APES AND MEN.
IN the New Review. . for June, there is a very remarkable paper by Professor Garner on the language of apes, which he has been studying with the help of the phonograph, and of which he thinks that he has acquired at least some of the rudiments. He tells us that, with the consent of Dr, Frank Baker, Director of the National Zoological Gardens at Washington, he separated a pair of apes which had been living together, and placed them in different rooms. Then he placed the phonograph near the cage of the female, and recorded a few of the sounds which she had uttered in that instrument. It was then removed to the cell of the male and made to repeat the sounds thus registered. "The surprise and per- plexity of the male were evident. He traced the sounds to the horn from which they came, and failing to find his mate, he thrust his hand and arm into the horn quite up to his shoulder, withdrew it, and peeped into the horn again and again. He would then retreat and again cautiously approach the horn, which he examined with evident interest. The expres- sions of his face were indeed a study." Using the phonograph, and doing all in his power to imitate its sound after he had obtained what he believed to be the chimpanzee word either for milk or for the desire to obtain milk, Professor Garner made the greatest effort to repeat this word with his own tongue and lips to a capuchin monkey. The monkey immediately turned to look at him, and when he had repeated it three or four times very distinctly, the monkey repeated the sound and turned to a pan kept in his cage for supplying him with drink, brought the pan to the front of the cage, came quite up to the bars and uttered the word himself, though as yet Professor Garner had not shown him any milk or any other drink. Then, and not till then, milk was brought and poured into the pan, which the monkey drank with great zest, and then repeated the sound again some three or four times. And Pro- fessor Garner found that when he wanted his pan replenished, he always used the .same sound. And as, when water was used instead of milk, the same word was repeated to express the desire for it, the inference was drawn that the word denoted either liquid or the thirst which was satisfied by liquid. The same experiment was tried with a sound which Professor Garner discovered to. be always used in connection with solid food, a banana, or a carrot, a bit of bread, or an apple; and as the same word seemed to apply to all of them equally, Professor Garner inferred that the word described either solid
food in general or the hunger for it. And in the same way he discovered the sound which described pain or sickness, and another which expressed either a sense of danger or a threat, the effect of its utterance being to alarm the monkey so violently that he always sprang to the highest point in his cage, and after it had been repeated three or four times, the re- sult was that the creature became almost frantic with dread; nor would this monkey even allow himself to be attracted by the words for drink or food after he had once learned to associate Professor Garner with this sound, expressive of either danger or menace. In this fashion Professor Garner obtained the mastery of about eight or nine sounds, which may be changed by different modulations into three or four times that number, so as to express modified forms of the same word, all of them chiefly vowel-sounds with the barest indication of something like a consonant ; and these sounds Professor Garner regards as the constituent elements of an ape-language which has a variety of different dialects, according to the species of ape addressed.
We give this curious and interesting story to show the sort of fundamental changes which mind may produce on the physical world, and as suggesting an answer to Mr. Nisbet's question, contained in the letter which we print in another column : "11a8 mind a physical basis P" The reply is : Of course it has, if you mean by " basis " a uniform physical condition, and are referring to the human mind only; but if we have the means of recognising that it is so, we have that means only on condition that we also recognise that " body " has a mental basis, and that the mental basis of bodily phenomena is not less certain,—nay, much more certain,—than the physical basis of mental phenomena.' How did Professor Garner get at this relation of cause and effect between the ape's wants and his cries, and the similar relation of cause and effect between his cries and the supply of his wants P He got at them by carefully attending to the sounds he heard, by applying that highest result of scientific attention, the phonograph, to the registration of these sounds, and then, again, by attending most carefully to the phonograph's registration, and imitating it till he could catch the attention of the ape, and speak to him, as it were, in his own rudimentary language. The whole series of experiments, and the wonderful instrument which rendered them possible, are a triumph of this one great funda- mental root of all science, the act of voluntary attention. With- out the act of voluntary attention, human science could not have been, and the mighty series of results which it seems destined to bring about, not only in the intellectual world, but in the re- action of that world on the physical world, could not have been brought about. If we are ever enabled to communicate freely with animals lower in the range of creation than ourselves, it will be as much due to the organisation of acts of attention, and the thoughtful interpretation of the results gained by those sots, as that power of communicating with and paying obe- dience to beings higher than ourselves which we call the religious life, is due to the organisation