
taste approves. Six bulls are tortured and
worried until they are exhausted. Then they
are killed by the thrusts of the sword of a
matador, who is the most popular person in the
community and makes more money than any
other man. Often as many as twelve horses are
ripped open by the horns of the infuriated bulls,
and are allowed to die in the presence of the
audience, with blood gushing from their wounds
and their entrails dragging upon the ground.
This sort of thing is carried on not only in
Madrid, but is a regular weekly festival in all
the cities of Spain. The horses are blindfolded,
so they cannot even see what attacks them. The
men who torture the bulls have wooden screens
behind which they can dodge when pursued, and
if one of the baited creatures crowds too closely
upon any of its tormentors, the other matadors
throw a blanket over its head. It is not sport,
THE ORIGIN OF PROVINCIALISM 291
for the poor bulls have no chance whatever to
escape or to fight back. It is simply slow
butchery, an exhibition of unmitigated cowardice
and cruelty. And yet, although the Spanish people
are the most religious people of Europe, 95 per
cent, of the population approve this atrocious
barbarism — not only approve it, but demand that
the King shall appear in the royal box at every
bull-fight, or have his throne upset.'
The notorious 'Juke' family of criminals,
who sprang from a single ruffian who lived
in 1720, has cost the State of New York
millions of dollars in money and incalculable
misery and crime. But the initial savage progeni-
tors of the human species have stocked the earth
with the most stupendous array of wrong-doers
— knaves, felons, kings, warriors, barbarians,
butchers, brutalitarians, kleptomaniacs, and thugs
— that has ever (let us hope) brought damnation
to a world.
VIII. Universal Ethics.
There are the same reasons for the recognition
by human beings of ethical relations to non-human
beings as there are for the recognition by human
beings of ethical relations among themselves.
Analyse the reasons for being considerate toward
men, any variety of men, and you will find the same
reasons to exist for being considerate toward all
men. And analyse the reasons for being altruistic
toward men — for being kind and sympathetic
toward them — and you will find the same reasons
19 — a
292 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
to exist for being altruistic toward those who ar
not men. The doctrine that we human being
may perform upon the other inhabitants of th
earth all sorts of injurious acts, and that these act
when so performed by us are perfectly right an(
proper, but that these same things when done b;
others to us are crimes, is the logic of pur
brutalitarianism. It is a doctrine utterly withou
intelligence, at variance with every sentiment o
justice and humanity, and has no legitimate exist
ence outside the fibrous brains of ruffians.
Right and wrong are qualities belonging to tw(
diverse kinds of conduct. They are the qualitie:
which render conduct respectively proper anc
improper. All terrestrial races (unless the ven
lowest) have the power of experiencing two kind;
of conscious states — the desirable (pleasurable
and the undesirable (painful). Now, if being;
were indifferent as to what sort of conscioui
states entered into and made up their experiences
there would manifestly be no such thing as pro
priety and impropriety in the causing of these
states. But they are not indifferent. The pleasur
able experiences are the experiences all beings arc
seeking, and the painful ones are the ones thej
are all seeking to avoid. Those acts which helj
or tend to help beings to those experiences foi
which they are striving are, therefore, right anc
proper, and are, they and their authors, callec
good. While those acts which compel beings tc
undergo that which they are striving to avoid are
improper and wrong, and are, they and theii
UNIVERSAL ETHICS 293
authors, called bad. Kindness, courtesy, justice,
mercy, generosity, sympathy, love, and the like, are
good, and selfishness, cruelty, deceit, pillage, in-
justice, and murder, are bad, because they are
respectively the promoters and destroyers of well-
being and happiness in the world.
But these two kinds of conduct produce the
same respective effects upon non-human beings as
they do upon human beings. The emotion of a
mangled sensory — is it not the same terrible thing
whether the sensory hang to the brain of a quad-
ruped or a man ? Do shelter and food not affect
shivering and empty cattle, horses, and fowls,
precisely as they do human beings ? Thunder
harsh words at your dog. Will he not shrink
and suffer, just as your child or hired hand will
under like acts of terrorisation ? Speak kindly to
him, love him, and accord to him a quarter of the
consideration you claim for yourself. Is he not
caused to be one of the happiest and most devoted
of associates ? To take squirrels or song-birds,
the most active of animals, and shut them up in
narrow cages, and keep them there shut off from
their companions and their own green world their
whole lives long; to take an animal as sensitive
and high-minded as the horse and put a pack on
his back and a bit in his mouth, and then strike
him dozens of times a day with a lash whose touch
is like fire ; to shoot off the legs and wings of birds
and fill their vitals with lead, and leave them to
flounder out a lingering death in the reeds and
grasses — do these things not cause misery and
294 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
desolation in the world ? To place temptations in
the way of fur-bearing animals and induce them
to enter carefully concealed traps, and then allow
them to remain in the villainous clutches of these
devices, not minutes, but hours, perhaps days,
until it suits the convenience of the ensnarer to
knock out their brains, or until, crazed by pain,
the poor wretches eat off their own limbs and
escape — is not this a monstrous thing to do ?
Oh that men everywhere were moved by the
deep tenderness and the all-embracing sympathy
of poor Robert Burns, who could apologise with
real feeling to a frightened field-mouse whom he
had accidentally upturned with his plough.
' Wee, sleekit, cow'rin', tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie !
Thou needna start awa' sae hasty,
Wi' bick'ring brattle !
I wad be laith to rin and chase thee,
Wi' murd'rous pattle !
' I'm truly sorry man's dominion
Has broken nature's social union,
And justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
And fellow-mortal.'
Long ago it was said, and truthfully, that the
merciful man is merciful to his ox. The truly
kind man, the truly honest and the truly humane
man, is not kind and honest and humane to men
only, but to all beings — to the humble and lowly
as well as to the proud and powerful — to all that
have the misfortune to feel and mourn- Benevolence
UNIVERSAL ETHICS 295
is the same beautiful thing whether it pour sun-
shine into the dark and saddened souls of men or
into the dark and saddened souls of other beings.
John Howard never hearkened to a nobler duty
when he lifted the darkness that hung over English
gaols than will some inflamed soul some day who
hears the cry of the lonely captives who to-day
languish in menagerial dungeons to satisfy human
curiosity. He who will emancipate horses from
the hell in which they pass their lives — make
them the associates of men instead of their slaves
— will deserve to stand in the constellation of the
world's redeemers beside Garrison and Garibaldi.
