The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour Part 4

And first of all a confession. It has been pointed out to me that in one place I did my Horseherd an injustice. I wrote: "You are of opinion that to love G.o.d and your neighbour is equivalent to being good, and are evidently very proud of your discovery that there is no distinction between good and evil. Well," I then continue, "if loving G.o.d and your neighbour is equivalent to being good, then it follows that not loving G.o.d and not loving your neighbour is equivalent to not being good, or to being evil. There is, then, a very plain distinction between good and evil. And yet you say that you turned a somersault when you discovered that there was no such distinction."

Well, that looked as though I had driven my friend into a corner from which he would find it difficult to extricate himself. But I did him an injustice and shall therefore do everything in my power to right it. My memory, as it so frequently does, played me a prank. At the same time that I answered him, I was in active correspondence with one of the delegates to the Chicago Parliament of Religions, at which the love of G.o.d and one's neighbour had been adopted, as a sort of article of agreement which the followers of any or every faith could accept. Thus it befell that I supposed the Horseherd in America to stand at the same point of view, and consequently to be guilty of a contradiction. Such is, however, not the case; he made no such concession of love of G.o.d and one's neighbour in his letter. If he therefore insists that there is no distinction between good and evil, I cannot at least refute him out of his own mouth. The only place where he is inconsistent is where he concedes that he could not strike a dog, but is filled with bloodthirstiness toward the Jewish idea of G.o.d. Here he clearly holds it good that he cannot be cruel to an animal, and that he looks upon bloodthirstiness as a contrast. He also concedes that a lie can never accomplish any good, and believes that the truth is beautiful and holy. If a lie can accomplish no good, only evil, then there must be a distinction between good and evil. And what is the meaning of beautiful and holy, if there is no contrast between good and evil. But I shall argue this point no farther, but simply say _peccavi_, and I believe that he, and those like-minded with him, will be satisfied with that. How different it would have been, however, had I been guilty of such a mistake in a personal dispute! The injured party would never have believed that my oversight was accidental, and not malicious, in spite of the fact that it would have been the most stupid malevolence to say that which every one who can read would instantly recognise as untrue. But enough of this, and enough to show that my Horseherd at least remained consistent. Even when he so far forgets himself as to say, "G.o.d be praised," he excuses himself. Only he has unfortunately not told us what he really means when he says that good and evil are identical. Good and evil are relative ideas, just like right and left, black and white, and although he has told us that he turned somersaults with joy over the discovery that this distinction is false, he has left us in total darkness as to how we shall conceive this ident.i.ty.

But let us turn back to more important things. My opponents further call me sharply to account, and ask how I can imagine that the material world can be rational, or permeated with reason. I believed that it must be clear to every person with a philosophical training, that there are things that are beyond our understanding, that man can neither sensibly apprehend nor logically conceive an actual beginning, and that to inquire for the beginning of the subjective self, or of the objective world, is like inquiring for the beginning of the beginning. All that we can do is to investigate our perceptions, to see what they presuppose. A perception plainly presupposes a self that perceives, or that resists, and on the other side, something that forces itself upon us, or, as Kant says, something that is given. This "given" element might be mere confusion, but it is not; it displays order, cause and effect, and reveals itself as rational. This revelation of a rational world may, however, be explained in two ways. That there is reason in nature, even the majority of Darwinians admit, but they think that it arises of itself, since in the struggle for life that which is most adapted to its conditions, fittest, best, necessarily survives. In this view of the world, however, if I see it aright, much is admitted surrept.i.tiously. Whence comes all at once this idea of the best, of the good, the fit, the adapted, in the world? Do roasted pigeons fall from the sky? Is the pigeon itself an accidental combination, an evolution, that might as well have been as it is, or otherwise? It is all very fine to recognise in the ascending series of protozoa, clenterata, echinoderms, worms, mollusks, fishes, amphibia, reptiles, the stages of progress toward birds and finally to mammals and man. But whence comes the idea of bird or pigeon? Is it no more than an abstraction from our perceptions of thousands of birds or pigeons, or must the idea of bird, of pigeon, even of the wood pigeon, be there already, that we may detect it behind the multiplicity of our perceptions?

Is the pigeon, in whose wing each feather is counted, a mere accident, a mere survival which might have been what it is or something different, or is it something willed and thought, an organic whole? It is the old question whether the idea preceded or followed the reality, on which the whole Middle Ages broke their teeth, the question which separated and still separates philosophers into two camps,-the Realists and the Nominalists. I think that the latest investigations show us that the Greek philosophers, and especially Plato, saw more correctly when they recognised behind the multiplicity of individuals the unity of the idea, or the species, and then sought the true sequence of evolution not in this world, in a struggle for existence, but beyond the perception of the senses, in a development of the Logos or the idea. The circ.u.mstances, it appears to me, in this view remain just the same; the sequence, and the purposiveness in this sequence, remain untouched, only that the Greeks saw in the rational and purposive in nature the realisation of rational progressive thoughts, not the b.l.o.o.d.y survivals of a monstrous gladiatorial combat in nature. The Darwinians appear to me to resemble the Roman emperors, who waited till the combat was ended, and then applauded the survival of the fittest. The idealist philosophy, be it Plato's or Hegel's, recognises in what actually is, the rational, the realisation of eternal, rational ideas. This realisation, or the process of what we call creation, can never be conceived by us otherwise than figuratively. But we can make this figurative presentation clearer and clearer. That the world was made by a wood cutter, as was originally implied in the Hebrew word _bara_, and in the German _schoepfer_, _schaffer_, in the English _shaper_, or in the Vedic _tvashta_, and the Greek t??t??, was quite comprehensible at a time in which man's highest product was that of the carpenter and the stone mason; and in which the name of timber (_materies_) could become the universal name for matter (???, wood). After this idea of the founder of the universe as a carpenter or builder was abandoned as inadequate, the world was divided into two parties. The one adopted the theory of material primitive elements, whether they be called atoms, or monads, or cells, which by collision or struggle with each other, and by mutual affinity, became that which we now see around us. The other saw the impossibility of the rise of something rational out of the irrational, and conceived a rational being, in which was developed the original type of everything produced, the so-called Logos of the universe.

