OCR Text |
Show 360 CONCLUDING REMARKS CHAP. XlY. know ledge of expression, authors and artists would not have found it so difficult, as is notoriously the case, to describe and depict the characteristic signs of each particular state of mind. But this does not seem to me a valid argument. We may actually behold the expression changing in an unmistakable manner in a man or animal, and yet be quite unable, as I know from experience, to analyse the nature of the change. In the two photographs given by Duchenne of the same old man (Plate III. :figs. 5 and 6), almost every onerecognised that the one' represented a true, and the other a false smile ; but I have found it very difficult to decide in what the whole amount of difference consists. It has often struck me as a curious fact that so many shades of expression are instantly recognised without any conscious process of analysis on our part. No one, I believe, can clearly describe a sullen or sly expression; yet many observers are unanimous that these expressions can be recognised in the various races of man. Almost everyone to whom I showed Duchenne's photograph of the young man with oblique eyebrows (Plate II. :fig. 2) at once declared that it expressed grief or some such feeling; yet probably not one .of these persons, or one out of a thousand persons, could beforehand have told anything precise about the obliquity of the eyebrows with their inner ends puckered, or about the rectangular furrows on the forehead. So it is with many other expressions, of which I have had practical experience in the trouble requisite in instructing others what points to observe. If, then, great ignorance of details does not prevent our recognising with certainty and promptitude various expres· sions, I do not see how this ignorance can be advanced as an argument that our know ledge, though vague and general, is not innate. CHAP. XJV. AND SUMMARY. 361 I have endeavoured to show in considerable detail that all the chief expressions exhibited by man are the · a~e throughout the world. This fact is interesting, as 1t affords a new argument in favour of the several races being descended from a single parent-stock, which must have been almost completely human in structure, and to a large extent in mind, before the period at which the races diverged from each other. No doubt similar structt~res, adapted for the same purpose, have often been 1ndependently acquired through variation and natural selection by distinct species; but this view will not exrlain close. similarity between di. tinct species in a multitude of un1mportant details. Now if we bear in n:ind the numerous points of structure having no relation to expression, in which all the races of man closely agree, and then add to them the numerous points, so~~ of the highest importance and many of the most tr.Ifhng val?e, .on which the movements of expression ?1rectly ?r 1nd1rectly depend, it seems to me improbable ~n th~ h1ghest degree that so much similarity, or rather ~dent1ty of structure, could have been acquired by ~ndependent means. Yet this must have been the case If the races of man are descended from several aboriginally distinct species. It is far more probable that the many points of close similarity in the various races are due to inheritance from a single parent-form, which had already assumed a human character. It is a curious, though perhaps an idle speculatio h 1 .... h I · · 11 ow ear.y In t e ong hne of our progenitors the various' express1. ve movements, now exhibited by man w 1 . , ere success1ve y acquned. The following remarks will at least serve to recall some of the chief points discus d . 1 . 1 se 1n t 11s vo urn e. \Ve may confidently believe that laug~ter, as a sign of pleasure or enjoyment, was practised by our progenitors long before they deserved |