Harmony and Conflict in the Living World - Alexander F. Skutch [64]
When we turn from the anatomy to the psychic life of animals, we find a very different attitude among biologists. To recognize physical resemblances is orthodox; to recognize psychic similarities, at least above such basic feelings as hunger, pain, and sexual desire, is heresy. Are we to conclude, then, that some extranatural agent implanted the human mind in a body that evolved from earlier vertebrate forms? Proponents of this dualistic view of human origin have not been lacking, but this is not biological orthodoxy. The more consistent view is that the human mind and body evolved together. Both our physical structures and our psychic traits have antecedents among animals less richly endowed.
The difficulty is that psychic states are not observable as bones and organs are. Aside from our individual selves, consciousness is always an inference, never a datum. We infer the feelings of those closest to us by certain overt signs, vocal, facial, behavioral; we cannot prove by scientific procedures that they feel. The more unlike ourselves another creature is, the more precarious our inferences from its behavior become.
Our imagination is limited by our experience. It is difficult for us to imagine any feelings, affections, or enjoyments that might
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give value to another creature's life wholly different from those that have enhanced our own. An animal's psychic state may differ in intensity or tone from ours, but it cannot be utterly unlike anything that we have felt without becoming inconceivable by us. Among the experiences that might enrich the life of one of the more advanced animals, including many birds and mammals, are pleasure in spontaneous activity, such as flying and soaring by birds, gamboling by quadrupeds, swimming by dolphins; the comfort of companionship in a perilous world; affection for mates, especially among animals continuously paired; emotional attachment to nests and dependent young; aesthetic response to beautiful colors and melodious sounds; a bird's delight in its own singing; the comfort of a snug dormitory nest on a chilly night; and in a small minority of birds, joy in a tastefully decorated bower. Since all such satisfactions are of sorts that from time to time many of us experience, they are in this sense "anthropomorphic." Unless we ascribe to nonhuman animals certain psychic states that make life worth living to us, as likewise such debilitating passions as fear, anger, and hatred, we must view their lives as emotionally blank, with no zest in living.
We cannot prove that nonhuman animals enjoy living, are emotionally attached to mates and young, or are attracted by beauty; we can only seek indications and weigh probabilities. But instead of stigmatizingI almost wrote "vituperating"as anthropomorphic the attempt to demonstrate humanlike psychic qualities in animals, we should welcome every indication of their presence and be grateful to naturalists who call attention to them. The probability that they occur should raise our estimate of the worth of animate life, making us feel less alone in a world overcrowded with organisms. If all nonhuman creatures are devoid of the psychic attributes called anthropomorphic, it follows that during the immense age before humans arose, no gleam of joy, no warmth of affection, nothing to give living intrinsic value brightened the existence of any of the myriad animals that swarmed over a hospitable planet. Devoid of anything that might give value to existence, Earth might as well have remained lifeless until the human lineage abruptly acquired the psychic qualities that enhance our
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lives. We cannot prove beyond