The neighbor : The natural history of human contacts

Front matter

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Preface

In this book I have endeavored to set forth some matters concerning the intercourse of men with their neighbors which have helped me, and which I hope may be helpful to others who may desire to go beyond the commonplace relation with their fellow-men. The greater part of what I have said is, so far as the facts go, familiar knowledge; my effort has been to shape this information in such a manner that it will throw light on human relations.

What there is of novelty in this writing is mainly limited to the effect of tribal institutions and states of mind on the development of the modern commonwealth, and to the effects of the first contacts of individuals on their subsequent relations. I have endeavored to apply certain observations on those contact phenomena to two serious race problems, those presented by the intercourse of the Jews and the Negroes with the people of our own race. In so doing I have been compelled to set forth judgments vi PREFACE as to the character and qualities of these folk which are likely to prove offensive to some of their members. I realize that it is a serious and difficult matter to characterize races as a whole or to judge them on the basis of any experience such as can come to any one person. Where I have done this task with the Israelites and the Americanized Africans it has been done from long and patient study of those peoples. The questions as to their nature which I have discussed have been in my mind for about forty years, so that if the judgments are in error the mistakes are not due to haste.

The plan of the book has required a restatement of certain points more extendedly treated in a volume entitled, “ The Individual: A Study of Life and Death,” which was published two years ago. The repetition of this matter gives a certain look of similarity to these works; they are, however, essentially dissimilar. “'The Individual” is an essay towards a better understanding of what the solitary condition of man means in the order of nature ; this on the natural history of the neighbor endeavors to set forth some of the conditions of human contact as they are influenced by the organic education of

PREFACE vil mankind. In effect the two pieces of work seek essentially diverse, though in a way related, ends. Although this book is in effect a plea for a larger understanding of the differences between men, I would have the reader approach it with some sense of the significance of the questions it discusses. I ask him if itis not evident that the antecedents which determine the state of mind with which he meets an alien man are of great importance in determining his judgments concerning him. I ask him further to note that all our efforts to unite men in human associations, societies, states, and nations, depend upon the measure in which we may be able to overcome certain instinctive prejudices which grievously hinder such union of men in the common endeavors which advance mankind. If he will but see one instance of this, that of the Negro problem in the United States, © a type of what has to be faced the world about, he will perceive how the question of the natural history of the neighbor lies not only at the foundation of morals, but of statecraft as well; and that we need to understand it in order to shape our commonwealth.

N.S. S.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., September, 1903.

XI.

Contents

PAGE . On THE NATURE oF THE INDIVIDUAL ... 1 . On CeRTAIN CoNnDITIONS or Man... ... 10 DIrIMPONATURE OF HATRED. . . . . . « 21 PAJMeaeE NATURE OF THE TRIBE ....... 28 . NATURE AND VALUE OF ETunic Motives. . 51 MermereeeGREW FROBLEM . .. . . i: 4:1. 72 . THE PROBLEM OF THE AFRICAN. .... . 126 . THe CatreGoric Motive 1x Human REtA-

. THe CONDITIONS OF THE CONTACTS OF MEN . 204

. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF VARIETY AND SPECIES

Chapter I

Tue subject of the inquiries which are hereinafter set forth may be shortly defined as follows. In the case of mankind, as with all other organic groups, we have a multitude of individuals all of which have to establish more or less permanent relations with their kindred of various degrees. These relations are of the utmost importance to the persons concerned in them, for they determine their lot. They are of even more moment to the life of the group to which they belong, for on them may depend its success or failure in the struggle for existence. Such relations between individuals, though they are of relatively simple nature, exist among the units of the lower inorganic realm. The atoms, molecules, crystals, and celestial spheres act and react on one another and have their profit or loss from the exchange of influences; in fact, the visible universe, so far as we know it, appears to be made up of such isolated structures, each having for its share the task of receiving impressions from the others within the limits of environment and of sending forth its influences to all the like individualities within the range of its actions.

