over that of the inferior animals. Man’s mind is almost infinite in
device; it ranges over all the world; it forms the most wonderful
combinations; it seeks back into the past, and stretches forward into the
future; while the animals generally appear to have a narrow range of
thought and action. But so also has an infant but a limited range, and
yet it is mind which works there, as well as in the most accomplished
adults. The difference between mind in the lower animals and in man is a
difference in degree only; it is not a specific difference. All who have
studied animals by actual observation, and even those who have given a
candid attention to the subject in books, must attain more or less clear
convictions of this truth, notwithstanding all the obscurity which
prejudice may have engendered. We see animals capable of affection,
jealousy, envy; we see them quarrel, and conduct quarrels, in the very
manner pursued by the more impulsive of our own race. We see them liable
to flattery, inflated with pride, and dejected by shame. We see them as
tender to their young as human parents are, and as faithful to a trust as
the most conscientious of human servants. The horse is startled by
marvellous objects, as a man is. The dog and many others shew tenacious
memory. The dog also proves himself possessed of imagination, by the act
of dreaming. Horses, finding themselves in want of a shoe, have of their
own accord gone to a farrier’s shop where they were shod before. Cats,
closed up in rooms, will endeavour to obtain their liberation by pulling
a latch or ringing a bell. It has several times been observed that in a
field of cattle, when one or two were mischievous, and persisted long in
annoying or tyrannizing over the rest, the herd, to all appearance,
consulted, and then, making a united effort, drove the troublers off the
ground. The members of a rookery have also been observed to take turns
in supplying the needs of a family reduced to orphanhood. All of these
are acts of reason, in no respect different from similar acts of men.
Moreover, although there is no heritage of accumulated knowledge amongst
the lower animals, as there is amongst us, they are in some degree
susceptible of those modifications of natural character, and capable of
those accomplishments, which we call education. The taming and
domestication of animals, and the changes thus produced upon their nature
in the course of generations, are results identical with civilization
amongst ourselves; and the quiet, servile steer is probably as unlike the
original wild cattle of this country, as the English gentleman of the
present day is unlike the rude baron of the age of King John. Between a
young, unbroken horse, and a trained one, there is, again, all the
difference which exists between a wild youth reared at his own discretion
in the country, and the same person when he has been toned down by long
exposure to the influences of refined society. On the accomplishments
acquired by animals it were superfluous to enter at any length; but I may
advert to the dogs of M. Leonard, as remarkable examples of what the
animal intellect may be trained to. When four pieces of card are laid
down before them, each having a number pronounced _once_ in connexion
with it, they will, after a re-arrangement of the pieces, select any one
named by its number. They also play at dominoes, and with so much skill
as to triumph over biped opponents, whining if the adversary place a
wrong piece, or if they themselves be deficient in a right one. Of
extensive combinations of thought we have no reason to believe that any
animal is capable—and yet most of us must feel the force of Walter
Scott’s remark, that there was scarcely anything which he would not
believe of a dog. There is a curious result of education in certain
animals, namely, that habits to which they have been trained in some
instances become hereditary. For example, the accomplishment of pointing
at game, although a pure result of education, appears in the young pups
brought up apart from their parents and kind. The peculiar leap of the
Irish horse, acquired in the course of traversing a boggy country, is
continued in the progeny brought up in England. This hereditariness of
specific habits suggests a relation to that form of psychological
demonstration usually called instinct; but instinct is only another term
for mind, or is mind in a peculiar stage of development; and though the
fact were otherwise, it could not affect the postulate, that
demonstrations such as have been enumerated are mainly intellectual
demonstrations, not to be distinguished as such from those of human
beings.