How this Logos became objectively and materially real, is as far beyond human comprehension as is the origin of the cosmos out of countless atoms, or even out of living cells. So far, then, one hypothesis would be as complete and as incomplete as the other. But the Logos hypothesis has the far-reaching advantage, that instead of a long succession of wonders,-call them if you like the wonder of the monads, or the worm, or the mollusk, or the fish, or the amphibian, or the reptile, or the bird, or, lastly, man,-it has but one wonder before it, the Logos, the idea of thought, or of the eternal thinker, who thought everything that exists in natural sequence, and in this sense made all. In this view we need not even abandon the survival of the fittest, only it proceeds in the Logos, in the mind, not in the outward phenomenal world. It would then also become conceivable that the embryological development of animated nature runs parallel with the biological or historical, or as it were recapitulates it, only the continuity of the idea is far closer and more intimate than that of the reality. Thus, for instance, in the development of the human embryo, the transition from the invertebrate to the vertebrate may be represented in the reality by the isolated amphioxus, which remains stationary where vertebrate man begins, and can make no step forward, while the human embryo advances farther and farther till it reaches its highest limit.

In order now to infer from these and similar facts that man at one time really existed in this scarcely vertebrate condition of the amphioxus,-a conclusion which, strictly understood, yields no meaning,-we can make the case much more easily conceivable if we represent the thinking, or invention of the world, as an ascending scale, in which even the least chromatic tone must have a place without a break, while the princ.i.p.al tones do not become clear and full until the requisite number of vibrations is attained. These gradations of tone are the really interesting thing in nature. As the full, clear tones imply certain numerical relations among the vibrations, so the successive stages or the true species in nature imply a will or thought in which the true _Origin of Species_ has its foundation. That natural selection, as it is called, could suffice to explain the origin of species, was doubted even by Huxley,(38) who yet described himself as Darwin's bull-dog.

If we have followed the supporters of my Horseherd so far, I should like here to enter a caveat, that is indeed of no great significance, but may turn one or another from a by-way, which the Horseherd himself has not avoided. He speaks of the place of man in nature; he thinks (like so many others) that man is not only an animal belonging to the mammalia, which no one has ever denied, but that he is of the same nature as the animal world. He need not therefore have accepted the whole simian theory, at least he does not say so; but that each man, and the entire human race, has descended from an unknown pair of animals, he appears to receive as indubitable. This would not, so far as I can see, make the slightest difference in the so-called dignity of mankind. If man had a prehensile tail, it would not detract from his worth. I myself have little doubt that there were men with tails in prehistoric or even in historic times. I go still farther and declare that if ever there should be an ape who can form ideas and words, he would _ipso facto_ be a man. I have therefore no prejudices such as the advocates of the simian theory like to attribute to us. What I and those who agree with me demand of our opponents, is merely somewhat keener thought, and a certain consideration for the results of our knowledge, such as we on our side have bestowed on their researches.

They have taught us that the body in which we live was at first a simple cell. The significance of this "at first" is left somewhat vague. This cell was really what the word means, the _cella_ (room) of a dumb inhabitant, the Self. The essential thing is and remains what was in the cell. Through gemmation, differentiation, segmentation, evolution, or whatever other technical expressions we may use for division, multiplication, budding, increase, etc., each cell became a hundred, a thousand, a million. Within this cell is a bright spot into which not even the microscope can penetrate, although whole worlds may be contained therein. If it is now remembered that no one has ever succeeded in distinguis.h.i.+ng the human cell from the cell of a horse, an elephant, or an ape, we shall see how much unnecessary indignation has been expended in recent years over the simian origin of the human race, and how much intelligent thought has been wasted about the animal origin of man, that is of the individual. My body, your body, his body, is derived (ontogenetically) from the cell, is in fact the cell which has remained persistently the same from beginning to end, without ever, in spite of all changes, losing its ident.i.ty. This cell in its transformations has shown remarkable a.n.a.logies with the transformations of other animal cells.

While, however, the other animal cells in their transformations remain stationary here and there, either at the boundary line of worms, fishes, amphibia, reptiles, or mammals, the one cell which was destined to become man moves on to the stage of the tailed catarrhine apes, then of the tailless apes, and without staying here it irresistibly strides towards its original goal, and only stops where it is destined to stop. Speaking, however, not phylogenetically, but ontogenetically, at what point does our own cell come in contact with the cell that was intended to become an ape, and that became and remained an ape? If we accept the cell theory in its latest form, what meaning can there be in the statement of the late Henry Drummond, that "In a very distant period the progenitors of birds and the progenitors of men were one and the same"?(39) Would not a very small quant.i.ty of strictly logical thought have cut off _a priori_ the bold hypothesis that directly or indirectly we descend from a menagerie? Every man, and consequently all mankind, has accomplished his uninterrupted embryological development on his own account; no man and no human cell springs from the womb of an ape or any other animal, but only from the womb of a human mother, fertilised by a human father. Or do men owe their being to a miscarriage?

