field of speculation on animal intelligence which has not really
extended its boundaries since the time when he wrote, though it is
possible that we are now on the verge, if not of new discoveries, at
least of the admission of a new point of view. The study of the dual
element in man, the endeavour to establish a line of demarcation between
the conscious and subliminal self, may lead to the inquiry, how far the
conscious self corresponds with what was meant, when speaking of
animals, by “reason,” and the subliminal self with what was meant by
“instinct”? But the use of a new terminology would not alter the
conclusion: call it reason, consciousness, spirit; some of it the
“paragon of animals” shares with his poor relations. The case is put in
a homely way but not without force by the heroine of a forgotten novel
by Lamartine: the speaker is an old servant who is in despair at losing
her goldfinch: “Ah! On dit que les bêtes n’ont pas l’âme,” she says. “Je
ne veux pas offenser le bon Dieu, mais si mon pauvre oiseau n’avait pas
d’âme, avec quoi done n’aurait-il tant aimée? Avec les plumes ou avec
les pattes, peut-être?”
Plutarch reviews—to reject—the “Automata” argument, which had already
some supporters. Certain naturalists, he says, try to prove that animals
feel neither pleasure nor anger nor yet fear; that the nightingale does
not meditate his song, that the bee has no memory, that the swallow
makes no preparations, that the lion never grows angry, nor is the stag
subject to fear. Everything, according to these theorists, is merely
delusive appearance. They might as well assert that animals cannot see
or hear; that they only appear to see or hear; that they have no voice,
only the semblance of a voice; in short, that they are not alive but
only seem to live.
The moral aspects of any problem are those which to a moralist seem the
most important, and Plutarch did not seek to deny the force of the
objection: If virtue be the true aim of reason, how can Nature have
bestowed reason on creatures which cannot direct it to its true object?
But he denied the postulate that animals have no ethical potentialities.
If the love of men for their children is granted to be the corner-stone
of all human society, shall we say that there is no merit in the
affection of animals for their offspring? He sums up the matter by
remarking that the limitation of a faculty does not show that it does
not exist. To pretend that every being not endowed at birth with perfect
reason is, by its nature, incapable of reason of any kind, would be to
ignore the fact that although reason is a natural gift the degree in
which it is possessed by any individual depends on his training and on
his teachers. Perfect reason is possessed by none because none has
perfect rectitude and moral excellence.
Animals exhibit examples of sociability, courage, resource, and again,
of cowardice and viciousness. Why do we not say of one tree that it is
less teachable than another, as we say that a sheep is less teachable
than a dog? It is, of course, because plants cannot think, and where the
faculty of thought is wholly wanting, there cannot be more or less
quickness or slowness, more or less of good qualities or of bad.
Yet it must be allowed that man’s intelligence is amazingly superior to
that of animals. But what does that prove? Do not some animals leave man
far behind in the keenness of their sight and the sharpness of their
hearing? Shall we say, therefore, that man is blind or deaf? We have
some strength in our hands and in our bodies although we are not
elephants or camels. In the same way, we should be careful not to infer
that animals lack all reasoning faculties from the fact that their
intelligence is duller and more defective than man’s. “Boatfuls” of true
stories can be cited to show the docility and special aptitudes of the
different children of creation. And a very amusing occupation it is,
says Plutarch, for young people to collect such stories. In the course
of his work, he sets them a good example, for he brings together a real
“boatful” of anecdotes of clever beasts, but at this point he contents
himself with observing that madness in dogs and other animals would be
alone sufficient to show that they had some mind: otherwise, how could
they go out of it?
The stoics who taught the strictest humanity to animals rejected,
nevertheless, the supposition that animals had reason, for how, they
asked, can such a theory be reconciled with the idea of eternal justice?
Would it not make abstinence from their flesh imperative and entail
consequences which would make our life impracticable? If we were to give
up using animals for our own purposes, we should be reduced ourselves
almost to the condition of brutes. “What works would be left for us to
do by land or sea, what industries to cultivate, what embellishments of
our way of living, if we regarded animals as reasonable beings and our
fellow-creatures, and hence adopted the rule (which, clearly, would be
only proper) to do them no harm and to study their convenience.”
