Evolution in Modern Thought Part 13

Darwin was too good an observer and too honest a man to minimise the "enormous difference" between the level of mental attainment of civilised man and that reached by any animal. His contention was that the difference, great as it is, is one of degree and not of kind. He realised that, in the development of the mental faculties of man, new factors in evolution have supervened--factors which play but a subordinate and subsidiary part in animal intelligence.

Intercommunication by means of language, approbation and blame, and all that arises out of reflective thought, are but foreshadowed in the mental life of animals. Still he contends that these may be explained on the doctrine of evolution. He urges[185] "that man is variable in body and mind; and that the variations are induced, either directly or indirectly, by the same general causes, and obey the same general laws, as with the lower animals." He correlates mental development with the evolution of the brain.[186] "As the various mental faculties gradually developed themselves, the brain would almost certainly become larger. No one, I presume, doubts that the large proportion which the size of man's brain bears to his body, compared to the same proportion in the gorilla or orang, is closely connected with his higher mental powers." "With respect to the lower animals," he says,[187] "M. E. Lartet,[188] by comparing the crania of tertiary and recent mammals belonging to the same groups, has come to the remarkable conclusion that the brain is generally larger and the convolutions are more complex in the more recent form."

Sir E. Ray Lankester has sought to express in the simplest terms the implications of the increase in size of the cerebrum. "In what," he asks, "does the advantage of a larger cerebral ma.s.s consist?" "Man,"

he replies, "is born with fewer ready-made tricks of the nerve-centres--these performances of an inherited nervous mechanism so often called by the ill-defined term 'instincts'--than are the monkeys or any other animal. Correlated with the absence of inherited ready-made mechanism, man has a greater capacity of developing in the course of his individual growth similar nervous mechanisms (similar to but not identical with those of 'instinct') than any other animal.... The power of being educated--'educability' as we may term it--is what man possesses in excess as compared with the apes. I think we are justified in forming the hypothesis that it is this 'educability' which is the correlative of the increased size of the cerebrum." There has been natural selection of the more educable animals, for "the character which we describe as 'educability' can be transmitted, it is a congenital character. But the _results_ of education can _not_ be transmitted. In each generation they have to be acquired afresh, and with increased 'educability' they are more readily acquired and a larger variety of them.... The fact is that there is no community between the mechanisms of instinct and the mechanisms of intelligence, and that the latter are later in the history of the evolution of the brain than the former and can only develop in proportion as the former become feeble and defective."[189]

In this statement we have a good example of the further development of views which Darwin foreshadowed but did not thoroughly work out. It states the biological case clearly and tersely. Plasticity of behaviour in special accommodation to special circ.u.mstances is of survival value; it depends upon acquired characters; it is correlated with increase in size and complexity of the cerebrum; under natural selection therefore the larger and more complex cerebrum as the organ of plastic behaviour has been the outcome of natural selection. We have thus the biological foundations for a further development of genetic psychology.

There are diversities of opinion, as Darwin showed, with regard to the range of instinct in man and the higher animals as contrasted with lower types. Darwin himself said[190] that "Man, perhaps, has somewhat fewer instincts than those possessed by the animals which come next to him in the series." On the other hand, Prof. Wm. James says[191] that man is probably the animal with most instincts. The true position is that man and the higher animals have fewer complete and self-sufficing instincts than those which stand lower in the scale of mental evolution, but that they have an equally large or perhaps larger ma.s.s of instinctive raw material which may furnish the stuff to be elaborated by intelligent processes. There is, perhaps, a greater abundance of the primary tissue of experience to be refashioned and integrated by secondary modification; there is probably the same differentiation in relation to the determining biological ends, but there is at the outset less differentiation of the particular and specific modes of behaviour. The specialised instinctive performances and their concomitant experience-complexes are at the outset more indefinite. Only through acquired connections, correlated with experience, do they become definitely organised.

The full working-out of the delicate and subtle relationship of instinct and educability--that is, of the hereditary and the acquired factors in the mental life--is the task which lies before genetic and comparative psychology. They interact throughout the whole of life, and their interactions are very complex. No one can read the chapters of _The Descent of Man_ which Darwin devotes to a consideration of the mental characters of man and animals without noticing, on the one hand, how sedulous he is in his search for hereditary foundations, and, on the other hand, how fully he realises the importance of acquired habits of mind. The fact that educability itself has innate tendencies--is in fact a partially differentiated educability--renders the unravelling of the factors of mental progress all the more difficult.

