CHAPTER CXLV.
WILLIAM OSMER. INNATE QUALITIES. MARCH OF ANIMAL INTELLECT. FARTHER REVEALMENT OF THE COLUMBIAN PHILOSOPHY.
There is a word, and it is a great word in this Book,1 ἐπι το αὐτο,—In id ipsum, that is, to look to the thing itself, the very point, the principal matter of all; to have our eye on that, and not off it, upon alia omnia, any thing but it.—To go to the point, drive all to that, as also to go to the matter real, without declining from it this way or that, to the right hand or to the left.
BP. ANDREWS.
1The New Testament which the Preacher had before him.
A certain William Osmer once wrote a dissertation upon the Horse, wherein he affirmeth, it is demonstrated by matters of fact, as well as from the principles of philosophy, that innate qualities do not exist, and that the excellence of this animal is altogether mechanical and not in the blood. In affirming this of the Horse the said William Osmer hath gone far toward demonstrating himself an Ass; for he might as well have averred that the blood hath nothing to do with the qualities of a black pudding.—When Hurdis said
Give me the steed
Whose noble efforts bore the prize away,
I care not for his grandsire or his dam,
it was well said but not wisely.
The opinion which is as old as anything known concerning this animal, that the good qualities of a horse are likely to bear some resemblance to those of its sire or dam, Mr. Osmer endeavoured to invalidate by arguing that his strength and swiftness depend upon the exactness of his make, and that where this was defective these qualities would be deficient also,—a foolish argument, for the proposition rests upon just the same ground as that against which he was reasoning. But what better reasoning could be looked for from a man who affirmed that if horses were not shod they might travel upon the turnpike roads without injury to their feet, because, in his own language, “when time was young, when the earth was in a state of nature, and turnpike roads as yet were not, the Divine Artist had taken care to give their feet such defence as it pleased him.”
If the Doctor had known that Nobs was of Tartarian extraction, this fact would sufficiently have accounted for the excellences of that incomparable roadster. He explained them quite as satisfactorily to himself by the fancy which he amused himself with supporting on this occasion, that this marvellous horse was a son of the Wind. And hence he inferred that Nobs possessed the innate qualities of his kind in greater perfection than any other horse, as approaching nearer to the original perfection in which the species was created. For although animals are each in their kind less degenerate than man, whom so many circumstances have tended to injure in his physical nature, still, he argued, all which like the horse have been made subservient to the uses of man, were in some degree deteriorated by that subjection. Innate qualities, however, he admitted were more apparent in the brute creation than in the human creature, because even in those which suffer most by domestication, the course of nature is not so violently overruled.
I except the Duck, he would say. That bird, which Nature hath made free of earth, air and water, loses by servitude the use of one element, the enjoyment of two, and the freedom of all three.
Look at the Pig also, said the Doctor. In his wild state no animal is cleaner, happier, or better able to make himself respected. Look at him when tamed,—I will not say in a brawn-case, for I am not speaking now of those cruelties which the Devil and Man between them have devised,—but look at him prowling at large about the purlieus of his sty. What a loathsome poor despised creature hath man made him!
Animal propter convivia natum. 2
Every cur thinks itself privileged to take him by the ear; whereas if he were once more free in the woods, the stoutest mastiff or wolf-dog would not dare look him in the face.
2 JUVENAL.
Yet he was fond of maintaining that the lower creation are capable of intellectual improvement. In Holland indeed he had seen the school for dogs, where poodles go through a regular course of education, and where by this time perhaps the Lancasterian inventions have been introduced. But this was not what the Doctor contemplated. Making bears and elephants dance, teaching dogs to enact ballets, and horses to exhibit tricks at a fair, he considered as the freaks of man's capricious cruelty, and instances of that abuse of power which he so frequently exercises over his inferior creatures, and for which he must one day render an account, together with all those whose countenance of such spectacles affords the temptation to exhibit them.
In truth the power which animals as well as men possess, of conforming themselves to new situations and forming new habits adapted to new circumstances is proof of a capability of improvement. The wild dogs in the plains of La Plata, burrow, because there is no security for them above ground against stronger beasts of prey. In the same country owls make their nests in the ground, because there are neither trees nor buildings to afford them concealment. A clergyman in Iceland by sowing angelica upon a Lake-island some miles from the sea, not only attracted gulls and wild ducks to breed there, but brought about an alliance between those birds, who are not upon neighbourly terms elsewhere. Both perceived that the new plants afforded better shelter from wind and rain, than any thing which they had seen before; there was room enough for both; and neighbourhood produced so much good will, that the gulls protected the weaker birds not only against the ravens who are common enemies, but against another species of gull also which attacks the duck's nest.
A change more remarkable than either of these, is that which the common hearth-cricket has undergone in its very constitution as well as in all its ways of life, since men built houses and inhabited cold climates.