Many a sensitive modern soul has pondered over this crux without finding
a satisfactory solution. Plutarch says that Empedocles and Heraclites
admitted the injustice, and laid it to the door of Nature which permits
or ordains a state of war and necessity, in which nothing is
accomplished without the weaker going to the wall. For himself, he would
propose to those “who, instead of disputing, gently follow and learn”
the better way out of the difficulty—which was introduced by the Sages
of Antiquity, then long lost, and found again by Pythagoras. This better
way is to use animals as our helpers but to refrain from taking life.
Plutarch here evades a stumbling-block which he does not remove. The
dialogue, as it has come down to us, breaks off suddenly after one final
objection: how can beings have reason which have no notion of God? Some
scholars imagine that Plutarch hurried the dialogue to a close because
this query completely baffled him; others (and they are the majority)
attribute the abrupt finish to the loss of the concluding part. Would
Plutarch have contented himself with citing the analogy of young
children who, although not without the elements of reason, know very
little of theology, or would not he rather have contended with Celsus,
that animals _do_ possess religious knowledge? If he took the last
course, it may well be that the disappearance of the end of the dialogue
was not accidental. At Ravenna there is a terrible mosaic, alive with
wrath and energy, which shows a Christ we know not (for He looks like a
grand Inquisitor) thrusting into the flames heretical books. As I looked
at it, I thought how many valuable classical works, vaguely suspected on
the score of faith or morals, must have shared the fate of “unorthodox”
polemics in the merry bonfires which this mosaic holds up for imitation!
The argument “that it sounds unnatural to ascribe reason to creatures
ignorant of God,” suggests familiarity with a passage in Epictetus
(Plutarch’s contemporary), where he says that man alone was made to have
the understanding which recognises God—a recognition which he elsewhere
explains by the hypothesis that every man has in him a small portion of
the divine. Having this intuitive sense, man is bound, without ceasing,
to praise his Creator, and, since others are blind and neglect to do it,
Epictetus will do it on behalf of all: “for what else can I do, a lame
old man, than sing hymns to God? If I was a nightingale, I should do the
part of a nightingale; if I were a swan, I would do like a swan; but now
I am a _rational creature_, and I ought to praise God: this is my work;
I do it, nor will I desert this post so long as I am allowed to keep it,
and I exhort you to join in this song.”
The words are among the sweetest and most solemn that ever issued from
human lips; yet those who care to pursue the subject farther may submit
that there was some one before Epictetus, who called upon the beasts,
the fishes and the fowls to join him in blessing the name of the Lord,
and there was some one after him who commanded the birds of the air to
sing the praises of their Maker and Preserver! It is strange that,
despite the hard-and-fast line which the moulders of the Catholic Faith
were at pains to trace between man and beast, if we would find the most
emphatic assertion of their common privilege of praising God, we must
leave the Pagan world and take up the Bible and the “Fioretti” of St.
Francis!
[Illustration:
(_Photo: Sommer._)
BACCHUS RIDING ON A PANTHER.
Naples Museum.