of acts of attention of a different and more subtle nature. But what is the act of scientific attention P It is, though Mr. Nisbet disputes it, an act of pure will, meaning by will, of course, not that which is the resultant of pre-existent impulses and desires, but that self-caused effort by which scientific attention is distinguished from all such acts of involuntary attention. Mr. Nisbet, we know, denies the existence of will. For him, all will is a mere resultant of desire. All we can say to that explanation is, that he ignores the vital distinction between the attention of a thirsty ape when the scientific man excites it by uttering the sound which gives him a hope that his thirst will be gratified, and the attention of the scientific investigator when he desires to discriminate between the various sounds which the ape utters to his mate or his master. We know nothing if we do not know that we ourselves cause for ourselves an each acts of attention, and that science of all kinds is the organised result of such acts. The knowledge of cause and effect itself is the outcome of such acts of attention. If we say, as we do say justly enough with Mr. Nisbet, that the structure of the human mind has necessary physical conditions, we affirm it only on the strength of the knowledge we have obtained by attention and generalisation (which involves a special kind of attention and acts of com- parison following thereon), and we cannot say it with any greater certainty,—indeed, it must be said with even less certainty,—than the certainty with which we affirm that the physics of the universe have a mental basis in some being who, as Plato says, " geometrises," who applies laws which are only recognisable by a mind, and only to be imposed by a will, and who is capable of that infinitely extended atten- tion which is revealed in the laws of gravitation, of the undulation of the ether, and of electric vibration,—an infinite power of attention which is related to the infinitesimal acts of attention by which men discover these laws, much as the uni- verse is related to an atom. To deny will, and then to assert laws of cause and effect, as Mr. Nisbet does, is like cutting off the bough on which you are sitting ; for laws of cause and effect could never have been discovered without innumer- able acts of will organised into a chain of observations and inferences. Every reasoning being knows the difference between involuntary attention such as we give where there is no volition, but where the desire itself awakens the mind to the presence or probable presence of the thing desired,—such attention as the ape gave, for instance, when the sound was uttered which suggested to him milk or water,—and the attention which Professor Garner gave to the utterances of the ape, including the efforts which he made so to reproduce them through his careful study of the phono- graph, that the ape himself might recognise their meaning. Voluntary and discriminating attention is the very kernel of all science. If we are not capable of affirming that we our- selves produce the series of acts to which, for instance, the invention of the phonograph was due, or to which the sagacious effort of Professor Garner to get into communiaa- tion with chimpanzees and capuchins was due, we are utterly incapable of asserting that such a relation as cause and effect exists. Indeed, the certainty of the laws of Nature, of the laws of uniform antecedence and consequence, is a mere piece of guesswork as compared with the certainty of that steady gaze at phenomena we wish to understand, by which all science is generated. If we know, as we do know, that the human mind is subject to physical conditions without which we cannot expect it to go through any of its processes in our present state of existence, we know it only by virtue of the higher certainty that the ultimate forces of the universe are ex- pressible only in terms of mind and will; that they come to our knowledge in proportion as we freely exert our wills to attend to the phenomena by which they are manifested, and our intellects to discriminate between them. If the involuntary attention which is surprised out of us, as it is out of the ape, is not something distinct in kind from that nisus of effort by which we fix our minds on any phenomenon and attempt its interpretation, then the whole structure of science may well be an illusion. As we said last week, " will " is a word of supererogation, it is a will-o'-the-wisp which has no pretence for existing at all, if it represents nothing but a resultant of desires. Indeed the effort required for scientific attention, itself shows that it is not a resultant of desire, for a resultant of desire involves no effort, and as scientific men know, their desire to reach the truth is often so faint that all the ele- ment of craving has vanished out of it, while that of which they are conscious is something quite different from desire,—namely, resolute effort. In pure desire there is nothing that is not involuntary ; in pure will there is nothing that is involuntary; and if the latter does not exist at all, why is there a separate name for it, and a name which really suggests something unique, something that is at its highest point when the eager strain of the passions is absent, and which is disturbed or obliterated so soon as the crowd of desires rush in. It seems to us that Professor Garner's striking paper illustrates precisely the difference between the attention which comes of desire, and the attention which comes of will. The ape exhibited the one in perfection; the Professor who was making an attempt which may well result in revolutionising the life of the higher apes, exhibited the other in a perfection almost, though of course not quite, as high.
Previous page
