Part 5

Finally, we may ask, where are the traces of so tremendous and unparalleled a convulsion as one that could wrap the whole world in water, and hold all its dædal beauty for many months in that drowned condition, till a tempest still more furious and unparalleled drave heaven and earth, the clouds and ocean, once more asunder? We know how the little trilobite in the Devonian seas behaved in its hour of peril millions of years back; we know what food men ate long ages before the Flood, what weapons they used, what houses they built, what animals they tamed; but what became of man and beast and bird and forest in the supposed universal Deluge, no one knows. The signs and natural monuments of the catastrophe, which should have been visible or discoverable on every side, can nowhere be ascertained,--things that the waters should have swept away or torn down they have left undisturbed, shell-mounds and glacier moraines and boulderstones on the mountain-side; while the great museum of the dead which they should have formed, one would think, over all the earth, to constitute one striking and indisputable geological date, as well as a world-wide monument of religion, is nowhere to be found.

What became of flower and herb, of creatures that live between the zones of high and low water, of mollusk and coral and fish that require an appropriate depth and a fitting temperature in their liquid homes, it will be useless to speculate, if, after all that has been urged upon other points, there are some who still think that the description in Genesis is the description of a Flood that prevailed over all the world, and intend still to believe in such a Flood, and to teach it as a part of religious doctrine, notwithstanding any argument or scientific proof to the contrary. For them we can do no more than commend to their daily reflection a few lines from the lives of two famous men:--‘In spite,’ says Dr. Wilson, ‘alike of the science and the devout religious spirit of Columbus, the Salamanca divines pronounced the idea of the earth’s spherical form heterodox, and a belief in antipodes incompatible with the historical traditions of our faith: since to assert that there were inhabited lands on the opposite side of the globe would be to maintain that there were nations not descended from Adam, it being impossible for them to have passed the intervening ocean. This would therefore be to discredit the Bible, which expressly declares that all men are descended from one common parent[29].’ And thus another author describes a well-known incident in the life of Galileo:--‘Clad in a penitent’s sackcloth, the mighty, self-relying philosopher and genius fell upon his knees, and, with his hands laid on the Holy Evangelists, declared that he abjured, detested, and would never again teach, the doctrine of the sun’s stability and the earth’s motion. Having confirmed his oath in writing, and promised to perform the enjoined penance, he rose from his knees a pardoned man; and turning about to one of his friends, stamped on the ground, and pronounced in an emphatic whisper, “Eppure si muove[30],”--but still it _does_ move.’

As the antipodes exist, as the earth goes round the sun, and as the Bible continues to be true, in spite of the theologians and inquisitors at Salamanca and at Rome, so will it continue to be true and full of truth, when at length it shall be acknowledged, as it will be, that there is nothing universal about the Noachian Deluge except the disbelief in its universality.

INSTINCT AND REASON.

An initial probability has been established by Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace that the reason or mind of man, as well as his body, has attained its present complete excellence through gradual development. No one denies that, between a man’s birth and his prime of life, time is required for the intellectual powers to unfold; but it demands an effort which few have as yet made to see in this progression of the individual mind a compendious history of the indefinitely slow process by which the human mind itself has been formed, passing upward, step by step, from simple vitality, dawning consciousness, the various grades of so-called instinct, to the full capacities of the most enlightened reason.

The theory of development or evolution has excited immense opposition and distrust, because of its obvious application to the human body. Its application to the human mind, which, though less obvious at the first glance, almost inevitably follows, seems to have inspired Mr. Wallace himself with alarm. He winds up the admirable series of essays in which he supports the theory under discussion with one that earnestly propounds ‘the _limits_ of natural selection as applied to man.’ His arguments on this subject are drawn from physical science, though his mind is evidently, and even confessedly, swayed throughout by other than physical considerations. He represents, in fact, and endeavours to reconcile to his own scientific views, the weight of popular prejudice which has hitherto condemned those views with some vehemence of opposition.

