Darwin was too good an observer and too honest a man to minimise the
"enormous difference" between the level of mental attainment of
civilised man and that reached by any animal. His contention was that
the difference, great as it is, is one of degree and not of kind. He
realised that, in the development of the mental faculties of man, new
factors in evolution have supervened--factors which play but a
subordinate and subsidiary part in animal intelligence.
Intercommunication by means of language, approbation and blame, and
all that arises out of reflective thought, are but foreshadowed in the
mental life of animals. Still he contends that these may be explained
on the doctrine of evolution. He urges[185] "that man is variable in
body and mind; and that the variations are induced, either directly or
indirectly, by the same general causes, and obey the same general
laws, as with the lower animals." He correlates mental development
with the evolution of the brain.[186] "As the various mental faculties
gradually developed themselves, the brain would almost certainly
become larger. No one, I presume, doubts that the large proportion
which the size of man's brain bears to his body, compared to the same
proportion in the gorilla or orang, is closely connected with his
higher mental powers." "With respect to the lower animals," he
says,[187] "M. E. Lartet,[188] by comparing the crania of tertiary and
recent mammals belonging to the same groups, has come to the
remarkable conclusion that the brain is generally larger and the
convolutions are more complex in the more recent form."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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