Is there he who holds in his heart-cups the love
and compassion of Buddha ? Let him go where
the dagger drips and the heartless pole-axe crashes,
and the meek-eyed millions of the meadows pour
out their innocent existences in the soulless houses
of slaughter. Let him lift from off the races the
hounding incubus of fear, give back to them their
birthright — the right to a free, unhunted life — and
make the great monster (man) to be their high-
priest and friend.
' Among the noblest in the land,
Though he may count himself the least.
That man I honour and revere
Who, without favour, without fear,
In the great city dares to stand
The friend of every friendless beast,
And tames with his unflinching hand
The brutes that wear our form and face,
The were-wolves of the human race.'
296 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
If to do good is to generate welfare, then to
cause welfare to a horse, a bird, a butterfly, or a
fish, is to do good just as truly as to cause welfare
to men. And if to do evil is to cause unhappiness
and illfare, then to cause these things to one
individual or race is evil just as certainly as to
cause them to any other individual or race. And
if to put one's self in the place of others, and to
act toward them as one would wish them to act
toward him, is the one great rule — the Golden
Rule — by which men are to gauge their conduct
when acting toward each other, then this is also
the one great rule — the Golden Rule — by which
men are to regulate their conduct toward all
beings. There is no escape from these conclusions,
except for the savage and the fool.*
IX. The Psychology of Altruism.
The growth of altruism in the world has been
largely cotemporaneous with the growth of the
power of sympathy. Sympathy is the emotion a
* The deliberate causing of misery and death to criminals,
whether they be human or non-human beings, individuals or
species, is not, as is sometimes supposed, a violation or
reversal of the general theory of ethics. When they are
prompted by a spirit of tenderness and universal goodness
rather than by a spirit of revenge, penalties are justifiable by
the everyday assumption that it is sometimes wise to inflict
or undergo a certain amount of illfare in order to avoid or
forestall a larger amount. The problems of universal penology
are not different from those of human penology, practically
the same cases and perplexities being presented by all delin-
quents. See ' Better-World Philosophy,' by the author,
pp. 218-227, foi' a discussion of the function of punishment.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ALTRUISM 297
being has when by means of his imagination he
gets so actually into the place of another that his
own feelings duplicate more or less the feelings
of that other. It is the ability or the impulse to
weep with those who weep, and rejoice with those
who are glad. Sympathy is the substance and
the only sure basis of morality — the only tie of
sincere and lasting mutualism. Men have always
been to a considerable extent, and are yet, dis-
posed to think about and act toward each other
from motives of mutual fear or advantage. But
such motives are not the highest nor the most
reliable bonds of fellowship and unity. True
altruism and solidarity — true expansion and uni-
versalisation of the self — are found in sympathy.
It is impossible for one individual to do in his
heart to another as he would that another should
do to him, unless he is at all times able and
willing to get into the place of that other, and to
realise in his own consciousness the results to the
other of his acts. It is only when there is such an
intertwining of the consciousnesses that the joys
and sorrows of each individual consist to a greater
or less extent of the reflexes of the joys and
sorrows around him that there exists true social
oneness. The great task of reforming the universe
is, therefore, since the world is so steeped in
selfishness and hate, the task of endowing beings,
or the task of stocking the universe with beings,
with dispositions to get out of themselves. If the
far-away first parents of men and women had
been broad-minded beings instead of narrow — had
298 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
been beings whose most natural impulse was to be
kind to others, and whose sympathies were as
far-reaching as feeling — terrestrial life would not
to-day present to the all-seeing understanding the
disheartening spectacle it does present, and the
long struggle for justice and amelioration would
not have been.
The primary fact prompting and underlying the
exploitation of one being or set of beings by
another is, and has always been. Selfishness.
Whenever and wherever one people have ex-
ploited another — whether the exploiters have been
savages, Jews, Romans, Caucasians, or men —
they have done so primarily because the act of
exploitation was a convenience and pleasure to
them and in harmony with their natures. This
selfishness, in the case of civilised peoples, has
been acquired by them through inheritance from
the savage tribes from whom they have severally
evolved ; and the selfishness of the savage is a
legacy from the animal forms from whom the
savage has come. Human selfishness is simply
an eddy of an impulse that is universal — an im-
pulse that has been implanted in the nature of the
life-process of the earth by the manner in which
life has been evolved.
But there is another fact which has generally,
if not always, contributed to every act of exploita-
tion in this world, and that is Ignorance — ignorance
on the part of those who have executed the ex-
ploitation : not ignorance of grammar or geography
or any other particular branch of human informa-
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ALTRUISM 299
tion or philosophy, but ignorance regarding those
upon whom they have worked their will — uncon-
sciousness on the part of the exploiters of the
similarity which actually existed between them-
selves and their victims. However free an indi-
vidual may be from naturally selfish impulses, he
will never act in an altruistic manner toward
others unless he is able to realise that these others,
are similar to himself, and that acts toward them
produce results of good and evil, of welfare and
suffering, similar to what these same acts produce
when done to himself. Altruistic conduct implies
not only altruistic impulses, but altruistic con-
ceptions as well. Tyrants hold, and have always
held, themselves to be an entirely different order
of beings from their subjects, and far more deserv-
ing. Read history — it is a tale told over and over.
Between those who have ruled and those who
have served — between the Ends and the Means —
has ever yawned a chasm, wide, deep, and im-
passable. The exploited have always been, ac-
cording to their masters, a fibrous set, unfavoured
and unthought of by the gods, endowed with little
feeling or intelligence, and brought into existence
more or less expressly as adjuncts to their masters.
This is the theory of the savage, and it is the
theory of all those who have inherited his narrow
and unfeeling philosophy. The Gentile had no
rights because he was a 'pagan.' He was a
human being, it is true, and had come forth from
the womb of woman, just as the Jew had. But
he spoke a different language from the Jews, had
300 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
his own ways of life, belonged to a different order
of things, and was irritatingly unconcerned about
the gods and traditions of the 'chosen people.'
The Gaul had no rights that were inconvenient to
Romans, because he was a ' barbarian.' The fact
that he had blood, and brains, and nerves, and
love of life, and ambitions, and that he suffered
when he was subjected to humiliation, hard treat-
ment, and death, just as Romans did, was never
really thought of by the arrogant and reckless
Romans. Romans never realised in their minds
what it meant for non-Romans to be treated as
they were treated ; and one reason why they never
realised it was because it was convenient for them
not to do so. To kill or enslave a Gaul or German
we now know, who are able to judge these acts
from an un-Roman and unprejudiced point of
view, was practically the same crime as to kill or
enslave a Roman. But it was not so to Romans.