(_Mosaic found at Pompeii._)]
Of the anecdotes with which Plutarch enlivens his pages, he says himself
that he puts on one side fable and mythology, and limits his choice to
the “all true” category, and if he appears to be at times a little
credulous, one may well believe that he is always candid. Just as in his
“Lives” he tried to ennoble his readers by making noble deeds
interesting, so in his writings on animals, he tried to make people
humane by making his dumb clients interesting. He did not start with
thinking the task an easy one, for he was convinced that man is more
cruel than the most savage of wild beasts. But he aims at pouring, if
not a full draught of mercy, at least some drops, into the heart that
never felt a pang, the mind that never gave a thought. Many of his
stories are taken straight from the common street life of the Rome of
his day, as that of the elephant which passed every day along a certain
street where the schoolboys teased it by pricking its trunk with their
writing stylets (men may come and go, but the small boy is a fixed
quantity!). At last, the elephant, losing patience, picked up one of his
tormentors and hoisted him in the air; a cry of horror rose from the
spectators, no one doubted that in another moment the child would be
dashed to the ground. But the elephant set the offender down very gently
and walked away, thinking, no doubt, that a good fright had been a
sufficient punishment. The Syrian elephant, of whom Plutarch tells how
he made his master understand that in his absence he had been cheated of
half his rations, was not cleverer than some of his kind on service in
India, who would not begin to eat till all three cakes which formed
their rations were set before each of them—a fact that was told me by
the officer whose duty it was to preside at their dinner. Plutarch
speaks of counting oxen that knew when the number of turns was finished
which constituted their daily task at a saw-mill: they refused to
perform one more turn than the appointed figure. As an instance of the
discrimination of animals, he tells how Alexander’s horse, Bucephalus,
when unsaddled, would allow the grooms to mount him, but when he had on
all his rich caparisons, no one on earth could get on his back except
his royal master. There is no doubt that animals take notice of dress. I
have been told that when crinolines were worn, all the dogs barked at
any woman not provided with one. Plutarch was among the earliest to
observe that animals discover sooner than man when ice will not bear,
which he thinks that they find out by noticing if there is any sound of
running water. He says truly that to draw such an inference presupposes
not only sharp ears, but a real power of weighing cause and effect.
Plutarch mentions foxes as particularly clever in this respect, but dogs
possess the same gift. The French Ambassador at Rome—who, like all
persons of superior intelligence, is very fond of animals—told me the
following story. One winter day, when he was French Minister at Munich,
he went alone with his gun and his dog to the banks of the Isar. Having
shot a snipe, he ordered the dog to go on to the ice to fetch it, but,
to his surprise, the animal, which had never disobeyed him, refused.
Annoyed at its obstinacy, he went himself on to the ice, which
immediately gave way, and had he not been a good swimmer he might not be
now at the Palazzo Farnese.
The two creatures that have been most praised for their wisdom are the
elephant and the ant, but of the ant’s admirers from Solomon to Lord
Avebury, not one was ever so enthusiastic as Plutarch. Horace, indeed,
had discoursed of her foresight: “She carries in her mouth whatever she
is able, and piles up her heap, by no means ignorant or careless of the
future; then, when Aquarius saddens the inverted year, never does she
creep abroad, wisely making use of the stores which were provided
beforehand.” But such a tribute sounds cold beside Plutarch’s praise of
her as the tiny mirror in which the greatest marvels of Nature are
reflected, a drop of the purest water, containing every Virtue, and,
above all, what Homer calls “the sweetness of loving qualities.” Ants,
he declares, show the utmost solicitude for their comrades, alive and
dead. They exhibit their ingenuity by biting off the ends of grains to
prevent them from sprouting and so spoiling the provender. He speaks,
though not from his own observation, of the beautiful interior
arrangements of ant-hills which had been examined by naturalists who
divided the mount into sections, “A thing I cannot approve of!”
Tender-hearted philosopher, who had a scruple about upsetting an
ant-hill! Of other insects, he most admires the skill of spiders and
bees. It is said that the bees of Crete, when rounding a certain
promontory, carried tiny stones as ballast to avoid being blown away by
the wind. I have seen more than once a tiny stone hanging from the
spider-threads which crossed and re-crossed an avenue—it seemed to me
that these were designed to steady the suspension bridge.
Plutarch insists that animals teach themselves even things outside the
order of their natural habits, a fact which will be confirmed by all who
have observed them closely. Just as no two animals have the same
disposition, so does each one, though in greatly varying degree, display
some little arts or accomplishments peculiar to itself. Plutarch
mentions a trained elephant that was seen practising its steps when it
thought that no one was looking. But he allots the palm of self-culture
to an incomparable magpie that belonged to a barber whose shop faced the
temple called the Agora of the Greeks. The bird could imitate to
perfection any sort of sound, cry or tune; it was renowned in the whole
quarter. Now it happened one morning that the funeral of a wealthy
citizen went past, accompanied by a very fine band of trumpeters which
performed an elaborate piece of music. After that day, to every one’s
surprise, the magpie grew mute! Had it become deaf or dumb or both!
