What Is Man? and Other Essays
episode of my remote boyhood which had suddenly flashed up in my
memory—moved to this by the spectacle of a yellow cat picking its way
carefully along the top of the garden wall. The color of this cat
brought the bygone cat before me, and I saw her walking along the
side-step of the pulpit; saw her walk on to a large sheet of sticky
fly-paper and get all her feet involved; saw her struggle and fall
down, helpless and dissatisfied, more and more urgent, more and more
unreconciled, more and more mutely profane; saw the silent congregation
quivering like jelly, and the tears running down their faces. I saw it
all. The sight of the tears whisked my mind to a far distant and a
sadder scene—in Terra del Fuego—and with Darwin’s eyes I saw a naked
great savage hurl his little boy against the rocks for a trifling
fault; saw the poor mother gather up her dying child and hug it to her
breast and weep, uttering no word. Did my mind stop to mourn with that
nude black sister of mine? No—it was far away from that scene in an
instant, and was busying itself with an ever-recurring and disagreeable
dream of mine. In this dream I always find myself, stripped to my
shirt, cringing and dodging about in the midst of a great drawing-room
throng of finely dressed ladies and gentlemen, and wondering how I got
there. And so on and so on, picture after picture, incident after
incident, a drifting panorama of ever-changing, ever-dissolving views
manufactured by my mind without any help from me—why, it would take me
two hours to merely name the multitude of things my mind tallied off
and photographed in fifteen minutes, let alone describe them to you.
O.M. A man’s mind, left free, has no use for his help. But there is one
way whereby he can get its help when he desires it.
Y.M. What is that way?
O.M. When your mind is racing along from subject to subject and strikes
an inspiring one, open your mouth and begin talking upon that
matter—or—take your pen and use that. It will interest your mind and
concentrate it, and it will pursue the subject with satisfaction. It
will take full charge, and furnish the words itself.
Y.M. But don’t I tell it what to say?
O.M. There are certainly occasions when you haven’t time. The words
leap out before you know what is coming.
Y.M. For instance?
O.M. Well, take a “flash of wit”—repartee. Flash is the right word. It
is out instantly. There is no time to arrange the words. There is no
thinking, no reflecting. Where there is a wit-mechanism it is automatic
in its action and needs no help. Where the wit-mechanism is lacking, no
amount of study and reflection can manufacture the product.
Y.M. You really think a man originates nothing, creates nothing.
_The Thinking-Process_
O.M. I do. Men perceive, and their brain-machines automatically combine
the things perceived. That is all.
Y.M. The steam-engine?
O.M. It takes fifty men a hundred years to invent it. One meaning of
invent is discover. I use the word in that sense. Little by little they
discover and apply the multitude of details that go to make the perfect
engine. Watt noticed that confined steam was strong enough to lift the
lid of the teapot. He didn’t create the idea, he merely discovered the
fact; the cat had noticed it a hundred times. From the teapot he
evolved the cylinder—from the displaced lid he evolved the piston-rod.
To attach something to the piston-rod to be moved by it, was a simple
matter—crank and wheel. And so there was a working engine.
One by one, improvements were discovered by men who used their eyes,
not their creating powers—for they hadn’t any—and now, after a hundred
years the patient contributions of fifty or a hundred observers stand
compacted in the wonderful machine which drives the ocean liner.
Y.M. A Shakespearean play?
O.M. The process is the same. The first actor was a savage. He
reproduced in his theatrical war-dances, scalp—dances, and so on,
incidents which he had seen in real life. A more advanced civilization
produced more incidents, more episodes; the actor and the story-teller
borrowed them. And so the drama grew, little by little, stage by stage.
It is made up of the facts of life, not creations. It took centuries to
develop the Greek drama. It borrowed from preceding ages; it lent to
the ages that came after. Men observe and combine, that is all. So does
a rat.
Y.M. How?
O.M. He observes a smell, he infers a cheese, he seeks and finds. The
astronomer observes this and that; adds his this and that to the
this-and-thats of a hundred predecessors, infers an invisible planet,
seeks it and finds it. The rat gets into a trap; gets out with trouble;
infers that cheese in traps lacks value, and meddles with that trap no
more. The astronomer is very proud of his achievement, the rat is proud
of his. Yet both are machines; they have done machine work, they have
originated nothing, they have no right to be vain; the whole credit
belongs to their Maker. They are entitled to no honors, no praises, no
monuments when they die, no remembrance. One is a complex and elaborate
machine, the other a simple and limited machine, but they are alike in
principle, function, and process, and neither of them works otherwise
than automatically, and neither of them may righteously claim a
_personal _superiority or a personal dignity above the other.
Y.M. In earned personal dignity, then, and in personal merit for what
he does, it follows of necessity that he is on the same level as a rat?
O.M. His brother the rat; yes, that is how it seems to me. Neither of
them being entitled to any personal merit for what he does, it follows
of necessity that neither of them has a right to arrogate to himself
(personally created) superiorities over his brother.
Y.M. Are you determined to go on believing in these insanities? Would
you go on believing in them in the face of able arguments backed by
collated facts and instances?
O.M. I have been a humble, earnest, and sincere Truth-Seeker.
Y.M. Very well?
