MIND IN THE LOWER ANIMALS.* Tun problem or mystery of
animals—what they are, and why they are—has interested thoughtful men ever since, perhaps, Adam gave to each animal its appropriate name ; and now Dr. Lindsay has come up for judgment, with his two big
* Mind in the Lower Animate. in Health and Mame, By W, Lauder Lindsay, M.D. London: C. Kogan Paul and Co.
volumes. In estimating the likelihood of a work of this kind proving of value, it is, in the first place, desirable to discover what qualifications for his task the author may have ; and secondly, what plan he proposes to follow. Be it said, then, at once, that Dr. LindSay has drawn together an astonishing amount of information. So far as common-place books may be held to justify a man, our present author can claim to be un- impeachable. During twenty years, more or less, he has busied himself with researches bearing on the subject in hand; he has read, observed, made extracts, and, in short, has conscientiously and diligently, in such measure as nature and acquired habit permitted, kept eyes and ears open, until at length, with his thousands and tens of thousands of facts, illustrations, and in- ferences, he has come on to the attack, like Xerxes to his Thermopylin. With a matgriel so vast, he might well have been pardoned some small betrayal of self-complacency and an- ticipative glorification, for what warrior better equipped and backed went ever out to battle ? Nevertheless, he must be credited with a noticeable lack of professions of overweening con- fidence; on the contrary, he modestly protests that he has done little more than provide the sinews of war for the benefit of better men than he. If there be anything that he abhors, it is dogma- tism; and prejudice of all kinds is a bugbear to him. He claims only to keep his mind open, and on an even balance ; he will take a fact for no more than it is worth, and on no account will he force it to eubserve any preconceived theory. What he desires is to reveal truth, not to manufacture it ; that he leaves to demigods, and fools. In a word, Dr. Lindsay's preface, and his remarks throughout upon the nature of his intentions, are a model of suggestive diffidence.
Far be it from us to counsel Dr. Lindsay, or anybody else, to be conceited; but there is, or ought to be, a point where conceit ends, and an honest fulfilment of obligations begins. A man who has spent the better part of his mature life in collect- ing evidence with a view to obtaining certain results, should surely be in a better position than another to put that evidence to its proper use—to organise, in ether words, the mass of chaotic information which he has heaped together. A house- builder does not pretend to have done his work when he has collected and piled up so many thousand bricks, so many tons of mortar, so many feet of timber, and so many slates. He is bound to make a house of them, and does so, in accordance with whatever architectural lights may be vouchsafed to him. The house, when built, may be a shaky and insecure affair, with an inconvenient arrangement of rooms, and possibly without any staircase, or substantial foundations ; destined, therefore, to be done away with by the destructive criticism of time and com- mon-sense. But a house of some kind there must be, else what right have housebuilders to exist? Now, as regards Dr. Lindsay, he has called his book Mind in the Lower Animals, which implies in itself an important conclusion, though he does not appear to think so ; and the burden of his endeavour, so far as one can make it out, is to show not only that animals have a mind, but that this mind is, upon the whole, a much more accurate and admirable instrument than the mind of man. Mind, in fact, begins in vegetables, attains an already excellent development in the lowest zoological orders, is a master- piece of efficiency in parrots, dogs, and ants, and becomes per- verse and degraded only when the process of evolution reaches man, or such particular animals as man has contrived to inocu- late with a spice of his own infirmity. These, we say, are the inferences we have drawn as to Dr. Lindsay's meaning, after a painful examination of his volumes ; but not only is he too cautious or too self-distrustful to state these results himself in so many words, but he serenely and uniformly evades all such difficulties as give weight to theother side of the question, or at most dismisses them as unwarrantable assumptions and pre- judices. To revert to our late figure, he has designed a house which he is afraid to build, and at the same time refuses to adopt any more practicable design, lest he should sin against the self-constituted laws of scientific evidence. The world would never get on, if it proceeded upon any such principle as this.
It behoves us, consequently, to state our matured conviction that the reason Dr. Lindsay has thus left undone what he ought to have done, is because ho did not have it in him to do it. There is an ailment which, for lack of a, more decorous name, must be called mental dyspepsia, and to this unhappy disease Dr. Lindsay appears to be a victim. He, and thousands like him,
cannot digest the enormous meals of facts which they neverthe- less swallow ; they lack the inward force to organise them into wisdom. But they feel uncomfortably full ; they desire in some way to justify their gluttony ; and the result—not to carry our comparison too far—is the production of precisely such books as this of Mind in the Lower Animate. Such production is not to be encouraged. Sufferers from indigestion should keep their discomfort to themselves : that is the only course by which they can establish a claim even to the negative gratitude of mankind.
It would not be worth our while to analyse the present work, even were this a journal devoted to that department of investi- • gation. Dr. Lindsay has a genius for making distinctions without differences, and he fills pages and chapters with minute subdivisions of mental and moral attributes which he nowhere makes any attempt to account for or define. In the illogical spirit of not a few other scientific men, he seeks to throw doubts upon the soul by dint of means to which only the existence of a soul could give effect ; and at the same time, maintains the absoluteness of matter by those very material arguments which he considers inapplicable to the problems of psychology. But assuming the existence of a soul in man, Dr. Lindsay fails to see why it should be denied to animals. Where, he mks, shall the demarcation line be drawn ? This question, at least, is a preg- nant one ; it lies at the base of the whole theory of self-acting• evolution, and, rightly considered, is sufficient to demonstrate the inadequacy of the entire structure. Because there are traces of all animals to be found in man, science has assumed that man must have worked his way through the whole animal kingdom to his present position. But though it be true that man is the sum of animals, it is not less true that there is nothing in any animal that adequately characterises man. In other words, the degrees of creation are not continuous, but discrete. The savage is next in degree above the ape, let us say ; but though all of the ape is in the savage, there is nothing in the ape of the quality which makes the savage the savage that he incontestably is. Or, to look at the question from another side, the animal can think,. but the man alone can think about thinking, and hence use a spoken language. Dr. Lindsay finds that ants and beavers know how to manage their affairs much better than some men manage theirs, and he concludes that their mental faculties are of a higher order than man's. But that marvellous adaptation of means to ends in animals, which is vulgarly called instinct, is one of the strongest evidences that mind, in the human or independent sense, they have none. They are created into their proper order of life ; the beaver builds his dam from innate- impulse, not from calculation ; or just as the savage scratches himself, but not as the same savage makes his poisoned arrow. Men are helpless and ignorant, because their life and their dis- tinction is to learn by taking thought ; animals are born into their whole realm of knowledge at once, because they cannot learn as men do ; for the talk of parrots and the tricks of poodles are acquired by imitation from without, never by conscious reflection to-operating from within. And finally, the individual animal may be mortal, though the type survives ; because there may be nothing in them which would render immortality a boon ; the life of a bee, for example, being an complete after he has built and filled a single cell, as if he were to live to build and fill ten thousand. With these brief hints, we must take our leave of Dr. Lindsay. He, too, has missed an opportunity.
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