Mind in animals

Front matter

THOUGHT.

l ^f .

MIND IN ANIMALS.

Preface To The Third Editiox

THE great interest which has been aroused by the publication of the improved edition of this work makes it possible to issue this third edition, despite the comparatively short time that has elapsed and the unfavorable nature of the times for literary enterprises. The book has again been most carefully revised, and has been enriched and rendered more complete by many new additional facts taken from the researches and communications of Lubbock, McCook, Graber, Espinas, Taschenberg, Miiller, Dzierzon, and others. Especially worthy of thanks are the researches carried on in Philadelphia by the Rev. H. C. McCook, on the habits of ants and spiders ; these, like the communications of the above named investigators, confirm and complete in almost every particular the facts already published ; this is notably the case with the results given in the admirable work of Dr. A. Forel on the ants of Switzerland. "We cannot deny ourselves the pleasure of here quoting the excellent remarks of M. A. Espinas, the author of the book on " Animal Societies " (translated into German by Vieweg, 1879), although we do not thereby wish to give the idea that our own volume owes its existence to any motives save to those of simple love of truth and of popular instruction or instructive amusement. M. Espinas says : " To elevate animal societies is at the same time to elevate those of men, who so widely surpass and rule them. We think that weshall better promote civilisation if we show that man is the last step of an advancing progress, than if we isolate him in the universe and leave him to rule a world bare of intelligence and of emotion." Equally well does the same author speak in another place, wherein he argues against those whoabove all things will not admit any comparison between the intellectual powers of men and beasts : " It is clear that we can only comprehend an intelligence, of whatever kind it may be, 'when we can find its analogue in our own intellectual life. This is a necessity of Animal Psychology to which we must absolutely hold fast."

The promises made by the author at the close of the preface of the first edition have been partly redeemed by the issue, by M. A. Hofman, of Berlin, of the work on " Love and love habits of the Animal World," as one of the publications of the " Universal Society of German Literature." The author further hopes that he may have time and opportunity to fulfil the remaining part of his promise before very long. It will doubtless interest readers of this volume to hear that a Dutch translation has appeared under the title of " Uit het Leven der Dieren, vertaald door R. E. de Haan " (Nimwegen, published by Bloomert and Timmerman), and that a French translation of this third edition will shortly be issued in Paris by Reinwald.

Darmstadt, March, 1880.

Chapter I. Historical Review

THE question of mind in animals and of their intellectual capacities as compared with those of men is as old as man's thought ; it can scarcely be accepted as a brilliant testimony to human philosophy and its progress, that the different points of view from which this question has been judged stand out against each other to-day with almost the same distinctness as was the case some thousand years ago, although lately the influence of the Darwinian theory, and the more accurate knowledge of the remarkable facts of heredity, have thrown a heavy weight into the scale of the opinion hitherto rejected by the majority. This opinion has been urged or denied less from scientific than from egoistical motives ; it was feared lest man and his place in nature should be lowered and degraded if animals were allowed the possession of intellectual powers like or allied to those of man. Just as if " our superiority over the animals " (as Lord Brougham says in his '' Discourse on Instinct") "was not great enough to banish and make ridiculous every feeling of jealousy in this respect, even if we regard the difference between ourselves and them as a question of degree and not of kind."

There was indeed in their exceedingly slight knowledge of animals and of their habits an excuse for the philosophers of antiquity, which cannot be admitted for the philosophers of to-day. Nevertheless, Anaxagoras, with philosophic insight, calls man the wisest of animals ; Socrates calls him a beautiful, and Plato a civilised animal. Their disciple,

