WHAT IS MAN? AND OTHER ESSAYS OF MARK TWAIN

emergencies and deducting smart conclusions from the

combinations–a man’s mental process exactly. With memory to

help, man preserves his observations and reasonings, reflects

upon them, adds to them, recombines, and so proceeds, stage by

stage, to far results–from the teakettle to the ocean

greyhound’s complex engine; from personal labor to slave labor;

from wigwam to palace; from the capricious chase to agriculture

and stored food; from nomadic life to stable government and

concentrated authority; from incoherent hordes to massed armies.

The ant has observation, the reasoning faculty, and the

preserving adjunct of a prodigious memory; she has duplicated

man’s development and the essential features of his civilization,

and you call it all instinct!

Y.M. Perhaps I lacked the reasoning faculty myself.

O.M. Well, don’t tell anybody, and don’t do it again.

Y.M. We have come a good way. As a result–as I understand it–

I am required to concede that there is absolutely no intellectual

frontier separating Man and the Unrevealed Creatures?

O.M. That is what you are required to concede. There is no

such frontier–there is no way to get around that. Man has a

finer and more capable machine in him than those others, but it

is the same machine and works in the same way. And neither he

nor those others can command the machine–it is strictly

automatic, independent of control, works when it pleases, and

when it doesn’t please, it can’t be forced.

Y.M. Then man and the other animals are all alike, as to mental

machinery, and there isn’t any difference of any stupendous

magnitude between them, except in quality, not in kind.

O.M. That is about the state of it–intellectuality. There

are pronounced limitations on both sides. We can’t learn to

understand much of their language, but the dog, the elephant,

etc., learn to understand a very great deal of ours. To that

extent they are our superiors. On the other hand, they can’t

learn reading, writing, etc., nor any of our fine and high

things, and there we have a large advantage over them.

Y.M. Very well, let them have what they’ve got, and welcome;

there is still a wall, and a lofty one. They haven’t got the

Moral Sense; we have it, and it lifts us immeasurably above them.

O.M. What makes you think that?

Y.M. Now look here–let’s call a halt. I have stood the

other infamies and insanities and that is enough; I am not going

to have man and the other animals put on the same level morally.

O.M. I wasn’t going to hoist man up to that.

Y.M. This is too much! I think it is not right to jest

about such things.

O.M. I am not jesting, I am merely reflecting a plain and

simple truth–and without uncharitableness. The fact that man

knows right from wrong proves his INTELLECTUAL superiority to the

other creatures; but the fact that he can DO wrong proves his

MORAL inferiority to any creature that CANNOT. It is my belief

that this position is not assailable.

Free Will

Y.M. What is your opinion regarding Free Will?

O.M. That there is no such thing. Did the man possess it

who gave the old woman his last shilling and trudged home in the

storm?

Y.M. He had the choice between succoring the old woman and

leaving her to suffer. Isn’t it so?

O.M. Yes, there was a choice to be made, between bodily

comfort on the one hand and the comfort of the spirit on the

other. The body made a strong appeal, of course–the body would

be quite sure to do that; the spirit made a counter appeal. A

choice had to be made between the two appeals, and was made. Who

or what determined that choice?

Y.M. Any one but you would say that the man determined it,

and that in doing it he exercised Free Will.

O.M. We are constantly assured that every man is endowed

with Free Will, and that he can and must exercise it where he is

offered a choice between good conduct and less-good conduct. Yet

we clearly saw that in that man’s case he really had no Free

Will: his temperament, his training, and the daily influences

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