The Evolution of Man, V.2, Ernst Haeckel [free ebook reader for pc txt] 📗

see if we cannot meet this grave stricture from the well-known facts of comparative anatomy, physiology, and embryology. It will be best to begin with a comparative study of the souls of various groups of Vertebrates. Here we find such an enormous variety of vertebrate souls that, at first sight, it seems quite impossible to trace them all to a common "Primitive Vertebrate." Think of the tiny Amphioxus, with no real brain but a simple medullary tube, and its whole psychic life at the very lowest stage among the Vertebrates. The following group of the Cyclostomes are still very limited, though they have a brain. When we pass on to the fishes, we find their intelligence remaining at a very low level. We do not see any material advance in mental development until we go on to the Amphibia and Reptiles. There is still greater advance when we come to the Mammals, though even here the minds of the Monotremes and of the stupid Marsupials remain at a low stage. But when we rise from these to the Placentals we find within this one vast group such a number of important stages of differentiation and progress that the psychic differences between the least intelligent (such as the sloths and armadillos) and the most intelligent Placentals (such as the dogs and apes) are much greater than the psychic differences between the lowest Placentals and the Marsupials or Monotremes. Most certainly the differences are far greater than the differences in mental power between the dog, the ape, and man. Yet all these animals are genetically-related members of a single natural class.

We see this to a still more astonishing extent in the comparative psychology of another class of animals, that is especially interesting for many reasons--the insect class. It is well known that we find in many insects a degree of intelligence that is found in man alone among the Vertebrates. Everybody knows of the famous communities and states of bees and ants, and of the very remarkable social arrangements in them, such as we find among the more advanced races of men, but among no other group of animals. I need only mention the social organisation and government of the monarchic bees and the republican ants, and their division into different conditions--queen, drone-nobles, workers, educators, soldiers, etc. One of the most remarkable phenomena in this very interesting province is the cattle-keeping of the ants, which rear plant-lice as milch-cows and regularly extract their honeyed juice. Still more remarkable is the slave-holding of the large red ants, which steal the young of the small black ants and bring them up as slaves. It has long been known that these political and social arrangements of the ants are due to the deliberate cooperation of the countless citizens, and that they understand each other. A number of recent observers, especially Fritz Muller, Sir J. Lubbock (Lord Avebury), and August Forel, have put the astonishing degree of intelligence of these tiny Articulates beyond question.

Now, compare with these the mental life of many of the lower, especially the parasitic insects, as Darwin did. There is, for instance, the cochineal insect (Coccus), which, in its adult state, has a motionless, shield-shaped body, attached to the leaves of plants. Its feet are atrophied. Its snout is sunk in the tissue of the plants of which it absorbs the sap. The whole psychic life of these inert female parasites consists in the pleasure they experience from sucking the sap of the plant and in sexual intercourse with the males. It is the same with the maggot-like females of the fan-fly (Strepsitera), which spend their lives parasitically and immovably, without wings or feet, in the abdomen of wasps. There is no question here of higher psychic action. If we compare these sluggish parasites with the intelligent and active ants, we must admit that the psychic differences between them are much greater than the psychic differences between the lowest and highest mammals, between the Monotremes, Marsupials, and armadillos on the one hand, and the dog, ape, or man on the other. Yet all these insects belong to the same class of Articulates, just as all the mammals belong to one and the same class. And just as every consistent evolutionist must admit a common stem-form for all these insects, so he must also for all the mammals.

If we now turn from the comparative study of psychic life in different animals to the question of the organs of this function, we receive the answer that in all the higher animals they are always bound up with certain groups of cells, the ganglionic cells or neurona that compose the nervous system. All scientists without exception are agreed that the central nervous system is the organ of psychic life in the animal, and it is possible to prove this experimentally at any moment. When we partially or wholly destroy the central nervous system, we extinguish in the same proportion, partially or wholly, the "soul" or psychic activity of the animal. We have, therefore, to examine the features of the psychic organ in man. The reader already knows the incontestable answer to this question. Man's psychic organ is, in structure and origin, just the same organ as in all the other Vertebrates. It originates in the shape of a simple medullary tube from the outer membrane of the embryo--the skin-sense layer. The simple cerebral vesicle that is formed by the expansion of the head-part of this medullary tube divides by transverse constrictions into five, and these pass through more or less the same stages of construction in the human embryo as in the rest of the mammals. As these are undoubtedly of a common origin, their brain and spinal cord must also have a common origin.