More than this, the lower animals manifested mental phenomena long before
man existed. While as yet there was no brain capable of working out a
mathematical problem, the economy of the six-sided figure was exemplified
by the instinct of the bee. Ere human musician had whistled or piped,
the owl hooted in B flat, the cuckoo had her song of a falling third, and
the chirp of the cricket was in B. The dog and the elephant prefigured
the sagacity of the human mind. The love of a human mother for her babe
was anticipated by nearly every humbler mammal, the carnaria not
excepted. The peacock strutted, the turkey blustered, and the cock
fought for victory, just as human beings afterwards did, and still do.
Our faculty of imitation, on which so much of our amusement depends, was
exercised by the mocking-bird; and the whole tribe of monkeys must have
walked about the pre-human world, playing off those tricks in which we
see the comicality and mischief-making of our character so curiously
exaggerated.
The unity and simplicity which characterize nature give great antecedent
probability to what observation seems about to establish, that, as the
brain of the vertebrata generally is just an advanced condition of a
particular ganglion in the mollusca and crustacea, so are the brains of
the higher and more intelligent mammalia only farther developments of the
brains of the inferior orders of the same class. Or, to the same
purpose, it may be said, that each species has certain superior
developments, according to its needs, while others are in a rudimental or
repressed state. This will more clearly appear after some inquiry has
been made into the various powers comprehended under the term mind.
One of the first and simplest functions of mind is to give
consciousness—consciousness of our identity and of our existence. This,
apparently, is independent of the _senses_, which are simply media, and,
as Locke has shewn, the only media, through which ideas respecting the
external world reach the brain. The access of such ideas to the brain is
the act to which the metaphysicians have given the name of perception.
Gall, however, has shewn, by induction from a vast number of actual
cases, that there is a part of the brain devoted to perception, and that
even this is subdivided into portions which are respectively dedicated to
the reception of different sets of ideas, as those of form, size, colour,
weight, objects in their totality, events in their progress or
occurrence, time, musical sounds, &c. The system of mind invented by
this philosopher—the only one founded upon nature, or which even pretends
to or admits of that necessary basis—shews a portion of the brain acting
as a faculty of comic ideas, another of imitation, another of wonder, one
for discriminating or observing differences, and another in which resides
the power of tracing effects to causes. There are also parts of the
brain for the sentimental part of our nature, or the affections, at the
head of which stand the moral feelings of benevolence, conscientiousness,
and veneration. Through these, man stands in relation to himself, his
fellow-men, the external world, and his God; and through these comes most
of the happiness of man’s life, as well as that which he derives from the
contemplation of the world to come, and the cultivation of his relation
to it, (pure religion.) The other sentiments may be briefly enumerated,
their names being sufficient in general to denote their
functions—firmness, hope, cautiousness, self-esteem, love of approbation,
secretiveness, marvellousness, constructiveness, imitation,
combativeness, destructiveness, concentrativeness, adhesiveness, love of
the opposite sex, love of offspring, alimentiveness, and love of life.
Through these faculties, man is connected with the external world, and
supplied with active impulses to maintain his place in it as an
individual and as a species. There is also a faculty, (language) for
expressing, by whatever means, (signs, gestures, looks, conventional
terms in speech,) the ideas which arise in the mind. There is a
particular state of each of these faculties, when the ideas of objects
once formed by it are revived or reproduced, a process which seems to be
intimately allied with some of the phenomena of the new science of
photography, when images impressed by reflection of the sun’s rays upon
sensitive paper are, after a temporary obliteration, resuscitated on the
sheet being exposed to the fumes of mercury. Such are the phenomena of
memory, that handmaid of intellect, without which there could be no
accumulation of mental capital, but an universal and continual infancy.
Conception and imagination appear to be only intensities, so to speak, of
the state of brain in which memory is produced. On their promptness and
power depend most of the exertions which distinguish the man of arts and
letters, and even in no small measure the cultivator of science.