As many streams may flow alongside of each other and through the same strata, and one ends in a lake while the others flow on and grow larger and larger, till finally one river attains its highest goal, the sea, so the cells develop for a time alongside of each other, then some remain stationary at their points of destination, while others move on farther; but the cell that has moved forward is as little derived from the stationary cell as the Indus from the Sarasvati. It is at the points of destination that the true species digress, and when these points are reached, the specific development ceases, and there remains only the possibility of the variety, the origin of which is conditioned by the multiplicity of individuals; but which must never be confounded with a true species. Every species represents an act of the will, a thought, and this thought cannot be shaken from its course, however close temptation may often come.

With this I believe I have cleared up and refuted one of the objections that my correspondents made, at any rate to the best of my ability.

Whoever is convinced that each individual, be it fish or bird, springs from its own cell, knows _ipso facto_ that a human cell, however undistinguishable it may be to the human eye from the cell of a catarrhine ape, could never have been the cell of an ape. And what is true ontogenetically, is of course true phylogenetically. For myself this inquiry into the simian origin of man never had any great interest; I even doubt whether the Horseherd would have laid great stress upon it. His champions, however, plainly consider it one of the princ.i.p.al and fundamental questions on which our whole view of the world must be erected. In my opinion so little depends on our covering of flesh, that as I have often said, I should instantly acknowledge an ape that could speak, that is, think in concepts, as a man and brother, in spite of his hide, in spite of his tail, in spite of his stunted brain. We are not that which is buried or burned. We are not even the cell, but the inhabitant of the cell. But this leads me to new questions and objections, which have been made by the representatives and successors of the Horseherd, and to which I hope to reply on some other occasion, a.s.suming that my own somewhat dilapidated cell holds out so long against wind and rain.

F. MAX MuLLER.

FRASCATI, April, 1897.

CHAPTER IV.

Language And Mind

The number of Horseherds appears to grow each month. He would rejoice to see the letters of men and women who are all on his side, and give me clearly to understand that I should by no means imagine that I have refuted my unknown friend. The letter of Ignotus Agnosticus in the June number of the _Deutsche Rundschau_ is a good example of these communications. I have read it with much interest, and have partly dealt with it in my article in the same number; but I hope at some future time to answer his objections, and those of several other correspondents, more fully. I should have been glad to publish some of these letters. But first, they are too long, and they are far inferior in power to the letter of the Horseherd. Moreover, they are usually so full of friendly recognition, even when disagreeing with me, that it would ill become me to give them publicity. That there was no lack of coa.r.s.e letters as well, may be taken for granted; these however were all anonymous, as if the writers were ashamed of their heroic style. I have never been able to understand what attraction there can be in coa.r.s.eness. The coa.r.s.e work is generally left for the apprentice. Everything coa.r.s.e, be it a block, a wedge, or a blade, pa.s.ses as unfinished, as raw, jagged, and just the reverse of cutting. No one is proud of a coa.r.s.e s.h.i.+rt, but many, even quite distinguished people, proudly strut about the streets in a coa.r.s.e smock of abusive language, quite unconcernedly, without any suspicion of their unsuitable attire.

Well, I shall endeavour to be as fair as I can to my unknown opponents and friends, the coa.r.s.e as well as the courteous. I cannot be coa.r.s.e myself, much as it seems to be desired in some quarters that I should. Each one must determine for himself what is specially meant for him.

I cannot of course enter into all the objections that have been made. Many have very little or nothing to do with what lay nearest the Horseherd's heart. The antinomies, for example, on the infinity of s.p.a.ce and time, have long since belonged to the history of metaphysics, and have been so thoroughly worked out by Kant and his school that there is hardly anything new to be said about them. In the question about the age of our world, we need only distinguish between world as universe and world as our world, that is, as the earth or the terrestrial world. A beginning of the world as universe is of course incomprehensible to us; but we may speak of the beginning of the earth, especially of the earth as inhabited by man, because here, as Lord Kelvin has shown, astronomical physics and geology have enabled us to fix certain chronological limits, and to say how old our earth may be, and no older or younger. When I said of the world, that though it were millions of years old, there still was a time before it was one year or 1897 years old, I referred to the world in the sense of our world, that is, the earth. Of the world as universe this would scarcely be said; on the contrary, we should here apply the axiom that every boundary implies something beyond, _i.e._ an unbounded, until we arrive at the region where, as people say, the world is nailed up with boards. Many years ago I tried to prove that our senses can never perceive a real boundary, be it on the largest or the smallest scale; they present to us everywhere the infinite as their background, and everything that has to do with religion has sprung out of this infinite background as its ultimate and deepest foundation. Instead of saying that by our senses we perceive only the finite or limited, I have sought to show (_On the Perception of the Infinite_) that we everywhere perceive the unlimited, and that it is we, and not the objects about us, that draw the boundary lines in our perceptions. When I also called this unknown omnipresence of the infinite the source of all religion, this was the highest, the most abstract, and the most general expression that could be found for the wide domain of the transcendent; it had of course nothing to do with the historical beginnings of religion. When the Aryans felt, thought, and named their G.o.d, their Dyaus, in the blue sky, they meant the blue sky within the limits of the horizon. We know, however, that while they called the sky Dyaus, they had in mind an infinite subject, a Deva, a G.o.d. But, as stated, these things were remote from the Horseherd, and he would scarcely have had anything to object.