The field-cricket in North America, which buries itself during the winter ten inches deep and there lies torpid, began about an hundred years ago to avail itself of the work of man and take up its abode in the chimnies. This insect even likes man for a bed-fellow, not with any such felonious intentions as are put in execution by smaller and viler vermin, but for the sake of warmth. The Swedish traveller, Kalm, says that when he and his companions were forced to sleep in uninhabited places, the crickets got into the folds of their garments, so that they were obliged to make some tarriance every morning, and search carefully before they could get rid of them.
Two species of Swallows have domesticated themselves with man. We have only that which builds under the eaves in England, but in North America they have both the house swallow and the chimney swallow; the chimnies not being made use of in summer, they take possession, and keep it sometimes in spite of the smoke if the fire is not very great. Each feather in this bird's tail ends in a stiff point, like the end of an awl; they apply the tail to the side of the wall, and it assists in keeping them up, while they hold on with their feet. “They make a great thundering noise all day long by flying up and down in the chimnies;” now as the Indians had not so much as a hearth made of masonry, it is an obvious question, says Kalm, where did these swallows build before the Europeans came, and erected houses with chimnies? Probably, it is supposed, in hollow trees, but certainly where they could; and it is thus shown that they took the first opportunity of improving their own condition.
But the Doctor dwelt with most pleasure on the intellectual capabilities of Dogs. There had been Dogs, he said, who from the mere desire of following their master's example had regularly frequented either the Church or the Meeting House;—others who attended the Host whenever they heard the bell which announced that it was carried abroad; one who so modulated his voice as to accompany instrumental music through all the notes of a song; and Leibnitz had actually succeeded in teaching one to speak. A dog may be made an epicure as well as his master. He acquires notions of rank and respectability; understands that the aristocracy are his friends, regards the beggar as his rival for bones, and knows that whoever approaches in darkness is to be suspected for his intentions. A dog's physiognomical discernment never deceives him; and this the Doctor was fond of observing, because wherever he was known the dogs came to return the greeting they expected. He has a sense of right and wrong as far as he has been taught; a sense of honour and of duty, from which his master might sometimes take a lesson; and not unfrequently a depth and heroism of affection, which the Doctor verily believed would have its reward in a better world. John Wesley held the same opinion, which has been maintained also by his enemy Augustus Toplady, and by his biographer the laureated L. L. D. or the El-el-deed Laureate. The Materialist, Dr. Dove would argue, must allow upon his own principles that a dog has as much soul as himself; and the Immaterialist, if he would be consistent, must perceive that the life and affections and actions of an animal are as little to be explained as the mysteries of his own nature by mere materiality. The all-doubting and therefore always half-believing Bayle has said that les actions des bêtes sont peut-être un des plus profonds abîmes sur quoi notre raison se puisse exercer.
But here the Doctor acknowledged himself to be in doubt. That another state of existence there must be for every creature wherein there is the breath of life, he was verily persuaded. To that conclusion the whole tenour of his philosophy led him, and what he entertained as a philosophical opinion, acquired from a religious feeling something like the strength of faith. For if the whole of a brute animal's existence ended in this world, then it would follow that there are creatures born into it, for whom it had been better never to have been, than to endure the privations, pains and wrongs and cruelties, inflicted upon them by human wickedness; and he would not, could not, dared not believe that any, even the meanest of God's creatures, has been created to undergo more of evil than of good (where no power of choice was given)—much less to suffer unmingled evil, during its allotted term of existence. Yet this must be, if there were no state for animals after death.
A French speculator upon such things (I think it was P. Bougeant) felt this so strongly as to propose the strange hypothesis that fallen Angels underwent their punishment in the bodies of brutes, wherein they were incarnate and incarcerate as sentient, suffering and conscious spirits. The Doctor's theory of progressive life was liable to no such objections. It reconciled all seeming evil in the lower creation to the great system of benevolence. But still there remained a difficulty. Men being what they are, there were cases in which it seemed that the animal soul would be degraded instead of advanced by entering into the human form. For example, the Doctor considered the beast to be very often a much worthier animal than the butcher; the horse than the horse-jockey or the rider; the cock, than the cock-fighter; the young whale than the man who harpoons the reasonable and dutiful creature when it suffers itself to be struck rather than forsake its wounded mother.
In all these cases indeed, a migration into some better variety of the civilized biped might be presumed, Archeus bringing good predispositions and an aptitude for improvement. But when he looked at a good dog (in the best acceptation of the epithet),—a dog who has been humanized by human society,—who obeys and loves his master, pines during his illness, and dies upon his grave, (the fact has frequently occurred,) the Doctor declared his belief, and with a voice and look which told that he was speaking from his heart, that such a creature was ripe for a better world than this, and that in passing through the condition of humanity it might lose more than it could gain.
The price of a dog might not, among the Jews, be brought into the House of the Lord, “for any vow,” for it was an abomination to the Lord. This inhibition occurs in the same part of the Levitical law which enjoins the Israelites not to deliver up to his master the servant who had escaped from him; and it is in the spirit of that injunction, and of those other parts of the Law which are so beautifully and feelingly humane, that their very tenderness may be received in proof of their divine origin. It looks upon the dog as standing to his master in far other relation than his horse or his ox or his ass,—as a creature connected with him by the moral ties of companionship and fidelity and friendship.
