To Ourselves It Is The
Speaking With Unknown Tongues To The Early Corinthians; We Cannot
Fully Understand Our Own Speech, And We Fear Lest There Be Not A
Sufficient Number Of Interpreters Present To Make Our Utterance
Edify.
But there!
(Go on straight to the body of the article.)
The limbs of the lower animals have never been modified by any act of
deliberation and forethought on their own part. Recent researches
have thrown absolutely no light upon the origin of life - upon the
initial force which introduced a sense of identity and a deliberate
faculty into the world; but they do certainly appear to show very
clearly that each species of the animal and vegetable kingdom has
been moulded into its present shape by chances and changes of many
millions of years, by chances and changes over which the creature
modified had no control whatever, and concerning whose aim it was
alike unconscious and indifferent, by forces which seem insensate to
the pain which they inflict, but by whose inexorably beneficent
cruelty the brave and strong keep coming to the fore, while the weak
and bad drop behind and perish. There was a moral government of this
world before man came near it - a moral government suited to the
capacities of the governed, and which unperceived by them has laid
fast the foundations of courage, endurance, and cunning. It laid
them so fast that they became more and more hereditary. Horace says
well fortes creantur fortibus et bonis, good men beget good children;
the rule held even in the geological period; good ichthyosauri begot
good ichthyosauri, and would to our discomfort have gone on doing so
to the present time had not better creatures been begetting better
things than ichthyosauri, or famine or fire or convulsion put an end
to them. Good apes begot good apes, and at last when human
intelligence stole like a late spring upon the mimicry of our semi-
simious ancestry, the creature learnt how he could of his own
forethought add extra-corporaneous limbs to the members of his own
body, and become not only a vertebrate mammal, but a vertebrate
machinate mammal into the bargain.
It was a wise monkey that first learned to carry a stick, and a
useful monkey that mimicked him. For the race of man has learned to
walk uprightly much as a child learns the same thing. At first he
crawls on all fours, then he clambers, laying hold of whatever he
can; and lastly he stands upright alone and walks, but for a long
time with an unsteady step. So when the human race was in its
gorilla-hood it generally carried a stick; from carrying a stick for
many million years it became accustomed and modified to an upright
position. The stick wherewith it had learned to walk would now serve
to beat its younger brothers, and then it found out its service as a
lever. Man would thus learn that the limbs of his body were not the
only limbs that he could command. His body was already the most
versatile in existence, but he could render it more versatile still.
With the improvement in his body his mind improved also. He learnt
to perceive the moral government under which he held the feudal
tenure of his life - perceiving it he symbolised it, and to this day
our poets and prophets still strive to symbolise it more and more
completely.
The mind grew because the body grew; more things were perceived, more
things were handled, and being handled became familiar. But this
came about chiefly because there was a hand to handle with; without
the hand there would be no handling, and no method of holding and
examining is comparable to the human hand. The tail of an opossum is
a prehensile thing, but it is too far from his eyes; the elephant's
trunk is better, and it is probably to their trunks that the
elephants owe their sagacity. It is here that the bee, in spite of
her wings, has failed. She has a high civilisation, but it is one
whose equilibrium appears to have been already attained; the
appearance is a false one, for the bee changes, though more slowly
than man can watch her; but the reason of the very gradual nature of
the change is chiefly because the physical organisation of the insect
changes, but slowly also. She is poorly off for hands, and has never
fairly grasped the notion of tacking on other limbs to the limbs of
her own body, and so being short lived to boot she remains from
century to century to human eyes in statu quo. Her body never
becomes machinate, whereas this new phase of organism which has been
introduced with man into the mundane economy, has made him a very
quicksand for the foundation of an unchanging civilisation; certain
fundamental principles will always remain, but every century the
change in man's physical status, as compared with the elements around
him, is greater and greater. He is a shifting basis on which no
equilibrium of habit and civilisation can be established. Were it
not for this constant change in our physical powers, which our
mechanical limbs have brought about, man would have long since
apparently attained his limit of possibility; he would be a creature
of as much fixity as the ants and bees; he would still have advanced,
but no faster than other animals advance.
If there were a race of men without any mechanical appliances we
should see this clearly. There are none, nor have there been, so far
as we can tell, for millions and millions of years. The lowest
Australian savage carries weapons for the fight or the chase, and has
his cooking and drinking utensils at home; a race without these
things would be completely ferae naturae and not men at all. We are
unable to point to any example of a race absolutely devoid of extra-
corporaneous limbs, but we can see among the Chinese that with the
failure to invent new limbs a civilisation becomes as much fixed as
that of the ants; and among savage tribes we observe that few
implements involve a state of things scarcely human at all.
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