Vestiges of the Natural History of CreationChambers, Robert
Science
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
Chambers, Robert
Creation; Evolution (Biology)
It is a common mistake to suppose that the individuals of our own species
are all of them formed with similar faculties—similar in power and
tendency—and that education and the influence of circumstances produce
all the differences which we observe. There is not, in the old systems
of mental philosophy, any doctrine more opposite to the truth than this.
It is refuted at once by the great differences of intellectual tendency
and moral disposition to be observed amongst a group of young children
who have been all brought up in circumstances perfectly identical—even in
twins, who have never been but in one place, under the charge of one
nurse, attended to alike in all respects. The mental characters of
individuals are inherently various, as the forms of their persons and the
features of their faces are; and education and circumstances, though
their influence is not to be despised, are incapable of entirely altering
these characters, where they are strongly developed. That the original
characters of mind are dependent on the volume of particular parts of the
brain and the general quality of that viscus, is proved by induction from
an extensive range of observations, the force of which must have been
long since universally acknowledged but for the unpreparedness of mankind
to admit a functional connexion between mind and body. The different
mental characters of individuals may be presumed from analogy to depend
on the same law of development which we have seen determining forms of
being and the mental characters of particular species. This we may
conceive as carrying forward the intellectual powers and moral
dispositions of some to a high pitch, repressing those of others at a
moderate amount, and thus producing all the varieties which we see in our
fellow-creatures. Thus a Cuvier and a Newton are but expansions of a
clown, and the person emphatically called the wicked man, is one whose
highest moral feelings are rudimental. Such differences are not confined
to our species; they are only less strongly marked in many of the
inferior animals. There are clever dogs and wicked horses, as well as
clever men and wicked men, and education sharpens the talents, and in
some degree regulates the dispositions of animals, as it does our own.
Here I may advert to a very interesting analogy between the mental
characters of the types in the quinary system of zoology and the
characters of individual men. We have seen that the pre-eminent type is
usually endowed with an harmonious assemblage of the mental qualities
belonging to the whole group, while the sub-typical inclines to ferocity,
the rasorial to gentleness, and so on. Now, amongst individuals, some
appear to be almost exclusively of the sub-typical, and others of the
rasorial characters, while to a limited number is given the finely
assorted assemblage of qualities which places them on a parallel with the
typical. To this may be attributed the universality which marks all the
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