The most trifling offence against a Roman citizen
was enough, according to Roman law, to condemn
the offender to execution. But the most horrible
outrages, when committed by Romans upon non-
Romans, were nothing. Romans always thought
and felt from the standpoint of Romans. They
never got over into the world of the ' barbarians,'
and really pictured to themselves — really felt — the
misfortunes of their victims. It was the same
way with the black man in the eyes of the white
man a generation or two ago ; it is the same way
with the brown man to-day. The black man had
no rights that were inconvenient for the white
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ALTRUISM 301
man to respect, because he was a ' nigger,' and
had no ' soul,' and was the offspring of Ham.
This spirit of unconsciousness, which has been
so prominent throughout the history of mankind,
still survives in the minds of civilised men and
women to-day, as is shown by the conception (or
misconception) cherished by the Caucasian toward
the 'nigger,' by the Christian toward the ' heathen,'
by the Moslem toward the ' infidel,' by the Pro-
testant toward the Catholic, and vice versa, by the
plutocrat toward the proletarian, by men toward
women, and by the human being toward the
' animal.'
The psychology of the exploitation of non-
human beings by human beings is not different in
kind from the psychology of any other act of
exploitation. The great first cause of man's in-
humanity to not-men is the same precisely as the
great first cause of man's inhumanity to man —
Selfishness — blind, brutal, unconscionable egoism.
Monopolist-like man thinks and cares only about
himself. He has the heart of the bully — deriving
from the contemplation of his fiendish supremacy
a sort of monstrous satisfaction. But there is
also present in this case the same half-sincere,
half-fostered nescience as in all other cases of
exploitation. The ox, the hare, the bird, and the
fish have no rights in the world in which they
live other than those that are convenient for men to
allow to them, because they are ' animals.' They
are assumed to belong to an order of beings
entirely different from that to which human beings
302 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
belong. They are filled with nerves, and brains,
and bloodvessels ; they love life, and bleed, and
struggle, and cry out when their veins are opened,
just as human beings do ; they have the same
general form and structure of body, their bodies are
composed of the same organs busied with the
same functions ; and they are descended from the
same ancestors and have been developed in the
same world through the operation of the same great
laws as we ourselves have. But all of these things,
and dozens of others just as significant, are dis-
regarded by us in our hard-hearted determination
to exploit them. We have a set of words and
phrases which we use in speaking of ourselves,
and another very different set for other beings.
The very same things are called by different
names with wholly different connotations depend-
ing on whether it is a man that is referred to or
some other being. It is ' murder ' to take the life
of a human being, but to take the life of a sheep
or a cow is only ' knocking it on the head.' A man
may murder squirrels or birds all day — that is, he
may do that which when done to human beings is
called murder — but it is only ' sport ' when done to
these humble inhabitants of the wilds. The dead
body of a man is a ' corpse ' ; the dead body of a
quadruped is only a ' carcass.' A race of horses
or dogs is a ' breed ' ; but a breed of men and
women is always respectfully referred to as a race.
We perpetuate our blindness by the use of words.
We accommodate our consciences by inventing
ways of looking at things that will bring out our
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ALTRUISM 303
own lustre and relieve us from the ghastly faces
of our crimes. For the human race to rob and
kill other races is the same kind of activity exactly
as it is for human beings to rob and kill each
other. But it is not considered so to-day — except
by a few lost-caste ' visionaries ' scattered here and
there over Christendom, and some millions of
' heathens ' in Asia.
A short time ago a series of letters came into
my hands vinritten from Burmah by an American
missionary in that country. According to this
writer, one of the greatest obstacles the mission-
aries have to contend with in their work there is
the hostility aroused in the people by the killing
and flesh-eating habits of the missionaries them-
selves. The native inhabitants, who are the most
compassionate of mankind, look upon the Christian
missionaries, who kill and eat cows and shoot
monkeys for pastime, as being little better than
cannibals. Contemplate the presumption neces-
sary to cause an individual to leave behind him
fields white for mission-work, and travel, at great
expense, halfway round the earth in order to
preach a narrow, cruel, anthropocentric gospel to
a people of so great tenderness and humanity as
to be kind even to ' animals ' and enemies !
We human beings feel at liberty to commit any
kind of outrage upon other races, and these out-
rages are looked upon by us as nothing. But the
most trifling annoyances of other races are deemed
by us of sufficient consequence to justify us in
visiting upon them the most fearful retributions.
304 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
We can break up the laboriously built home of a
mother mouse in the rubbish-heap of our back
yard, scatter the pink babies of that mother over
the ground to die of cold and starvation, and
cause the frightened mother to flee at the risk of
her very life — all to give to the terrier and our-
selves a 'little moment of savage pastime. But if
that same mother, some hard winter's night, when
she has failed in her search elsewhere for some-
thing to stay her hunger, comes into our larder
and nibbles a bit of cheese or a few mouthfuls of
crust from our pie, although she takes but a crumb
in all, and is as dainty in her feeding as a lady,
we immediately get out our traps and poisons and
storm around as if a murder or some other irrepar-
able wrong had been committed. We think of our
acts toward non-human peoples, when we think of
them at all, entirely from the human point of view.
We never take the time to put ourselves in the
places of our victims. We never take the trouble
to get over into their world, and realise what is
happening over there as a result of our doings
toward them. It is so much more comfortable not
to do so — so much more comfortable to be blind and
deaf and insane. We go on quieting our con-
sciences, as best we can, by the fact that every-
body else nearly is engaged in the same business
as we are, and by the fact that so few ever say
anything about the matter — anaesthetised, as it
were, by the universality of our iniquities and the
infrequency of disquieting reminders.
Many years ago an eccentric but gifted English-
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ALTRUISM 305
man had a dream in which he saw the fortunes of
the world reversed. Man was no longer master,
but victim. The earth was ruled by the birds and
quadrupeds, the mice and monkeys, who pro-
ceeded to inflict upon their erstwhile tyrant the
same cruelties he had hitherto inflicted upon them.
' Multitudes of human beings were systematically
fattened for the carnivora. They were frequently
forwarded to great distances by train, in trucks,
without food or water. Large numbers of infants
were constantly boiled down to form broth
for invalid animals. In over-populous districts
babies were given to malicious young cats and
dogs to be taken away and drowned. Boys were
hunted by terriers and stoned to death by frogs.
