COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY.
On one occasion, two monkeys were brought into the presence of the
orang described by Grant, about which we spoke in the last chapter.
They were led by a chain up to the animal, and were threatened with a
stick. “During the whole interview,” says our informant, “the grave
commanding attitude and bearing of the orang, compared to the levity
and apparent sense of inferiority of the monkeys, was very striking,
and it was impossible not to feel that he was a creature of a much more
elevated order and capacity.”[56]
“The animal from Sumatra is neither a man nor an ape,” said the crowd
before the orang at the Museum. The communications which were then
made to the Institute by Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire may be, one
of these days, a new triumph for him, the forerunner of a science
which is not yet in existence,--the study of intellect in animals,
based upon observation and experience; as for instance, in the passage
where he proposes to submit the orang to a methodical education, in
order to study the modifications which would be caused by such an
alteration of method.[57] He who has discovered organic unity, will
have placed us in the way of a discovery not less important, that of
psychological unity.[58] A new science, which would only date from
the time of the reaction against Cartesian ideas,--a science still
without a name, merely touched upon even by great minds which have the
inestimable privilege of understanding everything; it has never been
_studied_,--never thoroughly investigated,--never submitted to all our
means of information.[59] We should call it _Comparative Psychology_.
We should, then, re-enter into one great _Unity_. The intellect of
vertebrate animals would be identical, as their organism is identical;
thus gradually descending, passing through the orang, from man himself
to all the mammalia. It may be said that these propositions are not yet
proved,--at least it will be allowed, seeing what has passed during a
very few years, that the last word has not yet been said concerning the
intellect of animals.
Has this question, then, made so much progress, either to the profit of
animals or the detriment of mankind, that we should wish to stop it,
when it has started already on so straight a path? Saint Chrysostom
reproached the Gentile philosopher, it is said, with having always been
inclined to assimilate that which they called the soul of animals with
that of man himself.[60] The opinion of these Gentiles, nevertheless,
is worth the trouble of being noticed. They were as well able to
observe animals as ourselves. Since then, the means of study, as
applied to intellect, have made little or no progress; observation and
reflection are still the same; we have found no new process, no new
method, by which we can more profoundly examine into this subject; we
have, then, no reason to think that the solutions given by ourselves
upon this point are at all preferable to those of the ancients. It
may be rather the contrary. For their opinion has this much in its
favour, that it was born free, in minds which did not restrain, even
unwittingly, any new influence or theory which might be brought
forward.[61] The idea of the intellectual gradation from man to animals
must have been necessarily offensive to Christianity, which promised a
future existence; it was not so for these Gentiles, who were much more
occupied with matters of the world.[62]
The principles which we are endeavouring to revive are not, however,
completely those of Aristotle. In his treatise on the soul he admits
this gradation, but as presenting in each degree a new manifestation
beyond the manifestations existing in the inferior degrees. The
principle of the soul is unity; but as we reascend the series, from
plants to man, it invests itself with a greatly increased number of
faculties. Porphyrius, resuming the ideas of the Stagyrite, seems to
go even further, and to approach nearer the truth; it is not faculties
joined one to another that he recognises in man and animals, but the
same in all, only more or less developed.[63]
At the present day, if we have not returned to the ideas of Pythagoras
and the Stoics, at least we are very far from Pereira and Descartes,
with their _animal machines, hydraulic-pneumatic machines_, as one of
the partisans of the Bréton philosopher (J. H. Crocius) calls them.[64]
We are really astonished at the infatuation for the opinions of
Descartes which took possession of Germany during the latter
half of the seventeenth century. They were pushed to the extreme
point,--soul, reason, and intellect were denied to all animals. A
person named Stahl,[65] who had at least the merit of being consistent
to the last, brings forward a principle, that animals do not feel,
_bruta non sentire_. This announcement is the conclusion of a very
learned syllogism, and which one Gaspard Laugenhert had added to the
_Compendium Physicæ_ of Arnold Geulinx.
