The Universal Kinship means the kinship of all the inhabitants of the planet Earth. Whether they came into existence among the waters or among desert sands, in a hole in the earth, in the hollow of a tree, or in a palace; whether they build nests or empires; whether they swim, fly, crawl, or ambulate; and whether they realise it or not, they are all related, physically, mentally, morally—this is the thesis of this book. But since man is the most gifted and influential of animals, and since his relationship with other animals is more important and more reluctantly recognised than any other, the chief purpose of these pages is to prove and interpret the kinship, of the human species with the other species of animals.
The thesis of this book comes pretty squarely in conflict with widely-practised and highly-prized sins. It will therefore be generally criticised where it is not passed by in silence. Men as a rule do not care to improve. Although they have but one life to live, they are satisfied to live the thing out as they have started on it.
Enthusiasm, which in an enlightened or ideal race would be devoted to self-improvement, is used by men in weaving excuses for their own inertia or in singing of the infirmities of others.
But there is a Future. And the creeds and ideals, men bow down to to-day will in time to come pass away, and new creeds and ideals will claim their allegiance. Shrines change as the generations come and go, and out of the decomposition of the old comes the new. The time will come when the sentiments of these pages will not be hailed by two or three, and ridiculed or ignored by the rest; they will represent Public Opinion and Law.
M.
Chicago, 1905
The Physical Kinship
The Psychical Kinship
The Ethical Kinship
‘Like the Roman emperors, who, intoxicated by their power, at length regarded themselves as demigods, so the ruler of the earth believes that the animals subjected to his will have nothing in common with his own nature. Man is not content to be the king of animals. He insists on having it that an impassable gulf separates him from his subjects. The affinity of the ape disturbs and humbles him. And, turning his back upon the earth, he flies, with his threatened majesty, into the cloudy sphere of a special “human kingdom.” But Anatomy, like those slaves who followed the conqueror’s car crying, “Thou art a man,” disturbs him in his self-admiration, and reminds him of those plain and tangible realities which unite him with the animal world.’
— Broca.
It was in the zoology class at college. We had made all the long journey from amoeba to coral, from coral to worm, from worm to mollusk, from mollusk to fish, from fish to reptile, and from reptile to mammal—and there, in the closing pages of faithful old Packard, we found it. ‘A mammal of the order of primates,’ the book said, with that unconcern characteristic of the deliverances of science. I was almost saddened. It was the first intimation I had ever received of that trite but neglected truth that man is an animal.
But the intimation was so weak, and I was at that time so unconscious, that it was not till years later that I began, through reflection, actually to realise the truth here first caught sight of. During these years I knew that man was not a mineral nor a plant—that, indeed, he belonged to the animal kingdom. But, like most men still, I continued to think of him as being altogether different from other animals. I thought of man and the animals, not of man and the other animals. Man was somehow sui generis. He had had, I believed, a unique and miraculous origin; for I had not yet learned of organic evolution. The pre-Darwinian belief that I had come down from the skies, and that non-human creatures of all kinds had been brought into existence as adjuncts of the distinguished species to which I belonged, occupied prominent place in my thinking. Non-human races, so I had been taught, had in themselves no reason for existence. They were accessories. A chasm, too wide for any bridge ever to span, yawned between the human and all other species. Man was celestial, a blue-blood barely escaping divinity. All other beings were little higher than clods. So faithfully and mechanically did I reflect the bias in which I had grown up.
But man is an animal. It was away out there on the prairies, among the green corn rows, one beautiful June morning—a long time ago it seems to me now—that this revelation really came to me. And I repeat it here, as it has grown to seem to me, for the sake of a world which is so wise in many things, but so darkened and wayward regarding this one thing. However averse to accepting it we may be on account of favourite traditions, man is an animal in the most literal and materialistic meaning of the word. Man has not a spark of so-called ‘divinity’ about him. In important respects he is the most highly evolved of animals; but in origin, disposition, and form he is no more ‘divine’ than the dog who laps his sores, the terrapin who waddles over the earth in a carapace, or the unfastidious worm who dines on the dust of his feet. Man is not the pedestalled individual pictured by his imagination—a being glittering with prerogatives, and towering apart from and above all other beings. He is a pain-shunning, pleasure-seeking, death-dreading organism, differing in particulars, but not in kind, from the pain-shunning, pleasure-seeking, death-dreading organisms below and around him. Man is neither a rock, a vegetable, nor a deity. He belongs to the same class of existences, and has been brought into existence by the same evolutional processes, as the horse, the toad that hops in his garden, the firefly that lights its twilight torch, and the bivalve that reluctantly feeds him.