Mice were a good deal occupied in setting man-
traps, baited with toasted cheese, in poor neigh-
bourhoods. Gouty old gentlemen were hitched to
night-cabs, and forced to totter, on their weak
ankles and diseased joints, to clubs, where fashion-
able young colts were picked up, and taken, at
such speed as whipcord could extract, to visit
chestnut fillies. Flying figures in scarlet coats,
buckskins, and top-boots were run down by packs
of foxes that had nothing else to do. Old cock-
grouse strutted out for a morning's sport, and
came in to talk of how many brace of country
gentlemen they had bagged. Gamekeepers lived
a precarious life in holes and caves. They were
perpetually harried by game and vermin ; held
fast in steel traps, their toes were nibbled by
stoats and martens ; and finally, their eyes picked
20
305 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
out by owls and kites, they were gibbeted alive on
trees, head downwards, until the termination of
their martyrdom. In one especially tragic case,
a naturalist in spectacles dodged about painfully
among the topmost branches of a wood, while a
mias underneath, armed with a gun, inflicted on
him dreadful wounds. A veterinary surgeon of
Alfort was stretched on his back, his arms and
legs secured to posts, in order that a horse might
cut him up alive for the beneiit of an equine
audience ; but the generous steed, incapable of
vindictive feelings, with one disdainful stamp on
the midriff, crushed the wretch's life out ' (8).
The following is from the Chinese. The speaker
is an ox:
' I request, good people, that you will listen to
what I have to say. In the whole world there is no
distress equal to that of the ox. In spring and sum-
mer, autumn and winter, I diligently put forth
my strength ; during the four seasons there is
no respite to my labours. I drag the plough, a
thousand-pound weight fastened to my shoulders.
Hundreds of thousands of lashes are, by a leather
whip, inflicted upon me. Curses and abuses in a
thousand forms are poured upon me. I am
driven, with threatenings, rapidly along, and not
allowed to stand still. Through the dry ground
or the deep water I with difficulty drag the plough,
with an empty belly; the tears flow from both
my eyes. I hope in the morning that I shall be
early released, but I am detained until the
evening. If, with a hungry stomach, I eat the
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ALTRUISM 307
grass in the middle of the field, the whole family,
great and small, insultingly abuse me. I am left
to eat any species of herbs among the hills, but
you, my master, yourself receive the grain that is
sown in the field. Of the chen paddy you make
rice ; of the no paddy you make wine. You have
cotton, wheat, and herbs of a thousand different
kinds. Your garden is full of vegetables. When
your men and women marry, amid all your
felicity, if there be a want of money, you let
me out to others. When pressed for the payment
of duties, you devise no plans, but take and sell
the ox that ploughs your field. When you see that
I am old and weak, you sell me to the butcher to
be killed. The butcher conducts me to his home
and soon strikes me in the forehead with the head
of an iron hatchet, after which I am left to die in
the utmost distress. My skin is peeled off, my
bones are scraped, and my skin is taken to cover
the drum by which the country is alarmed.'
' Witness the patient ox, with stripes and yells
Driven to the slaughter, goaded as he runs
To madness, while the savage at his heels
Laughs at the frantic sufferer's fury.'
The angler brags about his ' haul ' and the
hunter about his ' bag ' and his ' big game ' with
as little realisation of what these things mean as
the slave-master boasts of his ' niggers.' Men
talk of ' chops ' and ' steaks ' and ' roasts ' with
the same somnambulism, the same profound un-
consciousness of what these things really signify
in the psychic economies of the world, as the
20 — 2
3o8 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
conqueror contemplates his ' captives,' the robber
his ' spoil,' or the savage his ' scalps.' If before
the eyes and in the mind of each individual who
sits unconcernedly down to a parsleyed ' steak '
could rise the facts in the biography of that
' steak ' — the happy heifer on the far western
meadows, the fateful day when she is forced by'
the drover's whip from her home,* the arduous
' drive ' to the village and her baffled efforts to
escape, the crowding into cars and the long,
painful journey, the silent heartaches and the
low, pitiful moans, the terrible hunger and thirst
and cold, her arrival, bruised and bewildered, in
the city, her dazed mingling with others, the great
murder-house, the prods and bellowings, the
treacherous crash of the brain-axe, the death drop
and shudder, the butcher's knife, the gush of blood
from her pretty throat, and the glassy gaze of her
dead but beautiful eyes — there would be, in spite of
the inherent hardness of the human heart, a great
drawing back from those acts which render such
fearful things necessary. If human beings could
only realise what the hare suffers, or the stag, when
it is pursued by dogs, horses, and men bent on
taking its life, or what the fish feels when it is
thrust through and flung into suffocating gases,
* I have many times seen cows chased all over their native
premises, round and round, through fields and barnyards,
across streams and over fences — chased until the poor things
were utterly exhausted, and whipped and beaten until their
faces and backs were covered with wounds — before they
could be compelled to leave for ever the old farm where they
had been born and raised.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ALTRUISM 309
no one of them, not even the most recreant, could
find pleasure in such work. How painful to a
person of tenderness and enlightenment is even
the thought of rabbit-shootings, duck-slaughterings,
bear-hunts, quail-killing expeditions, tame pigeon
massacres, and the like ! And yet with what
light-hearted enthusiasm the mindless ruffians who
do these atrocious things enter upon them ! One
would think that grown men would be ashamed
to arm themselves and go out with horses and
hounds and engage in such babyish and unequal
contests as sportsmen usually rely on for their
peculiar ' glory.' And they would be if grown
men were not so often simply able-bodied bullies.
If human beings could only realise what it means to
live in a world and associate day after day with other
beings more intelligent and powerful than themselves,
and yet be regarded by these more intelligent indi-
viduals simply as merchandise to be bought and sold,
or as targets to be shot at, they would hide their guilty
heads in shame and horror.
The Being from whose breaking heart gushed
these lines of sorrow and sympathy on seeing a
wounded hare was a god :
' Inhuman man ! curse on thy barbarous art,
And blasted be thy murder-aiming eye :
May never pity soothe thee with a sigh,
Nor ever pleasure glad thy cruel heart !
' Go, live, poor wanderer of the wood and field,
The bitter little that of life remains ;
No more the thickening brakes and verdant plains
To thee shall home, or food, or pastime yield.
310 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
' Seek, mangled one, some place of wonted rest.
No more of rest, but now thy dying bed ;
The sheltering rushes whistling o'er thy head,
The cold earth with thy bloody bosom pressed.
' Oft, as by winding Nith I, musing, wait
The sober eve or hail the cheerful dawn,
I'll miss thee sporting o'er the dewy lawn,
And curse the ruffian's aim and mourn thy hapless fate.'
We human beings, in our conduct toward the
races of beings associated with us on this planet,
are almost pure savages. We are not even half
civilised. And this fact is certain to bring upon
us the criticism and condemnation of the more
enlightened generations to come. The fact is
apparent to-day, however — ^just as apparent as the
barbarity of the Romans — to everyone who will
take the trouble to rid himself of the prejudices
which enslave and blind him, and view human
phenomena from an un-human, extra-terrestrial
point of view.