One of the noblest accomplishments of ‘modern science has been to show us something of this exchange of influences which goes on in that vast realm of atomic relations. We see, though as yet but dimly, how the more or less temporary groupings of these inconceivably small units give us all the varied qualities of matter. In one order of arrangement, in any set of atoms, we have a molecule which sends forth a stream of actions that affects the realm about it in a certain manner. If we change the grouping of the association with no other alteration save that brought about by the change in the number or position of its units, the qualities it sends forth are altered, it may be in effect infinitely, so that an inconceivable variety of properties can be produced by what seems to be no more than a change of place of the constituent units. Thus by a mere shifting of the stations of the thirty atoms of carbon in a molecule of a certain kind of alcohol, species of that group may be produced in number so great as to transcend the imagination. The sum of the innovations thus originated may far exceed a million million, and each of the perturbations gives rise to substances of new qualities, that is, to forms of matter each of which has a peculiar influence on its environment. It is evident that even in the relatively simple conditions of the atoms of a molecule, what appear to be very slight alterations in the relation of its atomic units to each other in some inevitable way alter the quality of the action which the association exercises on the individuals about it.

Great as are the effects arising from the diversities in the groupings of units in the atomic field, the value of such reciprocal influence on any part of the inorganic realm is small as compared with what it is in that of the organic. In all the living associations of matter the physical and chemical effects arising from changes in the position of the units are exhibited quite as well as they are in those which are inanimate; but in addition to the properties due to atomic and molecular conditions, we have in living things other higher and more varied qualities due to the peculiar kinds of association which come about with life. We need now to glance at these characteristics of animate individuals.

I have elsewhere and in more detail than is required for my present purpose endeavored to show that the essential difference between the living or organic and the inorganic or non-living realms consists in that fact that in the organic the qualities exhibited by the individuals of any species — as, for instance, those of any particular kind of atom, molecule, or crystals — are, under the same environing conditions, always precisely alike. Thus the atoms of the farthest stars are evidently the same as those of the earth, and a crystal of quartz formed in the Archzean’ age, if built under like environment, in no wise differs from one we make in our laboratories. On the other hand, because they inherit their experience with environment from their ancestors and are much affected by that experience, organic individuals are in their generational succession in constant process of modification. They are ever changing as regards what they take from and give to their surroundings. This is perhaps most clearly seen when we consider the difference between the lowest living forms in the series of beings which led to mankind, and the last of the great procession, man himself. The quality of the last term, man, that is, its capacity for influencing its neighbors, of acting on and being acted on by the environing individuals, is evidently vastly different from the first. Moreover, this organic feature of inherited quality brings about changes not only from generation to generation and from species to species, but it is likely to change very much in. the lifetime of each of the persons in the succession. Thus while permanence of quality is a general feature in the inorganic realm, in the organic we find an endless flux in that quality, and a consequent variation in the influences which the individual exercises on its environment.

Although the observer may, with very little study, see enough of the order of nature to note the fact that what is done in the visible universe is, so far as we can see, accomplished by individualities of various grades from the lowest of the physical to the highest of the organic realm, it is not easy to see far enough into the matter to recognize how, as the development of the individualizing process goes on, the value of the unit steadily gains. Although the scope and variety of actions of an atom are evidently great, probably far greater than we shall ever know, they are relatively very limited as compared with those of a molecule made up of many such units, and the field of influential qualities in the lowest living form must be vastly more extended than in the case of the highest of those which are not informed by life. As we go up in the organic series, the influences which the creature receives from andsendsforth to the individualities about it steadily increase. This advance is made even when the gain is in structure alone, but it becomes very much more evident in the series of animals which develop intelligence. Such creatures receive and send forth influences in proportion to their intellectual capacity, and with each increment of that power the scope of those reactions is increased in an exceedingly rapid proportion.

The result of the system of evolving individualities of higher and higher grade attains, so far as the naturalist discerns, its summit in man. It is highly improbable that in human kind we have the actual culmination of this evidently pervading motive of advance, this most deep-seated and apparently universal impulse of the visible universe; it is, indeed, reasonable to suppose that it extends without limit throughout the realm, and that there are at least as many kinds of individuals of a higher grade as there are of a lower grade than ourselves. For our problem, however, we need consider no more than the evident fact that by a process of evolution, which, so far as we can see, is of universal application, we as men have come by successive stages of advance — leading through, perhaps, more than a hundred thousand different organic species — up to a station where we have a singular capacity of receiving from the world about us, and sending back to that world, a body of influences in range and scope immeasurably greater than those that came to or went forth from any of the lower creatures whence our life was derived.

