mathematical problems and the concerted action of multitudes in accordance with a complex and far reaching plan, and since these acts must be referred to instinct, there is room for a similar explanation of acts like that of the orang-utan, in which if there was reasoning it was far simpler. Such acts may probably be explained by the association of one remembered perception with another, or some simple process of thought not implying the knowledge of universal principles like those on which mathematical and other scientific reasoning rests. The female larva of the stag-beetle, about to become a chrysalis, makes a hole of just its own size. The male makes double his own length because he will have horns as long as his body. Perfect insects in laying their eggs make provision for the food of the larva which is to be hatched. No one can suppose this is done by reasoning founded on the insect's remembrance of its own needs in the larva state and foresight of the needs of the coming larva. Why then may not simpler processes be explained by instinct?

A third point to be noticed is, that the argument to prove that man has no powers differing in kind from the brutes, rests on anthropomorphic conceptions of brute life. It attributes to brutes thoughts and feelings the same as man would have in the same circumstances. It interprets into the life of the brute what exists only in the consciousness of man. This fault is conspicuous in Darwin's discussion of natural selection.

The objection against personality that man has no powers differing in kind from those of brutes is grounded, as we see from the foregoing discussion, on errors of two kinds. On the one hand, the objector fails to distinguish the attributes of personality peculiar to man from conscious feeling, volition and intelligence of a lower order, common to man with the brutes. Because all the mental powers of brutes are found also in man, the objector jumps to the inference that all the mental powers of man are found also in the brutes. Besides this, though not definitely apprehending what the attributes of personality are, the objector urges as indicating morality, religion, æsthetic emotion or reason in brutes, actions which manifest only mental powers of a lower grade; for example, that a dog fawning on its master manifests religion. A story was told many years ago of two dilettanti of Boston seeing Fanny Elsler dance, that the man enraptured turned and exclaimed, "Margaret, this is poetry!" But she replied, "No, Paul, this is religion!" It only needs an exact and correct definition of religion, or of the other attributes of personality to demonstrate the inappositeness of many of the facts cited in support of the objection and the inconclusiveness of the reasoning from them.

On the other hand, the objection is grounded in biological anthro

pomorphism, which interprets into the acts of brutes, thoughts, motives, emotions and determinations which exist only in the man who observes them.

3. The higher attainments of men are impossible to brutes.

The first of these attainments is language. Brutes are capable of expressing a present feeling or impulse by gestures, attitudes, cries and other natural signs. In this way they hold communication with one another. But this is not language. Language, in its proper significance, is the expression of general notions by symbols. It presupposes the power of abstraction and generalization. The symbols may be words spoken or written or, as with deaf mutes, signs made with the fingers or other bodily organs. But in each case the utterance transcends the natural signs by which feeling is spontaneously expressed, and is made by symbols fixed by thought and expressive of general notions formed by thought Some brutes can articulate words; they have voice but not language. No brute has ever been known to attain to the utterance of a single word of language in its full and proper meaning. This implies incapacity to abstract and generalize. All feeling carries in it a certain indefinite element of intelligence. The intelligence of brutes remains mostly swaddled in the sensations and feelings. Says Lewes "Between the extremes of human intelligence say a Tasmanian and a Shakespeare-there are infinitesimal gradations, enabling us to follow the development of the one into the other without the introduction of any essentially new factor. But between animal and human intelligence there is a gap which can only be bridged over by an addition from without. That bridge is the language of symbols, at once the cause and the effect of civilization. The absurdity of supposing that any ape could under any normal circumstances construct a scientific theory, analyze a fact into its component factors, frame to himself a picture of the life led by his ancestors, or consciously regulate his conduct with a view to the welfare of remote descendants, is so glaring, that we need not wonder at profoundly meditative minds having been led to reject with scorn the hypothesis which seeks for an explanation of human intelligence in the functions of the bodily organism common to man and animals, and having had recourse to the hypothesis of a spiritual agent superadded to the organism."*

A brute does not change his voice. An ass's colt suckled by a mare and brought up among horses never loses its bray, nor learns to neigh like a horse. A child of whatever race speaks the language of those among whom it is brought up.

*Problems of Life and Mind. First Series. Vol. I., 144, 22 52, 53.

A second attainment, impossible to brutes, is the use of tools. Wherever an implement is found, if only a stone ever so roughly chipped, we infer at once that it was made and used by man. This is not because the brutes do not have hands; for apes, which have hands, do not use tools. If it is a fact that an ape, untaught by man, ever uses a stone to crack a nut, yet it is still a fact that an ape never shapes a stone or a stick, nor ties a stone to a stick to fit it for use as a tool.

A third attainment never made by brutes is the use of fire. They enjoy the warmth of the fire kindled by man but they cannot preserve much less kindle it. Mr. Lubbock says that some races of men have been found who knew nothing about fire.* This may be doubted. Traces of fire are found in the earliest pile-dwellings and in the Danish shell-mounds. In the caves where the remains of the earliest men have been found, charcoal and burnt bones have been discovered with the bones of the mammoth and the cave-bear. At Aurignac, in the Pyrenees, not only coal and ashes were found, but also fragments of fissile sandstone reddened by heat which must have formed a hearth.† In the earliest periods "the rude cave-men made fires to cook their food and warm themselves by." Mr. Tylor says: "No savage tribe seems really to have been found so low as to be without fire." If man ever existed without fire, he had discovered it at the earliest period to which his existence can be traced, has preserved it ever since and made the most wonderful applications of it in supplying his wants and advancing his civilization. The contrast with the utter helplessness of the most intelligent brutes in this respect is very striking.