Physiology teaches us further, on the ground of observation and experiment, that the relation of the "soul" to its organ, the brain and spinal cord, is just the same in man as in the other mammals. The one cannot act at all without the other; it is just as much bound up with it as muscular movement is with the muscles. It can only develop in connection with it. If we are evolutionists at all, and grant the causal connection of ontogenesis and phylogenesis, we are forced to admit this thesis: The human soul or psyche, as a function of the medullary tube, has developed along with it; and just as brain and spinal cord now develop from the simple medullary tube in every human individual, so the human mind or the psychic life of the whole human race has been gradually evolved from the lower vertebrate soul. Just as to-day the intricate structure of the brain proceeds step by step from the same rudiment in every human individual--the same five cerebral vesicles--as in all the other Craniotes; so the human soul has been gradually developed in the course of millions of years from a long series of craniote-souls. Finally, just as to-day in every human embryo the various parts of the brain differentiate after the special type of the ape-brain, so the human psyche has proceeded historically from the ape-soul.

It is true that this Monistic conception is rejected with horror by most men, and the Dualistic idea, which denies the inseparable connection of brain and mind, and regards body and soul as two totally different things, is still popular. But how can we reconcile this view with the known facts of evolution? It meets with difficulties equally great and insuperable in embryology and in phylogeny. If we suppose with the majority of men that the soul is an independent entity, which has nothing to do with the body originally, but merely inhabits it for a time, and gives expression to its experiences through the brain just as the pianist does through his instrument, we must assign a point in human embryology at which the soul enters into the brain; and at death again we must assign a moment at which it abandons the body. As, further, each human individual has inherited certain personal features from each parent, we must suppose that in the act of conception pieces were detached from their souls and transferred to the embryo. A piece of the paternal soul goes with-the spermatozoon, and a piece of the mother's soul remains in the ovum. At the moment of conception, when portions of the two nuclei of the copulating cells join together to form the nucleus of the stem-cell, the accompanying fragments of the immaterial souls must also be supposed to coalesce.

On this Dualistic view the phenomena of psychic development are totally incomprehensible. Everybody knows that the new-born child has no consciousness, no knowledge of itself and the surrounding world. Every parent who has impartially followed the mental development of his children will find it impossible to deny that it is a case of biological evolutionary processes. Just as all other functions of the body develop in connection with their organs, so the soul does in connection with the brain. This gradual unfolding of the soul of the child is, in fact, so wonderful and glorious a phenomenon that every mother or father who has eyes to observe is never tired of contemplating it. It is only our manuals of psychology that know nothing of this development; we are almost tempted to think sometimes that their authors can never have had children themselves. The human soul, as described in most of our psychological works, is merely the soul of a learned philosopher, who has read a good many books, but knows nothing of evolution, and never even reflects that his own soul has had a development.

When these Dualistic philosophers are consistent they must assign a moment in the phylogeny of the human soul at which it was first "introduced" into man's vertebrate body. Hence, at the time when the human body was evolved from the anthropoid body of the ape (probably in the Tertiary period), a specific human psychic element--or, as people love to say, "a spark of divinity"--must have been suddenly infused or breathed into the anthropoid brain, and been associated with the ape-soul already present in it. I need not insist on the enormous theoretical difficulties of this idea. I will only point out that this "spark of divinity," which is supposed to distinguish the soul of man from that of the other animals, must be itself capable of development, and has, as a matter of fact, progressively developed in the course of human history. As a rule, reason is taken to be this "spark of divinity," and is supposed to be an exclusive possession of humanity. But comparative psychology shows us that it is quite impossible to set up this barrier between man and the brute. Either we take the word "reason" in the wider sense, and then it is found in the higher mammals (ape, dog, elephant, horse) just as well as in most men; or else in the narrower sense, and then it is lacking in most men just as much as in the majority of animals. On the whole, we may still say of man's reason what Goethe's Mephistopheles said:--

Life somewhat better might content him But for the gleam of heavenly light that Thou hast given him. He calls it reason; thence his power's increased To be still beastlier than any beast.

If, then, we must reject these popular and, in some respects, agreeable Dualistic theories as untenable, because inconsistent with the genetic facts, there remains only the opposite or Monistic conception, according to which the human soul is, like any other animal soul, a function of the central nervous system, and develops in inseparable connection therewith. We see this ontogenetically in every child. The biogenetic law compels us to affirm it phylogenetically. Just as in every human embryo the skin-sense layer gives rise to the medullary tube, from the anterior end of which the five cerebral vesicles of the Craniotes are developed, and from these the mammal brain (first with the characters