His chief objection was of a quite different nature. He wished to show that the human mind was a mere phantom of man's making, that there are only bodies in the world, and that the mind has sprung from the body, and therefore const.i.tuted, not the _prius_, but the _posterius_ of those bodies. This view is evidently widely disseminated and has found very abundant support, at least in the letters addressed to me. "The mind," so wrote the Horseherd, "is not a _prius_, it is a development, a self-evolving phenomenon." Everything is now development, and there is no better salve for all ills than development. If our knowledge of development is taken in the sense of scientific historical inquiry, then we all agree, for how can there be anything that has not developed? In order to know what a thing is, we must learn how it became what it is. A much-admired philosopher, recently deceased, Henry Drummond, who was quite intoxicated with evolution, nevertheless admits quite plainly in his last work, _The Ascent of Man_, that "Order of events is history, and evolution is history" (p. 132). With this I am of course quite satisfied, for it is what I have been preaching in season and out of season for at least thirty years. But this order, or this sequence of facts, must be proved with scientific accuracy, and not merely postulated. If then my Horseherd had been content to say, "The human mind is also a development," certainly no student of history, least of all a philologist, would have contradicted him. But he says: "Max, all German savants, or, if you please, the majority of them, still labour under the delusion that mind is a _prius_.

But nonsense, Max, mind is a development, a self-evolving phenomenon. One would consider it impossible that a thinking man, who has ever observed a child, could be of any other opinion; why seek ghosts behind matter? Mind is a function of living organisms, which belongs also to a goose and a chicken."

In the Horseherd such language was excusable, but for philosophers to talk in the same style is strange, to say the least. How can such an a.s.sertion be made without any proof whatever, without even a few words to explain what is meant by the term "mind"? The German like the English language swarms with words that may be used interchangeably, though each of them has its own shade of meaning. If we translate Geist (Spirit) as mind, then we must consider that "spirit," in such expressions as "He has yielded up his spirit," means the same as the principle of life or physical life. The same is true of "spirit" in such a phrase as "his spirit has departed."

But easy as it is to distinguish between spirit in the sense of the breath of life, and spirit in the sense of mind, the exact definition of such words as intellect, reason, understanding, thought, consciousness, or self-consciousness becomes very difficult, to say nothing of soul and feeling in their various activities. These words are used in both English and German so confusedly that we often hesitate merely to touch them. Now if we say that the mind is a development, and is not a _prius_, what idea ought it to suggest? Does this mean the principle of life, or the understanding, or the reason, or consciousness? We suffer here from a real and very dangerous _embarras de richesse_. The words are often intended to signify the same things, only viewed under different aspects. But as there were various words, it was believed that they must also signify various things. Different philosophers have further advanced different definitions of these words, until it was finally supposed that each of these names must be borne by a separate subject, while some of them originally only signified activities of one and the same substance. Understanding, reason, and thought originally expressed properties or activities, the activities of understanding, of perceiving, of thinking, and their elevation to nouns was simply psychological mythology, which has prevailed, and still prevails just as extensively as the physical mythology of the ancient Aryan peoples.

It would be most useful if we could lay aside all these mouldy and decayed expressions, and introduce a word that simply means what is not understood by body, the subject, in opposition to the objective world. It would by no means follow that what is not body must therefore exist independent of the body. It would first of all only declare that beside the objective body perceived by the senses, there is also something subjective, which the five senses cannot perceive. The best name for this appears to me still to be the Vedantic term _atman_, which I translate into "the Self" (neuter), because our language will scarcely allow the phrase "the Self"

(masculine). "Soul" has a too tender quality to be the equivalent of _atman_.

This Self is something that exists for itself and not for others. While everything that is purely corporeal only exists for us men, inasmuch as it is perceived, the Self exists by reason of the fact that it perceives.

While the _Esse_ of all objects is a percipi, a something perceived, which has come into knowledge, the _Esse_ of the self is a _percipere_, a perceiving, a knowing, that is, the Self can only be thought of as self-knowing. The Self exists even when it does not yet clearly know itself, but it is not the real Self until it knows itself; and it requires long and earnest thought for the Self to know or recognise itself as different from the ego or the body. But if the Self has once come to itself, the darkness or the phenomenal appearance which the Vedanta philosophers called _Avidya_ (not knowing, ignorance), or also _Maya_ (appearance, or illusion), vanishes.

The origin of this ignorance, this illusion, or the world of appearance, is a question which no human being will ever solve. There are questions which must be set aside as simply _ultra vires_ by every reasonable philosophy. We know that we cannot hear certain tones, cannot see certain colours; why not then understand that we cannot comprehend certain things?

The Vedanta philosophers consider the _Avidya_ (ignorance) as inexplicable, and this was no doubt originally implied in the name which they gave it. Their aim was, to prove the temporal existence of such an _Avidya_, not to discover its origin; and then in the _Vidya_, the Vedanta philosophy, to set forth the means by which the Avidya could be destroyed.

How or when the Self came into this ignorance, _Avidya_, or _Maya_ (illusion, or the phenomenal world), the Vedanta philosophers no more sought to explain than we seek to explain how the Self comes into the body, the bodily senses, and the phenomenal world which they perceive. We begin our philosophy with what is given us, that is, with a Self, that in its embodiment knows everything that befalls the body; that for a time is blended with the body, till it attains a true self-knowledge, and then, even in life, or later in death, by liberation from its phenomenal existence, or from the body, again comes to itself.

