ANIMAL REVERENCE.
THE Victoria Institute, which is a London theological debating society, not a little frequented by the clergy, has been attempting to define the distinction between the lower animals and man, without, as far as we can see, being very successful. Of course, the old attempt to distinguish between instinct and reason was tried, and defeated by the ingenious arguments of more than one gentleman. The orthodox view of instinct is that it is a wholly irrational sort of impulse, which accomplishes its great results quite blindly under the guidance of a higher power, and in defence of this view the old story of a tame beaver building a dam in a room with tables and brushes, and so forth, was related. To this argument no one seems to have given the answer that the most intellectual man is often found to do equally useless and
inapplicable things, from inherited habit, without its being inferred that the inherited habit has never had any sort of intellectual origin. When a posthumous child imitates, as it often does, the mannerisms of a parent it has never seen, we do not argue that those mannerisms cannot have had, in that parent, a rational origin. Nor do we argue the same thing in the case of any habit prolonged after its use has disappeared. When an orator in the decline of life cannot refrain from addressing elo- quent speeches to his turnips, or an architect from making models of buildings that can never be executed, and are not even intended for other persons to study, or a scholar in prison turns nursery rhymes into Greek or Latin hexameters, without the slightest intention of either amusing or teaching any one but himself, an external intelligence watching these men without seeing into their minds, might very plausibly say that they were doing just what the tame beaver does when he builds his dam of tables and brushes in a dry room,—doing from "blind instinct" what he had no rational pretence for doing ; and such an observer might fairly enoughadd that this demonstrates the fact thatthe original speeches, architectural efforts, and Latin and Greek verses, were composed by instinct, without any mastery of the rational laws involved. And such an inference would, as we know, be certainly mistaken. We do not see that the tame beaver really proves anything except that in his case he was building from hereditary habit, displaying .
an inherited trick of manner, as we might say; but how far the origin of that hereditary habit, of that inherited trick of manner, might have been rational or otherwise,—i.e., a conscious adapta- tion of means to ends, or a mere blind instrumentality, the story does not in any degree tend to show. On the other hand, the cases adduced of animals adapting themselves to new emergencies, the capacity to deal with which could not possibly have been inherited, do seem to show a real element of reason in the matter. The bees which found out an uninhabited hive and gave information to the Queen Bee,—who never leaves the hive but twice in her life, in early infancy, and on occasion of her heading a swarm,—which caused her to lead them into possession of that hive, must have ex- ercised many of the faculties supposed to be peculiar to the pioneers of human civilization. The setter who bribed the sheep-dog by the voluntary sacrifice of some of his dinner bones, to assist in catching the game that the setter indicated, must have divined something of the power of co-operation, and division of labour, and deliberately applied capital (the "saved wages of labour ") to this very remunerative investment in the sheep-dog's labour. Whatever be the definition of instinct, and the certainty that many of the most apparently sagacious animals do things quite over the head of not only their rational powers, but ours, it seems to us certain that very many of the lower animals do adapt means consciously to ends, though not after a very elaborate fashion, and are, therefore, rationally as well as instinctively, constructive. The attempt to divide man sharply from the lower animals by his possession of an intelligence different in kind from theirs seems to us certainly a failure. No one can pretend for an instant that the famous Fire Brigade dog which used to give the alarm of fire, to run up the ladder into a burning house, to bark so as to guide his master through the thickest of the smoke to the place of egress, to give notice when there were living people shut up in a state of suffocation, whom the firemen would have missed, by barking violently at the door of their rooms, and, in short, to co-operate most effectually, not only in the general, but the special measures for bringing individual relief in the case of dan- gerous fires,—no one, we say, can pretend for an instant that this dog did not bring as clear a reason to work (in aid of the acute instinctive smell, for instance, which he possessed), as the firemen themselves. Unquestionably, the attempt to make the distinction between instinct and intelligence the main distinction between the lower animals and man is a mistake.