Man’s body is composed fundamentally of the same materials as the bodies of all other animals. The bodies of all animals are composed of clay. They are formed of the same elements as those that murmur in the waters, gallop in the winds, and constitute the substance of the insensate rocks and soils. More than two-thirds of the weight of the human body is made up of oxygen alone, a gas which forms one-fifth of the weight of the air, more than eight-ninths of that of the sea, and forty-seven per cent, of the superficial solids of the earth.
Man’s body is composed of cells. So are the bodies of all other animals. And the cells in the body of a human being are not essentially different in composition or structure from the cells in the body of the sponge. All cells are composed primarily of protoplasm, a compound of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen. Like all other animals, man is incapable of producing a particle of the essential substance of which his body is made. No animal can produce protoplasm. This is a power of the plant, and the plant only. All that any animal can do is to burn the compounds formed in the sun-lit laboratories of the vegetable world. The human skeleton, like the skeletons of nearly all other animals, is composed chiefly of lime—lime being, in the sea, where life spent so many of its earlier centuries, the most available material for parts whose purpose it is to furnish shape and durability to the organism. Man grows from an egg. So do all creatures of clay. Every animal commences at the same place—in a single, lowly, almost homogeneous cell. A dog, a frog, a philosopher, and a worm cannot for a long time after their embryonic commencement be distinguished from each other. Like the oyster, the ox, the insect, and the fish, like all that live, move, and breathe, man is mortal. He increases in size and complexity through an allotted period of time; then, like all his kindred, wilts back into the indistinguishable flux from which he came. Man inhales oxygen and exhales carbon dioxide. So does every animal that breathes, whether it breathe by lungs, gills, skin, or ectosarc, and whether it breathe the sunless ooze of the sea floor or the ethereal blue of the sky. Animals inhale oxygen because they eat carbon and hydrogen. The energy of all animals is produced mainly by the union of oxygen with the elements of carbon and hydrogen in the tissues of animal bodies, the plentiful and ardent oxygen being the most available supporter of the combustion of these two elements.
Man is, then, an animal, more highly evolved than the most of his fellow-beings, but positively of the same clay, and of the same fundamental make-up, with the same eagerness to exceed and the same destiny, as his less pompous kindred who float and frolic and pass away in the seas and atmospheres, and creep over the land-patches of a common clod.
The resemblances, homologies, and metamorphoses existing everywhere among animal forms are, therefore, evidence of the most logical consanguinities. It is all so perfectly plain. The structures of organic beings have come about as a result of the action and reaction of environment upon these structures. Every being—and not only every being, but every species, the whole organic world—has come to be what it is as a result of the incessant hammerings of its surroundings, the hammerings not only of the present, but of the long-stretching past. By surroundings is meant, of course, the rest of the universe. Those animals belonging to the same stock resemble each other because they have been subjected to the same experiences, the same series of selections. They have lain on the same great anvil, and felt the down-comings of the same sledge. The similarities among animal forms in general indicate relationships, just as the similarities among the races of men indicate racial consanguinities. All men belong to the human species because they are all fundamentally alike. But there are differences in the character of the hair, in the colour of the skin, in the conformation of the skull, and in the structure of the language, among the different varieties of the species, indicating striking variety in relationship and origin. An eminent biologist has said that if Negroes and Caucasians were snails they would be classed as entirely distinct species of animals. Whether, as is thought by some, the woolly-haired races are the descendants of the African anthropoids, and the straight-haired varieties are the posterity of the orangs and gibbons, we may never know positively. But we do know that these two great branches of mankind must have different genealogies, extending to a remote antiquity, and that the varieties belonging to each great group sustain to each other the relations of a common kinship. Englishmen look like each other, act like each other, and speak the same language. So do Frenchmen and Swedes and Chinese. Every people is peculiar. This is not the result of accident or agreement, but the result of law. Mongolians do not all have short heads, yellow faces, slanting eyes, and prominent malars because they have agreed to have them, but as a result of a common pedigree. Similarity of structure implies commonalty of origin, and commonalty of origin means consanguinity.