How this body, with its senses that convey and present to us the phenomenal world, originated or developed, is a question that belongs to biology. So far as is possible to the human understanding, this question has been solved by the cell theory. The other question is the development of what we call mind, that is, the subjective knowledge of the phenomenal world. To this the body, as it exists and lives, and the organs of sense, as they exist, are essential. We know that all sense-perceptions depend upon bodily vibrations, _i.e._ the nerves; and if we wish to make plain the transition of impressions to conscious ideas, we can best do so through the a.s.sumption of the Self as a witness or accessory to the nerve-vibrations. This, however, is only an image, not an explanation, for an explanation belongs to the Utopia of philosophy. How it happens that atoms think, atomists do not know, and no one should imagine that so-called Darwinism has helped or can help us even one step farther.

Whatever some Darwinians may say, nothing can be simpler than the frank admission of ignorance on this point on the part of Darwin. The frank and modest expressions of this great but sober thinker are generally pa.s.sed over in silence, or are even controverted as signs of a temporary weakness. To me, on the contrary, they are very valuable, and very characteristic of Darwin.

In one place(40) he says, "I have nothing to do with the origin of the primary mental power any more than I have with that of life itself." In another place(41) he speaks still more plainly and says, "In what manner the mental powers were first developed in the lowest organisms is as hopeless an inquiry as how life first originated." Let no one suppose, therefore, that all gates and doors can be opened with the word "evolution" or the name Darwin. It is easy to say with Drummond, "Evolution is revolutionising the world of nature and of thought, and within living memory has opened up avenues into the past and vistas into the future such as science has never witnessed before."(42) Those are bold words, but what do they mean or prove? DuBois-Reymond has said long before, "How consciousness can arise from the co-operation of atoms is beyond our comprehension." In the _Contemporary Review_, November, 1871,(43) Huxley speaks just as decidedly as Darwin in the name of biology, "I really know nothing whatever, and never hope to know anything, of the steps by which the pa.s.sage from molecular movement to states of consciousness is effected." Molecules and atoms are objects of knowledge.

If we ascribe knowledge to them, they immediately become the monads of Leibnitz; you may evolve out of them what you have first involved into them. Knowledge belongs to the Self alone, call it what we will. The nerve-fibres might vibrate as often as they pleased, millions and millions of times in a second; they would never produce the sensation of red if there were no Self as the receiver and illuminator, the translator of these vibrations of ether; this Self, that alone receives, alone illumines, alone knows, and of which we can say nothing more than what the Indian philosophers call _sak-kid-ananda_, that it exists, that it perceives, and as they add, that it is blessed, _i.e._ that it is complete in itself, serene and eternal.

If we take a firm stand on this living and perceiving Self (for _kid_ is not so much thinking as perceiving, or knowing), there can then be no question that it is present not only in men, but in animals as well; only let us beware of the inference that what we mean by human mind, that is, understanding and reasoning thought, is a necessary function of all living organisms, and is possessed also by a goose or a chicken. It is just the same with the perceiving Self as it is with the cell. To the eye they are all alike. To express it figuratively, one cell has a ticket to Cologne, another to Paris, a third to London. Each reaches its destination, and then remains stationary, and no power on earth can make it advance beyond the place to which it is ticketed, that is, its original destination, its fundamental eternal idea. It is just the same with the perceiving Self. It is true that the Self sees, hears, and thinks. As there are animals that cannot see, that cannot hear, so there are animals-and this cla.s.s includes the whole of them-that cannot speak. It is true that the speaking animals, that is men, have pa.s.sed the former stations on a fast train; but they did not leave the train, nor have they anything in common with those who remained behind at previous stations, least of all can we consider them as the offspring of those that remained behind. This is only a simile, and should not provoke ridicule. Of course it will be said that those who can journey to Cologne may go on to Paris, and once in Paris may easily cross the Channel. We must not ride a comparison to death, but always adhere to the facts. Why does not gra.s.s grow as high as a poplar, why is care taken, as Goethe says, that no tree grows up to the sky? A strawberry might grow as large as a cuc.u.mber or a pumpkin, but it does not. Who draws the line?

It is true, too, that along every line slight deviations take place right and left. Nearly each year we hear of an abnormally large strawberry, and no doubt abnormally small ones could be found as well. But in spite of all, the normal remains. And whence comes it, if not from the same hand or the same source which we compared with the ticket agent at the railway station, in whom all who are familiar with the history of philosophy will again readily recognise the Greek Logos?

These comparisons should at least be so far useful as to disclose the confusion of thought, when, for instance, Mr. Romanes holds that it is not only comprehensible, but the conclusion is unavoidable, that the human mind has sprung from the minds of the higher quadrumana on the line of natural genesis. The human mind may mean every possible thing; the question therefore arises if he refers only to consciousness, or to understanding and reason. In the second place the human mind is not something subsisting by itself, but can only be the mind of an individual man. We cannot be too careful in these discussions-otherwise we only end by subst.i.tuting bare abstractions for concrete things. We do not know the human mind as anything concrete at all, only as an abstraction, and in that case only as the mind of one man, or of many men. How can it then be thought that my mind or the mind of Darwin sprang from the minds of the higher quadrumana. We may say such things, but what meaning can we attach to them? The same misconception exists here, if I am not mistaken, as in the statement, that the human body springs from the bodies of the higher quadrupeds-a misconception to which we have already referred. That has absolutely no sense if we only hold firmly, that every organised body was originally a cell, or originates in a cell, and that each cell, even in its most complicated, manifold, and perfect form, always is, and remains, an individual. It is useless therefore to talk of a descent of the human mind from the minds of the higher quadrupeds, for no intelligible meaning can be discovered in it; we should have to fall back on a miscarriage, and to set up this miscarriage as the mother of all men, and without a legitimate father. Such are the wanderings of a wrong method of thought, even if it struts about in kingly robes.

