Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 106.djvu/638

628 night, the year through, for a thousand, for a million ears it goes on, and no one is the wiser, yet the tides have played their part in the history of the globe. But nature's cradle keeps rocking after her child has left it. Only the land benefits from the rain, and yet it rains upon the sea as upon the land. The trees ripen their fruits and their nuts whether there is any creature to feed upon them, or any room to plant them or not. Nature's purpose (more anthropomorphism) embraces them all, she covers the full circle, she does not need to discriminate and husband her resources as we do.

Far and forgot to me are near,

Shadow and sunshine are the same;

The vanished gods to me appear,

And one to me are shame and fame.

The animals are so wise in their own way, such a success, without thought, yet so provocative of thought in us! They are rational without reason, and wise without understanding. They communicate without language, and subsist without forethought. They weave and spin and drill and bore without tools, they traverse zones without guide or compass, they are cunning without instruction, and prudent without precept. They know the ends of the earth, the depths of the sea, the currents of the air, and are at home in the wilderness. We ascribe to them thought and reason, and discuss their psychology, because we are anthropomorphic; we have no other standards than those furnished by our own nature and experience.

Animal behavior, as I have said, is much more like the behavior of natural forces than is that of man: the animal goes along with nature, borne along by her currents, while the mind of man crosses and confronts nature, thwarts her, uses her, or turns her back upon herself. During the vast eons while the earth was peopled by the lower orders alone, nature went her way. But when this new animal, man, appeared, in due time nature began to go his way, to own him as master. Her steam and her currents did his work, her lightning carried his messages, her forces became his servants.

I am not aware that any animal in the least degree confronts nature in this way—cuts its paths through her, and arbitrarily shapes her. Probably the nearest approach to it is among the insects, such as the balloon-spiders, the agricultural ants, etc. In some parts of the country one might think that the cow was a landscape gardener, from the pretty cone-shaped forms that she carves out of the wild-apple and thorn trees, but she does this quite unwittingly through her taste for the young shoots of these trees. It is like her engineering skill in laying out paths, quite inevitable from the nature of her wants and activities.

Man is the only inventive and tool-using animal, because he alone has the faculty of reason, and can see the end of a thing before the beginning. With his mind's eye he sees a world hidden from the lower orders. There are hints of this gift in the lower orders, hints of reason, of language, of tool-using, and the like, but hints only.

The cries and calls of animals must have preceded human speech, but who can measure the gulf between them? Man must have had animal emotions—fear, hunger, joy, love, hate—long before he had ideas. His gift of language and his gift of ideas must have grown together, and mutually reacted upon one another. Without language could he possess ideas, or possess ideas without language? Which was first?

An animal's use of signals—warning signals and recognition signals, if this is the true significance of some of their markings is as unwitting as the flower's use of its perfume or its colors to attract insects. The deer