MENTAL POWERS, 105 



one will admit who has listened at night to the irregular 

 flapping of a rope on board ship. The same principle seems 

 to come into play with vision, as the eye prefers symmetry 

 or figures with some regular recurrence. Patterns of this 

 kind are employed by even the lowest savages as ornaments; 

 and they have been developed through sexual selection for 

 the adornment of some male animals. Whether we can or 

 not give any reason for the pleasure thus derived from vision 

 and hearing, yet man and many of the lower animals are 

 alike pleased by the same colors, graceful shading and 

 forms, and the same sounds. 



The taste for the beautiful, at least as far as female 

 beauty is concerned, is not of a special nature in the human 

 mind; for it dilt'ers widely in the diilerent races of man, 

 and is not quite the same even in the different nations of 

 the same race. Judging from the hideous ornaments and 

 the equally hideous music admired by most savages, it might 

 be urged that their aesthetic faculty was not so highly de- 

 veloped as in certain animals, for instance, as in birds. 

 Obviously no animal would be capable of admiring such 

 scenes as the heavens at night, a beautiful landscape, or 

 refined music; but such high tastes are acquired through 

 culture, and depend on complex associations; they are not 

 enjoyed by barbarians or by uneducated persons. 



Many of the faculties, which have been of inestimable 

 service to man for his progressive advancement, such as the 

 powers of the imagination, wonder, curiosity, an undefined 

 sense of beauty, a tendency to imitation, and the love of 

 excitement or novelty, could hardly fail to lead to capricious 

 changes of customs and fashions. I have alluded to this 

 point because a recent writer* has oddly fixed on Caprice 

 ^' as one of the most remarkable and typical differences be- 

 tween savages and brutes.^'' But not only can we partially 

 understand how it is that man is from various conflicting 

 influences rendered capricious, but that the lower animals 

 are, as we shall hereafter see, likewise capricious in their 

 affections, aversions, and sense of beauty. There is also 

 reason to suspect that they love novelty for its own sake. 



Belief in God Religion. There is no evidence that 

 man was aboriginally endowed with the ennobling belief in 



* " The Spectator," Dec. 4, 1869, p. 1430. 



