8. The brute has no conscience and no religious nature. No dog ever brought back to the butcher the meat it had stolen. “The aspen trembles without fear, and dogs skulk without guilt.” The dog mentioned by Darwin, whose behavior in presence of a newspaper moved by the wind seemed to testify to “a sense of the supernatural,” was merely exhibiting the irritation due to the sense of an unknown future; see James, Will to Believe, 79. The bearing of flogged curs does not throw light upon the nature of conscience. If ethics is not hedonism, if moral obligation is not a refined utilitarianism, if the right is something distinct from the good we get out of it, then there must be a flaw in the theory that man’s conscience is simply a development of brute instincts; and a reinforcement of brute life from the divine source of life must be postulated in order to account for the appearance of man. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 165-167—“Is the spirit of man derived from the soul of the animal? No, for neither one of these has self-existence. Both are self-differentiations of God. The latter is simply God’s preparation for the former.” Calderwood, Evolution and Man’s Place in Nature, 337, speaks of “the impossibility of tracing the origin of man’s rational life to evolution from a lower life.... There are no physical forces discoverable in nature sufficient to account for the appearance of this life.” Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 186—“Man’s place has been won by an entire change in the limitations of his psychic development.... The old bondage of the mind to the body is swept away.... In this new freedom we find the one dominant characteristic of man, the feature which entitles us to class him as an entirely new class of animal.”
John Burroughs, Ways of Nature: “Animal life parallels human life at many points, but it is in another plane. Something guides the lower animals, but it is not thought; something restrains them, but it is not judgment; they are provident without prudence; they are active without industry; they are skilful without practice; they are wise without knowledge; they are rational without reason; they are deceptive without guile.... When they are joyful, they sing or they play; when they are distressed, they moan or they cry; ... and yet I do not suppose they experience the emotion of joy or sorrow, or anger or love, as we do, because these feelings in them do not involve reflection, memory, and what we call the higher nature, as with us. Their instinct is intelligence directed outward, never inward, as in man. They share with man the emotions of his animal nature, but not of his moral or æsthetic nature; they know no altruism, no moral code.” Mr. Burroughs maintains that we have no proof that animals in a state of nature can reflect, form abstract ideas, associate cause and effect. Animals, for instance, that store up food for the winter simply follow a provident instinct but do not take thought for the future, any more than does the tree that forms new buds for the coming season. He sums up his position as follows: “To attribute human motives and faculties to the animals is to caricature them; but to put us in such relation to them that we feel their kinship, that we see their lives embosomed in the same iron necessity as our own, that we see in their minds a humbler manifestation of the same psychic power and intelligence that culminates and is conscious of itself in man—that, I take it, is the true humanization.” We assent to all this except the ascription to human life of the same iron necessity that rules the animal creation. Man is man, because his free will transcends the limitations of the brute.