Above all things we must settle what we are really to understand by the mind of the higher quadrupeds as distinguished from the human mind. What is there lacking in these animal minds to make them human? And what do they possess, or what are they, that they should claim equal birth with man? How much obscurity there is in these matters among the best animal psychologists is seen when, for instance, we compare the a.s.sertions of Romanes with those of Lloyd Morgan. While the former sets up a natural genesis of the human mind from animal mind as being indisputable and as not being thinkable in any other way, the latter, his greatest admirer, says, "Believing, as I do, that conception is beyond the power of my favourite and clever dog, I am forced to believe that his mind differs generically from my own."(44) Undoubtedly by "generically" is meant, according to his genus or his genesis. But in spite of this, the same savant says in another place, that he cannot allow that there is a difference _in kind_, that is _in genere_, between the human mind and the mind of a dog. If men would only define their words, such contradictions would in time become impossible.

What men and animals have in common is the Self, and this so-called Self consists first of all in perception. This perception belongs, as has been said, to those things which are given us, and not to those which can be explained. It is a property of the eternal Self, as of light, to s.h.i.+ne, to illumine itself, that is, to know. Its knowing is its being, and its being is its knowing, or its self-consciousness. If we take the Self as we find it, not merely in itself, but embodied, we must attribute to it, besides its own self-consciousness, a consciousness of the conditions of the body; but of course we must not imagine that we can make this embodiment in any way conceivable to us. It _is_ so-that is all that we can say, just as in an earlier consideration of the embodiment and multiplication of the eternal Logos we had to accept this as a datum, without being able to come any nearer to the fact by conceptions, or even by mere a.n.a.logies. This is where the task of the psychologist begins. Grant the self-consciousness of the individual, although still very obscure; grant the sentient perception; everything else that we call mind is the result of a development, which we must follow historically in order to understand that it could not come about in any other way. But where are the facts, where the monuments, where the trustworthy doc.u.ments, from which we can draw our knowledge of this wonderful development?

Four sources have been propounded for the study of psychogenesis. It has been said that to investigate the development of the human mind, the following objects must be scientifically observed: (1) The mind of a child; (2) the mind of the lower animals; (3) the survivals of the oldest culture, as we find it in ethnological collections; (4) the mind of still living savages. I formerly entertained similar hopes, but in my own melancholy experience all these studies end in delusion, in so far as they are applied to explain the genesis of the human mind. They do not reach far enough, they give us everywhere only the products of growth, the result of art, not the natural growth, or the real evolution. The observations on the development of a child's mind are very attractive, especially when they are made by thoughtful mothers. But this nursery psychology is wanting in all scientific exactness. The object of observation, the child that cannot yet speak, can never be entirely isolated. Its environment is of incalculable influence, and the petted child develops very differently from the neglected foundling. The early smile of the one is often as much a reflex action as the crying and bl.u.s.tering of the other, from hunger or inherited disease. Much as I admire the painstaking effort with which the first evidences of perception or of mental activity in a child have been recorded from day to day, from week to week, these observations prove untrustworthy when we endeavour to control them independently. It has been said that the mental activities of a child develop in the following order:-

After three weeks fear is manifested;

After seven weeks social affections;

After twelve weeks jealousy and anger;

After five months sympathy;

After eight months, pride, sentiment, love of ornament;

After fifteen months, shame, remorse, a sense of the ludicrous.(45)

We may generalise this scale as much as we please, and gradually permit the gradations to vanish, but I doubt if even two mothers could be found who would agree in such an interpretation of their children's looks. Add to this that this whole scale has very little to do with what, in the strict sense of the word, we call mind. From fear up to shame and penitence are all manifestations simply of the feelings, and not of the mind. We know that what we call fear is often a reflex action, as when a child closes its eyelids before a blow. What has been named jealousy in a child, is often nothing but hunger, while shame is instilled into one child, and in others is by no means of spontaneous growth.

The worst feature of such observations is that they are very quickly regarded as safe ground, and are reared higher and higher until in the end the entire scaffold collapses. In order to establish the truth of this psychologic scale in children still more firmly, and at the same time to make good its universal necessity, an effort has been made to prove that a similar scale is to be found in the animal kingdom, and of course what was sought has been found. Romanes a.s.serts that the lowest order of animals, the annelids, only show traces of fear; a little higher in the scale, in insects, are found social instincts such as industry, combativeness, and curiosity; another step higher, fishes exhibit jealousy, and birds, sympathy; then in carnivorous animals follow cruelty, hate, and grief; and lastly, in the anthropoid apes, remorse, shame, and a sense of the ridiculous, as well as deceit. It needs but one step more to make this scale, which belongs much more to the sphere of feeling than the realm of thought, universally applicable to all psychology. How should we otherwise explain the parallelism between the mental development of infants and that of undeveloped animals? One need but take a firm hold of such observations, and they are transformed into airy visions. Who, for instance, would dare to distinguish the traces of fear in annelids from those of surprise in higher animals? Nevertheless fear occupies the first place, surprise the third. And what mark distinguished combativeness in insects from jealousy in fishes? In the same way I doubt if any two nurses would agree in the chronology of the phenomena of the infant disposition, and have therefore long since given up all hope of obtaining any hints either in embryological or physiological development, about the real historical unfolding of the human consciousness, either out of a nursery or out of a zoological garden.

