MAN-ANIMAL AND ANIMAL-MAN
In remote ages man and animal were closely bound by a thousand ties.
Under barbaric conditions human beings and animals lived, as it were,
in touch with one another, they were next-door neighbours in the
primeval forests, their necessities were the same to a large extent
and their tastes did not widely differ. Both were actuated by the need
of shelter, food, and protection against enemies. Is it surprising,
then, that primitive man was closely allied to his less intelligent
brothers, and that he believed them to be endowed with feelings and
desires akin to his own?
Owing to his powers of mental growth, however, it was not long before
man's instincts developed above those of the beasts. He was still, in
reality, a savage animal, but he had more skill and ingenuity in the
art of killing, as soon as he began to realise that a stick, a stone,
or other weapons could be used to beat out the life of other animals.
Gradually he found out that he possessed higher qualities on the
mental plane, and that he had the power of conscious spiritual
development which was apparently denied to brute creatures.
Many writers have endeavoured to formulate the great kinship which
exists amongst all created beings in this particular aspect of the
evolution of soul.
"There is not any matter, nor any spirit, nor any creature, but it is
capable of a unity of some kind with other creatures," writes
Ruskin;[21] "and in that unity is its perfection and theirs, and a
pleasure also for the beholding of all other creatures that can
behold. So the unity of spirits is partly in their sympathy and partly
in their giving and taking, and always in their love; and these are
their delight and their strength; for their strength is their
co-working and army fellowship, and their delight is in their giving
and receiving of alternate and perpetual good; their inseparable
dependancy on each other's being, and their essential and perfect
depending on their Creator's."
"Let us label beings by what they are," says a more modern writer,[22]
"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 great seer, Prentice Mulford, believed that the spirit of an animal
could actually be re-embodied in a man or woman, and he thought that its
prominent characteristics would appear in that man or woman. The mother
might attract to her the spirit of some more intelligent or highly
developed savage animal. That spirit would then lose its identity as a
quadruped and reappear in the body of the new-born child.
"Remember," he writes, "that as to size and shape the spirit of a
horse need not be like the horse materialised in flesh and blood.
Spirit takes hold of a mass of matter and holds that matter in
accordance with its ruling desire and the amount of its intelligence.
An anaconda is but the faint spark of intelligence only awakened into
desire to swallow and digest. Such low forms of life as the reptile or
fish have not even awakened into affection for their young. The
reptile, as to spirit or intellect, is but a remove from the
vegetable. Trees have life of their own; they are gregarious, and grow
in communities. The spirit of the old tree reanimates the new one.
There is in the vegetable kingdom the unconscious desire for
refinement, for better forms of life. For this reason is the entire
vegetable kingdom of a finer type than ages ago, when the world's
trees and plants, though immense in size, were coarse in fibre and in
correspondence with the animal life about them."
The true evolution, then, is that of spirit, taking on itself through
successive ages many re-embodiments and adding to itself some new
quality with each re-embodiment.
The survival of the fittest implies that the best qualities so gathered
do survive. The lower, coarse and more savage are gradually sloughed
off. The best qualities in all animal forms of life eventually are
gathered in a man. He has so gained or absorbed into himself courage
from the lion, cunning from the fox, rapaciousness from vulture and
eagle. You often see the eagle or vulture beak on one person's face, the
bulldog on that of another, the wolf, the fox, and so on. Faces hang out
no false sign of the character of the spirit. Man, unconsciously
recognising this, uses the terms "foxy," "wolfish," "snaky," and even
"hoggish," in describing the character of certain individuals.[23]
Most people are able to find physical similarities between human beings
and animals. The equine man who moves his ears is not rarely to be met
with. The person who uncovers his canine teeth in a snarl is an even
more common type. Short women who flap their arms and waddle in the
style of penguins; tall ones who have the graceful sliding movement of
the giraffe; persons of either sex who jerk along with hops like
feathered creatures on a lawn are all to be met with any day.
Mrs. Heron stalks in with solemnity and stateliness, and cranes her
neck to find something she has mislaid. She has a prying face, sharp
nose, and small projecting chin.
Lion faces, tiger faces, cat faces, fox faces, fish faces, bird faces,
sheep faces, and rat faces meet us at every turn.
Sheep men are mild in appearance, beaming with amiability,
truthfulness, and freedom from cant. Ox faces are more robust, with
wider and broader features, and a certain flatness of face. People of
this appearance have good dispositions, good appetite, are stubborn in
bargains perhaps, but reliable and trustworthy.
