The Universal Kinship

‘After I took this monkey back to the Zoological Gardens,’ says Romanes, ‘and up to the time of his death, he remembered me as well as the day he was returned. I visited the mon...

To most persons—to all except to a few—everything is simply a matter of habit and education. And a majority of persons, too, can become educated to one thing about as easily and...

_Emotion_ is the stirring of the sensibilities by way of the intellect or the imagination. The following emotions are found in non-human beings: fear, surprise, affection, pugna...

9. If human mind has been evolved, it is logical to expect to find in other animals, especially in those more closely resembling ourselves in structure, mind elements similar to...

Broad as he is who can look upon all men as his brethren and countrymen—broad as he is compared with those groundlings called ‘patriots,’ who can see nothing clearly beyond the...

_The Universal Kinship_ means the kinship of all the inhabitants of the planet Earth. Whether they came into existence among the waters or among desert sands, in a hole in the e...

Among the most interesting derivatives of the herbivorous marsupials, because the most aberrant, are the whales. They are true mammals—have warm blood, breathe the air with lung...

The line of demarkation between instinct and reason is a mezzotint, reason being often instinctive, and instinct being as frequently flavoured with judgment, ‘Instinct is usuall...

No one can fully realise the vast advance that has been made by the human mind until he has looked upon a savage—has seen the savage in his native haunts attacking the problems...

The preponderance of egoism in the natures of living beings is the most mournful and immense fact in the phenomena of conscious life. It has made the world the kind of world it...

8. There is another reason for a belief in evolution furnished by geology, but of a somewhat different kind from that just stated. It consists in the fact that there are found i...

It has been said that man is the only animal that uses tools. But this is not true either, for animals as low in the scale of development as insects have been known to use tools...

The world now knows—at least, the scientific part of it knows—that these things are not true, that they are but the solemn fancies of honest but simple-minded ancients who did t...

The first forms of life were one-celled—simple, jelly-like dots of almost homogeneous plasm—the _protozoa_. These primitive organisms were the common grandparents of all beings....

That mind has evolved, and that there is a psychical kinship, an actual consanguinity of feelings and ideas, among all the forms of animal life is proved incontestably by the fo...

Ants tend their fields, gather their harvests, domesticate other insects, and keep slaves. They help each other bear heavy burdens, extricate each other from misfortune, speak t...

Scarce less revolting than the gladiatorial arena, in its violation of every principle of humanity, was the institution of human slavery. During the later republic and the earli...

1. The deliberate causing of misery and death to criminals, whether they be human or non-human beings, individuals or species, is not, as is sometimes supposed, a violation or r...

4. That existing forms of life have been evolved from other forms, and that these ancestral forms have been different from those derived from them, is shown by the occasional ap...

The nearest relatives by blood man has in this world are the exceedingly man-like apes—the tailless anthropoids—the gorillas and chimpanzees of Africa, and the orangs and gibbon...

Birds have a keen observation and a good deal of that invaluable faculty known as common-sense. It is wonderful how quickly they learn to avoid telegraph-wires when these invisi...

In the Mahabharata, the great epic of the Sanskrit, written by Indian moralists in various ages, and representing the accumulated wisdom of one of the most marvellous of all peo...