In his comparison of the mental powers of men and animals it was essential that Darwin should lay stress on points of similarity rather than on points of difference. Seeking to establish a doctrine of evolution, with its basal concept of continuity of process and community of character, he was bound to render clear and to emphasise the contention that the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is one of degree and not of kind. To this end Darwin not only recorded a large number of valuable observations of his own, and collected a considerable body of information from reliable sources, he presented the whole subject in a new light and showed that a natural history of mind might be written and that this method of study offered a wide and rich field for investigation. Of course those who regarded the study of mind only as a branch of metaphysics smiled at the philosophical inept.i.tude of the mere man of science. But the investigation, on natural history lines, has been prosecuted with a large measure of success. Much indeed still remains to be done; for special training is required, and the workers are still few. Promise for the future is however afforded by the fact that investigation is prosecuted on experimental lines and that something like organised methods of research are taking form. There is now but little reliance on casual observations recorded by those who have not undergone the necessary discipline in these methods. There is also some change of emphasis in formulating conclusions. Now that the general evolutionary thesis is fully and freely accepted by those who carry on such researches, more stress is laid on the differentiation of the stages of evolutionary advance than on the fact of their underlying community of nature. The conceptual intelligence which is especially characteristic of the higher mental procedure of man is more firmly distinguished from the perceptual intelligence which he shares with the lower animals--distinguished now as a higher product of evolution, no longer as differing in origin or different in kind.

Some progress has been made, on the one hand in rendering an account of intelligent profiting by experience under the guidance of pleasure and pain in the perceptual field, on lines predetermined by instinctive differentiation for biological ends, and on the other hand in elucidating the method of conceptual thought employed, for example, by the investigator himself in interpreting the perceptual experience of the lower animals.

Thus there is a growing tendency to realise more fully that there are two orders of educability--first an educability of the perceptual intelligence based on the biological foundation of instinct, and secondly an educability of the conceptual intelligence which refashions and rearranges the data afforded by previous inheritance and acquisition. It is in relation to this second and higher order of educability that the cerebrum of man shows so large an increase of ma.s.s and a yet larger increase of effective surface through its rich convolutions. It is through educability of this order that the human child is brought intellectually and affectively into touch with the ideal constructions by means of which man has endeavoured, with more or less success, to reach an interpretation of nature, and to guide the course of the further evolution of his race--ideal constructions which form part of man's environment.

It formed no part of Darwin's purpose to consider, save in broad outline, the methods, or to discuss in any fulness of detail the results of the process by which a differentiation of the mental faculties of man from those of the lower animals has been brought about--a differentiation the existence of which he again and again acknowledges. His purpose was rather to show that, notwithstanding this differentiation, there is basal community in kind. This must be remembered in considering his treatment of the biological foundations on which man's systems of ethics are built. He definitely stated that he approached the subject "exclusively from the side of natural history."[192] His general conclusion is that the moral sense is fundamentally identical with the social instincts, which have been developed for the good of the community; and he suggests that the concept which thus enables us to interpret the biological ground-plan of morals also enables us to frame a rational ideal of the moral end.

"As the social instincts," he says,[193] "both of man and the lower animals have no doubt been developed by nearly the same steps, it would be advisable, if found practicable, to use the same definition in both cases, and to take as the standard of morality, the general good or welfare of the community, rather than the general happiness."

But the kind of community for the good of which the social instincts of animals and primitive men were biologically developed may be different from that which is the product of civilisation, as Darwin no doubt realised. Darwin's contention was that conscience is a social instinct and has been evolved because it is useful to the tribe in the struggle for existence against other tribes. One the other hand J. S.

Mill urged that the moral feelings are not innate but acquired, and Bain held the same view, believing that the moral sense is acquired by each individual during his life-time. Darwin, who notes[194] their opinion with his usual candour, adds that "on the general theory of evolution this is at least extremely improbable." It is impossible to enter into the question here: much turns on the exact connotation of the terms "conscience" and "moral sense," and on the meaning we attach to the statement that the moral sense is fundamentally identical with the social instincts.

Presumably the majority of those who approach the subjects discussed in the third, fourth, and fifth chapters of _The Descent of Man_ in the full conviction that mental phenomena, not less than organic phenomena, have a natural genesis, would, without hesitation, admit that the intellectual and moral systems of civilised man are ideal constructions, the products of conceptual thought, and that as such they are, in their developed form, acquired. The moral sentiments are the emotional a.n.a.logues of highly developed concepts. This does not however imply that they are outside the range of natural history treatment. Even though it may be desirable to differentiate the moral conduct of men from the social behaviour of animals (to which some such term as "pre-moral" or "quasi-moral" may be applied), still the fact remains that, as Darwin showed, there is abundant evidence of the occurrence of such social behaviour--social behaviour which, even granted that it is in large part intelligently acquired, and is itself so far a product of educability, is of survival value. It makes for that integration without which no social group could hold together and escape elimination. Furthermore, even if we grant that such behaviour is intelligently acquired, that is to say arises through the modification of hereditary instincts and emotions, the fact remains that only through these instinctive and emotional data is afforded the primary tissue of the experience which is susceptible of such modification.

