The Psychical Kinship (continued 3)

It has been said that man differs from other animals, and is superior to them in the fact that he modifies his environment while other animals do not, but are modified by environment. Mr. Lester F. Ward makes this distinction in his ‘Pure Sociology.’ The distinction is no nearer the truth than other distinctions of like character that have from time to time been drawn between men and other animals. It is not much more than half true, if it is that, and does not by any means deserve the italics awarded to it by this writer. Many races of non-human beings have a far greater influence on their environment than many races of men have. Many tribes of men wander about naked, build no habitations, make no weapons, and feed upon the fruits, roots, insects, and such other chance morsels as they can pick up from day to day in their wanderings. Such races are far inferior in constructive activity to the birds, who build elaborate houses, and to the beavers, who not only construct substantial dwellings, but dam rivers, and cut down trees and transport them long distances, and dig artificial waterways, to be used as aids in their engineering enterprises. Compare the elaborate compartments of the Australian bower-birds, surrounded with ornamented and carefully-kept grounds, with the lean-to of many savage tribes, made by sticking two or three palm-leaves in the ground and leaning them against a pole. Even ants plant crops, make clearings, build roads and tunnels, etc. It must be remembered, too, that, however affirmative and masterful a race of men may become, it never succeeds, and never can succeed, in emancipating itself from the influences of environment. It is true that with the growth of intelligence among organic forms there has been a constant transfer of influence from the environment to the organism; but this transfer began, not with man by any means, but low down in the scale of animal life.

It has been said that man is the only animal that uses tools. But this is not true either, for animals as low in the scale of development as insects have been known to use tools. At least two different observers testify to having seen ground-wasps use small stones as hammers in packing the dirt firmly over their nests. Spiders use stones as weights to steady their webs in times of storm. Orangs throw sticks and stones at their pursuers, and certain tribes of Abyssinian baboons, when they go to battle with each other, carry stones as missiles. Monkeys often use stones to crack nuts with, and tame monkeys know very well how to use a hammer when it is given to them. In the London Zoological Gardens a monkey with poor teeth kept a stone hidden in the straw of its cage to crack its nuts with, and it would not allow any other monkey to touch the stone. ‘Here,’ says Darwin, in speaking of this case, ‘is the idea of property.’ Monkeys also use sticks as levers in prying open chests and lifting heavy objects. Cuvier’s orang used to carry a chair across the room and stand on it to lift the door-latch. Chimpanzees, who are very fond of making a noise, have been seen standing around a hollow log in the forest, beating it with sticks; and if we are to believe Emin Pasha, these ingenious parodies of men sometimes carry torches when they go at night on foraging expeditions. The Indian elephant, when travelling, will sometimes turn aside and break off a leafy branch from a roadside tree and carry it along in its trunk to sweep off the flies. As Dr. Wesley Mills says in his work on ‘The Nature and Development of Animal Intelligence,’ ‘It was formerly believed that animals cannot reason, but only those persons who do not themselves reason about the subject, with the facts before them, can any longer occupy such a position.’

V. Conclusion.

It is enough. The ancient gulf scooped by human conceit between man and the other animals has been effectually and forever filled up. The human species constitutes but one branch in the gigantic arbour of life. And all the merit and all the feeling and all the righteousness of the world are not, as we have been accustomed to aver, congested into this one branch. And all of the weakness and deformity are not, as we have also been anxious to believe, found elsewhere. The reluctance of wrinkles and deformities to appear in the pictures of men, and of strength and beauty to appear in the representations of the other races of the earth, is to be accounted for by the highly elucidative fact that man is the universal portrait-painter. There is no one to tell man what he is and how he strikes others, and hence he is the ‘paragon of creation’—the inter-stellar pet, half clay and half halo—the image and pride of the gods—the flower and gem of the eternal spheres. Man is the only professional linguist in the universe. And it is fortunate for him that he is. For, if he were not, his auditories would be compelled to carry to his perceptive centres a great many sentiments he now never hears. He would be likely to hear a good deal said, and said with a good deal of feeling, about perpendicular brigand—grandiloquent kakistocrat swelling with self-righteousness—rhetorical hideful wrapped in pillage and gorged with decomposition—a voluble and sanctimonious squash with two sticks in it. The definition of man as it appears in the dictionary of the donkey probably runs something like this: ‘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 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 Machiavellian ways of men. Would you learn forgiveness? Go to the dog. The dog can stand more abuse and forgive greater accumulations of wrong than any other animal, not even excepting a wife. About the only thing in the universe superior to the dog in willingness to undergo outrage is the human stomach. Would you learn wisdom and industry? Go to the ant, that tireless toiler of the dust. The ant can do that which no man can do—keep grain in a warm, moist atmosphere without sprouting. Would you learn art? Go to the bee or to the wild bird’s lodge. The art of the honeycomb and of the hang-bird’s nest surpasses that of the cranny of the savage as the Cathedral of St. Peter exceeds the cottage. Would you learn socialism, that dream of poets and the hope and expectation of wise men? It is actualised around you in thousands of insect communities. The social and economic relations existing in the most highly wrought societies of bees and wasps are fundamentally the ideal relations of living beings to each other, but it will require millenniums of struggle and bloodshed for men to come up to them. Would you learn curiosity—not the curiosity that gossips and backbites, but the curiosity of the explorer and searcher after knowledge? Go to the monkey. The monkey has been known to work two hours, without pause, utterly unconscious of everything but its purposes, trying to open a fettered trunk lock.^[1] Would you learn sobriety? Go not to the gilded hells of cities, where men die like flies in gin’s vile miasma. Go to the spring where the antelope drinks. Would you learn chastity? Go not to the foul dens and fiery chambers of men. Go to the boudoir of the bower-bird, or to the subterranean hollow where the wild wolf rears her litter.

