![]() While most of Darwin’s text deals with emotions in man, in a number of chapters in The Expression of the Emotions the author takes pains to commingle species under such headings as “Serviceable Associated Habits,” “The Principle of Antithesis,” and “Action of the Nervous System.” Darwin’s implicit assumption is the likeness of man and “lower animals,” not their unlikeness. ![]() Writing thirteen years after On the Origin of Species and one year after The Descent of Man, he takes as the object of his inquiry “the principle of the direct action of the excited nervous system on the body, independently of the will and in part of habit.” Not what might be self-described by people possessing language but rather what is displayed-“behavior.” ![]() ![]() In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Charles Darwin tacitly diminishes the difference between “man” and “animals” by matter-of-factly conflating, in passages fascinating and rich in detail, close examinations of human beings and “lower animals” (by which Darwin meant not relatively primitive animals but all “non-human” animals). He who understands baboons would do more toward metaphysics than Locke. A tamed chimpanzee at Albert Schweitzer’s mission hospital, Lambarene, Gabon, 1954 ![]()
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