Darwin sought to show, and succeeded in showing, that for the intellectual and moral life there are instinctive foundations which a biological treatment alone can disclose. It is true that he did not in all cases a.n.a.lytically distinguish the foundations from the superstructure. Even to-day we are scarcely in a position to do so adequately. But his treatment was of great value in giving an impetus to further research. This value indeed can scarcely be over-estimated.

And when the natural history of the mental operations shall have been written, the cardinal fact will stand forth, that the instinctive and emotional foundations are the outcome of biological evolution and have been ingrained in the race through natural selection. We shall more clearly realise that educability itself is a product of natural selection, though the specific results acquired through cerebral modifications are not transmitted through heredity. It will, perhaps, also be realised that the instinctive foundations of social behaviour are, for us, somewhat out of date and have undergone but little change throughout the progress of civilisation, because natural selection has long since ceased to be the dominant factor in human progress. The history of human progress has been mainly the history of man's higher educability, the products of which he has projected on to his environment. This educability remains on the average what it was a dozen generations ago; but the thought-woven tapestry of his surroundings is refashioned and improved by each succeeding generation. Few men have in greater measure enriched the thought-environment with which it is the aim of education to bring educable human beings into vital contact, than has Charles Darwin. His special field of work was the wide province of biology; but he did much to help us to realise that mental factors have contributed to organic evolution and that in man, the highest product of Evolution, they have reached a position of unquestioned supremacy.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 153: _Origin of Species_ (6th edit.), p. 205.]

[Footnote 154: _Descent of man_ (2nd edit. 1888), Vol. I. p. 99; Popular edit. p. 99.]

[Footnote 155: _Ibid._ p. 99.]

[Footnote 156: _The Expression of the Emotions_ (2nd edit.), p. 32.]

[Footnote 157: _Descent of Man_, Vol. II. p. 435.]

[Footnote 158: _Ibid._ 437, 438.]

[Footnote 159: _Origin of Species_ (6th edit.), p. 205.]

[Footnote 160: _Origin of Species_ (6th edit.), p. 205.]

[Footnote 161: _Ibid._ p. 233.]

[Footnote 162: _Ibid._ p. 205.]

[Footnote 163: _Origin of Species_ (6th edit.), p. 233.]

[Footnote 164: _Origin of Species_, pp. 210, 211.]

[Footnote 165: Independently suggested, on somewhat different lines, by Profs. J. Mark Baldwin, Henry F. Osborn and the writer.]

[Footnote 166: _Origin of Species_ (6th edit.), p. 206.]

[Footnote 167: _Expression of the Emotions_, p. 13. The pa.s.sage is here somewhat condensed.]

[Footnote 168: _Ibid._ p. 368.]

[Footnote 169: _Expression of the Emotions_, pp. 373, 374.]

[Footnote 170: _Ibid._ p. 368.]

[Footnote 171: _Ibid._ p. 369.]

[Footnote 172: _Expression of the Emotions_, pp. 65 ff.]

[Footnote 173: Cf. William James, _Principles of Psychology_, Vol. II.

Chap. XXV, New York, 1890.]

[Footnote 174: _Darwinism_, pp. 282, 283, London, 1889.]

[Footnote 175: _Ibid._ p. 283.]

[Footnote 176: _Darwinism_, pp. 283, 284.]

[Footnote 177: _Descent of Man_ (2nd edit.), Vol. II. pp. 136, 137; (Popular edit.), pp. 642, 643.]

[Footnote 178: _The Play of Animals_, p. 244, London, 1898.]

[Footnote 179: _Ibid._ p. 283.]

[Footnote 180: _Descent of Man_, Vol. II. p. 60; (Popular edit.), p.

566.]

[Footnote 181: _The Play of Animals_, p. 76.]

[Footnote 182: _Ibid._ p. 75.]

[Footnote 183: _The Play of Animals_ p. 24.]

[Footnote 184: _Descent of Man_ (1st edit.), Chaps. II, III, V; (2nd edit.), Chaps. III, IV, V.]

[Footnote 185: _Descent of Man_, Vol. I. pp. 70, 71; (Popular edit.), pp. 70, 71.]

[Footnote 186: _Ibid._ p. 81.]