Serpent-Worship, and Other Essays, with a Chapter on TotemismWake, C. Staniland (Charles Staniland)
Religion
Serpent-Worship, and Other Essays, with a Chapter on Totemism
Wake, C. Staniland (Charles Staniland)
Phallicism; Serpent worship; Totemism
While admitting that physiological considerations reveal a much
wider interval between man and the anthropoid apes than anatomical
data require, M. Broca would hardly allow that the former exhibits
anything peculiar in his mental action. So, also, Mr. Darwin says that
man and the higher mammals “have some few instincts in common. All
have the same senses, intuitions, and sensations—similar passions,
affections, and emotions, even the more complex ones; they feel
wonder and curiosity; they possess the same faculties of imitation,
attention, memory, imagination, and reason, though in very different
degrees.”[368] The faculty of articulate speech, moreover, is said
not in itself to offer “any insuperable objection to the belief that
man has been developed from some lower form;” while the taste for
the “beautiful” is shown not to be peculiar to the human mind.[369]
The moral sense is supposed by Mr. Darwin to be the most distinctive
characteristic of man; but even this is asserted to have been developed
out of the social instincts which man and many of the lower animals
have in common.[370] Finally, self-consciousness, abstraction, &c.,
even if peculiar to man, are declared to be “the incidental results of
other highly-advanced intellectual faculties;”[371] and these again
are mainly due to the continued use of a highly-developed language,
which originated in “the imitation and modification, aided by signs and
gestures, of various natural sounds, the voices of other animals and
man’s own instinctive cries.”[372]
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.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account