NORTH AMERICAN

No. CCXLI.

OCTOBER, 1873.

REVIEW.

ART. I.-THE PROGRESS FROM BRUTE TO MAN.

(Two Chapters from a forthcoming work on the Doctrine of Evolution.) *

I.

THE chief difficulty which most persons find in accepting the Doctrine of Evolution, as applied to the origin of the human race, is the difficulty of realizing in imagination the kinship between the higher and the lower forms of intelligence and emotion. And this difficulty is enhanced by a tendency of which our daily associations make it hard to rid ourselves. This is a tendency to exaggerate the contrasts which really exist, by leaving out of mind the intermediate phenomena and considering only the extremes. Many critics, both among those who are hostile to the Development Theory and among those who regard it with favor, habitually argue as if the intelligence and morality of the human race might be fairly represented by the intelligence and morality of a minority of highly organized

* In thus publishing as an independent article what is really a fragmentary portion of an integral work, I have unavoidably been compelled to make occasional reference to arguments contained in other chapters of the work, the full force of which, therefore, will not be here apparent. This slight inconvenience, however, will probably make little difference to the reader. For he who already understands and accepts the Development Theory will have no difficulty in following my argument; while to him who neither understands nor accepts the Development Theory my argument will have no significance or value whatever. 17

VOL. CXVII. NO. 241.

and highly educated people in the most civilized communities. When speaking of mankind they are speaking of that which is represented to their imagination by the small number of upright, cultivated, and well-bred people with whom they are directly acquainted, and also to some extent by a few of those quite exceptional men and women who have left names recorded in history. Though other elements are admitted into the conception, these are, nevertheless, the ones which chiefly give to it its character. Employing then this conception of mankind, abstracted from these inadequate instances, our critics ask us how it is possible to imagine that a race possessed of such a godlike intellect, such a keen æsthetic sense, and such a lofty soul should ever have descended from a race of mere brutes. And again they ask us how can a race endowed with such a capacity for progress be genetically akin to those lower races of which even the highest show no advance from one generation to another. Confronted thus by difficulties which reason and imagination seem alike incompetent to overcome, they too often either give up the problem as insoluble, or else — which amounts to nearly the same thing—have recourse to the deus ex machina as an aid in solving it.

Influenced, no doubt, by some such mental habit as this, Mr. St. George Mivart declares that, while thoroughly agreeing with Mr. Darwin as to man's zoological position, he nevertheless regards the difference between ape and mushroom as less important than the difference between ape and man, so soon as we take into the account" the totality of man's being." (Nature, April 20, 1871.) In this emphatic statement there is a certain amount of truth, though Mr. Mivart is not justified in implying that it is a truth which the Darwinian is bound not to recognize. The enormous difference between civilized man and the highest of brute animals is by no one more emphatically recognized than by the evolutionist, who holds that to the process of organic development there has been superadded a stupendous process of social development, and who must therefore admit that with the beginning of human civilization there was opened a new chapter in the history of the universe, so far as we know it. From the human point of view we may contentedly grant that, for all practical purposes, the difference

between an ape and a mushroom is of less consequence than the difference between an ape and an educated European of the nineteenth century. But to take this educated European as a typical sample of mankind, and to contrast him directly with chimpanzees and gibbons, is in the highest degree fallacious; since the proceeding involves the omission of a host of facts which, when taken into account, must essentially modify the aspect of the whole case.

When we take the refined and intellectual Teuton, with his one hundred and fourteen cubic inches of brain, and set him alongside of the chimpanzee with his thirty-five cubic inches of brain, the difference seems so enormous as to be incompatible with any original kinship. But when we interpose the Australian, whose brain, measuring seventy cubic inches, comes considerably nearer to that of the chimpanzee than to that of the Teuton, the case is entirely altered, and we are no longer inclined to admit sweeping statements about the immeasurable superiority of man, which we may still admit, provided they are restricted to civilized man. If we examine the anatomical composition of these brains, the discovery that in structural complexity the Teutonic cerebrum surpasses the Australian even more than the latter surpasses that of the chimpanzee, serves to strengthen us in our position. And when we pass from facts of anatomy to facts of psychology, we obtain still further confirmation; for we find that the difference in structure is fully paralleled by the difference in functional manifestation. If the Englishman shows such wonderful command of relations of space, time, and number as to be able to tell us that to an observer stationed at Greenwich on the 7th of June, A. D. 2004, at precisely nine minutes and fifty-six seconds after five o'clock in the morning, Venus will begin to cross the sun's disk, the Australian, on the other hand, is able to count only up to five or six, and cannot tell us the number of fingers on his two hands, since so large a number as ten excites in him only an indefinite impression of plurality.* Our conception of

