What is Man? and Other Essays. Mark Twain

noticed that confined steam was strong enough to lift the lid of the teapot. He didn't create the idea, he merely discovered the fact; the cat had noticed it a hundred times. From the teapot he evolved the cylinder – from the displaced lid he evolved the piston-rod. To attach something to the piston-rod to be moved by it, was a simple matter – crank and wheel. And so there was a working engine.[1]

      One by one, improvements were discovered by men who used their eyes, not their creating powers – for they hadn't any – and now, after a hundred years the patient contributions of fifty or a hundred observers stand compacted in the wonderful machine which drives the ocean liner.

      Y.M. A Shakespearean play?

      O.M. The process is the same. The first actor was a savage. He reproduced in his theatrical war-dances, scalp-dances, and so on, incidents which he had seen in real life. A more advanced civilization produced more incidents, more episodes; the actor and the story-teller borrowed them. And so the drama grew, little by little, stage by stage. It is made up of the facts of life, not creations. It took centuries to develop the Greek drama. It borrowed from preceding ages; it lent to the ages that came after. Men observe and combine, that is all. So does a rat.

      Y.M. How?

      O.M. He observes a smell, he infers a cheese, he seeks and finds. The astronomer observes this and that; adds his this and that to the this-and-thats of a hundred predecessors, infers an invisible planet, seeks it and finds it. The rat gets into a trap; gets out with trouble; infers that cheese in traps lacks value, and meddles with that trap no more. The astronomer is very proud of his achievement, the rat is proud of his. Yet both are machines; they have done machine work, they have originated nothing, they have no right to be vain; the whole credit belongs to their Maker. They are entitled to no honors, no praises, no monuments when they die, no remembrance. One is a complex and elaborate machine, the other a simple and limited machine, but they are alike in principle, function, and process, and neither of them works otherwise than automatically, and neither of them may righteously claim a PERSONAL superiority or a personal dignity above the other.

      Y.M. In earned personal dignity, then, and in personal merit for what he does, it follows of necessity that he is on the same level as a rat?

      O.M. His brother the rat; yes, that is how it seems to me. Neither of them being entitled to any personal merit for what he does, it follows of necessity that neither of them has a right to arrogate to himself (personally created) superiorities over his brother.

      Y.M. Are you determined to go on believing in these insanities? Would you go on believing in them in the face of able arguments backed by collated facts and instances?

      O.M. I have been a humble, earnest, and sincere Truth-Seeker.

      Y.M. Very well?

      O.M. The humble, earnest, and sincere Truth-Seeker is always convertible by such means.

      Y.M. I am thankful to God to hear you say this, for now I know that your conversion—

      O.M. Wait. You misunderstand. I said I have BEEN a Truth-Seeker.

      Y.M. Well?

      O.M. I am not that now. Have your forgotten? I told you that there are none but temporary Truth-Seekers; that a permanent one is a human impossibility; that as soon as the Seeker finds what he is thoroughly convinced is the Truth, he seeks no further, but gives the rest of his days to hunting junk to patch it and caulk it and prop it with, and make it weather-proof and keep it from caving in on him. Hence the Presbyterian remains a Presbyterian, the Mohammedan a Mohammedan, the Spiritualist a Spiritualist, the Democrat a Democrat, the Republican a Republican, the Monarchist a Monarchist; and if a humble, earnest, and sincere Seeker after Truth should find it in the proposition that the moon is made of green cheese nothing could ever budge him from that position; for he is nothing but an automatic machine, and must obey the laws of his construction.

      Y.M. After so—

      O.M. Having found the Truth; perceiving that beyond question man has but one moving impulse – the contenting of his own spirit – and is merely a machine and entitled to no personal merit for anything he does, it is not humanly possible for me to seek further. The rest of my days will be spent in patching and painting and puttying and caulking my priceless possession and in looking the other way when an imploring argument or a damaging fact approaches.

VI. Instinct and Thought

      Young Man. It is odious. Those drunken theories of yours, advanced a while ago – concerning the rat and all that – strip Man bare of all his dignities, grandeurs, sublimities.

      Old Man. He hasn't any to strip – they are shams, stolen clothes. He claims credits which belong solely to his Maker.

      Y.M. But you have no right to put him on a level with a rat.

      O.M. I don't – morally. That would not be fair to the rat. The rat is well above him, there.

      Y.M. Are you joking?

      O.M. No, I am not.

      Y.M. Then what do you mean?

      O.M. That comes under the head of the Moral Sense. It is a large question. Let us finish with what we are about now, before we take it up.

      Y.M. Very well. You have seemed to concede that you place Man and the rat on A level. What is it? The intellectual?

      O.M. In form – not a degree.

      Y.M. Explain.

      O.M. I think that the rat's mind and the man's mind are the same machine, but of unequal capacities – like yours and Edison's; like the African pygmy's and Homer's; like the Bushman's and Bismarck's.

      Y.M. How are you going to make that out, when the lower animals have no mental quality but instinct, while man possesses reason?

      O.M. What is instinct?

      Y.M. It is merely unthinking and mechanical exercise of inherited habit.

      O.M. What originated the habit?

      Y.M. The first animal started it, its descendants have inherited it.

      O.M. How did the first one come to start it?

      Y.M. I don't know; but it didn't THINK it out.

      O.M. How do you know it didn't?

      Y.M. Well – I have a right to suppose it didn't, anyway.

      O.M. I don't believe you have. What is thought?

      Y.M. I know what you call it: the mechanical and automatic putting together of impressions received from outside, and drawing an inference from them.

      O.M. Very good. Now my idea of the meaningless term "instinct" is, that it is merely PETRIFIED THOUGHT; solidified and made inanimate by habit; thought which was once alive and awake, but it become unconscious – walks in its sleep, so to speak.

      Y.M. Illustrate it.

      O.M. Take a herd of cows, feeding in a pasture. Their heads are all turned in one direction. They do that instinctively; they gain nothing by it, they have no reason for it, they don't know why they do it. It is an inherited habit which was originally thought – that is to say, observation of an exterior fact, and a valuable inference drawn from that observation and confirmed by experience. The original wild ox noticed that with the wind in his favor he could smell his enemy in time to escape; then he inferred that it was worth while to keep his nose to the wind. That is the process which man calls reasoning. Man's thought-machine works just like the other animals', but it is a better one and more Edisonian. Man, in the ox's place, would go further, reason wider: he would face part of the herd the other way and protect both front and rear.

      Y.M. Did you stay the term instinct is meaningless?

      O.M. I think it is a bastard word. I think it confuses us; for as a rule it applies itself to habits and impulses which had a far-off origin in thought, and now and then breaks the rule and applies itself to habits which can hardly claim a thought-origin.

      Y.M. Give an instance.

      O.M. Well, in putting on trousers a man

1

The Marquess of Worcester had done all of this more than a century earlier.