It is with much trouble that some strong minds have dared to raise
their voices in this Cartesian concert, having taken good care to
strengthen themselves by plenty of quotations gathered from the Old and
New Testaments.[66] These were then proofs positive, and at times it
was prudent to use them. The side of the animals has been successively
strengthened by Buffon, and indeed by everybody. At the present day,
M. Flourens refuses them _thought_ alone, “this supreme faculty which
the mind of man possesses, so that it may rely upon itself, and study
its own mind.[67] There is here,” says the physiologist of whom we are
speaking, “a strong line of demarcation; this thought which can reason
about itself,--this intellect which beholds and studies itself,--this
knowledge which is acquainted with itself,--evidently forms an order
of determined phenomena of a clearly defined nature, and to which no
animal would know how to attain. _There_ is a purely intellectual
world, if we may say so, and this world belongs only to man. In one
word, animals feel, understand, think; but man is the only one among
all created beings to whom the power has been given of _feeling_ that
he feels, of _knowing_ that he understands, and of _thinking_ that he
has the _power_ of thinking.”[68]
Such is the only difference. The question is now reduced to a more
limited field than it has ever been before, and infinitely less
vast. The thing which would be wanting in animals is a kind of
internal knowledge; not the knowledge of oneself (they know this
since they _feel_) but the _scientific knowledge of oneself_, which
can bring reflecting and reasoning study to bear on all the interior
phenomena which may occur to each. We desire fully that this may be
a distinction, but solely a secondary one, and able at most to make
certain races of men differ one from the other. In fact, if we form an
absolute and fundamental character of humanity out of this faculty,
this power of investigation into an interior world, we ought to find
it in a powerful manner among all men. It will resist every other
influence, it will be permanent, since, this being destroyed, man would
be no longer a man, and would be lowered by this fact to the rank
whence he is said to have come.
And do we consider that it may possibly be so? Does this reflected
knowledge of oneself exist among inferior races, if it does not exist
among animals? Certainly we shall never maintain that these last enjoy
such a faculty, the source of all our legislation, and that which has
made us what we are. But we ask if it is well proved whether all human
races possess it. If we do not allow innate ideas to the orang, as F.
Cuvier[69] would do, be it so, but let it be remembered that certain
philosophers have refused them to man himself. We ourselves agree that
an animal has no abstract notion of right or duty, or any idea of a
divinity,[70] but it must also be remembered that certain people have
not even a word for the purpose of expressing these things, and it is
M. de Quatrefages himself who avows it.[71]
We refer these persons to the following account of animal economy,
and we think that they will not deny their application to various
African and Oceanic tribes. “Ideas, abstract ideas, arise from their
own domain; the past, that which preceded their birth; the future, that
which will follow their death, does not occupy their attention; the
present is their only business in life. They do not demand ‘Whence do I
come? What am I? Where am I going?’ And they have no idea whatsoever of
a Divinity.”[72] Bayle, Maupertuis,[73] and M. Flourens have, one after
another, declared how difficult it is to fix a limit, to say where the
intellect of animals ceases, and where that of man commences. That
limit escapes even ourselves; whilst separating two terms specifically
distinct we only see one continued line from the other vertebrate
animals to mankind, without any clearly defined demarcation,--the
organism only of one mammifer as separated by an unbroken limit from
the organism of another. It is a chain of which the links, if we wish,
may go on increasing from one extremity to the other, following a
given progression, but without ceasing to be _like_, and consequently
comparable amongst themselves. A certain number of links may be
wanting, but the mind re-establishes them, and the continuity, although
an abstraction, is not the less real. It is even, if we may say so, the
track of a hyperbolic curve, interrupted here and there, of which only
the arcs remain, quite different, and all, however, reducible by the
mind to one and the same system.
Unity of composition is the condition of all harmony, the necessary
rule of nature. As to ourselves, we only see everywhere the same
faculties, extended and developed among the superior vertebrate
animals; having even acquired among mankind the singular property
of aggrandising itself almost _ad infinitum_, confined among other
vertebrata, enclosed in a small circle, where they can even escape our
own means of knowledge.
But there is everywhere the same nature, everywhere things are alike.
Life is unity; we do not share it one with another; both the life
of the body and the life of intellect, both matter and the mind, and
the organism and the faculties,[74] belong to each one separately.
Terms correlative one to the other, never independent. There is an
immense space between the intellect of animals and that of a civilised
European; we willingly recognise this, but encumbered by mean terms
and numerous transitions; that these latter exist, or that they have
finished their time upon our planet, we also allow. The question of
language, so confused, and so full of obscurity, still remains.
“Whatever resemblance there may be between the Hottentot and the
monkey,” says Buffon, “the distance which separates them is immense,
since internally it is filled by thought and outwardly by speech.”[75]
We know how to consider the first of these appreciations. As to the
second, let us see if we shall not there perceive a sort of gradation
which would insensibly lead us from our own complicated languages
to others of a much greater simplicity, so much so that they can
scarcely be called by that name. Speech and language are two words
often confounded, but in science we must give to each of them its own
value. _Speech_ is a language articulated by the respiratory channels.
