All
such inquirers, from Aristotle to Smellie, principally insist on two
great leading distinctions--speech and reason. But it is obvious to the
meanest capacity, that monkeys have both speech and reason. They have a
language of their own, which, though not so capacious as the Greek, is
much more so than the Hottentottish; and as for reason, no man of a
truly philosophical genius ever saw a monkey crack a nut, without
perceiving that the creature possesses that endowment, or faculty, in no
small perfection. Their speech, indeed, is said not to be articulate;
but it is audibly more so than the Gaelic. The words unquestionably do
run into each other, in a way that, to our ears, renders it rather
unintelligible; but it is contrary to all the rules of sound
philosophizing, to confuse the obtuseness of our own senses with the
want of any faculty in others; and they have just as good a right to
maintain, and to complain of, our inarticulate mode of speaking, as we
have of theirs--indeed much more--for monkeys speak the same, or nearly
the same, language all over the habitable globe, whereas men, ever since
the Tower of Babel, have kept chattering, muttering, humming, and
hawing, in divers ways and sundry manners, so that one nation is unable
to comprehend what another would be at, and the earth groans in vain
with vocabularies and dictionaries.
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