The sentiment in question amounts to this, that certain powers or faculties of the human mind are so wonderful and so unique, that they could not have originated in the ordinary processes of nature without some special intervention. Antecedents conforming to the usual observed order in other living productions are not sufficiently magnificent for the soul of man. Something sudden, something mysterious, is demanded in the agency of its creation. It must be like Pallas Athene, springing from the brain of Zeus, a goddess fully armed from her birth in the panoply of wisdom and virtue. Yet the whole feeling thus to be described of what is fit and worthy must be accredited, as we desire to show, simply to prejudice. Nothing can really depend for its intrinsic grandeur upon our knowledge or ignorance of its origin. A single cause instantaneously producing its effect does not make the result in any way more admirable or magnificent than the like result coming at the close of an indefinitely extended chain of causation. Feelings of surprise and wonder are excited when we find that ten thousand copies of the _Times_ newspaper can be printed within a single hour; but the same feelings move us in the granite-yards of Scotland, when we learn that many months are required for cutting through a single block. At the first proposal of railways, a pace of twenty or five-and-twenty miles an hour was thought too wonderful for belief; while now, from familiarity with far higher rates of speed, we think it miserably slow. A child is surprised to learn that the light of the sun requires time to reach the eye; but a new and even greater surprise is aroused by the information that the time so required is only a few minutes for ninety millions of miles. The swiftness of thought is proverbial. A single act of thought is commonly supposed to be absolutely instantaneous; and yet presence of mind, which depends on rapidity of thought, is fully recognized as an uncommon quality, while it has now been ascertained by experiment that every thought requires a definite, and in many cases measurable, length of time for its production and exercise. Following the analogy of these illustrations, we may expect that the popular opinion or prejudice as to the instantaneous creation of the human mind will vanish and subside when men become familiar with the idea of its slow development. It will at least be seen that there is no special dignity and grandeur in the supposed suddenness of its introduction into the universe. The general scheme of nature, so far as we can penetrate its working, seems to show that there is some proportion observed between the time spent in producing and the perfection of the thing produced. Religion itself is an unquestionable witness to this method of procedure. There is no great religion of which the adherents claim to have had it revealed to them from the first in its full perfection. What is true of religion, is true of all arts and sciences. Their progress has been gradual. The greatness of nations, even when it seems to blaze forth in history most suddenly, ever finds its true origin in numerous steps of slow preparation. A hardy, frugal tribe of warriors is nursed in some obscure mountain cradle. The struggle for existence fosters their preservative virtues. A line of rulers is evoked, forced by the circumstances of their tenure to acquire, as their leading qualities, cunning, prudence, self-control, fertility of resource, promptitude of action, till at length the hour and the man coincide, and a handful of barbarians give their name to a great empire. The same rule prevails with languages, and the literatures that adorn them. So fully is this established in regard to literature, that men who examine the subject deeply are almost led to disbelieve in originality of genius altogether, from the invariable indebtedness of the noblest authors to the thoughts and imaginings of earlier minds. There is, therefore, no antecedent improbability that can fairly be pleaded against the gradual development of the human mind. On the contrary, every possible analogy is in its favour. A supposition so favoured becomes at least a lawful and reasonable subject of enquiry. If it be true that the theory of evolution applies to the mind of man, we should expect to find in that mind itself traces of the earlier steps, or grades of development, through which it has passed, and also in the world around creatures lower than humanity in some sort representing those earlier stages of slowly unfolding reason. In other words, we should expect to find in human nature itself those very inequalities, that very conflict of the higher and the lower elements on which moralists so urgently insist, and we should expect to find affinities and resemblances, more or less close, pervading the whole animal creation, and exhibiting human reason and brute intelligence as, upon a broad view, one in kind, however different in degree.

The first requisite for intelligence is the possession of memory. Without this faculty, intelligence is impossible; but, on the other hand, memory that does not subserve some sort of intelligence, is a useless faculty; and in this the old theory of creation agrees with the new, that nothing obtains a footing in the world without a use. It may be urged, that the human memory is incomparably superior to that of the lower animals; but there are surprising differences in the powers of memory among human beings, and the effects of cultivation, with the facilities for that cultivation supplied by language, should be taken into account. It is important to observe also, that with brutes, as with men, some individuals are quicker than others; that the memory of brutes, like our own, can be improved by training; and that its powers are not equally distributed to all classes. The dog, the horse, the parrot, the elephant, are probably not further below mankind in the faculty of memory, than they are superior in it to the oyster and the jelly-fish.

To make the most of humanity, without introducing the question of man’s material form and structure, one would naturally insist upon his docility or power of being taught; upon his versatility or power of adapting various means to the same or various ends; upon his moral nature, embracing the different passions and affections, and the knowledge of good and evil; and, lastly, no doubt, one would be inclined and one would have a right to insist on the grandeur of his aspirations. A crafty rhetorician would perhaps dwell on the collective value of these endowments, and then exhibit them, separately, rising to their height and fulness in men like Archimedes, and Chrysostom, and Dante. He would dare us to trace back the mental ancestry of these true heroes to apes and fishes. Yet the reason, piety, and imagination of such men, are themselves developed between childhood and maturity; their very pre-eminence shows that improvement in such qualities is possible from one generation to another, and that therefore meanness of origin needs only to be coupled with remoteness in time to reconcile the supremacy of man’s intelligence with its ultimate derivation from the lowest powers of consciousness.