Man also is capable of progress both as an individual and in society. Brutes improve only by natural selection or by man's agency in domestication. They are incapable of progress by self-education and the transmission of their discoveries and inventions to posterity.

The difference between the lowest savage and the highest brute is immeasurably greater than that between the lowest savage and the most highly endowed of civilized men. Laura Bridgman, blind, deaf and dumb from infancy, and with scarcely any sense of taste and smell, can now write a good letter, maintain an intelligent conversation by signs, and do various kinds of work; she has also high moral and religious culture. No teaching and training of the most intelligent brute can approximate to such education and culture, or even make the least beginning of them. Lamettrie became deeply interested in

Prehistoric Times, p. 453.

Lyell: Antiquity of Man, pp. 181-193.

Anthropology, p. 260.

a then recently invented method of educating the deaf and dumb. He compared apes to deaf mutes, and expressed a desire for a large and clever ape to educate by the new method. Had he tried the experiment it would have been instructive to contrast his failure with the education of Laura Bridgman. Dr. Maudsley says: "However low a human being may fall, he never reverts to the type of an animal; the fallen majesty of mankind being manifest in the worst wrecks. Certainly there may be sometimes a general resemblance to one of the lower animals, but the resemblance is never anything more than a general and superficial one; all the special differences in mental manifestations are still more or less apparent, just as the special differences in anatomical structure still remain. The idiot with hairy back may go on his knees and 'baa' like a sheep, as did one of which Pinel tells, but as he does not get the wool and conformation of the sheep, so he does not get its psychical characters; he is not adapted for the relations of the sheep, and if placed in them would surely perish; and he does exhibit unconscious traces of his adaptation to his relations as a human being which the best developed animal never would. So also with regard to man's next of kin, the monkeys; no possible arrest of development, no degradation of human nature through generations, will bring him to the special type of the monkey."*

Man has also the capacity of falling by sin, which the brute has not. By the minding of the flesh instead of the minding of the spirit, he perverts, abases and corrupts himself, and fails of all the true ends of his being. No brute is capable of this. Prof. Tayler Lewis published an article maintaining that the highest power in man, by which he is completely distinguished from the brute, is his power to "fall" from his normal condition by his own action. The Duke of Argyll, in his essays on "The Unity of Nature," advances the same thought. There seems to be much force in the argument. In brutes we do not discover a common disposition to actions contrary to their constitution and tending to weaken and destroy not only the individual but the race. In them the evolution passes through all its stages with perfect accuracy to the end, the propensities developed in it are in harmony with their powers, and these in their functions are in harmony with the constitution of things. This must be so, according to the theory of evolution, because the theory assumes that the need of a function leads to the evolution of its organ, and the organ acts to supply the need. In man alone we find a persistent tendency to action which leads to the vitiation and even the destruction instead of the perfection of his being and his race; action in disharmony with himself

* Physiology and Pathology of the Mind, p. 290.

and with his highest functions in the world, and with his own consciousness of duty to obey what he knows is the supreme law of his being. A very large part of mankind, embracing nearly all savage tribes and multitudes of civilized men, exhibit dispositions, habits and actions which, as tending to corrupt, weaken and destroy the race, are unnatural and monstrous. They enslave and maltreat their females, murder their children, kill and eat one another. So that, as the Duke of Argyll intimates, there is a certain literal truth in the comparison of man with the dragons:

"Dragons of the prime,

That tear each other in their slime,

Were mellow music matched with him."

The most horrible and loathsome brutes show no tendency to action contrary to their own nature and destructive of their own species. Here, then, is something exceptional in man, inconsistent with the unity of nature; something which can be explained by free-will, but not by natural evolution and the dominance of the forces of nature through instinct. If man is in his entire being the product of evolution, or of nature-forces only in whatever way acting, then in his lowest stage and onward through all his history he must show the simplicity of brute life and its harmony with itself. His conscious sin and wrong-doing reveal him as a free agent, above nature, transscending its fixed course, using his own free-will in violation of the law of his being, and thus different from the brutes which exist and act only in the fixed and necessary course of nature.

III. If it should be made evident that certain brutes possess the distinctive characteristics of personality, this would prove only that these particular animals are personal beings, having reason, rational sensibility and free-will, subject to the law of God and capable of knowing and serving him. It would not prove that other species of animals were persons. It would not disprove the personality of man. It would enlarge the number of personal beings. The distinction between the personal and the impersonal would remain as sharply defined as ever. It would be pleasanter, certainly, to enlarge the area of personality by finding some animals qualified to be in it, than with Comte to obliterate it altogether and insist that man must give up his claim to be the lowest of the angels and content himself with being the highest of the brutes. If any animals have these distinctive attributes, we cordially welcome them to the fraternity of personal and immortal beings; concurring with the "untutored mind" of "the poor Indian,"

"Who thinks admitted to that equal sky,

His faithful dog shall bear him company."