And this is true whether you contemplate the featural resemblances of brothers and sisters of the same human parent, or those more fundamental characteristics which distinguish species, orders, and sub-kingdoms. All animals are composed of protoplasm, which is a compound of clay, because all animals are descended from the same first parents, protoplasmic organisms evolved out of the elemental ooze. All vertebrates have nerve-filled backbones with two pairs of ventrally branching limbs, because the original ancestors of the vertebrates had nerve-filled backbones with two pairs of ventrally branching limbs. Insects individually evolve from worms because worms are their phylogenetic fathers and mothers. Man has hands and a vertical spine, and walks on his hind-limbs, not because he was fashioned in the image of a god, but because his ancestors lived among the trees. The habit of using the posterior limbs for locomotion, and the anterior for prehension, and the resulting perpendicular, are peculiarities developed by our simian ancestors wholly on account of the incentives to such structure and posture afforded by aboreal life. These peculiarities would not likely have been acquired by quadrupeds living upon and taking their food from a perfectly level and treeless plain. If there had been no forests on the earth, therefore, there would have been no incentive to the perpendicular, and the ‘human form divine’ would have been inconceivably different from what it is to-day. And if fishes had had three serial pairs of limbs instead of two, and their posterity had inherited them, as they certainly would have had the foresight to do if they had had the opportunity, the highest animals on the earth to-day, the ‘paragons of creation,’ would probably be two-handed quadrupeds (centaurs) instead of two-handed bipeds. And much more efficient and ideal individuals they would have been in every way than the rickety, peculiar, unsubstantial plantigrades who, by their talent to talk, have become the masters of the universe, and, by their imaginations, ‘divine.’
Kinship is universal. The orders, families, species, and races of the animal kingdom are the branches of a gigantic arbour. Every individual is a cell, every species is a tissue, and every order is an organ in the great surging, suffering, palpitating process. Man is simply one portion of the immense enterprise. He is as veritably an animal as the insect that drinks its little fill from his veins, the ox he goads, or the wild-fox that flees before his bellowings. Man is not a god, nor in any imminent danger of becoming one. He is not a celestial star-babe dropped down among mundane matters for a time and endowed with wing possibilities and the anatomy of a deity. He is a mammal of the order of primates, not so lamentable when we think of the hyena and the serpent, but an exceedingly discouraging vertebrate compared with what he ought to be. He has come up from the worm and the quadruped. His relatives dwell on the prairies and in the fields, forests, and waves. He shares the honours and partakes of the infirmities of all his kindred. He walks on his hind-limbs like the ape; he eats herbage and suckles his young like the ox; he slays his fellows and fills himself with their blood like the crocodile and the tiger; he grows old and dies, and turns to banqueting worms, like all that come from the elemental loins. He cannot exceed the winds like the hound, nor dissolve his image in the mid-day blue like the eagle. He has not the courage of the gorilla, the magnificence of the steed, nor the plaintive innocence of the ring-dove. Poor, pitiful, glory-hunting hideful! Born into a universe which he creates when he comes into it, and clinging, like all his kindred, to a clod that knows him not, he drives on in the preposterous storm of the atoms, as helpless to fashion his fate as the sleet that pelts him, and lost absolutely in the somnambulism of his own being.
‘I saw, deep in the eyes of the animals, the human soul look out upon me.’
‘I saw where it was born down deep under feathers and fur, or condemned for awhile to roam four-footed among the brambles. I caught the clinging mute glance of the prisoner, and swore that I would be faithful.’
‘Thee, my brother and sister, I see and mistake not. Do not be afraid. Dwelling thus and thus for awhile, fulfilling thy appointed time—thou too shalt come to thyself at last.’
‘Thy half-warm horns and long tongue lapping round my wrist do not conceal thy humanity any more than the learned talk of the pedant conceals his—for all thou art dumb we have words and plenty between us.’— Edward Carpenter.