To most persons — to all except to a few — every-
thing is simply a matter of habit and education.
And a majority of persons, too, can become
educated to one thing about as easily and com-
pletely as they can to another. In Mr. Huxley's
' Man's Place in Nature ' there is reprinted from
an old volume the picture of a butcher's shop as
it is said to have existed among the savage Anziques
of Africa in the sixteenth century. Mr. Huxley
says that the original engraving claims to represent
an actual fact, and that he has himself no doubt
but it does really stand for just what it purports to
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ALTRUISM 311
represent, especially since the fact has been cor-
roborated by Du Chaillu in comparatively recent
times. The fact for which this old picture stands
is a good illustration of the power of custom in
shaping human ideas. In this savage ' market '
pretty much the same line of goods appears as is
found in modern ' markets,' except that, instead
of the quartered corpses of sheep and bullocks,
there hang the shoulders, thighs, and gory heads
of men. The butcher is represented as standing
beside the chopping-block in the act of cutting up
the leg of a man. A child's head and other
fragments of the human body are piled up on
another block, and behind these on pegs are
ranged the more pretentious wares of the establish-
ment. ' Presently we passed a woman,' says Du
Chaillu, in speaking of the cannibalism of the
Fans, who were probably identical with those
referred to two centuries earlier as Anziques.
' She bore with her a piece of the thigh of a
human body, just as we should go to market and
carry thence a roast of steak.' We can easily
imagine (by the help of the sights we see every
day) the anthropophagous crowd standing around
giving their early morning orders, and the enter-
prising assassin hustling about to wait on them.
One of them wants an arm, another wants a leg,
another a liver, another a half-dozen nice fat ribs.
One fellow wants a tender ' cut ' of young girl's
sirloin, and another would like an old man's calf
for soup. A little naked urchin, who has had to
wait a long time in order to get a chance to buy
312 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
anything at all, exchanges a few shells for a
section of human bologna. One fellow wants to
know the price of the boy's head which lies on the
neighbouring block, and a woman complains that
the baby's brains which she bought the day before,
and which were recommended as being especially
' fresh and nice,' turned out to be ' bad.' We can
see them go home with their gruesome purchases,
cook them, and sit down and eat them, discussing
their flavour or their lack of it, and remarking their
tenderness, toughness, or juiciness, and finally
throwing the bones out to the dogs — all with as
little thought of the immorality of it as ' Thanks-
giving ' gluttons have to-day at their feasts of
blood. There may have been an occasional
' visionary ' among these people fanatical enough to
' refuse to eat meat,' or even to protest against the
practice. Probably there was. There generally
are a few such discordants in every generation of
vipers. But ' fanatics ' in those days were in all
likelihood, as they are to-day, too few to be
troublesome.
To anyone familiar with the pliability of the
human conscience, or with the soundness and
depth of intellectual sleep, these things are neither
impossible nor strange. There is so little looking
into the essence of things, so little looking at
things as they are, and so much thinking and
doing as we are accustomed or told to think and do
— there are, in fact, so few who can really think
at all — that if we had been accustomed and taught
to do so from childhood, and the world were
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ALTRUISM 313
practically unanimous in its conduct and teach-
ings on the matter, very few of us indeed would
not sit down to a breakfast of scrambled infant's
brains, a luncheon of cold boiled aunt, or a dinner
of roast uncle, with as little compunction, perhaps
with the same horrible merriment, as we to-day
attend a ' barbecue ' or a ' turkey.' Why should
we not make hash and sausages out of our broken-
down grandfathers and grandmothers just as we
do out of our worn-out horses, and help out the
pigeons at our killing carnivals with a few live
peasants ? How much more artistic and civilised
to pile our tables on holy days with the gold and
crimson of the fields and orchards than to load
them with the dead ! And yet how strangely few
are mature enough to care anything at all about
the matter !
Oh, the helplessness and irresponsibility of the
human mind ! There is no spontaneity, no origin-
ality, only the dead level of the machine. How im-
possible it is for us to think, to discover anything
unassisted, to perceive anything after it has been
pointed out to us even, if it is a little different
from what we are used to ! This, it seems to me,
is one of the most pathetic things in all this world
— this illimitable impotence, this powerlessness
to inspect things from any other point of view
than the one we inherit when we come into the
world ; to be a knave or lunatic (or the next thing
to it), and never have the slightest suspicion of
the fact. The human mind will certainly not
always be this way. It will surely be different
314 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
some time. It seems incredible that the planet
will drag along in disgrace this way forever. The
men of Europe and America are not so primitive
as the junglemen, and the junglemen are superior
in some respects to the quadrupeds and reptiles,
and this gives reason for a little hope. But when,
that is the question, when will it he ? In what
distant time will the Golden Dream of our prophetic
hours come to this poor darkened larva of a world ?
Ages upon ages after our little existences have
gone out, and the detritus of our wasted bodies
has wandered long in the labyrinths of the sod
or been sown by aimless gusts over our native
hills.
X. Anthropocentric Ethics.
Anthropocentricism, which drifted down as a
tradition from ancient times, and which for cen-
turies shaped the theories of the Western world,
but whose respectability among thinking people
has now nearly passed away, was, perhaps, the
boldest and most revolting expression of human
provincialism and conceit ever formulated by any
people. It was the doctrine that man was the
centre about whom revolved all facts and interests
whatsoever; and Judaism and its two children,
Christianity and Mahometanism, were responsible
for it. Everything, according to this conception,
was interpreted in terms of human utility. Every-
thing was made for man — including women. The
sun and moon were luminaries, not worlds, hung
there by the fatherly manufacturer of things for
ANTHROPOCENTRIC ETHICS 315
the convenience and delight of his children. The
stars were perforations in the overarching concave
through which eavesdropping prophets peered into
celestial secrets, and errand-angels came and went
with messages between gods and men. Not only
the spheres in space, but the earth and all it
contained — the rivers, seas, and seasons, all the
plants that grow, and all the ilowers that blow,
and all the millions that swim and suffer in the
waters and skies — were, according to this remorse-
less notion, the soulless adjuncts of man. In-
trinsically they were meaningless. They had sig-
nificance only as they served the human species.
The hues and perfumes of flowers, the songs of
birds, the dews, the breezes, the rains, the rocks,
the ' beasts of the field and the fowls of the air,'
the great forests, the mighty mountains, the
fearful solitudes, even famine and pestilence, were
all made for the being with the reinless imagination.