The gentlemen of the Victoria Institute appeared more or less sensible of this difficulty, and some of them proposed, in the place of this distinction, to make the characteristic distinction between the lower animal and man the want in the former, and the presence in the latter, of a faculty of reverence. Here, we imagine, the theologians of the Institute got nearer to a characteristic distinc- tion. But even here they failed to express it in the most character- istic form. The great leading fact of domestication is the unques- tionable reverence of the higher domesticated animals for the human beings whom they accept as their masters. The dog at Edin- burgh which has for eight years slept on the grave of its master, and has refused to sleep anywhere else, can scarcely be denied a kind of fidelity to that master's memory which deserves to be termed reverence. The "instinctive" school would, we suppose, make this at first a mere matter of physical instinct, leading the dog
to the place where it found most trace of its master's body, and afterwards a result of habit. But as a matter of fact, no creatures are less victims of habit than dogs. They go from place to place with their masters with nothing but delight in the change, and the difficulty would have been, had the master been living, to get the dog to sleep for eight years in any one place unless his master had slept there too. We can only properly account for this extraordinary case of a truly spiritual attachment to the memory of a master, by suppos- ing that the dog can really recall, or, rather, has never forgotten its own intense love, and respect, and regret for him, and feels the grave more closely associated with these feelings of love, and respect, and regret than any other place within its reach. That dogs really reverence their masters, and do so even in the absence .of their bodily presence, and after very long absence, seems to us absolutely certain. And the same thing is more or lees true of ether domesticated animals, especially the horse and the elephant. Nay, it seems certain that all the higher gregarious animals rever- ence their own leaders,—the herds of elephants especially show- ing implicit confidence in the directions of their leaders. Any man with several dogs will notice that a sort of hero-worship grows up amongst them, the small dogs usually fixing their _admiration on the larger doge, and bestowing a good deal of the most disinterested respect and reverence upon them. A terrier of our acquaintance always rushes to meet a large retriever (of her own sex) when they first meet in the morning, with the deepest signs of devotion. If the retriever is tied up, the terrier will never be easy till she has obtained the release of her large friend, .and caresses the latter on her release with an effusion that makes the retriever quite bashful and ashamed. Here is a genuine case of reverence as between dog and dog. The same quality in a far higher degree holds between dog and man.
But then animal reverence is always founded, we believe, on the admiration felt for external qualities, which the lower -animals can more or less appreciate, like size, speed, cour- age, resource, and protecting power. The dog defends the man ; but none the less he feels in a larger sense depen- -dent on the man, and is aware of the man's power to control, punish, or reward him, indeed, of his still greater power to -determine generally the whole destiny of his own life. Hence the reverence of the lower animal for man is like the reverence of the -savage for the civilized man when first he beholds his great resource in the arts of war and peace,—not so much moral reverence, as that sense of physical inferiority and dependence which, when met with generous treatment, often results in the deepest affection. As far as we know, the lower animals, though they show plenty of trace of reverence in this vaguer sense, show none of that reverence which we yield to those who are better than ourselves simply because they are better. Lord Bacon long ago remarked that dogs have a religion, and that their gods are their masters. But then this is the sort of religious reverence paid by a savage to a man with a gun, or a voltaic battery, or an electric telegraph, or anything he cannot understand, when combined with the feeling of gratitude and love which the latter's kindness may in- -spire. But the dog shows no sign of self-reproach, of looking for a higher moral ideal than itself, of probing the purity of its own mo- tives,and shrinking before the spirit which teaches the higher grades of nobility it has never reached. In short, moral reverence is, no doubt, beyond the reach of the lower animals, simply because this rests upon a conscious comparison of the conflicting principles by which life can be regulated, a discovery that some of these are higher than others, and a further discovery that there are beings whose lives show far more of the higher and less of the lower than -our own. We should say that this is beyond the range of the highest animal life, because a conscious reflection on the motives .and springs of action has never yet been reached at all by any mere animal, — not even by the lowest tribes of the human species itself. Here, again, the distinction, though complete for the purpose of excluding the lower animals, doubtless does more, excludes also the lowest tribes of human beings them- selves. The kind of reverence which we have claimed even for domesticated animals passes no doubt very gradually and by almost insensible shades into that phase of moral comparison and reflection which is the source of all true worship. But the knowledge of the comparative worth of different motives, and the sense of shame which accompanies the complete predominance of the lowest motives, though peculiar to man, is not common, we imagine, to all the beings who are capable of becoming men in this higher sense. We suspect it is true that many domestic animals, though they have less of moral capacity in them than the lowest human animals,—the bushmen, for example,—have more of actual reverence, more of the humaner qualities of disinterested love and devotion, in short, more civilization, though less capability of civilization. The highest range reached in the world of the lower animal life overlaps the lowest reached by man, the difference being, however, that the former is incapable of cultivation beyond a certain point, owing to the absence of any adequate means of accumulating the results of past experience, while the latter is capable of cultivation far beyond the point at which the former stops. Still, as a matter of actual attainment, as distinguished from the capacity for future development, no doubt the highest class of animals surpass the lowest tribes which deserve the name of man.
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