The doctrine that on mankind’s account all other beings came into existence, and that non-human beings are mere hunks of matter devoid of all psychic qualities found in man, is a doctrine about as sagacious as the old geocentric theory of the universe. Conceit is a distinctly human emotion. No other animal has it. But it has been lavished upon man with a generosity sufficient to compensate for its total absence from the rest of the universe. Man has always overestimated himself. In whatever age or province of the world you look down on the human imagination, you find it industriously digging disparities and establishing gulfs. Man, according to himself, has had great difficulty many times in the history of the world in escaping the divine. According to the facts, he has only in recent biological times and after great labour and uncertainty abandoned his tail and his all-fours. According to himself, man was made ‘in the image of his maker,’ and has been endowed with powers and properties peculiarly his own. According to the facts, he has come into the world in a manner identical with that of all other animals, and has been endowed with like nature and destiny. Man has never manifested a warmer or more indelicate enthusiasm than the enthusiasm with which he has appreciated himself. And with the same ardour with which he has praised himself he has maligned and misrepresented others. Man has set himself up as the supreme judge and executive of the world, and he has not hesitated to award to himself the lion’s share of everything. He has ransacked his fancy for adjectives with which to praise himself, and driven his inventive faculties to the verge of distraction in search of justification for his crimes upon those around him. Every individual bent on deeds of darkness first seeks in his own mind justification for his purposed sins. And it is a caustic comment on the character of human conviction that no enthusiastic criminal—from the marauder of continents to the kitchen pilferer—ever yet sought unsuccessfully at the court of his conscience for a sinful permit. It was an easy matter, therefore, for man—aided as he was by such an experienced imagination—to convince himself that all other animals were made for him, that they were made without feeling or intelligence, and that hence he was justified in using in any way he chose the conveniences so generously provided by an eccentric providence. But Darwin has lived. Beings have come into the world, we now know, through the operation of natural law. Man is not different from the rest. The story of Eden is a fabrication, bequeathed to us by our well-meaning but dimly-lighted ancestors. There has been no more miracle in the origin of the human species than in the origin of any other species. And there is no more miracle in the origin of a species than there is in the birth of a molecule or in the breaking of a tired wave on the beach. Man was not made in the image of the hypothetical creator of heaven and earth, but in the image of the ape. Man is not a fallen god, but a promoted reptile. The beings around him are not conveniences, but cousins. Instead of stretching away to the stars, man’s pedigree slinks down into the sea. Horrible revelation! Frightful antithesis! Instead of celestial genesis and a ‘fall’—long and doleful promotion. Instead of elysian gardens and romance—the slime. Instead of a god with royal nostrils miraculously animating an immortal duplicate—a little lounging cellule, too small to be seen and too senseless to distinguish between midnight and noon. But the situation is not half so horrible as it looks to be to those who see only the skin of things. Is it not better, after all, to be the honourable outcome of a straightforward evolution than the offspring of flunky-loving celestials? Are the illustrious children of the ape less glorious than the sycophants of irrational theological systems? Darwin dealt in his quiet way some malicious blows to human conceit, but he also bequeathed to a misguided world the elements of its ultimate redemption.
The supposed psychical gulf between human and non-human beings has no more existence, outside the flamboyant imagination of man, than has the once-supposed physical gulf. It is pure fiction. The supposition is a relic of the rapidly dwindling vanity of anthropocentricism, and is perpetuated from age to age by human selfishness and conceit. It has no foundation either in science or in common-sense. Man strives to lessen his guilt by the laudation of himself and the disparagement and degradation of his victims. Like the ostrich, who, pursued by death, improvises an imaginary escape by plunging its head into the desert, so man, pursued by the vengeful correctives of his own conscience, fabricates a fictitious innocence by the calumniation of those upon whom he battens. But such excuses cannot much longer hold out against the rising consciousness of kinship. Psychology, like all other sciences, is rapidly ceasing to attend exclusively to human phenomena. It is lifting up its eyes and looking about; it is preparing to become comparative. It has come to realise that the mind of man is but a single shoot of a something which ramifies the entire animal world, and that in order to understand its subject it is necessary for it to familiarise itself with the whole field of phenomenon. The soul of man did not commence to be in the savage. It commenced to be in the worm, whose life man grinds out with his heel, and in the bivalve that flounders in his broth. The roots of consciousness are in the sea. Side by side with physical evolution has gone on psychical evolution; side by side with the evolution of organs and tissues has gone on the evolution of intellect, sensibility, and will. Human nature and human mind are no more sui generis than are human anatomy and physiology. The same considerations that prove that man’s material organism is the cumulative result of long evolution proclaim that human mind, the immaterial concomitant of the material organism, is also the cumulative result of long evolution.
