Kinship and Kingdom, Primate Emotions and the Human Divide

“ As for the sterner emotions, rage may be so pronounced as to make a monkey exhaust itself with beating about its cage, or a baboon bite its own limbs till the blood flows. [275] Jealousy occurs in a correspondingly high degree, while retaliation and revenge are shown by all the higher monkeys when injury has been done to them, as any one may find by offering an insult to a baboon. The following is a good case of this, as it shows what may be called brooding resentment deliberately preparing a satisfactory revenge. ”

“ Passion, especially of love, causes much crime among animals as it does among men. Jealousy burns fiercely even in the breast of a beast. It is a common heritage of the fiercest lion and the gentle gazelle alike, and is capable of perpetrating the most dreadful crimes. ”

“ Most of the more complex emotions are common to the higher animals and ourselves. Every one has seen how jealous a dog is of his master’s affection, if lavished on any other creature; and I have observed the same fact with monkeys. This shews that animals not only love, but have desire to be loved. ”

“ To return to our immediate subject: the lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness and misery. Happiness is never better exhibited than by young animals, such as puppies, kittens, lambs, &c., when playing together, like our own children. ”

“ The mother monkey’s little one is the object of her constant care and affection. She nurses and bathes it, licks it and cleans its coat, and folds it in her arms and rocks it as if to lull it to sleep, just as human mammas do. She divides every bite with her little one, but does not hesitate to chastise it with slaps and pinches when it is rude. The monkey child is generally very obedient, obedient enough for an example to many a human youngster.
‘Very touching,’ says Brehm, from whom many of the foregoing facts are gleaned, ‘is the conduct of the mother when her baby is obviously suffering. ”

“ That this is so, we see most clearly when we consider the family life of the anthropoid or manlike apes—man's nearest cousins in the animal world. All of these apes, of which the chief representatives are the gorilla, orangutan, and the chimpanzee, live in relatively permanent family groups, usually monogamous. These family groups are quite human in many of their characteristics, such as the care which the male parent gives to the mother and her offspring, and the seeming affection which exists between all members of the group. ”

“ Soon after this young couple forsook their associates to found the human race, their Primates father became disconsolate—he was heartbroken. He refused to eat, even when food was brought to him by his other children. His brilliant offspring having been lost, life did not seem worth living among his ordinary fellows ”

“ It is abundantly evident, both from history and from present experience, that the instinctive shock, or natural feeling of disgust, caused by the sight of the sufferings of men is not generically different from that which is caused by the sight of the sufferings of animals. ”

“ I have endeavoured to show that no absolute structural line of demarcation, wider than that between the animals which immediately succeed us in the scale, can be drawn between the animal world and ourselves; and I may add the expression of my belief that the attempt to draw a physical distinction is equally futile, and that even the highest faculties of feeling and of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of life. ”

“ Nevertheless the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals. ”

“ We must be blinded by prejudice not to comprehend that these same general facts, revealed by the study of biology and animal psychology, are repeated in the human mind. Some animals are even superior to the majority of men in the intensity of their sentiments of sympathy and duty, as well as in love and conjugal fidelity—monkeys and parrots, for example. In the social insects, such as the ants and bees, with their communities so solidly organized and so finely coördinated on the basis of instinct, the sentiment of social duty has almost entirely replaced the individual sentiments of sympathy. ”

“ But if an action, the motive of which is nothing but affection or sympathy, may be deserving of moral approbation and really good, who that has ever had a dog of his own will deny that animals are capable of such actions? ”

“ Just as I never could decide that the old baboon was not a person, so I can't quite believe Aunt Peachy is one. She mumbles the strangest things while I am there and keeps looking at me with her eyes shining like a rat's. Her eyes are not a bit like a baboon's. All monkey people have sad, soft eyes. No matter how mischievous they are, they always have a kind of mournful expression as though they had been kind of cheated in not having souls. ”

“ But that you are yourselves capable of that disdain and dismay; that you are ashamed of having been apes, if you ever were so; that you acknowledge instinctively, a relation of better and worse, and a law respecting what is noble and base, which makes it no question to you that the man is worthier than the baboon—this is a fact of infinite significance. ”

“ They live their own life; the mother knows them no longer. As to the father, he has scarcely ever known them. Such are the domestic ties among animals: and, rude as they may be, one cannot help already recognizing and admiring in them the anticipated image of the family.
The family in the human species has the same origin and the same end as in the animal species, namely, the perpetuation of the species; but in the former it is exalted and ennobled by additional sentiments: it is consecrated and sanctioned by laws of duty and right to which animals are absolutely incapable of rising. ”