Aristotle — who far surpassed his predecessors in scientific knowledge — approached more nearly to the solution of the question, for he had caught a glimpse of the gradations of organised beings. He sees in the minds of animals traces of the properties of human minds and human reflection, and maintains that the mind of the child scarcely differs in aught from the mind of the animal ("Natural History,"" Book 8). He regards the elephant as the most intelligent of animals. The Roman Pliny, although too credulous, does the same in relating wonderful anecdotes about animals. Also the Roman poet, Virgil (70 B.C.), speaks very lovingly in his poems about the breeding of animals, and in describing the wonderful doings of bees declares that a portion of the divine spirit dwells in these creatures. Plutarch (B.C. 50) in his treatise on reason in animals makes himself merry over the opinion — taught in the schools of the cynics and stoics and still defended to-day — that animals in reality possess neither emotion nor thought, and that the identity of their actions with those of men is only apparent. " As for those," he says, " who judge so clumsily and are so barefaced as to maintain that animals feel neither joy, nor anger, nor fear, that the swallow has no forethought, and the bee no memory, but that it is a mere appearance when the swallow shows forethought, or the lion anger, or the hind timidity — I do not know how they would answer those who should say that they must then also admit that animals do not see, nor hear, nor have voices, but that they only apparently see, hear, and have voices ; that in fact they do not really live at all, but only appear to have life. For the one contention would not be more antagonistic to manifest fact than is the other."

Plutarch seems also to embrace the opinion, about which there is now so much controversy, that the difference between animals of the same race is not nearly so great as that between man and man.

The great Roman physician, Claudius Galen, of Pergamus, whose system of medicine ruled the world for more than a thousand years, gives it plainly to be understood in his writings that he ascribes reflection and power of determination to animals, and that they only differ from men as to degree. He also, like Anaxagoras, calls man the wisest of animals.

The first writer of the Christian era who troubled himself about animals, and combatted their more and more strongly emphasised inferiority to man, was Celsus, who lived in the second century after Christ, and who followed the materialistic philosophy of the Epicureans as adapted by the Platonists. He fought with wit and acuteness against Christianity, and also against the Judreo-Christian theory that everything was created for the sake of man, and that he was the final cause of the universe. He maintained, as regards animals, that their bodies differed in no important respect from those of men, and that in intellectual qualities they were in many things higher rather than lower than men, since they had a kind of intelligible government, and observed justice and love. His proofs in support of this argument he draws from the life of bees and ants — and with what justice the reader of this book will find abundant evidence.

" If men," proceeds Celsus, " want to separate themselves from animals because they inhabit towns, make laws, and set up a government, yet all this proves nothing ; bees and ants do the same. Bees have their king, whom they accompany and obey ; they have their wars, their victories, their massacres of the conquered ; they have towns and suburbs, regular hours of work, penalties for the lazy and the bad ; they hunt and punish hornets . . . ." He awards the same praise to the ants and to their prudence and care for the future. They help each other to carry heavy loads. " Out of the seeds and fruits which they collect they put on one side those which have begun to sprout, so that they may not affect the others, and that they may serve as food for the winter." They speak to each other when they meet, and do not mistake their road. Celsus even thinks that they have their own burying grounds. " If anyone were able to look down upon the earth from heaven, what difference would he see between the works of men and those of ants and of bees ? "

The Christian Middle Ages, enemy of all natural investigation, could evidently make no peace with such theories. In spite of the vigorous opposition of Rorarius, the learned nuncio of Clement VII. to the Court of the Emperor Ferdinand in Hungary, who brought forward a mass of facts in support of the reasoning powers of animals, and maintained, like Celsus, that they often put their reason to a better use than did men, the Church upheld the contrary view, going even as far as the famous, or at least notorious, contention of the French philosopher, Descartes (1596 to 1650), which, as is well-known, takes away from animals -all conscious feeling and emotion, and only regards them as living machines, or as automata. Descartes, however, is not the only holder of this opinion. He borrowed it from •a predecessor, the Spanish physician, Gomez Pereira, who in his " Antoniana Margarita," published in the sixteenth •century, first maintained that animals had neither intellectual feeling nor capacity of thought, and that, above all, they had no minds, but were only machines controlled by •external circumstances. Descartes, whose whole philosophy rests on the dualism of matter and spirit, admits nevertheless that animals do many things better than men ; but they therein follow, he asserts, only a blind instinct, or a mechanical impulse communicated through their external organs, just as a watch, an artificial machine, measures time better than a man^ with all his intellect and reason. According to Descartes, the feelings and emotions of animals are an empty show ; a welcome piece of news for animaltormentors! " After the error of Atheism," says Descartes, " there is none which leads weak minds further from the path of virtue than the idea that the minds of animals resemble our own, and therefore that we have no greater right to a future life than have gnats and ants, while, on the contrary, our mind is quite independent of the body, and does not therefore necessarily perish with it."