Luther believed that the fly — festive little Musca
domestica, who inhabits our homes, and sometimes
unwittingly wanders over our tender places — was
a pestiferous invention of the devil, maliciously
sent to annoy him in his meditations. Garlic
grew on the swamp brim as a handy antidote for
human malaria. Fruits ripened in the summer-
time because the acids and juices which they
contained were believed to be necessary for man's
health and refreshment. The great muscles of
the ox were made to provide men with delicacies
and leisure. The cloak of the ewe was made
without any special thought, or without any
3i6 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
thought at all, of the comforts of the ewe. It
was placed there on the ewe by an all-tender
creator, to be torn by his images from her
bleeding back and worn. The fossil forms found
in the rocks were not the bond fide remains of
creatures that had lived and perished when the
calcareous foundations of the continents were
forming in ancient sea-beds. They were counter-
feits, slyly designed by a suspicious providence,
and sandwiched among the strata ' to test human
faith.' The rainbow was a phenomenon with
which the laws of reflection and refraction had
nothing whatever to do. It was a sign or seal
stamped on the retreating storms as a pledge that
submersion would not be again used as a punish-
ment for sinners. The universal ruler was con-
ceived to be an individual of transcendent power
and respectability, but was supposed to spend
the most of his time and a good deal of anxiety
on the regulation and repair of his illustrious
likenesses.
The history of intellectual evolution is the
history of disillusionment. The stars, we now
know, are not hatchways, but worlds. They burn
because they are fire. They blaze and circle in
obedience to their own unchangeable inertias, just
as the earth does. They blazed and wheeled when
the elemental matters of the earth mingled indis-
tinguishably with the vapours of the sun, and they
will blaze and wheel when the last inhabitant of
this clod has dissolved into the everlasting atoms.
The I earth is not the capital of cosmos nor the
ANTHROPOCENTRIC ETHICS 317
subject of celestial anxiety. The earth is a satrap
of the sun — a subordinate among servants, not a
sovereign with a retinue of stars. The earth and
its contents were not made for man. They were
not made at all. They were evolved. The con-
caves of the sea have been hollowed, the mountains
upheaved, and the continents planted and peopled,
by the same tendencies as those that hold the
universes in their grasp- The primal matters of
the earth came out of the substance of the sun,
and by the play and activity of these elements and
the play and activity of their derivatives were
evolved all the multitudinous forms of land, fluid,
plant, animal, and society. The flowers that
' blush unseen ' do not necessarily ' waste their
sweetness on the desert air,' as the poet so melo-
diously imagines. The colours and scents of
flowers serve their purposes — which are to secure
the services of insects in fertilisation — quite as
well when unperceived, as when perceived by
human senses. The non-human races of beings
were not made for human beings. They were
evolved — the higher forms from the lower forms,
and the lower forms from still lower — ^just as
the higher societies of men have been evolved,
under the eye of history, out of barbarism and
savagery. They are our ancestors. They have
made human hfe and civilisation possible. They
made their homes on primeval land patches when
the continents we creep over were sleeping in
the seas. They lived and loved and suffered and
died in order that a being intelligent enough to
3i8 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
analyse himself and recreant enough to pick their
bones might come into the world.
There are supposed to be something like a
million (maybe there are several million) species
of inhabitants living on the earth. The human
species is one of these. Not more than a few
thousand of these species are seriously advan-
tageous to men. The harmful and useless species
are many times more numerous than the helpful.
Now, if the 999,999 non-human species were made
for the human species, why were the hundreds of
thousands of species made that are of no possible
human importance, and the hundreds of thousands
of other species that are a positive injury ? And
if by some miraculous stretch of imagination the
999,999 species now living on the earth are con-
ceived to have been made for man, why were the
10,000,000 or 15,000,000 of species made that lived
and passed away before there was a human being
in existence. Perhaps the traditionist will say —
accustomed as he is to treat syllogisms with con-
tempt — that they were made to invigorate human
' faith.'
If the age of the human species be estimated at
50,000 years and the age of the life-process at
100,000,000 years, the time during which man
has been on the earth is, when compared with
the entire period during which the planet has
been tenanted, as i to 2,000. And the time
during which the earth has been inhabited —
immense as that time is when compared with the
little span of human history — is also insignificant
ANTHROPOCENTRIC ETHICS 319
when compared with the enormous lapse of time
during which the planet was slowly cooling and
solidifying preliminary to the existence of life.
And the entire life of the planet — inconceivably
vast as it is — is as nothing compared with that
eternity, that duration without beginning or close,
during which the sidereal millions have undergone,
and are destined to continue to undergo, their
countless and immeasurable transformations.
It is about as profound to suppose that the
earth and its contents, and the suns, stars, and
systems of space, were all made for a single species
inhabitating an obscure ball located in a remote
quarter of the universe as it is to suppose that the
gigantic body of the elephant was made for the
wisp of hair on the tip of its tail. Man is not the
end, he is but an incident, of the infinite elabora-
tions of Time and Space.
XI. Ethical Implications of Evolution.
The doctrine of organic evolution, which forever
established the common genesis of all animals,
sealed the doom of anthropocentricism. "What-
ever the inhabitants of this world were or were
thought to be before the publication of ' The
Origin of Species,' they never could be anything
since then but a family. The doctrine of evolution
is probably the most important revelation that
has come to the world since the illuminations of
Galileo and Copernicus. The authors of the
Copernican theory enlarged and corrected human
understanding by disclosing to man the compara-
320 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
tive littleness of his world — by discovering that
the earth, which had up to that time been sup-
posed to be the centre and capital of cosmos, is
in reality a satellite of the sun. This heliocentric
discovery was hard on human conceit, for it was the
first broad hint man had thus far received of his true
dimensions. The doctrine of evolution has had,
and is having, and is destined to continue to have,
Sf. similarly correcting effect on the naturally narrow
conceptions of men. It tends to fry the conceit
out of us. It has been impossible since Darwin
for any sane and honest man to go around brag-
ging about having been ' made in the image of his
maker,' or to successfully lay claim to a more
honourable origin than the rest of the creatures of
the earth. And if men had accepted the logical
consequences of Darwin's teachings, the world
would not to-day — a half-century after his reve-
lation — be filled with practices which find their
only support and justification in out-of-date
traditions. But logical consequences, as Huxley
observes, are the official scarecrows of that large
and prolific class of defectives usually known as
fools. The doctrine of evolution is accepted in
one form or another by practically all who think.
It is taught even in school primers. But while
the biology of evolution is scarcely any longer
questioned, the psychology and ethics of the Dar-
winian revelation, though following from the same
premises, and almost as inevitably, are yet to be
generally realised. Darwin's revelation, like every
other revelation that has come to the world, is
ETHICS AND EVOLUTION 321
perceived most tardily by those working in depart-
ments where the phenomena are the most intan-
gible and complicated.
