Note 162 — Chapter V · REVIEW OF THE PRINCIPAL METAPHYSICAL HYPOTHESES WHICH WILL REPLACE DOGMA—Concluded. Idealism, Materialism, Monism.

To understand the enormous differences which, in spite of the analogies, may exist between the organization of the planetary or stellar beings and our own, it suffices to consider the immense variety which obtains among terrestrial species. Ants have already achieved an advanced state of society with their shepherd, labouring, and warrior castes. Suppose them to continue their intellectual development instead of halting at a mechanical life of instinct; they might arrive at a point of mental evolution analogous, mutatis mutandis, to that of such and such a human society; for example, that of the Chinese. Who knows, indeed, but that they might rule the earth by virtue of substituting number and intelligence for individual power? Their civilization would be in some sort Liliputian, and destined, no doubt, to exercise a smaller influence on the course of things than that of which physically stronger beings might prove capable; or, to pass from one extreme to the other, in the dreamland in which Fontenelle, Diderot, and Voltaire have laboured, conceive a race of human beings developed not from anthropoids, but from the next most intelligent members of the animal kingdom—from elephants. Scientifically, the supposition is not impossible, when it is considered that the elephant’s trunk is at once one of the strongest and most delicate organs of prehension known to us, and that to possess a well-developed brain and good organs of prehension are perhaps the prime requisites for success in the struggle for existence. A giant civilization, therefore, quite different from ours in externals, if not in essentials, might well have been achieved on the earth or on some neighbouring star. However repugnant to our instinctive anthropomorphism, we should familiarize ourselves with the thought that if evolution is subject to necessary laws, a simple series of accidents and favourable circumstances may give such and such a species the advantage over such and such another, and invert the comparative dignity of the two without the general onward movement of evolution being checked.

Moreover, the development of intelligence in a planet depends much less on the bodily form and number of the inhabitants than on the nature of their life; and as their life depends upon phenomena of heat, light, electricity, and the chemical modifications that they produce, it is these phenomena that in some sort decide the intellectual future of the planet. Kant threw out the suggestion that in an astronomic system, for example—in our solar system—the intellectual and moral perfection of the inhabitants increases with their aloofness from the central star, and thus follows a lowering of the temperature; but such a hypothesis is much too simple to account for so complex an effect, and one which is dependent upon many other things than temperature. What is probable, from the phenomena of life as we know them, is that thought could scarcely be developed either in a brazier or a glacier, and that a certain mean is a necessary condition of organic and intellectual development.