We might just as well recognise facts first as last, for they will have to be recognised some time. Truths are not put down by inhospitality—they are simply put off. The universe has a policy, a program. We may close our eyes to the facts around us, hoping in this way to compel them to pass away or be forgotten. But they do not pass away, nor will they be forgotten. They simply become invisible. They will live on and present themselves to other minds or ages or climes more hospitable or honest than our own. The only proper attitude of mind to assume toward the various doctrines existing among men is the attitude of perfect willingness to believe anything—anything that appeals to us as being reasonable and right. The great majority of men, however, are intellectual solids—unable to move and unwilling to think. They have certain beliefs to which they are determined to hold on, and everything that does not fit in with these beliefs is rejected as a matter of course.
One of the wisest things ever said by one of the profoundest philosophers of all time was the warning to the seeker after truth to beware of the influence of the ‘idols (or illusions) of the tribe’ by which he meant that body of traditional prejudices which every sect, family, nation, and neighbourhood has clinging to it, and in the midst of which and at the mercy of which every human being grows up.
The Golden Rule is not exemplified by the conduct of any considerable number of the inhabitants of the earth. To be civilised or even half-civilised is, to the children of this world, neither instinctive nor easy. To preserve a certain pretence or appearance of virtue, especially when encouraged to do so by an uplifted cudgel in the hands of the community, is a possible and not uncommon accomplishment. But to be at heart and in reality as considerate of others as we are of ourselves is, unfortunately, not natural. Human beings are not children of the sun, sojourning for a season on this spheroid of clay, and needing only pinions to be angels. Human nature did not come, pure and shining, down from the glittering gods. It came out of the jungle. Civilised peoples are the not very remote posterity of savages, and savages are the posterity of individuals who laid eggs and had literally cold blood in their veins. Civilised men and women are troglodytes with a veneering of virtue. In the heart of every ‘civilised’ man and woman is an unconverted core, large or small, of barbarism. 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. There is nothing more inevitable in the life of the convert than the haunting inclination to give way to original impulses. It is not strange that we are powerless to be as good and beautiful and true as we would like to be, that our divine efforts are our half-hearted efforts, and that the only time we get terribly in earnest and put forth really titanic energies is when we are dominated directly or indirectly by the instincts of the pack. Human aspiration is fettered by the fearful facts of human origin. It is not strange that we are continually conscious of being torn by contending tendencies, conscious of ghastly masteries, and of horrible goings on in our innermost beings. The human heart is the gladiatorial meeting-place of gods and beasts.
There are the same reasons for the recognition by human beings of ethical relations to non-human beings as there are for the recognition by human beings of ethical relations among themselves Analyse the reasons for being considerate toward men, any variety of men, and you will find the same reasons to exist for being considerate toward all men. And analyse the reasons for being altruistic toward men—for being kind and sympathetic toward them—and you will find the same reasons to exist for being altruistic toward those who are not men. The doctrine that we human beings may perform upon the other inhabitants of the earth all sorts of injurious acts, and that these acts when so performed by us are perfectly right and proper, but that these same things when done by others to us are crimes, is the logic of pure brutalitarianism. It is a doctrine utterly without intelligence, at variance with every sentiment of justice and humanity, and has no legitimate existence outside the fibrous brains of ruffians.
Right and wrong are qualities belonging to two diverse kinds of conduct. They are the qualities which render conduct respectively proper and improper. All terrestrial races (unless the very lowest) have the power of experiencing two kinds of conscious states—the desirable (pleasurable) and the undesirable (painful). Now, if beings were indifferent as to what sort of conscious states entered into and made up their experiences, there would manifestly be no such thing as propriety and impropriety in the causing of these states. But they are not indifferent. The pleasurable experiences are the experiences all beings are seeking, and the painful ones are the ones they are all seeking to avoid. Those acts which help or tend to help beings to those experiences for which they are striving are, therefore, right and proper, and are, they and their authors, called good. While those acts which compel beings to undergo that which they are striving to avoid are improper and wrong, and are, they and their authors, called bad. Kindness, courtesy, justice, mercy, generosity, sympathy, love, and the like, are good, and selfishness, cruelty, deceit, pillage, injustice, and murder, are bad, because they are respectively the promoters and destroyers of wellbeing and happiness in the world.