The faculties above described—the actual elements of the mental
constitution—are seen in mature man in an indefinite potentiality and
range of action. It is different with the lower animals. They are there
comparatively definite in their power and restricted in their
application. The reader is familiar with what are called instincts in
some of the humbler species, that is, an uniform and unprompted tendency
towards certain particular acts, as the building of cells by the bee, the
storing of provisions by that insect and several others, and the
construction of nests for a coming progeny by birds. This quality is
nothing more than a mode of operation peculiar to the faculties in a
humble state of endowment, or early stage of development. The cell
formation of the bee, the house-building of ants and beavers, the
web-spinning of spiders, are but primitive exercises of constructiveness,
the faculty which, indefinite with us, leads to the arts of the weaver,
upholsterer, architect, and mechanist, and makes us often work
delightedly where our labours are in vain, or nearly so. The storing of
provisions by the ants is an exercise of acquisitiveness,—the faculty
which with us makes rich men and misers. A vast number of curious
devices, by which insects provide for the protection and subsistence of
their young, whom they are perhaps never to see, are most probably a
peculiar restricted effort of philoprogenitiveness. The common source of
this class of acts, and of common mental operations, is shewn very
convincingly by the melting of the one set into the other. Thus, for
example, the bee and bird will make modifications in the ordinary form of
their cells and nests when necessity compels them. Thus, the
alimentiveness of such animals as the dog, usually definite with regard
to quantity and quality, can be pampered or educated up to a kind of
epicurism, that is, an indefiniteness of object and action. The same
faculty acts limitedly in ourselves at first, dictating the special act
of sucking; afterwards it acquires indefiniteness. Such is the real
nature of the distinction between what are called instincts and reason,
upon which so many volumes have been written without profit to the world.
All faculties are instinctive, that is, dependent on internal and
inherent impulses. This term is therefore not specially applicable to
either of the recognised modes of the operation of the faculties. We
only, in the one case, see the faculty in an immature and slightly
developed state; in the other, in its most advanced condition. In the
one case it is _definite_, in the other _indefinite_, in its range of
action. These terms would perhaps be the most suitable for expressing
the distinction.
In the humblest forms of being we can trace scarcely anything besides a
definite action in a few of the faculties. Generally speaking, as we
ascend in the scale, we see more and more of the faculties in exercise,
and these tending more to the indefinite mode of manifestation. And for
this there is the obvious reason in providence, that the lowest animals
have all of them a very limited sphere of existence, born only to perform
a few functions, and enjoy a brief term of life, and then give way to
another generation, so that they do not need much mental guidance. At
higher points in the scale, the sphere of existence is considerably
extended, and the mental operations are less definite accordingly. The
horse, dog, and a few other rasorial types, noted for their
serviceableness to our race, have the indefinite powers in no small
endowment. Man, again, shews very little of the definite mode of
operation, and that little chiefly in childhood, or in barbarism or
idiocy. Destined for a wide field of action, and to be applicable to
infinitely varied contingencies, he has all the faculties developed to a
high pitch of indefiniteness, that he may be ready to act well in all
imaginable cases. His commission, it may be said, gives large
discretionary powers, while that of the inferior animals is limited to a
few precise directions. But when the human brain is congenitally
imperfect or diseased, or when it is in the state of infancy, we see in
it an approach towards the character of the brains of some of the
inferior animals. Dr. G. J. Davey states that he has frequently
witnessed, among his patients at the Hanwell Lunatic Asylum, indications
of a particular abnormal cerebration which forcibly reminded him of the
specific healthy characteristics of animals lower in the scale of
organization; {346} and every one must have observed how often the
actions of children, especially in their moments of play, and where their
selfish feelings are concerned, bear a resemblance to those of certain
familiar animals. {347} Behold, then, the wonderful unity of the whole
system. The grades of mind, like the forms of being, are mere stages of
development. In the humbler forms, but a few of the mental faculties are
traceable, just as we see in them but a few of the lineaments of
universal structure. In man the system has arrived at its highest
condition. The few gleams of reason, then, which we see in the lower
animals, are precisely analogous to such a development of the fore-arm as
we find in the paddle of the whale. Causality, comparison, and other of
the nobler faculties, are in them _rudimental_.