This extreme opinion made a great success in its time, so that no man could call himself a Cartesian without declaring that animals were machines.

Besides, the all-powerful devil of the Middle Ages got mixed up in the matter, and was held to be the author of the unmistakable manifestations of reason in animals, by those who sought for some ground for them ; while, on the contrary, others did not hesitate to impute this same authorship to the Almighty Creator of heaven and earth, through the mediation of so-called instinct, which God had implanted in the minds of animals for their preservation and increase — a guiding and irresistible natural propensity, inborn, unchangeable, independent of experience and

INTRODUCTION. O

training, and acting appropriately without consciousness of the object aimed at. The word instinct is derived from the Latin instinguere, to excite or to allure, and therefore necessarily connotes an exciter or allurer. Therefore Ccesalpinius says, very properly, from this point of view : Deus est anima brutorum — God is the mind of animals.

It is evident that under such circumstances the question of the mind of animals could never become a scientific study ; scientific investigation of the intellectual and emotional powers of animals in comparison with those of man, in fact comparative psychology, was impossible. The subject was either dealt with as a mere collection of curiosities, an innocent amusement, an intellectual pastime, or, more usually, the purely theological standpoint was taken, and the endeavor was made to use this theme — as so many similar ones drawn from Nature — merely as an object of pious wonder.

The Cartesian theory had given rise to much controversy in its time, and the hostile philosophy of Leibnitz, teaching organic gradation and the unbroken unity of all living things, both of men and of animals, had called up against it a host of writers. The most important of these productions for our position was the small work of Jenkin Thomasuis, published in 1713, who supported against Descartes — and in the spirit of his own time and of Leibnitz — the immateriality, and therefore the immortality, of the animal soul. The German editor of the book, Professor Bajer, also declared against instinct, and held that among the various opinions of the learned on the mind of animals, that which saw in animals the analogue of the human mind was the most conformable to man's natural judgment, and the most useful for throwing light on animal actions. In like fashion Professor Reclam, another author on the same question (" Body and Mind," 1850, p. 384), wrote very well : " We therefore conclude that we ought entirely to give up the expression ' instinct,' for we only can and should apply it to such actions of animals as we can explain in no other way, and we ought, remembering Kepler's warning, to seek for every other explanation before we use a word so indefinite and so apt to mislead." In fact, those who deny this, and who will not compare the intellectual faculties of animals with those of men, must renounce all scientific conceptions of these faculties, since there is no other rule wherewith to measure them, and the word " instinct " — as will presently be further shown — is only a paraphrase of our ignorance, and depends in countless cases on demonstrably false representations.* The French philosopher, Condillac, the able tutor of the Infant of Parma, who, by his victorious struggle against the innate ideas of Locke, gave the death-stroke to the vanishing relics of the Cartesian philosophy, had used the argument against Descartes that animals were far removed from machines, since they felt like ourselves, avoided danger, gained expertness, and supplied their own wants as did human beings.

" Man is wont to say," remarks Condillac, " that animals obey instinct and man reason, without knowing what is to be conveyed bv these two words. The actions of animals can only be explained on three principles ; either as the result of mere mechanism, or of blind impulse which neither reasons nor judges, or as the outcome of something which reasons, judges and understands. Since I have proved that both the first explanations are utterly unsatisfactory, the last alone remains." Linnaeus, Buffon — who made the admirable remark that we were compelled to marvel the more at the intelligence of animals, the more we observed and the less we theorised — Voltaire, G. F. Meier (in his famous " Search after a new system of Animal Intelligence," 1750), C. Bonnet, and many others spoke more or less against the Cartesian philosophy. The last especially, an excellent naturalist and a distinguished thinker (1770), refers to the contrivances of insects, especially of wasps and bees, and to the artistic talent of the beavers, which last are brought in immediately after the bees. (!)