Darwin himself called ' the love for all living
creatures the most noble attribute of man.' Giant
as he was, he perceived more clearly than any of
his contemporaries, more clearly even than his
successors, the ultimate goal of evolving altruism.
For he says : ' As man advances in civilisation,
and small tribes are united into larger communities,
the simplest reason would tell each individual that
he ought to extend his social instincts and sym-
pathies to all members of the same nation, though
personally unknown to him. There is, then, only
an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies
extending to the men of all nations and races.
Experience, however, shows us how long it is, if
such men are separated from him by great differ-
ences of appearance or habits, before he looks
upon them as his fellow-creatures. Sympathy
beyond the confines of man is one of the latest
moral acquisitions. It is apparently unfelt by
savages, except for their pets. The very idea of
humanity, so far as I could observe, was new to
most of the Gauchos of the Pampas. This virtue
seems to arise from our sympathies becoming
more tender and more widely diffused, until they
are extended to all sentient beings ' (7).
The influences of a doctrine old enough and
precious enough to have become embodied in the
life and institutions of a race persist generally,
through mere mornentum, long after the substance
21
322 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
of the doctrine has passed away. This is eminently
true of that misconception which has come down
to us regarding the nature and origin of man and
his relations to the rest of the universe. Darwin
has lived, shed his light over the world, and passed
back to the dust whence he came. Men no
longer believe that other races and other worlds
were really made for them. But they continue to
act in about the same manner as they did when
they did believe it. This assertion applies not
simply to those half-baked intelligences who have
only the rudest and most antiquated notions about
anything but also to thousands of men and women
who pretend to have up-to-date conceptions of
themselves and the universe — men and women
noted even for their activity in reminding others
of their inconsistency — men and women who
' Compound for sins they are inclined to,
By damning those they have no mind to.'
The doctrine of Universal Kinship is not a new
doctrine, born from the more brilliant loins of
modern understanding. It is as old almost as
human philosophy. It was taught by Buddha
twenty-four hundred years ago. And the teach-
ings of this divine soul, spreading over the plains
and peninsulas of Asia, have made unnumbered
millions mild. It was taught also by Pythagoras
and all his school of philosophers, and rigidly
practised in their daily lives. Plutarch, one of
the grandest characters of antiquity, wrote several
essays in advocacy of it. In these essays, as well
ETHICS AND EVOLUTION 323
as in many passages of his writings generally, he
demonstrates that he was far ahead of his con-
temporaries in the breadth and intensity of his
moral nature, and in advance even of all except a
very few of those living to-day, 2,000 years after
him. Shelley among the poets of modern times,
and Tolstoy in these latter days, are others among
the eminent adherents of this holy cause.
Wherever Buddhism prevails, there will be
found in greater or less purity, as one of the
cardinal principles of its founder, the doctrine of
the sacredness of all Sentient Life. But the
Aryan race of the West has remained steadfastly
deaf to the pleadings of its Shelleys and Tolstoys,
owing to the overmastering influence of its anthro-
pocentric religions. Not till the coming of Darwin
and his school of thinkers was there a basis
for hope of a reformed world. To-day the planet
is ripe for the old-new doctrine. Tradition is
losing its power over men's conduct and concep-
tions as never before, and Science is growing
more and more influential. A central truth of
the Darwinian philosophy is the unity and con-
sanguinity of all organic life. And during the
next century or two the ethical corollary of this
truth is going to receive unprecedented recognition
in all departments of human thought. Ignorance
and Inertia are fearful facts. They endure like
granite in the human mind. But the tireless
chisels of evolution are invincible. And the time
will come when the anthropocentric customs and
conceptions, which are to-day fashionable enough
21 — 2
324 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
to be 'divine,' will have nothing but a historic
existence. The movement to put Science and
Humanitarianism in place of Tradition and
Savagery, which is so weak, languishing, and
neglected to-day, is a movement which has for its
ultimate destiny the conquest of the Human
Species.
XII. Conclusion.
All beings are ends; no creatures are means.
All beings have not equal rights, neither have all
men ; but all have rights. The Life Process is the
End — not man, nor any other animal temporarily
privileged to weave a world's philosophy. Non-
human beings were not made for human beings
any more than human beings were made for non-
human beings. Just as the sidereal spheres were
once supposed by the childish mind of man to be
unsubstantial satellites of the earth, but are known
by man's riper understanding to be worlds with
missions and materialities of their own, and of
such magnitude and number as to render terres-
trial insignificance frightful, so the billions that
dwell in the seas, fields, and atmospheres of the
earth were in like manner imagined by the illiterate
children of the race to be the mere trinkets of
men, but are now known by all who can interpret
the new revelation to be beings with substantially
the same origin, the same natures, structures, and
occupations, and the same general rights to life and
happiness, as we ourselves.
In their phenomena of life the inhabitants of
CONCLUSION 325
the earth display endless variety. They swim in
the waters, soar in the skies, squeeze among the
rocks, clamber among the trees, scamper over the
plains, and glide among the grounds and grasses.
Some are born for a summer, some for a century,
and some flutter their little lives out in a day.
They are black, white, blue, golden, all the colours
of the spectrum. Some are wise and some are
simple ; some are large and some are microscopic ;
some live in castles and some in bluebells ; some
roam over continents and seas, and some doze
their little day-dream away on a single dancing
leaf. But they are all the children of a common
mother and the co-tenants of a common world.
Why they are here in this world rather than some
place else ; why the world in which they find
themselves is so full of the undesirable ; and
whether it would not have been better if the ball
on which they ride and riot had been in the
beginning sterilised, are problems too deep and
baffling for the most of them. But since they are
here, and since they are too proud or too super-
stitious to die, and are surrounded by such cold
and wolfish immensities, what would seem more
proper than for them to be kind to each other,
and helpful, and dwell together as loving and
forbearing members of One Great Family ?
Act toward others as you would act
toward a part of your own self.
This is The Great Law, the all-inclusive gospel
of social salvation. It is the rule of social recti-
tude and perfection which has been held up in
326 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
greater or less perfection in all_ ages by the sages
and prophets of the human species.
Hear Confucius, the giant of Mongolia, and the
idol and law-giver of one-third of mankind :
' What you do not like when done to yourself do
not do to others.'
And again he says :
' Do not let a man practise to those beneath
him that which he dislikes in those above him.'
Over and over again the illustrious master
repeats these precepts to his disciples and
countrymen.
In the Mahabharata, the great epic of the
Sanskrit, written by Indian moralists in various
ages, and representing the accumulated wisdom of
one of the most marvellous of all peoples, we find
these words :
' Treat others as thou wouldst thyself be treated.'