As for ethnological museums, they certainly give us wonderful glimpses into the skilfulness of primitive man, especially in what relates to the struggle for life; but of the historic or prehistoric age of these wood, horn, and stone weapons, they tell us absolutely nothing. Whoever thinks that man descended from an ape, may no doubt say that flint implements for kindling fire belonged to a higher period, _post hominem natum_, although it has been thought that even apes could have imitated such weapons, though they could not have invented them. Romanes, in his book on _Mental Evolution in Animals_, has collected a large number of ill.u.s.trations of animal skilfulness; the majority of them, however, are explained by mere mimicry; of a development of original ideas peculiar to animals in their wild state, apart from the contact and influence of human society, there is no trace. Even the most intelligent animal, the elephant, acquires reason only in its intercourse with men, and similarly the more or less trained apes, dogs, parrots, etc. All this is very interesting reading, and an English weekly, _The Spectator_, has from week to week given us similar anecdotes about wonderfully gifted animals from all parts of the earth, but these matters lie outside the narrow sphere of science.

What then remains to enable us to study the earliest phase of development of the human mind accessible to us? If we go to savages, whose language we only understand imperfectly, these observations are of course still more untrustworthy than in the case of our own children; at all events we must wait before we receive any really valuable evidence of the development of the human mind from that source. I repeat that the human mind itself, as far as it perceives, must simply be accepted as a fact, given to us and inexplicable, whether in civilised or uncivilised races; but only in its greatest simplicity, as mere self-conscious perception-a perception which in this simplicity can in no wise be denied to animals, although we can only with difficulty form a clear idea of the peculiarity of their sentient perceptions.

Where can we observe the first steps that rise above this simple perception? I say, as I have always said, In language and in language alone. Language is the oldest monument which we possess of man's mental power, older than stone weapons, than cuneiform inscriptions, than hieroglyphics. The development of language is continuous, for where this continuity is broken, language dies. After every Tasmanian had been killed or had died, the Tasmanian language _ipso facto_ ceased; and even if any literary remains had survived, the language itself would have to be reckoned, like Latin and Greek, with dead languages. Thousands of them may have disappeared from the earth; in its development a language may have changed as much as Sanskrit to Bengali; but it suffers no break, it remains always the same, and in a certain sense we still speak in German the same tongue as was spoken by the Aryans before there was a Sanskrit, a Greek, or a Latin language. Consider what this signifies. Chronologically, we cannot get at this primitive Aryan speech. Let us a.s.sume that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin were spoken as independent national tongues at least fifteen hundred years before our chronology-what an age had elapsed before these three, as well as the remaining Aryan tongues, could have diverged so much as Sanskrit diverges from Greek and Greek from Latin. The numerals are the same in these three languages, and yet _katvaras_ sounds quite differently from t?ssa?e? and _quatuor_ and our four. The words for eight, _octo_ in Latin, ??t? in Greek, and _ashtau_ in Sanskrit, are nearly identical; and it is even possible that the lesser deviations in the p.r.o.nunciation of these words demanded no great interval of time. But now let us consider what lies behind these ten numerals. There is the elaboration of a decimal system from 1 to 10, no, to 100 (??at??), Sanskrit _satam_, _centum_. There is the formation and fixing of names for these numbers, which must have been originally more or less arbitrary, because numbers only subordinate themselves with difficulty to one of those general ideas which are expressed in the Aryan roots. Besides these words are, even in their oldest attainable forms, already so weather-beaten, that in most cases it is impossible even to guess their etymology and original meaning. We see that the names for two and eight are dual, while those for three and four clearly have plural endings. But why eight in the primitive Aryan was a dual, and what were the two tetrads, which, combined in _asht-au_, _oct-o_, ??t-?, expressed the number eight, will probably never be discovered. It is possible that _asht-i_ was a name for the four phases of the moon, or for the four fingers of the hand without the thumb. a.n.a.logies occur in other families of language, but certainty is beyond our reach. If we now consider what mental effort is necessary to work out a decimal system, and to secure general recognition and value for the name given to each number, we shall readily realise what remote periods in the development of the human mind open up before us here, and of how little use it would be to try to establish chronological limits. Old as the Vedas, old as the Homeric songs may be, what is their age compared with the periods that were required not only to work out the numerals but the entire treasury of Aryan words, and the wonderful network of grammar that surrounds this treasure, which also was complete before the separation of the Aryan languages began. The immeasurable cannot be measured, but this much stands immovable in the mind of every linguist, that there is nothing older in the entire Aryan world than the complete primitive Aryan language and grammar, in which nearly all the categories of thought, and consequently the whole scaffold of our thinking, have found their expression.