Even the Jesuit father, Bonjeant, who found so much intelligence in animals that he thought it could only be due to the help of the devil or devils, turned against Descartes with the words: "All the Cartesians in the world will never persuade me that a dog is a mere machine. Imagine a man who should love his clock as a man loves his dog, and who should pet it because he believed it loved him and was of opinion that it struck the hours consciously and out

* Compare on this point the admirable treatment of the mind of animals, by L. H. Morgan, in " The American Beaver and his Works," p. 148, etc.

of friendship for him. Yet, if Descartes be right, that is exactly the absurdity committed by all those who believe that their dog is faithful to them and loves them. I see how my dog runs to me when I call him, caresses me when I coax him, trembles and runs away when I threaten him, obeys when I order him, and how he exhibits all the outward signs of the distinct emotions of joy, grief, pain, fear, desire, love, and hate. " And if all the philosophers in the world should come and try to convince me, I should never be able to persuade myself that an animal is a machine ; this feeling will always set men against the philosophy of Descartes."

The great fable-teller, La Fontaine, has made fun of the Cartesian theory of animal-machines in several admirable poems (the fables of the two rats, the fox and the egg).

Descartes, however, found his most distinguished opponent in the French Inspector of Forests, G-. Leroy, who, in consequence of his office in the royal gardens and forests at Marly and Versailles, had good opportunities of observing dogs and wood-animals. In the time of Leroy and Buff on, the question of the intelligence of animals had been for a hundred years and more a question of pure philosophy and speculation ; it only entered into the circle of experimental observation with these two investigators. The first letters of Leroy — who was one of the famous French Encyclopaedists— on the intelligence and perfectibility of animals, were published in 1764, under the name of a " Nuremberg Physician ;" Leroy at that time would have been in danger of a prosecution by the Sorbonne, had he sought to prove that animals were not mere machines, but that they possessed all the marks of reason and improveability, as well as of feeling, thought and prudence. Want and need, fear and danger, and so on, are, with him, the guiding springs of the intellectual development of animals, which, as for example the wolf, communicate with each other, often hunt in packs, discover snares and utilise experience. With use, says Leroy, reason grows in animals, and the capacity of employing their minds ; there is a very great difference between a young and an old wolf or fox. The young animals, partly from lack of reflection and experience, partly from overmastering timidity, commit a number of mistakes which the old ones avoid. The dog especially,

B 2 owing to the chase and to his contact with man, learns to an extraordinary extent, and thinks out particular tricks for trapping game. According to Leroy, animals must have a common tongue, however little we may understand of it ; it is impossible that their various communications can be made without speech, and they possess all that is supposed to be necessary to speech, such as faculties of thought, comparison, judgment, decision, reflection, etc. Leroy had then more accurate views about an animal-language than our great language-investigator, Max Miiller, who calls speech the Rubicon between men and animals which will never be crossed.*

That which must most interest and astonish us in Leroy, however, who quite ignores instinct and refers everything to reason, is that he has already grasped the power and significance of the transmission of qualities acquired during life, and that he makes the important and fruitful remark: "that all that we regarded as mere blind mechanism in animals, was perhaps the result of long-since acquired habits which had been handed down from generation to generation." P. Floureus ("De 1'Jnstinct et de 1'Intelligence des Apimaux, 5 ed., p. 41) calls the investigations of Leroy the deepest which had until then been made into the intellectual capabilities of animals. After Leroy, it was the great naturalist, F. Cuvier, who, by means of observations made on a young ourang-outang kept by him in captivity, was led to declare that an animal was able " to combine various ideas in its head and to draw a conclusion from them ; " and this