It is difficult to conceive the extent to which man has become the recipient and the originator of influences. We see something of the dynamic value of the creature when we behold the vast effect he has had on the physical conditions of the earth: how he has swept away forests, extirpated a host of animals, and changed the nature of the life over wide areas of its surface. In his battles with the beasts, with his fellow-men, and with the nature that opposes his desires, we see only the ‘ruder and less important side of his power; the more important is discerned by those alone who attend to what we may term the moral side of his activities, to those actions which influence for good or ill the well-being of the fellowcreatures of his own or other kinds which share life with him. Because these effects of the individual person or of those higher personalities created where such units are merged into societies or states are not visible to the eye, they are inevitably neglected. Reflection, however, will show the student of such matters that every human being is a centre which receives an almost infinite array of moral impulses and transmits a like host to other life. If by some art we could render these movements visible, these persons would no longer seem as they now do to be solitary, little affected and little affecting things, but each would appear as a sun ruling and being ruled by a host of like orbs, receiving influences from millions of its kind and sending in return the like to each and all of its fellows.

The conception of the individual man as the present summit of a series of advancing individualities, each, in the measure of its advancement, the centre of relations with the sources from which it receives and to which it sends influences, helps us in many ways to see the moral status of our kind. It is evident that, as the result of this evolution, human beings have in effect become agencies by which energy is transformed from its lower states of manifestation, such as it exhibits in the physical realm, to the higher intellectual plane. What we do as men is accomplished by the conversion of the forces which come to us from the chemical and physical fields, where they have operated from the beginning of the present state of the universe, into action which is guided by mind. All the energy which we apply in any kind of thought is in no sense originated in the thinking ; it is merely converted from the lower to the higher use. So far as we can clearly discern, this force when used commonly falls back into the lower ancient plane of activity, but there is an evident and most important remainder which does not thus return to the primal state but abides in the higher plane in the influence which the thoughtguided actions have upon the conduct of other individuals. Thus, though the mere dynamic values of the apparently temporary life fall back into the lower ancient store, the qualities of that life which are really its important part remain and are sent on to direct the course of other individuals, which in turn are to shape matter and energy to the task of living.

It should be understood that the limited view just above suggested, as to the value of the individual life as a source of influence in other lives, is to be regarded as but the immediate judgment of the naturalist working within the limits of his craft, which allows him to deal with no more than the evidently visible, or that which may be directly inferred from observations of facts. He may suspect or believe that there is something other than the directing influence of the individual being that survives death, but under his limitations he cannot deal with that question. It is clear that one of these survivals is that of directing power by which, to take - the most significant example, a Jewish peasant who died near two thousand years ago shapes to this day by his brief and simple life the ways of men. Thus while the naturalist’s way of looking at the matter is narrow, and leaves aside a very momentous part of it, the body of fact he has to consider is of momentous importance.

Chapter II

TuHE proportion of the influences which the individual of any species receives or sends forth varies through an almost infinite range. In the inorganie world the action of the unit under given conditions is essentially invariable, — it may be regarded as mechanical in its nature; in the organic field, at least among animals, both the reception and transmission of actions are affected by the operation of some form of intelligence. For our present purpose this intelligence may be regarded as a condition of action in which the particular deed is qualified by experience gained by the individual in its own life or that of its ancestors, and so stored in memory that it may be used to qualify the otherwise machine-like response to stimulus. Thus defined we may if we please regard the relations of the plants to their environment as intelligent, for there can be no doubt that in them there are inheritances from the experience of ancestors which are brought into the equation which determines their conduct, so that, unlike the inorganic units such as the atom or the crystal, their individual deeds are, in a measure, determined by those of the forms through which their life was derived.