But these two kinds of conduct produce the same respective effects upon non-human beings as they do upon human beings. The emotion of a mangled sensory—is it not the same terrible thing whether the sensory hang to the brain of a quadruped or a man? Do shelter and food not affect shivering and empty cattle, horses, and fowls, precisely as they do human beings? Thunder harsh words at your dog. Will he not shrink and suffer, just as your child or hired hand will under like acts of terrorisation? Speak kindly to him, love him, and accord to him a quarter of the consideration you claim for yourself. Is he not caused to be one of the happiest and most devoted of associates? To take squirrels or song-birds, the most active of animals, and shut them up in narrow cages, and keep them there shut off from their companions and their own green world their whole lives long; to take an animal as sensitive and high-minded as the horse and put a pack on his back and a bit in his mouth, and then strike him dozens of times a day with a lash whose touch is like fire; to shoot off the legs and wings of birds and fill their vitals with lead, and leave them to flounder out a lingering death in the reeds and grasses—do these things not cause misery and desolation in the world? To place temptations in the way of fur-bearing animals and induce them to enter carefully concealed traps, and then allow them to remain in the villainous clutches of these devices, not minutes, but hours, perhaps days, until it suits the convenience of the ensnarer to knock out their brains, or until, crazed by pain, the poor wretches eat off their own limbs and escape—is not this a monstrous thing to do?
Oh that men everywhere were moved by the deep tenderness and the all-embracing sympathy of poor Robert Burns, who could apologise with real feeling to a frightened field-mouse whom he had accidentally upturned with his plough.
‘Wee, sleekit, cow’rin’, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou needna start awa’ sae hasty,
Wi’ bick’ring brattle!
I had be laith to rin and chase thee,
Wi’ murd’rous pattle!
‘I’m truly sorry man’s dominion
Has broken nature’s social union,
And justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
And fellow-mortal.’
Long ago it was said, and truthfully, that the merciful man is merciful to his ox. The truly kind man, the truly honest and the truly humane man, is not kind and honest and humane to men only, but to all beings—to the humble and lowly as well as to the proud and powerful—to all that have the misfortune to feel and mourn. Benevolence is the same beautiful thing whether it pour sunshine into the dark and saddened souls of men or into the dark and saddened souls of other beings. John Howard never hearkened to a nobler duty when he lifted the darkness that hung over English gaols than will some inflamed soul some day who hears the cry of the lonely captives who to-day languish in menagerial dungeons to satisfy human curiosity. He who will emancipate horses from the hell in which they pass their lives—make them the associates of men instead of their slaves—will deserve to stand in the constellation of the world’s redeemers beside Garrison and Garibaldi. Is there he who holds in his heart-cups the love and compassion of Buddha? Let him go where the dagger drips and the heartless pole-axe crashes, and the meek-eyed millions of the meadows pour out their innocent existences in the soulless houses of slaughter. Let him lift from off the races the hounding incubus of fear, give back to them their birthright—the right to a free, unhunted life—and make the great monster (man) to be their high-priest and friend.
‘Among the noblest in the land,
Though he may count himself the least,
That man I honour and revere
Who, without favour, without fear,
In the great city dares to stand
The friend of every friendless beast,
And tames with his unflinching hand
The brutes that wear our form and face,
The were-wolves of the human race.’
If to do good is to generate welfare, then to cause welfare to a horse, a bird, a butterfly, or a fish, is to do good just as truly as to cause welfare to men. And if to do evil is to cause unhappiness and illfare, then to cause these things to one individual or race is evil just as certainly as to cause them to any other individual or race. And if to put one’s self in the place of others, and to act toward them as one would wish them to act toward him, is the one great rule—the Golden Rule—by which men are to gauge their conduct when acting toward each other, then this is also the one great rule—the Golden Rule—by which men are to regulate their conduct toward all beings. There is no escape from these conclusions, except for the savage and the fool.[1]
1. The deliberate causing of misery and death to criminals, whether they be human or non-human beings, individuals or species, is not, as is sometimes supposed, a violation or reversal of the general theory of ethics. When they are prompted by a spirit of tenderness and universal goodness rather than by a spirit of revenge, penalties are justifiable by the everyday assumption that it is sometimes wise to inflict or undergo a certain amount of illfare in order to avoid or forestall a larger amount. The problems of universal penology are not different from those of human penology, practically the same cases and perplexities being presented by all delinquents. See ‘Better-World Philosophy,’ by the author, pp. 218-227, for a discussion of the function of punishment.