* The voice organs of men and animals are similar in construction ; there is neither anatomical nor physiological distinction between them. Indeed, this organ in some animals, as in birds, possesses a flexibility and an imitative power exceeding those of men. Animals communicate with each other by means of tones and gestures, as do men ; in both speech proceeds from imitation and hearing. Hence deaf people are also stupid. If speech, as many philosophers maintain, were innate in man, then men would speak even without hearing. The wild amongst animals, and children growing up alone amongst men, do not speak, but only utter cries, which are often almost the same in men and animals, as for instance the cries of astonishment or of fear. Also the language of primitive man has been much enriched by the imitation of natural sounds, education through the ear (Onomatopoeia). Parrots can be trained to talk just as children are. (See D. S. Wilks, in the " Journal of Mental Science.") On the natural development or origin of speech see further the author's " Man and his place in Nature."

although the unprejudiced sensational philosopher, Locke, had doubted the capacity of animals for abstract thought, and had laid just in this the distinction between animal and human minds.

In spite of all this the old strife, whether animals were machines or thinking and conscious creatures, went on as vigorously and as indecisively as ever, and found great support in the ignorance of the laity, or the mass of the people, who even down to th'c present day are more inclined to embrace the Cartesian ideas than those opposed to them. The great and famed era of philosophic speculation at the end of the la<t and the commencement of the present century mastered very little of this difficult question, owing to its fondness of theoretic, and its dislike of experimental methods. Even the great Konigsberg sage, by means of whose learning many now strive so vainly to rebuild the crumbled philosophy of the schools, stood helpless and powerless before it, owing to his philosophical prejudices, as before the question of the relations between the brain and the soul, or the brain and the mind.* For him the animal, like the plant and the mineral, is a mere thing, and is quite excluded from right and morality, which belong only to men. It has no reason, .no judgment, it knows no rights and no duties, and is not capable of education but can only be disciplined. Man only owes to animals the duty of kindness, and this not for the animals' sake but for his own. " And such things were taught," cries Sheitlin, indignantly, "in the Kantian primer of morality and orthodoxy fifty years ago."

From similar views about animals started Kant's famous disciple, the philosophical idealist and metaphysical egoist, Fichte, who, from the standpoint of so-called "pure reason,'' declares that animals are things without freedom, personality, reason or rights. 0 Philosophy, noblest and highest of all sciences, how pitiable thou appearest in the eyes of the lovers of Truth, when thou submittest to be led, not by experience and fact, but by the clinging to preconceived opinions, and by philosophic rules and axioms accepted as eternally valid !

Far better than Kant and Fichte did their noble and

* Compare the author's treatment of the brain in the second volume of his " Physiological Types." (Loipsig, Thomas, 1875.)

talented contemporary, Herder, grasp the nature of animals, whom, in his " Thoughts for a Philosophy of Human History," he calls with keen insight " the elder brethren of men." Brain development and erect position have made men into men ; yet in the animal-kingdom we see the rudiments of all the higher moral and intellectual faculties of man, such as reason, speech, art, freedom, etc.

With this last declaration, Herder approaches very nearly the standpoint of modern thought, which no longer recognises in animals a difference of kind, but only a difference of degree, and which sees the principle of intelligence developing through one endless and unbroken series, gradually and slowly, by way of countless acquisitions, inheritances, and transmissions, from its lowest stage to its highest. " The principle exists without doubt," says the anti-materialist, Agassiz, on this point (" Treatise on Natural History," U.S.A.), " and whether it be called soul, reason, or instinct, it displays in the whole series of organised beings a succession of closely interwoven pha3- nomena." According to Huxley, the admirable English naturalist ("Natural History Review, 1861"), no impartial judge can doubt that the roots of all those great capabilities, which give to man his immeasurable superiority over all other living things, can be traced deep into the animal world.

Chapter II. " Instinct."

