what I believe to be very common, of a higher mental power being involved in an operation performed by man, which, to the superficial observer, may seem the same as an unreasoning act performed by one of the lower animals. I have doubts whether the lower animals can abstract, whether they can generalize. That they can perceive resemblances and differences, and remember them, and that they associate things by these, I have no doubt; but that they can form general notions, and abstract notions, such as men entertain, such as all men, even savages, are capable of entertaining, there is no reason to believe. For what is involved in a general notion, say in the general notion, man? Not merely that all the beings put into the class resemble each other, but that the beings possess common properties, and that the notion must embrace all the objects possessing the common properties. In an abstract notion it is involved not merely that we image a part after having perceived a whole, but that we regard the part as a part; that we regard rationality as an attribute of man. Such general and abstract notions are intellectual exercises of a high order, and there is no reason to believe that the lower animals are capable of them. Abstraction as every one knows, is involved in arithmetic. Men low in the scale of intelligence can proceed only a very little way in the employment of numbers. Still, with the use of their digits, they can rise to the number five or ten. But there is no reason to believe that the lower animals can make any enumeration. They miss a person usually associated with others now before them; but there is no proof that they can perform, or be taught to perform, as even savages can, such simple operations as addition and subtraction. The school that I am opposing are accustomed to ascribe man's superiority very much to the power of speech. But many of the lower animals have the power of uttering articulate sounds. "Parrots," says Locke, "will be taught to make articulate sounds enough, which yet are by no means capable of language. Besides articulate sounds, therefore, it was further necessary that man should be able to use these sounds as signs of internal conceptions, and to make them stand as marks of the ideas within his mind." This is the defect of the lower animals, DARWIN'S DESCENT OF MAN. 359 lying not in their vocal organs, but in the mental incapacity to form the "internal conceptions" implied in the intelligent use of speech. Of this I am sure, that the lower animals cannot form those lofty ideas which constitute the peculiarities, the characteristics, of man: the ideas of necessary truth, of moral good and infinity, culminating in the idea of God. I allow that the ideas of this high kind entertained by savages are of a very vague and meagre character. But they are there (see Lecture V.) in their rudiments, and capable of being brought forth and cultivated, and made to go down by the laws of hereditary descent. Here, then, we have an essential distinction between man and the lower animals. There are ideas which all men, and no brutes, are capable of forming. It has often been remarked that the lower animals, dogs and horses, act as if they had a conscience. But this arises simply from their having the accompaniments of conscience, the feelings which are associated with conscientious convictions in man. Much of what seems conscience originates in the mere associated hope of reward and fear of penalty. There is no ground for believing that any of the lower animals have a sense of good as good, and of binding obligation, or a sense of evil as evil, and as deserving of disapproval. 66 Mr. Darwin's theory of the origin of our moral ideas is one of the loosest and most unsatisfactory, - altogether one of the weakest ever propounded. It is clear that he is not at home in philosophical and ethical subjects, as he is in questions of natural history. The following is his summary of his ethical theory: "A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions and motives, - of approving of some and disapproving of others; and the fact that man is the one being, who, with certainty, can be thus designated, makes the greatest of all distinctions between him and the lower animals. But in our third chapter I have endeavored to show that the moral sense follows, firstly, from the enduring and always present nature of the social instincts, in which respect man agrees with the lower animals; and, secondly, from his mental faculties being highly active, and his impressions of past events extremely vivid, in which respects he differs from the lower animals. Owing to this condition of mind, man cannot avoid looking backwards and comparing the impressions of past events and actions. He also continually looks forward. Hence, after some temporary desire or passion has mastered his social instincts, he will reflect and compare the now weakened impression of such past impulses with the ever present social instinct; and he will then feel that sense of dissatisfaction which all unsatisfied instincts leave behind them. Consequently he resolves to act differently for the future. And this is conscience. Any instinct which is permanently stronger or more enduring than another gives rise to a feeling which we express by saying that it ought to be obeyed. A pointer dog, if able to reflect on his past conduct, would say to himself, I ought (as, indeed, we say of him) to have pointed at that hare, and not have yielded to the passing temptation of hunting it." (Part II. c. xxi.) There is an immense number of unfilled-up breaks in this process, far more so than even in his genealogy of man. That