Romantic Love and Personal Beauty: Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiaritiesFinck, Henry T.
Science
Romantic Love and Personal Beauty: Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiarities
Finck, Henry T.
Beauty, Personal; Love
As comparative psychology is the youngest branch of philosophy, there
are still among us thousands of excellent but ignorant folks who cling
to the old mythologic notion that animals are animated machines or
things “which” are devoid of intellect and feeling, and guided by a
metaphysical fetish called “instinct.” To such the undertaking of a
search for Love—real Romantic Love—among animals, will seem not only
absurd, but a sort of high treason against human conceit. To mitigate
any possible indignation on the reader’s part, it may be advisable,
therefore, to begin by giving a few illustrations demonstrating the
existence of various family affections and friendship in the animal
world; after which, the possibility of finding traces of Love proper
will appear less remote.
_Paternal, filial, brotherly, and sisterly_ love, comparatively weak and
undeveloped in man, are indeed almost absent in the lower animals. Birds
of the same brood do not recognise each other after they have left their
nest; and a dog will not hesitate to attack his own brother as a
stranger after a year’s separation. The part which a male bird takes in
feeding and protecting the young is, as Horwicz suggests, an element of
his conjugal rather than his paternal feeling; and a young animal that
would risk its own life in defence of its mother or father is yet to be
heard from.
_Friendship_, however, does exist between animals, as we have already
seen; and not only among animals of the same species, but of different
species. “Happy families” of animals commonly hostile to each other have
been known outside of the showman’s cage. Büchner cites instances of
friendship between a robin and a cat; a fox and duck; dog and deer; cat
and mouse; and even such absurdly incongruous cases of attachment as
between a crow and a bull; a dog and an elephant; a cat and a
rattlesnake. But the deepest feeling of friendship which any animal is
capable of feeling is undoubtedly the dog’s love of his master.
“Professor Braubach,” says Darwin, “goes so far as to maintain that a
dog looks on his master as on a god.” “It is said,” he adds in a
footnote, “that Bacon long ago, and the poet Burns, held the same
notion.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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