Any one who has watched monkeys will not doubt
that they perfectly understand each other's gestures and expression,
and to a large extent, as Rengger asserts,[1] those of man.
An animal when going to attack another, or when afraid of another,
often makes itself appear terrible, by erecting its hair,
thus increasing the apparent bulk of its body, by showing its teeth,
or brandishing its horns, or by uttering fierce sounds.
As the power of intercommunication is certainly of high service to
many animals, there is no _a priori_ improbability in the supposition,
that gestures manifestly of an opposite nature to those by which certain
feelings are already expressed, should at first have been voluntarily
employed under the influence of an opposite state of feeling.
The fact of the gestures being now innate, would be no valid objection
to the belief that they were at first intentional; for if practised
during many generations, they would probably at last be inherited.
Nevertheless it is more than doubtful, as we shall immediately see,
whether any of the cases which come under our present head of antithesis,
have thus originated.
With conventional signs which are not innate, such as those
used by the deaf and dumb and by savages, the principle of
opposition or antithesis has been partially brought into play.
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