The result of the introduction of intelligence in the shape of previously inherited experience is very greatly to extend the range and scope of the interactions of individuals. So long as the reaction to impulse was mechanical, it was necessarily determined by the dynamic equations of the moment in which it took place.. As soon as any form of memory entered as a factor, the result became determined by new and vastly extended conditions, and what we may in the larger sense of the word term the moral realm was entered on. In the lower life, that of plants and the invertebrate animals, the reactions to stimulus, due to inheritance and to environment, though they may be much affected by the intellectual forces, retain a certain kind of fatality, for the reason that, even where there is evidence of a strong individual will, the actions of the creature are confined to certain determined paths; so that while they are not in the true sense of the word mechanical as in the lower physical realm, they are in large measure what may be termed inevitable. With the beginning of the vertebrate group organic life enters on a series of changes, which in a tolerably continuous manner serves to elevate and aggrandize the intellectual value of the individual, leading, in various branches of the type, to a number of considerable successes, and in man,.to the supreme accomplishment which this planet is to attain.

The peculiar success of the vertebrate animals appears to be due to two important structural features, which are characteristic of the group, and constitute important departures from the preceding lower plans or systems of architecture in this kingdom. First, or at least the most evident, of these, is that the jointed skeleton, which in all the lower groups is effectively external, in the invertebrates is to be internal. The result of this change is that those hard parts which enable the creature to be supported and to apply muscular force, do not have to be shed from time to time in the process of growth, as is the case with the crustaceans and the insects, so that the creature can steadfastly increase in size while remaining continuously active. With the articulated animals, on the contrary, the process of shedding the external hard parts makes it necessary for them to be for a time without the protection and support which they require for their activities. The result of this is that while the crustaceans and the kindred forms are in most ways supremely fortunate animals, they are denied the chance of dominance by the fact that their skeletons have from time to time to be cast away, which makes it impossible for them to attain any considerable bulk. How effective this limitation has been may be judged by the evident fact that the average weight of mature insects is certainly less than one ten-thousandth that of adult vertebrates.

The other peculiarity of the vertebrates is closely related to the constitution of the vertebrated skeleton, for it led to the institution of that structure; it consists in the invention of a special tract, that of the spinal cord, and later the brain, which is effectively an addition to that series of parts existing in the invertebrate group. In those lowlier forms all the work of receiving impressions from without and reacting on them, as well as the control of the functions of the various parts of the body, is effected in the simplest forms, such as the protozoa, by the diffused nervous capacity which primarily exists in organic matter; higher up in the several advancing series there develop sets of nerves and ganglia, all tied together in structure, so that the intellectual and organic work are done by the same parts. The essential peculiarity of the cerebro-spinal or vertebrate nervous system is that, while it in some measure serves to direct the work of the body, its principal function is to receive impressions from without, and to act as the seat of the intelligence. It is, as regards the most important work, a bureau of foreign affairs, and as such is the seat of the intellectual powers of the creature.

In its initial stage the nervous system characteristic of the vertebrates is no more than a simple nerve supported by what is at first but a cartilaginous rod, which is channeled to receive the nerve. From this primitive simplicity of the Chordata, well shown by the lancelet, the advance towards the characteristic skeletal arrangements of the higher back-boned animals is made with singular speed, and as if to appointed ends. What was a mere supporting rod soon incloses the spinal cord; it hardens, becomes jointed in the characteristic manner of the back-bone, and develops the specialized head, or casing, for the enlargement of the tract which forms the brain. From the joints of the vertebree double processes which are to become the ribs extend downwards along the sides of the trunk; and others, single, grow upwards to form the spines of the several segments. The whole is quickly shaped so as to serve as an elastic framework by which the muscles can swing the afterpart of the body in the sculling motion by which most fishes swim. This is the first and in the fish stage the only important use of the jointed skeleton which has its beginning in that group. In the later developments it ceases to have value, yet even among the higher mammals the ancient habit of swinging the afterpart of the body in the sculling movement remains, though it serves, as in the dog, only as a means of expressing a pleasurable sense of activity.

In the icthye or earliest stage of the vertebrate skeleton, while the only method in which progression could be accomplished was by the swinging tail, the fore and hind limbs which were ever afterwards to control the ways of vertebrate life began to form. At first these structures, essentially fins, are so slight and inefficient that it is unreasonable to attribute their development to the process of natural selection. At best they serve only as balancing organs, in some measure preventing the rolling motion of the body which the strokes of the tail may tend to produce. Those who know living fishes well are likely to agree with me in the opinion that these paired fins have no such functional value as would by selective action lead to their development. Yet there is an absolute justification for their existence in that they are the beginnings of the fore and hind limbs of all the higher vertebrates. Those parts which have so far determined the bodies and minds of the series of amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, are in the end the inheritance of man.