“ A second typical weakness of this race will come from their fears. They are not either self-sufficing or gallant enough to travel great roads without cringing,—clear-eyed, unafraid. They are finely made, but not nobly made,—in that sense. They will therefore have a too urgent need of religion. Few primates have the courage to face—alone—the still inner mysteries: Infinity, Space and Time. They will think it too terrible, they will feel it would turn them to water, to live through unearthly moments of vision without creeds or beliefs. ”

“ In reality, a disgust for the animal instinct has been trained for ages in hundreds of generations; it is inherited by me in my blood and forms part of my nature, and if I poetize love, is not that as natural and inevitable in our day as my ears' not being able to move and my not being covered with fur? ”

“ There is not, in my opinion, any thing more mysterious in nature than this instinct in animals, which thus rises above reason, and falls infinitely short of it. ”

“ but they would be forced to acknowledge that disinterested love for all living creatures, the most noble attribute of man, was quite beyond their comprehension. ”

“ It consists precisely in the progressive negation of the primitive animality of man by the development of his humanity. Man, a wild beast, cousin of the gorilla, has emerged from the profound darkness of animal instinct into the light of the mind, which explains in a wholly natural way all his past mistakes and partially consoles us for his present errors. He has gone out from animal slavery, and passing through divine slavery, a temporary condition between his animality and his humanity, he is now marching on to the conquest and realisation of human liberty. ”

“ One might even say that the skeleton gives us at a glance the characteristic psychological difference; the animal eats, man thinks; that is, the animal is destined only to vegetate, to feed itself; man is an entirely different species; he has a very different task before him; he is the creative being, who, through thought and labour, is destined to subjugate and transform the world.
There are still other characteristic differences between the animal and the human skull. ”

“ It would be easy to add a great number of other proofs of the all-sufficiency of the one leading characteristic of the human species—superior brain development—to account for all the important features that distinguish man from the lower animals, but those already mentioned will suffice.
The last question to be discussed is whether there is any generic distinction between human and animal association. Many animals are gregarious and some lead a truly social life. We all know how most domestic animals love to mingle with their kind. ”

“ We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. ”

“ No doubt this resentment is a survival from evolutionary ancestry. It has probably served a necessary purpose in the conservation of animal life by causing the animal to attack what may, in the jealousy of self-preservation and its feeble discrimination, even be suspected of being inimical to its welfare. Blind and unjust, perhaps, but Nature hesitates at no apparent injustice to accomplish this. When we go higher, to the tribal relation of man, we find the same blind resentment. ”

“ Humanity is only a habit. Against it, and tending ever to weaken and subvert it, are the powerful inertias of animalism. Like the ship in Ibsen’s ‘Rhymed Epistle,’ civilisation carries a corpse in its cargo—the elemental appetites and passions which have been implanted in all sentient nature by the laws in accordance with which organic forms have been fashioned. Moral progress is simply the sloughing off of this inherited animality.
To the initiated, therefore, it is not strange that we civilised folk in our conduct display so freely the phenomena of the savage. ”

“ Of course, the moral sense, as it occurs in ourselves, involves ideas of high abstraction, so that in animals we can only expect to meet with a moral sense in a very rudimentary form; and, therefore, even if it is true that no indications of such a sense are to be met with in animals, the fact would not establish any difference in kind between animal intelligence and human. But I am inclined to believe that in highly-intelligent, highly-sympathetic, and tolerably well-treated animals, the germs of a moral sense become apparent. ”

“ Hamerton, in his comments on this anecdote, "we always commit one of two mistakes—either we conclude that the beasts have great knowledge because they are so clever, or else we fancy that they must be stupid because they are so ignorant." "The main difficulty in conceiving the mental states of animals," says the same observer, "is that the moment we think of them as human, we are lost." Yes, but the pity of it is that we cannot think of them in any other terms than those of human consciousness. The only world of constructs that we know is the world constructed by man. ”

“ Since man is descended from less highly endowed animals, there must have been a time when the man-animal was in a state of animal ignorance. He started with no more than an ape is able to know. He had to learn everything for himself, as he had no one to teach him the tricks that apes and children can be taught by sophisticated human beings. He was necessarily self-taught, and began, as we have seen, in a state of ignorance beyond anything we can readily conceive. ”

“ Our physical bodies are very similar to theirs except that ours are almost always much inferior. Merely because we have a superior intellect which enables us to rule and enslave the animals, shall we deny them all intellect and all feeling? In the words of that remarkable naturalist, William J. Long, "To call a thing intelligence in one creature and reflex action in another, or to speak of the same thing as love or kindness in one and blind impulse in the other, is to be blinder ourselves than the impulse which is supposed to govern animals. ”