Bound up as we thus are by an identity in the character of our mental
organization with the lower animals, we are yet, it will be observed,
strikingly distinguished from them by this great advance in development.
We have faculties in full force and activity which the animals either
possess not at all, or in so low and obscure a form as to be equivalent
to non-existence. Now these parts of mind are those which connect us
with the things that are not of this world. We have veneration,
prompting us to the worship of the Deity, which the animals lack. We
have hope, to carry us on in thought beyond the bounds of time. We have
reason, to enable us to inquire into the character of the Great Father,
and the relation of us, his humble creatures, towards him. We have
conscientiousness and benevolence, by which we can in a faint and humble
measure imitate, in our conduct, that which he exemplifies in the whole
of his wondrous doings. Beyond this, mental science does not carry us in
support of religion: the rest depends on evidence of a different kind.
But it is surely much that we thus discover in nature a provision for
things so important. The existence of faculties having a regard to such
things is a good evidence that such things exist. The face of God is
reflected in the organization of man, as a little pool reflects the
glorious sun.
The affective or sentimental faculties are all of them liable to operate
whenever appropriate objects or stimuli are presented, and this they do
as irresistibly and unerringly as the tree sucks up moisture which it
requires, with only this exception, that one faculty often interferes
with the action of another, and operates instead by force of superior
inherent strength or temporary activity. For example, alimentiveness may
be in powerful operation with regard to its appropriate object, producing
a keen appetite, and yet it may not act, in consequence of the more
powerful operation of cautiousness, warning against evil consequences
likely to ensue from the desired indulgence. This liability to flit from
under the control of one feeling to the control of another, constitutes
what is recognised as free will in man, being nothing more than a
vicissitude in the supremacy of the faculties over each other.
It is a common mistake to suppose that the individuals of our own species
are all of them formed with similar faculties—similar in power and
tendency—and that education and the influence of circumstances produce
all the differences which we observe. There is not, in the old systems
of mental philosophy, any doctrine more opposite to the truth than this.
It is refuted at once by the great differences of intellectual tendency
and moral disposition to be observed amongst a group of young children
who have been all brought up in circumstances perfectly identical—even in
twins, who have never been but in one place, under the charge of one
nurse, attended to alike in all respects. The mental characters of
individuals are inherently various, as the forms of their persons and the
features of their faces are; and education and circumstances, though
their influence is not to be despised, are incapable of entirely altering
these characters, where they are strongly developed. That the original
characters of mind are dependent on the volume of particular parts of the
brain and the general quality of that viscus, is proved by induction from
an extensive range of observations, the force of which must have been
long since universally acknowledged but for the unpreparedness of mankind
to admit a functional connexion between mind and body. The different
mental characters of individuals may be presumed from analogy to depend
on the same law of development which we have seen determining forms of
being and the mental characters of particular species. This we may
conceive as carrying forward the intellectual powers and moral
dispositions of some to a high pitch, repressing those of others at a
moderate amount, and thus producing all the varieties which we see in our
fellow-creatures. Thus a Cuvier and a Newton are but expansions of a
clown, and the person emphatically called the wicked man, is one whose
highest moral feelings are rudimental. Such differences are not confined
to our species; they are only less strongly marked in many of the
inferior animals. There are clever dogs and wicked horses, as well as
clever men and wicked men, and education sharpens the talents, and in
some degree regulates the dispositions of animals, as it does our own.
Here I may advert to a very interesting analogy between the mental
characters of the types in the quinary system of zoology and the
characters of individual men. We have seen that the pre-eminent type is
usually endowed with an harmonious assemblage of the mental qualities
belonging to the whole group, while the sub-typical inclines to ferocity,
the rasorial to gentleness, and so on. Now, amongst individuals, some
appear to be almost exclusively of the sub-typical, and others of the
rasorial characters, while to a limited number is given the finely
assorted assemblage of qualities which places them on a parallel with the
typical. To this may be attributed the universality which marks all the
very highest brains, such as those of Shakespeare and Scott, men of whom
it has been remarked that they must have possessed within themselves not
only the poet, but the warrior, the statesman, and the philosopher; and
who, moreover, appear to have had the mild and manly, the moral and the
forcible parts of our nature, in the most perfect balance.