' Do nothing to thy neighbour which thou
wouldst not hereafter have thy neighbour do to
thee.'
' A man obtains a rule of action by looking upon
his neighbour as himself.'
These same truths were also taught by Jesus,
that godlike Galilean, the great teacher and
saviour of the Western world :
' Love thy neighbour as thyself.'
' Do unto others as you would have others do
unto you.'
Oh that these words were etched in fire, and
stamped in scorching characters on the dull, cold
hearts of this world !
CONCLUSION 327
Act toward others as you would act
toward a part of your own self.
Look upon and treat others as you do your own
hands, your own eyes, your very heart and soul
— with infinite care and compassion — as suffering
and enjoying members of the same Great Being
with yourself. This is the spirit of the ideal
universe — the spirit of your own being. It is
this alone that can redeem this world, and give
to it the peace and harmony for which it longs.
Yes,
' So many gods, so many creeds,
So many paths that wind and wind,
While just the art of being kind
Is all the sad world needs.'
Oh the madness, and sorrow, and unbrotherli-
ness of this mal-wrought world ! Oh the poor,
weak, poisoned, monstrous natures of its children !
Who can look upon it all without pain, and
sympathy, and consternation, and tears ? What
an opportunity for philanthropy, if the ' All-
mighty One ' of our traditions would only set
about it !
Yes, do as you would be done by — and not to the
dark man and the white woman alone, but to the
sorrel horse and the gray squirrel as well ; not to
creatures of your own anatomy only, but to all
creatures. You cannot go high enough nor low
enough nor far enough to find those whose bowed
and broken beings will not rise up at the coming
of the kindly heart, or whose souls will not shrink
and darken at the touch of inhumanity. Live and
328 THE ETHICAL KINSHIP
let live. Do more. Live and help live. Do to
beings below yoti as you would be done by beings above
you. Pity the tortoise, the katydid, the wild-bird,
and the ox. Poor, undeveloped, untaught crea-
tures ! Into their dim and lowly lives strays of
sunshine little enough, though the fell hand of
man be never against them. They are our fellow-
mortals. They came out of the same mysterious
womb of the past, are passing through the same
dream, and are destined to the same melancholy
end, as we ourselves. Let us be kind and merciful
to them.
' Wilt thou draw near the nature of the gods ?
Draw near them, then, in being merciful ;
Sweet mercy is nobility's true badge.'
Let us be true to our ideals, true to the spirit
of Universal Compassion — whether we walk with
the lone worm wandering in the twilight of con-
sciousness, the feathered forms of the fields and
forests, the kine of the meadows, the simple
savage on the banks of the gladed river, the
political blanks whom men call wives, or the
outcasts of human industry.
Oh this poor world, this poor, suffering, ignorant,
fear-filled world ! How can men be blind or
deranged enough to think it is a good world ?
How can they be cold and satanic enough to be
unmoved by the groans and anguish, the writhing
and tears, that come up from its unparalleled
afflictions ?
But the world is growing better. And in the
CONCLUSION 329
Future — in the long, long ages to come — it will
BE REDEEMED ! The Same spirit of sympathy
and fraternity that broke the black man's manacles
and is to-day melting the white woman's chains
will to-morrow emancipate the working man and
the ox; and, as the ages bloom and the great
wheels of the centuries grind on, the same spirit
shall banish Selfishness from the earth, and
convert the planet finally into one unbroken and
unparalleled spectacle of Peace, Justice, and
Solidarity.
yr
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(1) Spencer: Principles of Ethics, vol. i. ; New York,
1893.
(2) Maine: Early History of Institutions ; New York, 1869.
(3) Tennent : Natural History of Ceylon ; London, 1861.
(4) Myers : Ancient History, part i. ; Boston, 1899.
(5) Myers : Ancient History, part ii. ; Boston, 1899.
(6) Preston and Dodge : The Private Life of the Romans ;
Boston, 1896.
(7) Darwin : Descent of Man ; London, 1874.
(8) Hamley: Our Poor Relations ; Boston, 1872.
VIII. Verte-
brates
5. Mammals-
'II. Primates : Man, monkey.
10. Carnivora : Dog, lion, skunk.
9. Ungulates : Ox, horse, deer.
8. Sirenians : Dugong.
7. Cetaceans : Whale, porpoise.
6. Chiroptera : Bat.
5. Insectivora : Mole, hedgehog.
4. Rodents : Rat, mouse, beaver.
3. Edentates : Sloth, ant-eater.
2. Marsupials : Kangaroo,
opossum.
I. Monotremes : Duckbill,
echidna.
Birds : Ostrich, owl, lark
Reptiles : Snake, lizard, turtle.
Amphibians : Frog, salamander.
Fishes : Shark, salmon, lung-fish.
VII. Arthro
PODS
4. Arachnids : Spider, tick, king-crab.
3. Insects : Ant, fly, bug, beetle.
2. Crustaceans : Crayfish, crab, barnacle.
I. Myriapods: Centiped, milliped.
VI. Mollusks : Clam, oyster, snail, squid.
V. Worms : Earthworm, leech, trichina.
IV. Echinoderms : Star-fish, sea-urchin.
III. Celenterates : Hydra, coral, jelly-fish.
II. PORIFERA : Sponge.
I. Protozoa : Amoeba, euglena, paramecium.
CLASSES OF ANIMALS
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD
Wooly haired Men
(UiotnxJu)
Oddtoed
Ungulates
Even-toed
TIngidates
Primitive
Cetaceans n /
Sirenians-I
Ungulates
Ape -111 :e Men
CMOx.")
Man -like Apes
Xew World 01d\*rorld
Apes
Straigkt-liaiied Men
flissotnchC)
Apes_
Edentates Rodents
Lemurs
Caiuivora
Seals
Bats Tiiscctivo.[-;i
lA-iLi4iUve
Camivora
Herbr'orous
Place ntals
Herbivorous
Marsupials
Monotremes
FliuenUd Atu/n<ii>:
Cavin\-oi-ous
Placekitals
CaniiA'orous
Marsupials
Keel-breasted
Birds
Ostrich-like
Birds
Primiti-le Birds
(ArcheApteryx)
Teleost^flshes
Insects
Spiders
ifyriapods
Trilobites
Shark-like fishes
Primitive fishes
(Lamprey)
Chordates
(Amphiicxus)
xMollusks
Echinoderms
Worms
Flat tWorms
Celenterates
I
Gastraea'
Vob^ox
Protozoa
GENEALOGY OF ANIMALS
To face p, 330.
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