Man is not the surpassingly pre-eminent individual he so actively advertises himself to be. Indeed, in many particulars he is excelled, and excelled seriously, by those whom he calls ‘lower.’ The locomotion of the bird is far superior in ease and expedition to the shuffling locomotion of man. The horse has a sense which guides it through darkness in which human eyes are blind; and the manner in which a cat, who has been carried in a bag and put down miles away, will turn up at the back-door of the old home next morning dumfounds science. The eye of the vulture is a telescope. The hound will track his master along a frequented street an hour behind his footsteps, by the imponderable odour of his soles. The catbird, without atlas or geographic manuals, will find her way back over hundreds of trackless leagues, season after season, to the same old nesting-place in the thicket. Birds, thousands of them, journey from Mexico to Arctic America, from Algiers and Italy to Spitzbergen, from Egypt to Siberia, and from Australia and the Polynesian Islands to New Zealand, and build their nests and rear their young, year after year, in the same vale, grove, or tundra. The nightingale, who pours out his incomparable lovesong in the twilight of English lanes during May and June, winters in the heart of Africa; and some birds nest within the Arctic Circle and winter in Argentina. Some of the plovers travel the entire length of the American land mass every summer, from Patagonia to the Arctic Circle, in order to lay three or four pale-green eggs, and see them turn to birdlings by the shores of the Hudson Sea. Many animals have the power to foretell storms, and man, though he can weigh worlds, is ever glad to profit by their superior sense. When herons fly high above the clouds, when sea-birds dip and sport in the water and the bittern booms from the marshes, when swallows fly low and the sow repairs her bed, when horses scamper and cattle sniff the air, when ravens beat the air with their wings, make noises, and flock together, when the swan raises her eggs by additions to her nest and the prairie-dog scratches the dirt up around its hole, when beetles are not found in the air and caterpillars mass in their webs, when bees remain near their hives and ants carry their eggs to their innermost abodes, when frogs croak more loudly from their watery retreats and fishes seek the safety of the unharried deeps—look out for foul weather! Man has not the sweetness of the song-sparrow, the innocence of the fawn, nor the high relative brain capacity of the tomtit and the fice.

Many animals have powers by which they are able to act in concert at times, vast numbers of them moving in unison over immense areas by signals or intuitions which man can neither imitate nor understand. Such are the mysterious migrations of the Norway lemming and of many birds and insects, and such were the memorable stampedes of the bison hordes on the American plains in years gone by. Kropotkin saw on the Siberian steppes one autumn ‘thousands and thousands’ of fallow deer come together from an area as large as Great Britain at a point on the Amur River in an unprecedented exodus to the lowlands on the other side.^[2] How these scattered thousands knew when to start so as to arrive at the river at the same time, and how they knew the direction to travel and found their way so well, are mysteries which man can as yet only wonder at. More marvellous yet—more marvellous, perhaps, than the concurrent action of any other animal, for it implies the most accurate time-keeping extending over many years—are the annual festivals of 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 down among the coral reefs and hatching into a new generation. ‘Year after year these creatures appear according to lunar time. And yet in the long-run they keep solar time. They keep two cycles, one of three and one of twenty-nine years. In the three-year cycle there are two intervals of twelve lunations and one of thirteen lunations. These thirty-seven lunations bring lunar time somewhat near to solar time. But in twenty-nine years there is enough difference to require the addition of another lunation; the twenty-ninth year is therefore one of thirteen instead of twelve lunations. In this way they do not change their season in an entire century. So unfailing is their appearance that in Samoa they have given their name to the spring season, which is called “the time of the palolo.”’

Instead of the highest, man is in some respects the lowest, of the animal kingdom. Man is the most unchaste, the most drunken, the most selfish and conceited, the most miserly, the most hypocritical, and the most bloodthirsty of terrestrial creatures. Almost no animals, except man, kill for the mere sake of killing. For one being to take the life of another for purposes of selfish utility is bad enough. But the indiscriminate massacre of defenceless innocents by armed and organised packs, just for pastime, is beyond characterisation. The human species is the only species of animals that plunges to such depths of atrocity. Even vipers and hyenas do not exterminate for recreation. No animal, except man, habitually seeks wealth purely out of an insane impulse to accumulate. And no animal, except man, gloats over accumulations that are of no possible use to him, that are an injury and an abomination, and in whose acquisition he may have committed irreparable crimes upon others. There are no millionaires—no professional, legalised, lifelong kleptomaniacs—among the birds and quadrupeds. No animal, except man, spends so large a part of his energies striving for superiority—not superiority in usefulness, but that superiority which consists in simply getting on the heads of one’s fellows. And no animal practises common, ordinary morality to the other beings of the world in which he lives so little, compared with the amount he preaches it, as man.

Let us be honest. Honour to whom honour is due. It will not emaciate our own glory to recognise the excellence and reality of others, or to come face to face with our own frailties. We are our brother’s keeper. Our brethren are they that feel. Let us universalise. Our thoughts and sympathies have been too long wingless. The Universe is our Country, and our Kindred are the Populations that Mount. It is well—it is eminently well, for it is godlike—to send our Magnanimity to the Dusts and the Deeps, our Sunrises to the Uttermost Isles, and our Charity to the Stars.