_Language_ may be defined as “everything spoken by well known and
understood means between two intellects.” It may be seen that we give
the fullest acceptation possible to this word. It is a _language_ that
the Abbé de l’Epée invented for the deaf and dumb. The writing of this
language is another. A phonetic telegram is, as regards a stranger,
merely a succession of sounds, like the song of a nightingale; a naval
telegram is only an assemblage and a combination of colours like an
arabesque, united the moment when the necessary arrangement forms these
sounds or these colours into language.[76]
Speech alone being the habitual and natural language of mankind,
endowed otherwise with special organic specifications in order to
produce it, we have been generally led to confound these two distinct
things in speaking of mankind, viz., _speech_ and _language_. This
being allowed, the first question which we have to examine is this,
“Has man always possessed the faculty of speech?”. A difficult
question, but one which we have no right to proclaim as impossible to
be solved, which is, perhaps, not the case, and of which the difficulty
belongs principally to the very imperfect knowledge which we possess
concerning the distant epoch which saw mankind in his cradle.[77] Let
us first of all remember that man has, in common with animals, voice,
cries, natural inflections (M. Flourens), that which we otherwise call
_natural language_. “Like a simple animal,” says Herder,[78] “man
possesses the faculty of speech. All the most violent and painful
sensations of his body, as well as the strong passions of his mind,
are manifested immediately by cries or inflections of the voice, by
natural and inarticulate sounds. The animal which suffers--as well as
the hero Philoctetes--when it feels sorrow will moan and sigh, even
when abandoned in a desert island, far from the sight of any friendly
creature, without any hope of succour.” This language is intelligible
between all animals, between animals and ourselves, and between
ourselves and animals. We may affirm that man possesses it always, from
the first hour of his birth. As to articulated language, as _artificial
language_ has been called in opposition to the preceding, the question
is much more confused and much less clearly defined.
We think with Steinthal, with Jacob Grimm,[79] and with M. Renan,[80]
that language is not innate in man, that is to say, it is not, as the
Buddhist philosophy has already declared, a _necessary_ consequence
of active intelligence.[81] Further, it has not been revealed--this
theory does not even deserve the honour of having been opposed by Jacob
Grimm.[82] But we may admit that language is, if not a necessity, a
least a direct consequence of an intellect such as existed amongst
mankind at the time, whether long or short we know not, which preceded
the appearance of language. “The moment,” says M. Renan, stating
the theories of Steinthal,[83] “that language arises from the human
soul and appears in the light of day and constitutes an epoch in the
development of the life of the mind, is the moment when intuition is
changed into idea. Things appear first to the mind in the complexity
of the real, abstraction is unknown to the primitive man.” Here, then,
are two well-characterised modes, two ways of being, entirely different
from the intellect of man. The one, where this intellect only possesses
intuition, the other where analysis sees the light, where the mind is
abstracted, and where, by a mechanism more or less complicated, but at
the same time by a real work,[84] it ends by calling every abstraction
of mind by a name; then he speaks. But before the time when this
revolution is accomplished, the state of man is completely comparable
to that in which animals are placed. They have caught at certain
relations by means of their intelligence, without usually feeling any
necessity for explaining them, a relation of a much more elevated order
of beings, for it has been truly remarked,[85] and it must not be
forgotten, that the capital act of language is to “wish to speak.”
We have seen that certain abstract ideas, by reason of their nature,
were so entirely foreign to certain races of men, that their intellects
had never _wished_ for a word in order to express them. Well, if other
ideas, expressing much more simple relations, have escaped animals,
there is only, in fact, a gradation corresponding to what we have just
said concerning intellectual phenomena among the human race. As for
the specific difference which some have tried to establish under this
head between man and animals, if it were correct it must be shown that
language is completely unattainable by any mammalia, even within the
most restricted limits.
And is it so? Will it be mooted that certain animals have not even
a rudiment of language, whether articulated or not it does not much
signify, in their state of nature? Will it be mooted that they never
make any sort of sign in order to communicate anything to one another,
to call them, or give an alarm, or express some peculiar sensation?[86]
Experience would entirely deny any such assertion. And this not only
with reference to the superior animals, for this faculty appears to be
extended even to the invertebrata. The well-known experiments of P.
Huber seem to have proved in the most decisive manner that ants,[87]
like bees, are able to transmit certain signs or indications from one
to the other; even if the mere act of living in a republic, of joining
together in one common work, did not offer the strongest presumption
of a language peculiar to these creatures. If anyone dares to deny to
animals the spontaneous exercise of a restricted language, limited in
whatever way that may be desired, at least it cannot be denied that
many of the vertebrate animals are not capable of receiving from it
an equal education, of understanding the signification of certain
sounds, of certain signs, and of producing in their turn such as may be
understood by us, of communicating to us any of their thoughts, or any
of their appreciations.
We are not speaking here of animals who can reproduce certain sounds
belonging to the vocal organs of man; that is a fact of an entirely
material character, and which has no reference to the question of
language. It is evident that the animal which articulates any word
whatsoever does not understand it a whit more than the man who imitates
the cry of an animal, and, in a general way, neither comprehends its
sense nor its signification.