Mr. Wallace has pointed out very clearly and conclusively the fallacious character of the evidence on which the old theory of instinct was founded. Starting with the notion that wild animals had none of that docility and versatility which man possesses through his reasoning powers, yet seeing them produce effects like those which man produces by the help of teachers or his own choice of means, we inferred the existence of as many separate faculties as there are kinds of animals. Each of these faculties was thought to resemble reason about as much as a jack-in-the-box resembles a man. The faculty came into exercise in one invariable way without any choice on its owner’s part, just as the jack starts up, whether he will or no, when his lid is taken off. We wondered at the admirable contrivance and design by which these very limited faculties were adapted in each case to the wants and preservation of the species to which they belonged. At times, it is true, with some inconsistency, we permitted ourselves to upbraid the goose with its stupidity; to speak of the sheep as silly, and the ostrich as wanting intelligence; we even expunged the dodo, with its self-preserving instinct, from the face of the earth; but in spite of these slips and mischances, we still kept gaping and wondering at our own explanation of things, and calling it an excessively wise and ingenious contrivance that every species of animal should have a separate faculty to itself, when one and the same faculty for them all would not only do just as well, but a great deal better. We were far from perceiving how strong a support to Materialism our theory involved, since if the lower animals without reason produce effects like those of reason, then effects like those of reason in a number of cases beyond calculation must be the result of bodily structure. It might not follow that the effects of reason itself were the results of bodily structure, but it would become startlingly probable.

The history of domesticated animals is a continuous proof that some at least of the lower creatures are capable of learning, and how learning can be achieved without intelligence has never yet been explained, and is never likely to be. But Mr. Wallace points out that we have made a gratuitous assumption, unsupported by evidence, in supposing birds, for example, to build their nests by instinct rather than by following the example and instruction of their parents. Many things, he remarks, which we ourselves are said to do instinctively, such as putting out our hands to save ourselves from falling, are acquired habits, not instinctive actions, and in fact not possessed by infants. Mr. Darwin[31] tells us of a species of ant which behaves differently towards its slaves in England and in Switzerland respectively. In his memorable account of the busy bee, he shows that some species of bees are less clever at their work than others, and that the accuracy even of the most advanced cell-makers has been overrated. This is the more worthy to be noted, because the same persons who are extremely zealous to set forth reason as superior in kind to what they call instinct, are yet often eager to extol the effects of the lower faculty above those of the higher. An interesting account has recently been given of baboons in the neighbourhood of the Cape of Good Hope combining to pursue, and after a chase of two days and a night, successfully destroying a leopard which had invaded their haunts. Two tribes of baboons in the same locality, the occupants of separate rocky strongholds, are described as upon one occasion meeting in battle, the result being, that nearly a hundred were afterwards found dead or dying on the scene of action[32]. The shape of the creature, and the combination for warlike purposes, which carries with it such a tinge of humanity, can scarcely fail to affect the imagination. Yet these isolated instances must be far less telling than the comparison which Mr. Wallace has so ingeniously instituted between man as a builder and birds in the same capacity. The shelter of the savage is in many cases a less finished contrivance than the nest which the bird prepares for its young. The featherless biped, like the feathered one, takes the materials readiest to its digits. Generations upon generations follow one another without improvement or signs of inventive skill. Even in the days of enlightenment, and in nations which pride themselves most upon it, the human nest is repeatedly constructed without the smallest attention to comfort, health, or beauty. Men, whose fathers before them have built long rows of red-brick boxes to live in, build, by instinct if you will, for it can scarcely be by reason, more lengthening chains of red-brick boxes. There is no reason, indeed, for supposing that the bird consults any principle of beauty in the construction of its nest, but a principle of expedience some birds certainly do consult; the orchard oriole, for example, building its nest shallow or deep, according as it is placed among firm and stiff branches, or suspended from the slender wind-swayed twigs of the weeping-willow[33]. The fact that birds build in human habitations, and make use of human manufactures, is a proof that they are capable of choice both as to locality and materials. The often-observed circumstance, that animals in a newly-discovered country are without fear of man,--a fear which they speedily acquire from experience of his mischievous propensities,--is a clear proof that they are capable of learning caution. It cannot be pretended that a caution which thus only comes in conjunction with experience is instinctive, or anything else than the result of observation, and therefore a sign of intelligent judgment. The lower animals, then, can learn prudence; can profit by experience. In the training of domesticated animals, the same motives of pleasure and pain are applied, and applied effectually, as are used in the education of human beings by parents and schoolmasters and lawgivers. This could not be if the groundwork of the moral nature were not the same in man and the lower animals. Addison was inclined to hold the old opinion, that ‘God himself is the soul of brutes,’ _Deus est anima brutorum._ ‘One would wonder,’ he says, ‘to hear sceptical men disputing for the reason of animals, and telling us it is only our pride and prejudices that will not allow them the use of that faculty[34].’ And yet his charming essays upon the natural history of animals, in which he took so keen a personal pleasure, with very little alteration, might be read as arguments in defence of the opinion he thus condemns. He remarks that birds, which ordinarily drive away their young as soon as they are able to get their own livelihood, nevertheless continue to feed them if they are tied to the nest, or confined within a cage, or by any other means appear to be out of a condition of supplying their own necessities. He observes, that the brood-hen will leave her eggs longer in summer than in winter, because in summer they will cool less speedily. But apart from the ingenuity necessary for the propagation of the species, he considers the same bird to be a very idiot, without the least glimmering of thought or common sense, mistaking a piece of chalk for an egg, and sitting upon it as though it were one, insensible of an increase or diminution in the number of those she lays, not distinguishing between her own and those of another species; and when the birth appears of never so different a bird, cherishing it for her own.