Every day in my inbox I get a book review from the independent bookseller Powells.com. Usually they’re reviews of current books, but occasionally they’re classics, and today’s was an anonymous review of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books series from the June 1898 Atlantic Monthly. It was an eye-opening read.
Written nearly 40 years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, the review opens with a tribute to Kipling’s accomplishment in making the truths of Darwin’s science palpable. Kipling, in presenting the psychology of animals, has helped people “really know and feel that the larger part of our mental composition is of the same substance as that of our cousins the animals, with a certain superstructure of reasoning faculty which has enabled us to become their masters.” I haven’t read The Jungle Book, so I can’t comment on Kipling’s evocation of animal minds, but I could still appreciate this glimpse into how the relationship between humans and other animals looked at that particular point in history. And I really like the comparisons the author draws between various animal states of mind and the behavior and longings of people.
But I was fairly astonished by the first sentence of the last paragraph:
“Man, as we usually think of him, is a being of pure reason, the product and the aim of countless ages of slow and halting development.”
Leaving aside the incorrect idea of evolution as a process of development that was somehow working to produce us, I can’t imagine anyone typically thinking of humankind as beings of pure reason. Is that really how humans looked to the average Atlantic Monthly reader in 1898?
The paragraph goes on to describe the emotions, sensations, and instincts that underlie “this brilliant flower of the intellect.” The message is that we are linked by our bodily essence to the life of all the other animals, and are not really such a thing of pure reason after all, and a good message it is. But I guess I’ve been steeped long enough in the idea that the thinking part and the meat part are inextricably interdependent and linked that it seems very odd to me to think of the higher, reasoning parts of our nature lying atop and apparently in opposition to this more instinctive undergrowth that we share with the animals. We’re finding that we share more of our cognitive traits with at least some of the animals than anyone guessed (that story about macaque monkeys and arithmetic from yesterday, for example), and we’re also learning that our own reasoning is not divorced from our emotions and instincts but is bound up with them. If anything I write survives for 110 years (which is doubtful), I wonder what I’m writing today, and what assumptions I’m making, that someone from the future will find astonishing.