* The Dammaras, according to Mr. Galton, are even worse off than this. "When they wish to express four, they take to their fingers, which are to them as formidable instruments of calculation as a sliding rule is to an English school-boy. They puzzle very much after five, because no spare hand remains to grasp and secure the

the godlike intellect evidently will not apply here. If the emotions of the German and his intellectual perceptions of the fitness of harmonious sounds for expressing emotion are so deep and subtile and varied as to result in the production of choruses like those of Handel and symphonies like those of Beethoven, the crude emotions of the Australian, on the other hand, are quite adequately expressed by the discordant yells and howls which constitute the sole kind of music appreciable by his undeveloped ears. We look in vain here for traces of the keen æsthetic sense which in a measure links together our intellectual and moral natures. Again, if the American student has been known to be actuated by such noble ethical impulses and guided by such lofty conceptions of morality as to leave his comfortable home and his favorite pursuits, and engage in rough warfare, at the risk of life and limb, solely or chiefly that he might assist in relieving the miseries of far inferior men, whose direct claim upon his personal sympathies

fingers that are required for units. Yet they seldom lose oxen; the way in which they discover the loss of one is not by the number of the herd being diminished, but by the absence of a face they know. When bartering is going on, each sheep must be paid for separately. Thus, suppose two sticks of tobacco to be the rate of exchange for one sheep, it would sorely puzzle a Dammara to take two sheep a d give him four sticks. I have done so, and seen a man put two of the sticks apart, and take a sight over them at one of the sheep he was about to sell. Having satisfied himself that that one was honestly paid for, and finding to his surprise that exactly two sticks remained in hand to settle the account for the other sheep, he would be afflicted with doubts; the transaction seemed to come out too 'pat' to be correct, and he would refer back to the first couple of sticks; and then his mind got hazy and confused, and wandered from one sheep to the other, and he broke off the transaction until two sticks were put into his hand, and one sheep driven away, and then the other two sticks given him, and the second sheep driven away. . . . Once while I watched a Dammara floundering hopelessly in a calculation on one side of me, I observed Dinah, my spaniel, equally embarrassed on the other. She was overlooking half a dozen of her new-born puppies, which had been removed two or three times from her, and her anxiety was excessive, as she tried to find out if they were all present, or if any were still missing. She kept puzzling and running her eyes over them, backwards and forwards, but could not satisfy herself. She evidently had a vague notion of counting, but the figure was too large for her brain. Taking the two as they stood, dog and Dammara, the comparison reflected no great honor on the man.". Galton, Tropical South Africa, p. 132, cited in Lubbock, Origin of Civilization, Amer. ed., p. 294. See also Tylor, Primitive Culture, Vol. I. pp. 218-246. Probably the dual number, in grammar, "preserves the memorial of that stage of thought when all beyond two was an idea of indefinite number." Id., p. 240.

could never be other than slight, on the other hand the Australian has no words in his language to express the ideas of justice and benevolence, and no amount of teaching can make him comprehend those ideas. For although, like some brute animals, he is not wholly destitute of the feelings which underlie them, yet these feelings are so seldom repeated in his experience that he is unable to generalize from them. The lofty soul, which is too sweepingly attributed to man in distinction from other animals, is here as difficult to discover as the godlike intellect or the keen æsthetic sense.

men.

In similar wise is made to disappear the sharp contrast between human and brute animals in capability of progress. Hardly any fact is more imposing to the imagination than the fact that each generation of men is perceptibly more enlightened than the preceding one, while each generation of brutes exactly resembles those which have come before it. But the contrast is obtained only by comparing the civilized European of to-day directly with the brute animals known to us through the short period of recorded human history. The capability of progress, however, is by no means shared alike by all races of Of the numerous races historically known to us, it has been manifested in a marked degree only by two, the Aryan and Semitic. To a much less conspicuous extent it has been exhibited by the Chinese and Japanese, the Copts of Egypt, and a few of the highest American races. On the other hand, the small-brained races the Australians and Papuans, the Hottentots, and the majority of tribes constituting the wide-spread Malay and American families-appear almost wholly incapable of progress, even under the guidance of higher races. most that can be said for them is, that they are somewhat more imitative and somewhat more teachable than any brute animals. In the presence of the Aryan, even under the most favorable circumstances, they tend to become extinguished, rather than to appropriate the results of a civilization which there is no reason to suppose they could ever have originated. The two great races of Middle Africa, the Negroes and Kaffirs, have shown, by their ability to endure slave labor, their superiority to those above mentioned; but their career, where it has not been interfered with by white men, has been but little less

The