Of course it will be said that all this only applies to the Aryan race, and that they const.i.tute only a small and perhaps the youngest portion of the human race. Well, it is difficult to prove that the Aryans const.i.tute the least numerous subdivision. We know too little of their great ma.s.ses to attempt a census. That they are the youngest branch of the human race is really of no consequence; we should then have to a.s.sume against all Darwinian principles, various, not contemporaneous, but successive monstrosities, slowly ascending to humanity, and this would only be pure invention. Nothing absolutely compels us to ascribe a shorter earthly life to those races which speak Chinese, Semitic, Bantu, American, Australian, or other languages, than to the Aryans. That all races have begun on a lower plane of culture, and especially of the knowledge of language, will no doubt be universally acknowledged. But even if we only place the first beginnings of the Aryan race at 10,000 B.C., there is time enough for it and other races to have risen, and also to have again declined. The difference would merely be that the Aryans, in spite of many drawbacks, on the whole constantly progressed, while the Australians, Negroes, and Patagonians, forced into unfavourable positions, remained stationary on a very low level. That their present plane can in any respect, and especially in regard to their language, supply a picture of the earliest condition of the human race, or even of certain branches of it, is again mere a.s.sumption, and as bare of all a.n.a.logy as the attempt to see in the salons of London a picture of Aryan family life before the first separation. There are savages who are cannibals. Shall we conclude from this that the first men all devoured each other, or that only those who were least appetising remained over as survivals of the fittest? It is remarkable how many ideas are current in science which the healthy human mind, after short reflection, silently lays aside. Any one who has occupied himself with the polysynthetic tongues of the Redskins, or with the prefixes in the languages of the Bantus, knows how much time must have been needed to develop their grammar, and how much higher the makers of these languages must have stood than those who speak them now.

But even if language is the oldest chronicle in which the human mind has traced its own development, we must by no means imagine that any known language, be it as old as the pyramids, or as the cuneiform inscriptions, can offer us a picture of the first beginning of the mental life of the race. Long before the pyramids, long before the oldest monuments in Babylon, Nineveh, and China, there was language, even writing; for on the oldest Egyptian inscriptions we find among the hieroglyphic signs writing materials and the stilus. Here perspectives open up to us, before which every chronological telescope gives way. There is a rigorous continuity in the development of a language, but this continuity in no wise excludes a transformation as marked as that of the b.u.t.terfly from the caterpillar.

Even when, as for instance in Sanskrit, we go back to a number of roots, to which Indian grammarians such as _Panini_ have systematically traced back the entire wealth of their abundant language, we must not suppose that these roots really const.i.tuted the original and complete material with which the primitive Aryan tongue began its historical career. This is not true even of the Indian branch of this primitive tongue, for in its development much may have been lost, and much so changed that we dare not think of restoring a perfect picture from these fragments of the earliest mental development of the Indians. These things are so simple that philologists accept them as axioms; but it is curious to observe, that in spite of the widespread interest that has been created in all civilised nations by the results of the science of language, philosophers who write about language and its relation to thought still trouble themselves over notions long since antiquated. I had, for instance, cla.s.sified the princ.i.p.al ideas expressed in Sanskrit roots, and had reduced them to the small number of 121.(46) With these 121 ideas, Indian philology pledges itself to explain all the simple and derivative meanings of words that fill the thick volumes of a Sanskrit lexicon. And what did ethnologists say to this? Instead of gratefully accepting this fact, they a.s.serted that many of these 121 radical ideas, as for instance, weaving or cooking, could not possibly be primitive. Impossible is always a very convenient word. But who ever claimed that these 121 fundamental ideas all belonged to the primitive Aryan language. They are, in fact, the ideas that are indicated in the thousands of words in cla.s.sical Sanskrit, but they have never made any claim to have const.i.tuted the mental capital of the primitive Aryans, whether acquired from heaven or from the domicile of apes. And if now a few of these ideas, such as to weave, to cook, to clean, appear modern, what of that compared with the simple fact that they are actually there?

These ethnologists, too, always make the old mistake of confounding the learning of a language, as is done by every child, with the first invention or formation of a language. The two things are as radically different as the labour of miners who bring forth to the light of day gold ore out of the depths of the earth, and the enjoyment which the heirs of a rich man have in squandering his cash. The two things are quite different, and yet there are books upon books which attempt to draw conclusions as to the creation of language from children learning to talk. We have at least now got so far as to admit that language facilitates thinking; but that language first made thought possible, that it was the first step in the development of the human mind, but few anthropologists have seen.(47) They do not know what language in the true sense of the word means, and still think that it is only communication, and that it does not differ from the signals made by chamois, or the information imparted by the antennae of ants. Henry Drummond goes so far as to say that "Any means by which information is conveyed from one mind to another, is language."(48) That is entirely erroneous. The entire chapter on sign language, interesting as it is, must be treated quite differently by the philologist, compared with the ethnologist. When the sign is such as was used in the old method of telegraphing, and meant a real word, or, as in modern electric telegraphy, even a letter, this is really speaking by signs; and so is the finger language of the deaf and dumb. But when I threaten my opponent with my fist, or strike him in the face, when I laugh, cry, sob, sigh, I certainly do not speak, although I do make a communication, the meaning of which cannot be doubted. Not every communication, therefore, is language, nor does every act of speaking aim at a communication. There are philologists who maintain that the first words were merely a clearing of the ideas, a sort of talking to oneself. This may have been so or not, at any rate it appears to me that in such primitive times, practical ends deserve the first consideration. No one can distinguish the difference in the stages of mental development, between wiping the perspiration from the brow after work, which signifies and communicates to every observer, "It is warm" or "I am tired," and the man who can actually say, "It is warm," "I am tired." Thousands, millions of years may lie between these two steps. We do not know, and to attempt to fix periods of time where the means are lacking, is like pouring water into the Danaids' sieves.