It is not our task to consider how the fins of the fishes came to be, or in what manner the limbs of the higher classes of the type were developed from these lowly beginnings. For our purpose we need only to note that the conditions under which these structures arose in the first steps of the vertebrates determined that there should never be more than four of these instruments which the general skeleton affords for the uses of the will. Here and there these limbs are supplemented by the jaws, or by elongations of the lips, as in the elephant; by horns or antlers, as in the ruminants and some other brutes; but for all the higher work of the will the vertebrate is limited to very few parts that are of any efficiency.

The result of the curious limitation in the parts which are subservient to the will of the vertebrate is to lessen the value of inherited experience in their actions, and correspondingly to increase that of individual thought. In the bees and ants, on the one hand, where the bodily parts are so arranged that they afford apparatus accurately fitted for all the needs of their wills, the result is that the mind operates in the automatic manner which we term instinctive, where, though the action is other than mechanical for the reason that it is guided by a mode of memory, it is narrowly limited as are the deeds which we do in what is called an automatic way, as the child sucks the mother, or as the eyelids close when the eye is threatened. On the other hand, in the vertebrates, though there is something of the mechanically operating instincts, the creature is continually being led by the limitations of its frame unconsciously to contrive means for attaining its ends. We see the effect of this need in all the series of this type; in the nest-building fishes ; in the amphibians; in certain reptiles; extensively in the birds; but most abundantly in the mammals, where the struggle of the will with imperfect instruments culminates in the developed intelligence of man, —an intelligence which has been forced towards the human quality by the need of doing much with the pair of hands that alone serve the behests of the will. In a word, if man had been as amply provided with instruments suited to his needs as is the bee, there is reason to believe that the quality of his intelligence would have been no more rational than that of the insects. He has, indeed, won to his high estate because with a vigorous nervous system and corresponding will his ancestry denied him other than the most limited instruments for accomplishing his desires.

While the physical conditions which led to man have served in large part to lift his intellect above the plane of instinct and give it the quality of rationality, the quality that reckons and judges, the result has by no means been to extinguish the ancient instinctive motives. In effect, the rational groups of motives have been superadded to the more ancient unconscious or emotional kinds of mind, with the result that in the higher groups of mammals, and especially in the human genus, the impulses which blindly lead to action are about as strong though perhaps less definite than they are in the insects. They appear to be more varied than in any invertebrates, perhaps for the reason that they are all in some measure qualified by the higher intelligence. Thus we recognize in man all the motives we find exhibited in the bees; love of offspring, of the fellow-members of his society, the greed of acquisition, fear of enemies, rage, valor, in a word all of those motives that are manifested by social insects of the militant type. What other impulses apparently of the instinctive order we may discern in our genus can be accounted for by the codperation of the higher intelligence with the lower. Thus the motive of personal sympathy with the fellow of the species, which is found in some measure among very many of the birds and mammals and is especially characteristic of well-developed human beings, but which apparently does not exist among the insects or other invertebrates, is not in its nature primal but secondary; it grows out of the intellectual capacity to recognize the essential kinship with the brother, which makes it possible to picture his sufferings as our own.

We have come now to the purpose of this seeming digression concerning the origin of man’s intelligence: it is that we may see even in the baldest outlines how it has come about that in man we have a mingling of the ancient primal form of intelligence which acts without consciousness, and is blindly moved by the form of mental impulse we term instinctive, and the higher rational quality which appears to be limited to the vertebrates alone. Even those who are least skilled in the analysis of their motives can clearly see how these two groups of mental actions are combined in deeds. The inherited hatreds, sympathies, and affections which are the basis of human relations are of the ancient pre-human order, but the conduct of life which gives them efficiency is of the new, for it is guided by the constructive imagination, by the reason, and by knowledge acquired in the lifetime of the individual. It is the first object of education and the noblest result of civilizing culture to bring these two groups of mental parts into a fit codrdination so that they together make the enlarged humanized man. It is hardly too much to say that all the important errors of conduct, all the burdens of men or of societies are caused by the inadequacies in the association of the primal animal emotions with those mental powers which have been so rapidly developed in mankind.