the lower animals are social beings, and that this arises from social instincts, is admitted. But social feelings are one thing, and a sense of right and wrong another thing,- quite as different as color is from shape or sound. It is the sense of right and wrong that constitutes man a moral and (taken along with free will and intelligence) a responsible being. It is when man has his social and instinctive qualities under subjection to the moral law revealed by conscience that he becomes a virtuous being. But these higher qualities present in man are wanting in the lower animals, which are, in consequence, not moral or accountable beings. It may even be allowed that our moral nature is intimately connected with our social feelings. Most of our moral perceptions rise on the contemplation of socia relation, our relations to our fellow-men and to God. But they sping up in breasts susceptible of them: they would no come forth in a stock or a stone; there is no evidence that they come forth in the souls of animals. There is no doubt that man is more inclined to look back on the past, and reflect upon it, than the lower creatures, which, I suspect, are not much given to musing or moralizing. But it is one thing to look back on DARWIN'S DESCENT OF MAN. 361 the past, and another to regard it as morally good or evil. Man is led to declare that there is a moral law which “ought to be obeyed," that there are instincts which ought to be restrained; but there is no evidence of such a moral decision being come to by the pointer dog, or any other animal. The reference to the pointer is a clear evidence that Mr. Darwin has not so much as weighed what is involved in our moral perceptions, judgments, and sentiments, how much is involved in the idea of right and wrong, of ought, obligation, merit and demerit. As the general result of this survey, we see that man has ideas involving principles different from any to be found in the lower creatures. The possession of these puts man in an entirely different order from the brutes that perish: they make him a responsible being, and point to and guarantee an immortality. I believe that man so endowed must have come from the Power which created matter at first, and added life as the ages rolled on, and gave the brutes their instincts or incipient intelligence, and crowned his works by creating a moral and responsible being. More than one half of the "Descent of Man" is occupied with an investigation of Sexual Selection. The discussion of this question must be left to those who have given attention, as Mr. Darwin has done, to the courtship, the propagation, and domestication of animals. Most of what he says has no bearing on the subjects discussed in these Lectures. The views which he presents are always ingenious, but they seem to me to be wire-drawn and overstretched. When animals have a tame, dull hue, it is because they are thereby less exposed to danger than if they had conspicuous colors. If a male has bright colors, it is to attract the female. He adds, however: "We ought to be cautious in concluding that colors which appear to us dull are not attractive to the females of certain species. We should bear in mind such cases as those of the common house-sparrow, in which the male differs much from the female, but does not exhibit any bright tints." Female birds have commonly a duller color, as bright hues would expose them to beasts of prey in hatching. Some males are white, as thereby they are rendered attractive to the females. But in other cases black seems the favorite color. "It seems at first sight a monstrous supposi tion that the jet blackness of the negro has been gained through sexual selection; but this view is supported by various analogies, and we know that negroes admire their own blackness (Part II. c. xx.) A law so flexible may be drawn round a great many phenomena, and seem to bind them. I am sure that in the vegetable kingdom (which I have studied more carefully) there is a beauty of flower which cannot have been produced by selection on the part of man, for I have seen it in remote isles of Scotland, and virgin forests of America never trodden by human footsteps; and this in plants which cannot have been aided by beauty-loving insects carrying the pollen. And if there be beauty in the vegetable kingdom independent of creature-selection, there may surely be the same in the animal kingdom. Here, as in so many other cases, his law explains so much, but not the whole. In all these speculations, for Mr. Darwin acknowledges that his work is highly speculative,there are laws and operations implied, of which he can give no account on his theory of Natural Selection. Whence the strong impulses of the males, and the coyness of the females, all implied in the laws which he illustrates, that the male needs gay colors and showy forms to attract the female, who does not require these? Whence the love of the beautiful in the female, the love of certain colors and certain forms, an anticipation of the higher æsthetics among cultivated minds? Whence that love of music appearing in birds, and becoming so cultivated and elevating a taste in advanced humanity? In the way in which all these things have appeared, and in the forms which they have taken, and in the mutual adaptations of all things to one another, and to seasons and circumstances, I delight to trace a presiding Intelligence, foreseeing all things from the beginning, and guiding them towards a grand and beneficent end. Art. III. ON MR. HERBERT SPENCER'S PHILOSOPHY. MR. SPENCER is acknowledged, on all hands, to be a powerfu speculative thinker. Give him a set of facts, and he at once |