Maupertuis alleges[88] that if animals were capable of understanding
we could teach them to make themselves understood by other signs in
default of a voice. A strange aberration of intellect for such a
studious and learned man. This is the man who makes an impossibility
out of an everyday occurrence; for, first of all, most animals _have_
some sort of voice, and if they had it not, there are few persons who
are ignorant of the way in which certain mute dogs make themselves
understood when they particularly desire it. What would really be
absurd would be the hope of imparting ideas to animals, matters
relating, indeed, to a higher order, since we see that even all _men_
are not capable of grasping them. Man has been able to train animals,
and to train implies precisely the idea of communicating a thought
from man to an animal, and from the animal to man. “Jump,” says the
shepherd to his dog, and the dog knows that this vocal articulation
orders him to make a given muscular effort. The man has _spoken_ to the
dog. During the night some one opens the gate of the farm-yard, and the
watch-dog barks; he thus _tells_ his master that something unusual is
happening.[89]
That which proves besides that the barking of the dog is merely a
conventional sign, an _artificial language_, so to say, is the fact,
that in certain countries the dogs do not bark; jackals and wolves
learn how to bark when in company with the dogs who can talk in this
manner, and that the same dogs lose the power, or rather the habit of
barking, if they return to a savage state.[90]
We have already spoken of those inferior races which seem to
have borrowed from their better endowed neighbours a rudiment of
civilisation, which, for a long time they did not know how to develope
in any way. Does it not seem that there is here some comparison with
what has just been stated? that under a civilising influence, in
contact with a superior being, the dog has learnt a language; but that
not understanding its general application (a more complex, and more
highly elevated idea), he has not known how to transmit the use of
it to his own race, or has himself forgotten it, from not having any
occasion to exercise this power?[91]
The language of animals is still a question full of obscurity, but
which may eventually, we believe, become fruitful in new facts.[92]
If Apollonius of Tyana and the ancient philosophers did not understand
the language of animals so well as has sometimes been believed, at
least they did not do wrong in directing their inquiries towards this
matter. We have no doubt but that in carefully studying animals, we
shall arrive at a scientific explanation of this well-known truth,
recognised by all those who live with them; which is that they can
understand us, that they make themselves understood by us, and that
they understood one another within certain limits.[93]
For a long time it was believed that intellect and thought belong
to man alone, and that he had only organic instinct in common with
animals.[94] This opinion tends each day towards a change; we hope
that we have proved so much. Something of the same sort will take
place, we think, for the best studied language. There, as with
intellect, as with organism, we shall doubtless be able to prove a
unity which may be regarded by analogy as necessary, offering alone
degrees of gradation in reference to organism and intellect. Every
living being (we are only speaking here of vertebrate animals)
will appear to be composed of the same constituent parts, but
unequally developed, and of which some have only been taken by us
for dissimilarities or new parts, on account of our own want of
sufficiently deep study. As they formerly tried to discover new
bones in the heads of fishes, until the time when their relations,
connexions, and development were better studied; so unity of
composition has been there recognised and proved where it was least
suspected.
We cannot do better, in order to sum up our ideas on this subject,
than quote a passage from the works of a learned man, who in our days
has gone most deeply into the study of organic homology, Professor
Richard Owen; it is the last step which has been taken, and indeed the
most decisive one, in the momentous question concerning man’s place in
nature.
“Not being able to appreciate or conceive of the distinction between
the _psychical_ phenomena of a chimpanzee and of a Bosjesman, or of an
Aztec with arrested brain-growth, as being of a nature so essential
as to preclude a comparison between them, or _as being other than
a difference of degree_, I cannot shut my eyes to the significance
of that all-pervading similitude of structure--every tooth, every
bone, strictly homologous--which makes the determination of the
difference between _Homo_ and _Pithecus_ the anatomist’s difficulty.
And therefore, with every respect for the author of the _Records of
Creation_,[95] I follow Linnæus[96] and Cuvier in regarding mankind as
a legitimate subject of zoological comparison and classification.[97]”
Is not the admission of gradation the means of binding more firmly
together the great chain of human beings, a thing quite impossible,
which could not exist, or rather, which would only be a caprice,--an
artificial method or system,--if the classified beings were only thus
classified by creatures of their own description? Does it not confirm,
even more strongly, the continuous series in which Aristotle, Leibnitz,
Bonnet, Linnæus, and de Blainville have believed? We shall proclaim,
then, the law, shaped by M. Flourens, who, however, does not receive
it, as we do, without reservation:--
LAW.--_From animals to man everything is but a chain of uninterrupted
gradation_; therefore, there is no human kingdom. Then comes this other
conclusion,--one and the same method is applicable both to mankind and
animals.