PSYCHICAL CHARACTERISTICS OP MAN.
the above-mentioned traits clearly distinguish man from other species of animals, they do not establish any such marked peculiarities in him as to remove him from the chain of organic forms, in which he stands merely as physically the most complete. If he differs radically in kind rather than in degree from his fellow-creatures, it must be not in his physical but in his psychical powers, in his intellect or soul. Vet even here the researches of recent years have materially narrowed the gulf which was once supposed to separate man from beast. It has been proved beyond peradventure that the lower animals have much the same emotions as ourselves. Even such cold-blooded creatures as fishes are found to love and hate, to fear and to be able to conquer fear, with a fervor that bears close comparison with anything the records of our race can produce.
power of reasoning, and especially the faculty of forming abstract conceptions, were long claimed as the exclusive prerog atives of man. But there are any number of authentic narratives about the intelligence of brutes which seem to require for their explanation the exercise of both these faculties ; and it becomes impossible, therefore, to deny their presence in some degree in the more intelligent quadrupeds. Every reader must be able to recall many such anecdotes of our household friend the dog, and a close study of so low an organized animal as the ant has revealed even more remarkable displays of intellectual action in the management of its communities.
philosophers have maintained that the power of contemplating one's self as a separate existence, of sciousness, is enjoyed exclusively by man, and is the secret of his intel lectual supremacy. The assertion is as difficult to prove as to disprove, as there is no action which we can name as the exclusive outcome of this feeling. If we accept, as some have suggested, suicide as such an action, then we must extend it to the brutes, for there are undoubted instances of deliberate self-destruction among them.
A careful survey of the recent studies on instinct and intelligence among the lower animals indicates that in only two directions can man claim to possess intellectual properties wholly beyond the ken of the lower animals : one of these is in his re/igions, the other in his languages.
we look upon religion as the recognition and worship of an unseen Power who has the ordering of the events of life, or whether we confine it to a sense of duty prompting to the perform ance of certain actions and to the abstention from others, in either of these comprehensive senses of the term it seems the exclusive perquisite of man, and not in any degree known or felt by inferior species.
articulate grammatical speech, is not less the exclusive property of the human race. It is quite true that many of the lower species have the power of communicating information, and this not nnfrequently by means of sounds. Such instances are familiar to every one. So has the infant. But the difference between this inarticulate, interjectional mode of utterance and spoken language is a radical one, and vindicates for man the possession of certain powers found nowhere else in nature. As the eminent anthropologist Dr. E. B. Tylor has well remarked : "Man's power of using a word, or even a gesture, as a symbol of a thought and the means of conversing about it, is one of the points where we see him parting company with all lower species and starting on his career of conquest through higher intellectual regions." a term drawn from the vocabulary of meta physics, we may define the fundamental difference between the mind of man and the intelligence or instinct of the lower animals to be that man has and constantly exercises the perception of causality. He recognizes and governs his actions by the observed relations of cause and effect. This the highest apes do not attain to in the most simple matters. Thus travellers in Central Africa tell us that in the cool nights there the apes will be seen watching the travellers keep up their camp-fire with sticks of wood, and if the men withdraw the apes will gather around the fire and enjoy the warmth hugely, but they never attain the degree of intelli gence to lay wood on the fire to keep it burning. The relation of cause to effect in this simple act escapes them.
ifanufacture of the same reason, no brute ever fashions a tool or weapon for its future use. Some, indeed, make use of such when ready to their hand. Thus, a monkey has been known to select a stone of convenient shape for cracking its nuts, and even to hide such a stone to preserve it for future occasions ; the gorilla and orang-outang will tear limbs from trees or pick up sticks to use as weapons ; and other species will hurl stones or nuts as missiles at their enemies ; but in spite of this familiarity with the use of ready-made instruments, no instance can be cited where even the most advanced of the inferior animals fashioned a single tool. When it is remembered that even the very lowest tribes of men make tools of remarkable ingenuity, and that in the most remote geologic age in which we find the slightest traces of man he both knew the use of fire and manufactured weapons, these distinctions mark him off broadly from all other living creatures.