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 sufficient to compensate for its
total absence from the rest of the universe. Man has always
overestimated himself. In whatever age or province of the world you
look down on the human imagination, you find it industriously
digging disparities and establishing gulfs. Man, according to
himself, has had great difficulty many times in the history of the
world in escaping the divine. According to the facts, he has only in
recent biological 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 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 indelicate 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 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
promoted 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 antithesis!
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 straightforward 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.
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, improvises 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
consciousness 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 understand 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 flounders in his broth. The roots of consciousness are
in the sea. Side by side with physical evolution has gone on
psychical evolution; side by side with 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 unwilling to think. They have certain
beliefs _to which they are determined to hold on_, and everything
that does not fit in with these beliefs is rejected as a matter of
course.