O.M. The humble, earnest, and sincere Truth-Seeker is always
convertible by such means.
Y.M. I am thankful to God to hear you say this, for now I know that
your conversion—
O.M. Wait. You misunderstand. I said I have _been _a Truth-Seeker.
Y.M. Well?
O.M. I am not that now. Have your forgotten? I told you that there are
none but temporary Truth-Seekers; that a permanent one is a human
impossibility; that as soon as the Seeker finds what he is thoroughly
convinced is the Truth, he seeks no further, but gives the rest of his
days to hunting junk to patch it and caulk it and prop it with, and
make it weather-proof and keep it from caving in on him. Hence the
Presbyterian remains a Presbyterian, the Mohammedan a Mohammedan, the
Spiritualist a Spiritualist, the Democrat a Democrat, the Republican a
Republican, the Monarchist a Monarchist; and if a humble, earnest, and
sincere Seeker after Truth should find it in the proposition that the
moon is made of green cheese nothing could ever budge him from that
position; for he is nothing but an automatic machine, and must obey the
laws of his construction.
Y.M. And so—
O.M. Having found the Truth; perceiving that beyond question man has
but one moving impulse—the contenting of his own spirit—and is merely a
machine and entitled to no personal merit for anything he does, it is
not humanly possible for me to seek further. The rest of my days will
be spent in patching and painting and puttying and caulking my
priceless possession and in looking the other way when an imploring
argument or a damaging fact approaches.
1. The Marquess of Worcester had done all of this more than a century
earlier.
VI
Instinct and Thought
Young Man. It is odious. Those drunken theories of yours, advanced a
while ago—concerning the rat and all that—strip Man bare of all his
dignities, grandeurs, sublimities.
Old Man. He hasn’t any to strip—they are shams, stolen clothes. He
claims credits which belong solely to his Maker.
Y.M. But you have no right to put him on a level with a rat.
O.M. I don’t—morally. That would not be fair to the rat. The rat is
well above him, there.
Y.M. Are you joking?
O.M. No, I am not.
Y.M. Then what do you mean?
O.M. That comes under the head of the Moral Sense. It is a large
question. Let us finish with what we are about now, before we take it
up.
Y.M. Very well. You have seemed to concede that you place Man and the
rat on a level. What is it? The intellectual?
O.M. In form—not a degree.
Y.M. Explain.
O.M. I think that the rat’s mind and the man’s mind are the same
machine, but of unequal capacities—like yours and Edison’s; like the
African pygmy’s and Homer’s; like the Bushman’s and Bismarck’s.
Y.M. How are you going to make that out, when the lower animals have no
mental quality but instinct, while man possesses reason?
O.M. What is instinct?
Y.M. It is merely unthinking and mechanical exercise of inherited
habit.
O.M. What originated the habit?
Y.M. The first animal started it, its descendants have inherited it.
O.M. How did the first one come to start it?
Y.M. I don’t know; but it didn’t _think _it out.
O.M. How do you know it didn’t?
Y.M. Well—I have a right to suppose it didn’t, anyway.
O.M. I don’t believe you have. What is thought?
Y.M. I know what you call it: the mechanical and automatic putting
together of impressions received from outside, and drawing an inference
from them.
O.M. Very good. Now my idea of the meaningless term “instinct” is, that
it is merely _petrified thought; _solidified and made inanimate by
habit; thought which was once alive and awake, but is become
unconscious—walks in its sleep, so to speak.
Y.M. Illustrate it.
O.M. Take a herd of cows, feeding in a pasture. Their heads are all
turned in one direction. They do that instinctively; they gain nothing
by it, they have no reason for it, they don’t know why they do it. It
is an inherited habit which was originally thought—that is to say,
observation of an exterior fact, and a valuable inference drawn from
that observation and confirmed by experience. The original wild ox
noticed that with the wind in his favor he could smell his enemy in
time to escape; then he inferred that it was worth while to keep his
nose to the wind. That is the process which man calls reasoning. Man’s
thought-machine works just like the other animals’, but it is a better
one and more Edisonian. Man, in the ox’s place, would go further,
reason wider: he would face part of the herd the other way and protect
both front and rear.
Y.M. Did you stay the term instinct is meaningless?
O.M. I think it is a bastard word. I think it confuses us; for as a
rule it applies itself to habits and impulses which had a far-off
origin in thought, and now and then breaks the rule and applies itself
to habits which can hardly claim a thought-origin.
Y.M. Give an instance.
O.M. Well, in putting on trousers a man always inserts the same old leg
first—never the other one. There is no advantage in that, and no sense
in it. All men do it, yet no man thought it out and adopted it of set
purpose, I imagine. But it is a habit which is transmitted, no doubt,
and will continue to be transmitted.
Y.M. Can you prove that the habit exists?
O.M. You can prove it, if you doubt. If you will take a man to a
clothing-store and watch him try on a dozen pairs of trousers, you will
see.
Y.M. The cow illustration is not—
O.M. Sufficient to show that a dumb animal’s mental machine is just the
same as a man’s and its reasoning processes the same? I will illustrate
further. If you should hand Mr. Edison a box which you caused to fly
open by some concealed device he would infer a spring, and would hunt