To come back now to our primeval savage, when he sees in a dream his
deceased comrade and mistakes the vision for a reality, his error is not
concerned with the most fundamental part of the matter. The
all-important fact is that this dreaming savage has somehow acquired a
mental attitude toward death which is totally different from that of all
other animals, and is therefore peculiarly human. Throughout the
half-dozen invertebrate branches or sub-kingdoms, where intelligence is
manifested only in its lower forms of reflex action and instinct, we
find no evidence that any creature has come to know of death. There is a
sense, no doubt, in which we may say that the love of life is
universal. As a rule, all animals shun danger, and natural selection
maintains this rule by the pitiless slaughter of all delinquents, of all
in whom the needful inherited tendencies are too weak. But in the lower
animal grades and in the vegetal world the courting of life and the
shrinking from death go on without conscious intelligence, as the blades
of grass in a meadow or the clustering leaves upon a tree compete with
one another for the maximum of exposure to sunshine until perhaps stout
boughs and stems are warped or twisted in the struggle. Among
invertebrates, even when we get so high as lobsters and cuttlefish, the
consciousness attendant upon the seizing of prey and the escape from
enemies probably does not extend beyond the facts within the immediate
sphere of vision. Even among those ants that have marshalled hosts and
grand tactics there is doubtless no such thing as meditation of death.
Passing to the vertebrates, it is not until we reach the warm-blooded
birds and mammals that we find what we are seeking. Among sundry birds
and mammals we see indications of a dawning recognition of the presence
of death. An early manifestation is the sense of bereavement when the
maternal instinct is rudely disturbed, as in the cow mourning for her
calf. This feeling goes a little way, but not a great way, beyond the
sense of physical discomfort, and is soon relieved by milking. Much more
intense and abiding is the feeling of bereavement among birds that mate
for life, and among the higher apes, and it reaches its culmination in
the dog whose intelligence and affections have been so profoundly
modified through his immensely long comradeship with man. Nowhere in
literature do we strike upon a deeper note of pathos than in Scott's
immortal lines on the dog who starved while watching his young master's
lifeless body, alone upon a Highland moor:--
"How long didst thou think that his silence was slumber?
When the wind stirred his garment, how oft didst thou start!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account