Sir C. Bell evidently wished to draw as broad a distinction as possible
between man and the lower animals; and he consequently asserts that
with “the lower creatures there is no expression but what may be
referred, more or less plainly, to their acts of volition or necessary
instincts.” He further maintains that their faces “seem chiefly capable
of expressing rage and fear.”[14] But man himself cannot express love
and humility by external signs, so plainly as does a dog, when with
drooping ears, hanging lips, flexuous body, and wagging tail, he meets
his beloved master. Nor can these movements in the dog be explained by
acts of volition or necessary instincts, any more than the beaming eyes
and smiling cheeks of a man when he meets an old friend. If Sir C. Bell
had been questioned about the expression of affection in the dog, he
would no doubt have answered that this animal had been created with
special instincts, adapting him for association with man, and that all
further enquiry on the subject was superfluous.
Although Gratiolet emphatically denies[15] that any muscle has been
developed solely for the sake of expression, he seems never to have
reflected on the principle of evolution. He apparently looks at each
species as a separate creation. So it is with the other writers on
Expression. For instance, Dr. Duchenne, after speaking of the movements
of the limbs, refers to those which give expression to the face, and
remarks:[16] “Le créateur n’a donc pas eu à se préoccuper ici des
besoins de la mécanique; il a pu, selon sa sagesse, ou—que l’on me
pardonne cette manière de parler—par une divine fantaisie, mettre en
action tel ou tel muscle, un seul ou plusieurs muscles à la fois,
lorsqu’il a voulu que les signes caractéristiques des passions, même
les plus fugaces, fussent écrits passagèrement sur la face de l’homme.
Ce langage de la physionomie une fois créé, il lui a suffi, pour le
rendre universel et immuable, de donner à tout être humain la faculté
instinctive d’exprimer toujours ses sendments par la contraction des
mêmes muscles.”
Many writers consider the whole subject of Expression as inexplicable.
Thus the illustrious physiologist Müller, says,[17] “The completely
different expression of the features in different passions shows that,
according to the kind of feeling excited, entirely different groups of
the fibres of the facial nerve are acted on. Of the cause of this we
are quite ignorant.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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