a place of sepulture for the remains of many generations, but possess the power of endless life (1 Cor. xiii. 12). 1 This "Plenary Memory" will lead to higher processes of life; the measure of which will be our capability and fitness. Unclouded by fumes of laboratories, untainted by sensual appetite, unhindered by life's ills and weaknesses, we may presume that we shall not travel by the present methods of logical reasoning, but be nourished and built up in truth by a sort of mental assimilation. The process being somewhat akin to the present work of the Holy Ghost (Jno. xvi. 13). The soul, combining with itself every element of knowledge, ever moving on, not wasting organic force, will be built up into the power of knowing more and more. The spiritual faculty, discerning all the links of the great chain which binds diversity of operation into unity of wisdom, will gather every luxury of love and knowledge. Thus accepting "Development" as a fact, we hold that "Adam is the princeps, and so the ideal prius of the creaturely world."" Using the idea of "Natural Selection," so far as it conceives an intelligent work in the world, the conversion of the lower into the higher by heredity, adaptation, variation, and distribution; we maintain that man is something more than a material organism. His structure, wonderful as it is, does not even approximately represent his essential nature. With a certain difference in structure, between the lower apes and the gorilla, we find a moderate and measurable difference of nature; but, with a less marked difference of structure between the gorilla and man, we have an immeasurable and practically infinite divergence of nature.3 His chamber of consciousness is the meeting-place of the material and the spiritual, he forms antithetical conceptions of both, correlates their energies, and in part understands the meaning of the wonderful machinery of which he is a portion. Man, as the highest animal, is an actual microcosm, and represents the whole of life in the world. Represents it as being of the earth, and taken from the ground; yet excels it 1 "The Physical Theory of Another Life," p. 79. Isaac Taylor. 2 "Lange on Genesis," p. 211. English Translation. "Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature," p. 103. Professor Huxley. not only by possession of superior mechanism; but, in use of mental and moral faculties. Considering his mechanism, we find that the organism in many respects nearest to him, the Anthropoid Ape, the Gibbon in particular rather than the Gorilla, is not a diminution of that which would otherwise have become human; but a formation by lateral and diverging operation which, however long continued, could never arrive at man. "The two series, ape and man, diverge from one another . . . the youthful individuals are more alike than the older ones. . . the ape, as he grows, becomes more bestial; man more human." Those moral and spiritual powers, summed up in one word, Soul," cannot be explained by the material properties of protoplasm, nor find an equivalent in mechanical adjustment ; nor is the soul made up of psychical bits which have passed through the life and mind of lower animals. The dog possesses attention, abstraction, imagination, judgment, desire, grief indeed a share of all the intellectual faculties and passion; "the dog, the cat, and the parrot, return love for our love, and hatred for our hatred; they are capable of shame and sorrow, and, though they may have no logic nor conscious ratiocination, no one who has watched their ways can doubt that they possess that power of rational cerebration which evolves reasonable acts from the premises furnished by the senses a process which takes fully as large a share as conscious reason in human activity; "2 but the soul is very much more than this. When we can conceive the nature of matter apart from its properties, then we may begin to investigate the nature of the soul; at present we have neither power to understand it nor words to describe it. The withering conclusions of atheists as to the mortality of the soul are unwarrantable and unscientific; for if matter cannot be annihilated, it appears highly unscientific to assert that the spirit in man, which subdues and rules matter, is of less enduring nature. Moreover, the principle of the conservation of energy is antagonistic to the utter loss of such mental energy as is lasting in its results on our present life; the 1 "Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism :" Professor Schmidt. Antiquity of Man," p. 495: Sir Chas. Lyell. cause of these effects cannot be annihilated, though it may change. We must pity that flippancy which contemns this high spiritual gift; and pray not only for the unwise who would refuse, but for the rash who despise the glorious distinction. It is a mystery, and the small vessel of our human reason, able to receive it as a gift, is utterly unable to comprehend its nature. "It cometh from afar Not in entire forgetfulness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our Home." We are rudely aroused from our joy in this perpetual benediction of Heaven, and degraded to bestial fellowship. We are as some scion of a noble house suddenly told, “You are not of honourable birth, you lie down with a dog-twist, your laugh is taken from the hyena, your song from the mockingbird, your tears from the crocodile, and your speech from the rudiments of animal cries. You are not a child of God, morally and intellectually endowed, you crawled into existence through many brutal shapes-" "Quum prorepserunt primis animalia terris." HOR.: Sat. i. 3. 