Читать книгу From Monkey to Man, or, Society in the Tertiary Age онлайн

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These great quantities of fruits, we say, attracted the snakes, who were soon found more plentiful about the homes than about the swamps. Wealth always has its enemies, and a snake no more than a man, will work for what he can get more easily. It was thought easier to get cocoanuts in Shoozoo’s dug-out than by climbing a tree.

One day an ape, who had made a large collection, found, on returning home, that all his store was gone. The snakes had broken in and eaten what they could, and destroyed the rest by half eating it. The only sign of the thieves was an old snake which had eaten so much that he could not get away, and lay, like a drunken man, helpless on the ground. The ape soon dispatched him; but that did not satisfy the ape. He was indignant, and in his sense of suffering wrong we have the first appearance of the ethical sentiment. The sense of wrong in others appears before we recognize it in ourselves. The snakes did not feel the wrong; nor did the same monkey when afterwards he went to steal some of Shoozoo’s fruit (and found none), although he felt an indignation at Shoozoo that might be called an incipient sense of the wrong of falsehood. He wanted to charge Shoozoo with lying; but as that would have disclosed his own theft, or attempt at it, he suppressed his indignation in his prudence.