Endless were the surmises, and what was not the general amazement when,
at last, it broke its long silence by bursting forth with a flood of
brilliant notes the exact reproduction of the difficult trills and
cadences executed by the funeral band! Evidently it had been practising
it in its head all that while, and only produced it when it had got it
quite perfect. Several Romans and several Greeks witnessed the facts and
could vouch for the truth of the narrative.
The swallow’s nest and the nightingale’s song make Plutarch pause and
wonder; he believes, with Aristotle, that the old nightingales teach the
young ones, remarking that nightingales reared in captivity never sing
so well as those that have profited by the parental lessons. He gives a
word to the dove of Deucalion which returned a first time to the ark
because the deluge continued, but disappeared when it was set free
again, the waters having subsided. Plutarch confesses, however, that
this is “mythical,” and though he admits that birds deserved the name by
which Euripides calls them of “Messengers of the gods,” he is inclined
to attribute their warnings to the direct intervention of an over-ruling
deity of whom they are the inconscient agents.
It is a pleasure to find that Plutarch had a high appreciation of the
hedgehog—the charming “urchin” which represents to many an English child
an epitome of wild nature, friendly yet untamed, familiar yet
mysterious. He does not say that it milks cows—a calumny which is an
article of faith with the British ploughman—but he relates that when the
grapes are ripe, the mother urchin goes under the vines and shakes the
plants till some of the grapes fall off; then, rolling herself over
them, she attaches a number of grapes to her spines and so marches back
to the hole where she keeps her nurslings. “One day,” says Plutarch,
“when we were all together, we had the chance of seeing this with our
own eyes—it looked as if a bunch of grapes was shuffling along the
ground, so thickly covered was the animal with its booty.”
Dogs that threw themselves on their masters’ pyre, dogs that caused the
arrest of assassins or thieves, dogs that remained with and protected
the bodies of their dead masters, clever dogs, devoted dogs, magnanimous
dogs—these will be all found in Plutarch’s gallery. How high-minded, he
says, it is in the dog when, as Homer advises, you lay down your stick,
even an angry dog ceases to attack you. He praises the affectionate
regard which many have shown in giving decent burial to the dogs they
cherished, and recalls how Xantippus of old, whose dog swam by his
galley to Salamis when the Athenians were forced to abandon their city,
buried the faithful creature on a promontory which “to this day” is
known as the Dog’s Grave. Very desolate was the case of the other
animals that ran up and down distraught when their masters embarked,
like the poor cats and dogs which helped the English soldiers in the
block-houses to while away the weary hours, and which, by superior
orders, were left to their fate, though their comrades in khaki were
anxious enough to carry them away. As a proof of the affection of the
Greeks for their dogs Plutarch might have spoken of the not uncommon
representation of them on the _Stelæ_ in the family group which brings
together all the dearest ties between life and death.
One animal is missing from Plutarch’s portrait gallery—the cat, to which
he only concedes the ungracious allusion “that man had not the excuse of
hunger for eating flesh, like the weasel or cat.” Can we make good the
omission from other sources?
There is a general notion that cats “were almost unknown to Greek and
Roman antiquity”—these are the words of so well-informed a writer as M.
S. Reinach. Yet instances exist of paintings of cats on Greek vases of
the fifth century, and I was interested to see in the Museum at Athens a
well-carved cat on a stele. Aristotle, who, like Plutarch, mentions cats
in connexion with weasels (both, he says, catch birds), reckons the time
they live at six years, less than half the life of an average modern
cat; this may indicate that though known, they were not then
acclimatised in Europe. Æsop has four fables of cats: 1. A cat dressed
as a physician offers his services to an aviary of birds; they are
declined. 2. A cat seeks an excuse for eating a cock; he fails to find
the excuse, but eats the cock all the same. 3. A cat pretends to be dead
so that mice may come near her. 4. A cat falls in love with a handsome
young man and induces Venus to change her into a lovely maiden. But on a
mouse coming into the room, she scampers after it. Venus, being
displeased, changes her back into a cat. This belongs to a large circle
of folk-tales, and probably all these fables came from the East.