99. When men first crept out of the earth, a dumb and filthy herd, they fought for acorns and lurking places with their nails and fists; and, then, with clubs; and, at last, with arms which taught by experience they had forged. Then they invented names for things, and words to express their thoughts, after which they began to desist from war, and to fortify cities and to enact laws." We will not multiply classical quotations; our concern is rather with those of our own day who state, "men, originally brutes, attained nobleness of mind. Before and during the transition they were not men, but creatures without the spiritual part of our being; nor endowed with the awful attribute of immortality." It may be put more definitely-there was a common point from which the present apes and men were derived. No greater difference exists between a man and a brute, than between one brute and another brute. Some animals are The Animal Theory. 303 "The soul of a very upright, and some men are very hairy. new born infant is, in its manifestations, in no way different from that of the young animal." Negroes and Indians are a low sort of men, but not so low as the Australian and Papuan; all these have not got on, and are left behind the average individuals of our race. Hence the fear of Mephistopheles lest men should be alarmed at finding themselves too much like God, is now changed into the dread of being too much like sheep. The course of transformations, we are gravely assured, was along the vertebral column; indeed we have only to look at the first vertebra of a sheep's neck and the last tail bone to see our identity established, and the gradual transition exemplified; we are all sheep with antelope-like ancestors. The ape struck out a disastrous path, persisting in a brain of small volume; but man selected a high conformation of well-formed and plastic cranium. Young monkeys and calves are still like us, they have not the bony skull and horns which are afterwards developed. One rather likes the humour; clever men are evidently making fun for us. The monkey has been given up, and now we are all sheep of an improved breed. The change is rather too sudden; and if it is hard to see how from the monkey's foot, which has extra muscles, rendering it a foot-hand for climbing and grasping, could have been evolved the flattreading and walking human foot; it is yet harder to have got it from anything which became a sheep's trotter. As to reason, we are told man cannot be widely separated from his lower creatures: for little children do not manifest great intelligence. Human progress is regulated by speech; and dogs talk, and are confessedly more civilised and intelligent than the wolf and stupid jackal. "Who can question that they have raised themselves mentally far above their ancestry?" Who can "doubt that the honey bee, as it gradually attained bodily advantages and peculiarities, developed likewise the higher mental powers, corresponding with the more minute and complex organism of the brain?" Even tame seals come like dogs at the call of their keeper. 'As to man's free will, little," we are told, “can be said for "The Doctrine of Descent," Prof. Schmidt. that; the individual mostly acts upon the will of the tribe-I might say of the herd." "The astonishing premeditation with which some few happily organised individuals, of some few species, turn circumstances to account with apparently complete free will," disposes of our conceit as to human freedom. As to conscience, there are some very conscientious dogs; and some animals dream. "That highly interesting dwarf people, the Niam Niam of Central Africa, have no word for God, and therefore, it must be supposed not the idea." As to progress in art, science, agriculture and architecture: the tactual sense, common to every creature, is mother of it all. With regard to languages, they have been developed. When there were races and no nations, man was a speechless animal. All languages have progressed: first the root, then the stem, after that a determinative element. In the root state, articulate sounds grew into words; in the stem stage, the words stuck together, and formed the agglutenated languages; finally the whole stood complete with inflexions in the speech of many nations. We are to conclude that, "from the irrational primordial state, man-like beings gradually became human; while with language, the work of many years, reason made its appearance." Some would complete this sketch of ourselves by imagining a miserable ape, crossed in love, or pining with cold, conceiving in its poor addled pate, "the dread of evil to come:" so he became the father of morality and theology, the very patriarch of the old worthies. "Fortunately for mankind, no actual legislators have ever been quite so foolish as some philosophers." 1 "Dieu me garde d'être savant D'une science si profonde. Sont les plus sottes gens du monde." There are three centres around which the Animal-Theory Arguments cluster: i. Man was originally a brute. ii. Human Language was developed from animal cries. iii. The Process of Development was by Civilisation. 1 "The Reign of Law," Duke of Argyle. |