Hercules was depicted with a powerful neck, a small head, short and
curly hair, which bore a striking resemblance to a vigorous and
untamable bull, whilst Herod was like a fox, with thin face, cunning
eye, restless head and neck, artful and deceptive with highly strung
nerves.
The weasel man is thin, tall, sharp-eyed, always in a hurry, and the
nose that augurs badly is that which is strikingly similar to the beak
of a parrot. The parrot-man is filled with a sense of his own
importance and is an endless prattler. Those who have a high and
narrow forehead and a nose that terminates like the beak of a crow are
sure to be subject to vile passions.
Beaumarchais said wittily, "Boire sans soif et faire l'amour en tout
temps, c'est ce que distingue l'homme de la bête."
Artists, too, have attempted to depict the animal spirit that dwells
in human beings. Sir Joshua Reynolds painted two portraits of young
girls, one holding a cage with a mouse in it, the other a kitten. The
former is called Muscipula,[24] the latter Felina, and it may be
surmised that he intended to show in their features the imitative
sympathy young children have with young animals, for Muscipula's
expression is that of the mouse.
Charles Le Brun, the artist, worked out the same idea in a less
symbolic and more practical manner, from the physiognomical aspect, in
his series of drawings illustrative of the relation between human
physiognomy and brute creation which depict man's features
transformed in many animal countenances.
"Man is a talkative and religious ape," says J. Howard Moore in "The
Universal Kinship,"[25] and goes on to point out that while man has
expressed his opinion about animals constantly, he has never had the
opportunity of hearing what animals have to say about human beings.
Although we know what a lion looks like when painted by a man, "human
eyes have never yet been illumined by the sardonic lineaments of a man
painted by a lion."[26]
Emerson expressed something of the same idea when confronting the
inmates of a stable or menagerie. "What compassion," he cries, "do
these imprisoning forms awaken! You may sometimes catch the glance of
a dog which lays a kind of claim to sympathy and brotherhood. What!
somewhat of me down there? Does he know it? Can he, too, as I, go out
of himself, see himself, perceive relations? We fear lest the poor
brute should gain one dreadful glimpse of his condition, should learn
in some moment the tough limitation of this fettering organisation. It
was in this glance that Ovid got the hint of his metamorphosis;
Calidasa of his transmigration of souls.
"For these fables are our own thoughts carried out. What keeps these
wild tales in circulation for thousands of years? What but the wild fact
to which they suggest some approximation of theory! Nor is the fact
quite solitary, for in varieties of our own species where organisation
seems to predominate over the genius of man, in Kalmuck or Malay or
Flathead Indian, we are sometimes pained by the same feeling; and
sometimes, too, the sharp-witted prosperous white man awakens it. In a
mixed assembly we have chanced to see not only a glance at Abdiel so
grand and keen, but also in other faces the features of the mink, of the
bull, of the rat, and the barn-door fowl."[27]
The great Chinese Epic "A Journey to Heaven," depicts the gradual
evolution of the beast into man and the transformation of character from
unpromising materials into saints worthy of heaven. The monkey's
ambition, the pig's love of ease and the horse's one talent of bearing
burdens are all made to play their part in working out the salvation of
man. One of the chief characters in the story is Sun Wu King, who
personates the irrepressible human mind, an inventive genius full of
resource who begins with monkey inquisitiveness to discover the reasons
of things and presently develops into a man of science and an inventor.
The pig impersonates man's lower nature and demons represent the untamed
passions of man. One demon having once been a clever, handsome man,
became extremely ugly with a snout like a pig and long flapping ears. He
tells his story thus: "Since I was born I have been stupid and loved
ease night and day. I received the pill of nine Transformations and
studied all the arts by which man could be united to the powers above
and below, till at last I was able to fly with a light but strong body
and was a guest in the celestial Court." Thence he was thrown out for
misdemeanours and made to take the shape of a pig, but gradually he was
weaned to better things and lost his animal propensities.
FOOTNOTES:
[21] Ruskin, "Frondes Agrestes," 1899, pp. 146-9.
[22] Moore, T. H., "The Universal Kinship," 1906, pp. 233-4.
[23] Mulford, Prentice, "The Gift of the Spirit," 1904. "Re-embodiment
Universal in Nature," pp. 170-1.
[24] The original painting is at Holland House.
[25] 1906, p. 17.
[26] _Ibid._, p. 233.
[27] Emerson, "Works," 1903, Vol. IV. "Demonology," pp. 12-13.