There is, nevertheless, a general adaptation of the mental constitution
of man to the circumstances in which he lives, as there is between all
the parts of nature to each other. The goods of the physical world are
only to be realized by ingenuity and industrious exertion; behold,
accordingly, an intellect full of device, and a fabric of the faculties
which would go to pieces or destroy itself if it were not kept in
constant occupation. Nature presents to us much that is sublime and
beautiful: behold faculties which delight in contemplating these
properties of hers, and in rising upon them, as upon wings, to the
presence of the Eternal. It is also a world of difficulties and perils,
and see how a large portion of our species are endowed with vigorous
powers which take a pleasure in meeting and overcoming difficulty and
danger. Even that principle on which our faculties are constituted—a
wide range of freedom in which to act for all various
occasions—necessitates a resentful faculty, by which individuals may
protect themselves from the undue and capricious exercise of each other’s
faculties, and thus preserve their individual rights. So also there is
cautiousness, to give us a tendency to provide against the evils by which
we may be assailed; and secretiveness, to enable us to conceal whatever,
being divulged, would be offensive to others or injurious to ourselves,—a
function which obviously has a certain legitimate range of action,
however liable to be abused. The constitution of the mind generally
points to a state of intimate relation of individuals towards society,
towards the external world, and towards things above this world. No
individual being is integral or independent; he is only part of an
extensive piece of social mechanism. The inferior mind, full of rude
energy and unregulated impulse, does not more require a superior nature
to act as its master and its mentor, than does the superior nature
require to be surrounded by such rough elements on which to exercise its
high endowments as a ruling and tutelary power. This relation of each to
each produces a vast portion of the active business of life. It is easy
to see that, if we were all alike in our moral tendencies, and all placed
on a medium of perfect moderation in this respect, the world would be a
scene of everlasting dulness and apathy. It requires the variety of
individual constitution to give moral life to the scene.
The indefiniteness of the potentiality of the human faculties, and the
complexity which thus attends their relations, lead unavoidably to
occasional error. If we consider for a moment that there are not less
than thirty such faculties, that they are each given in different
proportions to different persons, that each is at the same time endowed
with a wide discretion as to the force and frequency of its action, and
that our neighbours, the world, and our connexions with something beyond
it, are all exercising an ever-varying influence over us, we cannot be
surprised at the irregularities attending human conduct. It is simply
the penalty paid for the superior endowment. It is here that the
imperfection of our nature resides. Causality and conscientiousness are,
it is true, guides over all; but even these are only faculties of the
same indeterminate constitution as the rest, and partake accordingly of
the same inequality of action. Man is therefore a piece of mechanism,
which never can act so as to satisfy his own ideas of what he might
be—for he can imagine a state of moral perfection, (as he can imagine a
globe formed of diamonds, pearls, and rubies,) though his constitution
forbids him to realize it. There ever will, in the best disposed and
most disciplined minds, be occasional discrepancies between the amount of
temptation and the power summoned for regulation or resistance, or
between the stimulus and the mobility of the faculty; and hence those
errors, and shortcomings, and excesses, without end, with which the good
are constantly finding cause to charge themselves. There is at the same
time even here a possibility of improvement. In infancy, the impulses
are all of them irregular; a child is cruel, cunning, and false, under
the slightest temptation, but in time learns to control these
inclinations, and to be habitually humane, frank, and truthful. So is
human society, in its earliest stages, sanguinary, aggressive, and
deceitful, but in time becomes just, faithful, and benevolent. To such
improvements there is a natural tendency which will operate in all fair
circumstances, though it is not to be expected that irregular and undue
impulses will ever be altogether banished from the system.