Man is a primate. There are four divisions in the order of primates—lemurs, monkeys, apes, and men. But the most interesting and important of these, according to man, is man. Man is a primate because, like other primates, he has arms and hands instead of fore-legs. And these are important characteristics. It was a splendid moment when the tendencies of evolution, pondering the possibilities of structural improvement, decided to rear the vertebrate upon its hind-limbs, and convert its anterior appendages into instruments of manipulation. So long as living creatures were able simply to move through the airs and waters of the earth and over the surface of the solids, they were powerless to modify the universe about them very much. But the moment beings were developed with parts of their bodies fitted to take hold of and move and fashion and compel the universe around them, that moment the life process was endowed with the power of miracles. With the invention of hands and arms commenced seriously that long campaign against the tendencies of inanimate nature which finds its most marvellous achievements in the sustained and triumphant operations of human industry. None of the primates excepting man use their hind-limbs as a sole means of changing their place in the universe, but in all of them the fore-limbs are regularly used as organs of manipulation. Man is a primate because his fingers and toes, like those of other primates (except the tiny marmosets of Brazil), end in nails. Man has neither claws to burrow into the earth, talons with which to hold and rend his victims, nor hoofs to put thunder into his movements. The human stomach, like that of all the other primates, is a bagpipe. The stomach of the carnivora is usually a simple sack, while rodents have, as a rule, two stomachs, and ruminants four. Man is a primate because his milk glands are located on the breast and are two in number. The mammary glands vary in number in the different orders of mammals, from two in the horse and whale to twenty-two in some insectivora. Most ruminating animals have four, swine ten, and carnivora generally six or eight. These glands may be located in the region of the groin, as in the horse and whale; between the forelimbs, as in the elephant and bat; or arranged in pairs extending from the fore to the hind limbs, as in the carnivora and swine. In man and all other primates (except lemurs) the mammary glands are pectoral and two in number. All primates, including man, have also a disc-shaped placenta. The placenta is the organ of nutrition in mammalian embryos. It is found in all young-bearing animals above the marsupials, and consists of a mass of glands between the embryo and the parental body. In some animals it entirely surrounds and encloses the embryo; in others it assumes the form of a girdle; and in still others it is bell-shaped. The primates are the only animals in which this peculiar organ is in the shape of a simple disc.[1]
The nearest relatives by blood man has in this world are the exceedingly man-like apes—the tailless anthropoids—the gorillas and chimpanzees of Africa, and the orangs and gibbons of southern and insular Asia. The fact that man is an actual relative and descendant of the ape is one of the most disagreeable of the many distasteful truths which the human mind in its evolution has come upon. To a vanity puffed, as is that of human beings, to the splitting, the consanguinity of gorilla and gentleman seems horrible. Man prefers to have arrived on the earth by way of a ladder let down by his imagination from the celestial concave. Within his own memory man has been guilty of many foolish and disgraceful things. But this attempt by him to repudiate his ancestors by surreptitiously fabricating for himself an origin different from, and more glorious than the rest is one of the most absurd and scandalous in the whole list. It is a shallow logic—the logic of those who, without worth of their own, try to shine with a false and stolen lustre. No more masterly rebuke was ever administered to those in the habit of sneering at the truth in this matter than the caustic reply of Huxley to the taunt of the fat-witted Bishop—that he would rather be the descendant of a respectable ape than the descendant of one who not only closed his eyes to the facts around him, but used his official position to persuade others to do likewise. Man’s reluctance to take his anatomical place beside his simian kinspeople has been exceeded only by his selfish and high-handed determination to exclude all other terrestrial beings from his heaven.
Man is a talkative and religious ape. He is an ape, but with a much greater amount of enterprise and with a greater likelihood of being found in every variety of climate. Like the anthropoid, man has a bald face and an obsolete tail. But he is distinguished from his arboreal relative by his arrogant bearing, his skilled larynx, and especially by the satisfaction he experiences in the contemplation of the image which appears when he looks in a mirror.