Herodotus tells as a “very marvellous thing” that cats are apt to rush
back into a burning house, and that the Egyptians try to save them, even
at the risk of their lives, but rarely succeed: hence great lamentation.
Also, that if a cat die in a house all the dwellers in it shave their
eyebrows; “the cats, when they are dead, they carry for burial to the
city of Bubastis.” The Egyptian name for light (and for cat) is _Mau_,
and the inference is irresistible, that the Egyptians supposed the cat
to be constantly apostrophizing the sacred light of which she was the
symbol. Nothing shows the strength of tradition better than the
existence of an endowment at Cairo for the feeding and housing of
homeless cats.
If the cat in Europe had been a rarity so great as most people think, it
would have been more highly prized. It seems nearer the truth to say
that it was not admired. Its incomplete domestication which attracts us,
did not attract the ancient world. Tame only so far as it suits their
own purposes, cats patronize man, looking down upon him from a higher
plane, which, if only the house-top, they make a golden bar.
“Chat mystérieux,
Chat séraphique, chat étrange ...
Peut-être est-il fée, est-il dieu?”
Greeks and Romans preferred a plain animal to this half-elf, half-god.
The Greek comic writer, Anaxandrides, said to the Egyptians: “You weep
if you see a cat ailing, but I like to kill and skin it.” The fear lest
cats should be profanely treated in Europe led the Egyptians to do all
they could to prevent their exportation; they even sent missions to the
Mediterranean to ransom the cats borne into slavery and carry them back
to Egypt. But these missions could not have reached the cats that had
been taken inland, and as the animal increases rapidly, it may have been
fairly common from early times. There is no doubt, however, that the
number went up with a bound when Egypt became Christian, and every monk
who came to Europe brought shoals of cats, the date corresponding with
that of the first invasion of the rat in the trail of the Huns.
[Illustration:
BRONZE STATUE OF AN EGYPTIAN CAT.
(_Collection of H.E. Monsieur Camille Barrère, French Ambassador at
Rome._)]
Antiquity regarded the cat, before all things, as a little beast of
prey. Nearly every reference to it gives it this character. In the stele
at Athens the cat is supposed to be looking at a bird-cage to which the
man is pointing; the man holds a bird in his left hand, presumably the
pet of the child who stands by him. It seems as if the cat meditated if
it had not performed some fell deed. Seneca observed that young chickens
feel an instinctive fear of the cat but not of the dog. The fine mosaic
at Pompeii shows a tabby kitten in the act of catching a quail.
Only one ancient poet, by a slight magician-like touch, calls up a
different vision: Theorcitus makes the voluble Praxinœ say to her maid:
“Eunœ, pick up your work, and take care, lazy girl, how you leave it
lying about again; the cats find it just the bed they like.” There—at
last—is the cat we know! But after all, it is an Egyptian cat: a cat
sure of her privileges, a cat who relies on her goddess prototype, and
has but a modicum of respect for the chattering little Syracusan woman
in whose house she condescends to reside. Such were not cats of ancient
Greece and Rome, who, from being un-appreciated, fell back to the morals
of the simple ravager.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
V
MAN AND HIS BROTHER
TRADITIONAL beliefs are like the _coco de mer_ which was found floating,
here and there, on the sea, or washed up on the shore, and which gave
birth to the strangest conjectures; it was supposed to tell of
undiscovered continents or to have dropped from heaven itself. Then, one
day, some one saw this peculiar cocoanut quietly growing on a tall
palm-tree in an obscure islet of the Indian Ocean. All we gather of
primitive traditions is the fruit. Yet the fruit did not grow in the
air, it grew on branches and the branches grew on a trunk and the trunk
had a root. To get to the root of even the slightest of our own
prejudices—let alone those of the savage—we should have to travel back
far into times when history was not.
Lucretius placed at the beginning of the ages of mankind a berry-eating
race, innocent of blood. The second age belonged to the hunter who
killed animals, at first, and possibly for a long time, for their skins,
before he used their flesh as food. In the third age animals were
domesticated; first the sheep, because that was gentle and easily tamed
(which one may see by the moufflons at Monte Carlo), then, by degrees,
the others.