The Plurality of the Human Race

Here, without any doubt, man is indeed the first of the organisms, when one tries to place in linear series all those which move on our planet. It is, also, not his relative position in the living world that it is difficult to discover; it is what we may call his true place. What is, in other terms, the value of the differences which separate man from other mammalia? and at what distance is he from the animal that immediately follows him in this linear series which we are supposing? To examine what man is with respect to the highest orders of mammalia, and in a more general manner, to animals, is the primordial question which presents itself in anthropology. It seems at first sight that it would suffice, in order to settle it, to throw a glance on this complete body, formed of the same anatomical elements, absolutely submitted to the same exigences of development, nutrition, and reproduction, as animals. Ought not all this to make us think that we were not altogether made of so immaterial a substance as the philosophers have generally been satisfied to believe? This has not been the case.

Two systems—two theories, are before us. The one pretends that man is but the first among animals, that he issimilar to them in the clear and precise sense in which this term is taken in geometry, designing qualities, which may differ ad infinitum, but which still may be comparable.

Another system, supported by the most illustrious names, makes of man a sort of special entity, differing from other organised beings by the distinct and clear nature of his intelligence. It is an opinion adopted and defended to the last by a learned man, to whose memory we cannot, en passant, prevent ourselves from rendering the homage which is his due, Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. We find in the second volume of his Histoire Naturelle Générale, almost a return to Cartesian ideas. According to him animals do not think, they possess only that sensibility that plants have not. And the celebrated naturalist agreed with the adoption of a human kingdom, appearing as the crowning-point of the organic and inorganic kingdoms, and as distinct from the second as this is from the third.

Before proceeding further, we may be permitted to make one preliminary remark. We may thus declare it:—

Proposition.—Man nearly approaches the Anthropomorphous Apes in his Physical Organism. Whether one is a partisan or not of the “Human Kingdom,” this resemblance is a fact which it will be in no person’s ideas to contest. And it is not merely in the external forms; we find it even greater if, going to the foundation of the facts, we give our attention to the essential parts composing the body,—to the anatomical elements,—to those delicate particles visible only in the microscope, and which always show, among animals of the same group, a marvellous uniformity.

It is here where, if not an impossibility, at least a sort of contradiction presents itself to the defenders of the “human kingdom;” for there are two organisms, scarcely different, at the service of two directing powers, of two intelligences absolutely and radically dissimilar. Doubtless all the forces of organised matter are not known to us, but does not this resemblance, though even a superficial one, surprise us; and does it not seem that every organism constituted directly by reason of the influences which it is qualified to receive or to transmit, ought to vary like these influences, and in the same proportion?

It is very easy to admit that there is more distance between the intelligence of man and that of the anthropomorphous apes, than between the intelligence of these last and that of the smooth-brained squirrel, and that at the same time the immense distance is only marked in the first case by very superficial variations of the organ of intellectual manifestations, whilst, in the second case, this lesser distance is explained by enormous differences.