The man-like apes are from three to six feet tall, and are all of them very strong, the gorilla, who sometimes weighs over three hundred pounds, being about the bravest and most formidable unarmed animal on the planet. They are erect or semi-erect, have loud voices, plantigrade feet, and irritable dispositions—in all of these particulars being strikingly like men. The gorilla, chimpanzee, and gibbon are highlanders, preferring the uplands and mountains. The orang is a lowlander, living phlegmatically among the sylvan swamps of Sumatra and Borneo. The gorilla and chimpanzee are terrestrial, seldom going among the trees except to get food or to sleep. The orang and gibbon are arboreal, seldom coming to the ground except to drink or bathe. They all walk on their hind-limbs, generally in a stooping posture, with their knuckles or fingers touching the ground. But they sometimes walk with their arms hanging down by their sides, and sometimes with their hands clasped back of their heads to give them balance. None of them ever place their palms on the ground when they walk—that is, none of them walk on four feet. The anthropoid races, in the shape of their heads and faces and in the general form and structure of their bodies, and even in their habits of life, resemble in a remarkable manner the lowest races of human beings. This resemblance is recognised by the negro races, who call the gorilla and chimpanzee ‘hairy men,’ and believe them to be descendants of outcast members of their own species.
There are differences in structure between man and the apes, just as there are differences in structure between the Caucasian and the Caffre, or even between individual Caucasians or individual Caffres. There are differences in structure and topography, often very noticeable differences, even among members of the same family. But in all of its essential characters, and extending often to astonishing particulars, the structure of man is identical with that of the anthropoid.[2]
In external appearances the man-like races differ from men in having a luxuriant covering of natural hair. But anthropoids differ very much among themselves in this particular. The orang, usually covered with long hair, is sometimes almost hairless. There are, too, races of human beings whose bodies are covered with a considerable growth of hair. The Todas (Australians) and Ainus (aborigines of Japan) are noted for the hairiness of their bodies, certain individuals among them being covered with a real fur, especially on the lower limbs.[3]
Individuals also often appear in every race with a remarkable development of the hair. Adrian and his son Fedor, exhibited years ago over Europe as ‘dog-men,’ are examples. The father was completely covered with a thick growth of fine dirty-yellow hair two or three inches long. Long tufts grew out of his nostrils and ears, giving him a striking resemblance to a Skye terrier. Fedor, and also his sister, were covered with hair like the father, but another son was like ordinary men. The man-like races have also longer arms in proportion to the height of the body than man generally has. But this is also true of human infants and negroes. The gibbon has relatively much longer arms than the other anthropoids. It differs from the chimpanzee in this respect more than the chimpanzee differs from man. When standing upright and reaching down with the middle finger, the gibbon can touch its foot, while the chimpanzee can reach only to the knee. Man ordinarily reaches part way down the thigh, but negroes have been known to have arms reaching to the knee-pan.[4]
The skeleton of the African races contains many characters recognised by osteologists as ‘pithecoid,’ or ape-like. It is massive, the flat bones are thick, and the pelvis narrow. In the manlike apes the large toe is opposable to the other four, and is used by them much as the thumb is used. But this difference between the two races of beings is just what might be expected from the differences in their modes of life. Man has little need of this opposability on account of his exclusively terrestrial life, while to the ape it is indispensable on account of his arboreal environment and life. ‘But there are,’ says Haeckel, ‘wild tribes of men who can oppose the large toe to the other four just as if it were a thumb, and even new-born infants of the most highly-developed races of men can grasp as easily with their hind-hands as with their forehands. Chinese boatmen row with their feet, and Bengal workmen weave with them. The negro, in whom the big toe is freely movable, seizes hold of the branches of trees with it when climbing, just like the four-handed apes’.[5]
Many men have lost their arms by accident and have learned to use their feet as hands with wonderful skill. Not many years ago there died in Europe an armless violinist who had during his lifetime played to cultured audiences in most of the capitals of the world. Some of the most accomplished of penmen hold their pen between their toes. The man-like apes live to about the same age as man, and all of them, like man, have beards. The anthropoid beard, too, like the human, appears at the age of sexual maturity. The human beard often differs in colour from the hair of the scalp, and whenever it does it has been observed to be invariably lighter—never darker—than the hair on the scalp. This is true among all races of men. The same rule and the same uniformity exists among anthropoids. The races of mankind are divided into two primary groups depending upon the shape of the head and the character of the hair: the short-headed races (Brachycephali), such as the Malays, Mongols, and Aryans, with round or oval faces, straight hair, and vertical profiles; and the long-headed races (Dolichocephali), with woolly hair and prognathous faces, such as the Papuans and Africa races. The skin of the short-headed races is orange or white, while the skin and hair of the long-headed races are glossy black.