After some brief observations on instinct and intelligence, Darwin
brings forward evidence to show that the greater number of the
emotional states, such as pleasure and pain, happiness and misery,
love and hate are common to man and the higher animals. He goes on to
give various examples showing that wonder and curiosity, imitation,
attention, memory and imagination (dreams of animals), can also be
observed in the higher mammals, especially in apes. In regard even to
reason there are no sharply defined limits. A certain faculty of
deliberation is characteristic of some animals, and the more
thoroughly we know an animal the more intelligence we are inclined to
credit it with. Examples are brought forward of the intelligent and
deliberate actions of apes, dogs and elephants. But although no
sharply defined differences exist between man and animals, there is,
nevertheless, a series of other mental powers which are
characteristics usually regarded as absolutely peculiar to man. Some
of these characteristics are examined in detail, and it is shown that
the arguments drawn from them are not conclusive. Man alone is said to
be capable of progressive improvement; but against this must be placed
as something analogous in animals, the fact that they learn cunning
and caution through long continued persecution. Even the use of tools
is not in itself peculiar to man (monkeys use sticks, stones and
twigs), but man alone fashions and uses implements _designed for a
special purpose_. In this connection the remarks taken from Lubbock in
regard to the origin and gradual development of the earliest flint
implements will be read with interest; these are similar to the
observations on modern eoliths, and their bearing on the development
of the stone industry. It is interesting to learn from a letter to
Hooker,[96] that Darwin himself at first doubted whether the stone
implements discovered by Boucher de Perthes were really of the nature
of tools. With the relentless candour as to himself which
characterised him, he writes four years later in a letter to Lyell in
regard to this view of Boucher de Perthes' discoveries: "I know
something about his errors, and looked at his book many years ago, and
am ashamed to think that I concluded the whole was rubbish! Yet he has
done for man something like what Agassiz did for glaciers."[97]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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