FROM this standpoint the study of the intellectual capabilities of animals is of a far other and of a far deeper significance than of old, when, as already stated, it was generally regarded and treated rather as a pastime, or as hunting out anecdotes for amusement, or as adorning theological and teleological disquisitions, than as a scientific system. For if it be true that organic gradations form an unbroken series, and that man himself is compelled to trace his origin to a set of lowly organised forms, as is maintained by the theory of development and descent — nowmore and more accepted — then is it further clear that not only the bodily, but also the mental powers of man must have the same origin, and intellectual development must be regarded as a common quality of organised matter. Comparative anatomy, i.e., the study of bodies, which we have long followed, must necessarily have beside it comparative psychology, the study of minds ; indeed the former must find in the latter its true completion. " The study of the special mental science of man, which is the groundwork of universal mental science," says a more recent writer on the subject (T. Bignoli : " On the fundamental law of intelligence in the animal kingdom," p. 25), "requires this

foundation a comparative psychology of animals is

unattainable .... if this same psychical power is not studied in the whole of intelligent life. The animal kingdom is, so to speak, without a head, and man without feet

on which he can stand The science of comparative

anatomy and psychology is therefore senseless and cannot be understood, unless it be crowned with the still more fruitful science of the study of mind in animals."

This claim and this deduction are so clear and irrefragable that Darwin himself, in his famous book on the " Descent of Man," did not begin, as might be expected, with the comparison of anatomical or physiological observations, but with a digression upon the gradual development of intellectual powers in animals ; he well understood that if he were to succeed in proving the animal descent of man, or even in showing it to be possible, the objection would still remain that man, so far as his mental faculties were concerned, was nevertheless entirely and essentially different from the rest of nature. And, although the great naturalist had at his command comparatively small and poor materials (in reality they are far more numerous and more convincing), it was yet not difficult for him to find and point out the rudiments, the roots, in animals of nearly every intellectual and moral capacity found in man. For the rest, this digression, like everything written by Darwin, is admirable, rich in facts and in striking deductions and observations, although Darwin here, as in his other writings, uses always the mischievous term " instinct ; " this word leaves room for so much misapprehension, that it should be entirely avoided in scientific books, for, as Dr. Weinland well points out, it is nothing but a lazy way of escaping from the laborious study of animal intelligence.

" It is as though there were some witchcraft in the word 'instinct,'" says Umbreit, in his "Science of Psychology" (1831); "for with the phrase 'It is instinct,' all search after the manifestations of the intelligent life [of animals] is stopped as if by an anathema."

" The distinction between intelligence and instinct," says J. Franklin, " is now given up by all schools which have examined facts. There is intelligence in animals and instinct in man."

" Instinct," says Dr. F. C. Noll, in an admirable treatise on the manifestation of so-called instinct (Frankfort, 1876), " is merely an empty word, a veil for our ignorance or indolence."

Darwin does not, of course, use the word instinct in the old sense of an inexplicable and unchangeable impulse, springing from an unknown source ; he uses it to describe an inherited influence or tendency, originally acquired through adaptation or natui'al and sexual selection, and habits or capabilities of thought transmitted from generation to generation. This is the only sense in which the word can be now used by educated people ; in this sense, clear manifestations of instinct play a very important role in man's life, as in that of animals, although its influence is stronger and more apparent in the latter. It has, therefore, always aroused man's wonder, and led him, since he could not explain its origin, to the useless and foolish notion of an "instinct;" just in the same way, our ancestors, as they could not explain the rising of water against gravity into an exhausted receiver, ascribed it to nature's horror vacui, abhorrence of a vacuum, or as uneducated and thoughtless people now refer the origin of life to a special " vital force." That nothing is made clearer by such subterfuges, but that the whole question is made darker by the encouragement thus given to obscurity and mental sloth, must be seen by all. Shakspere jeers very bitterly at instinct when he makes Falstaff say in excuse for his senseless cowardice : " Instinct is a great matter ; I was a coward on instinct."