the indelible stamp of his lowly origin." | tion with which Philosophy proper can He adduces many arguments for the be- hardly deal. We must leave it to the lief that "man is descended from a hairy scientific naturalists to determine what is quadruped, furnished with a tail and the force of the argument from embryolopointed ears, probably arboreal in its gical phases; whether from the fact that habits, and an inhabitant of the Old the human embryo exhibits successively World." He concludes that "man is the an appearance similar to that of the emco-descendant with other mammals of a bryo of the insect, the fish, and of certain common progenitor." And this genealogy lower mammalia,- that the human species he traces back by saying that "in the dim must have been actually developed out of obscurity of the past we can see that the those lower species; whether from the fact early progenitor of all the vertebrata must that the human foetus is at one period have been an aquatic animal provided covered with a lanugo or fine down, it folwith branchia, with the two sexes united lows necessarily that man is descended in the same individual, and with the most from a hairy progenitor; what is the va important organs of the body (such as the lidity of the argument from anatomical brain and heart) imperfectly developed." homologies: whether the appearance of Mr. Darwin is conscious that this theory rudimentary branchiæ proves that man will be distasteful to many, but after offering some consolations, he very properly adds that it is not a question of liking or disliking, of hopes or fears, but of the truth as far as we can discover it. The question simply must be, are the arguments sound and the conclusion drawn from them inevitable? And this is the spirit in which Philosophy should look at the Darwinian hypothesis of the descent of man. was once a fish; whether the faint appearance of a point in the fold of his ear indicates that he was once a pointed-eared animal; whether other evidence is so strong as to enable us to pass over the remarkable break between the skeleton of man and all other animals, and to make us wait in faith, as Mr. Darwin suggests, till the exploration of Africa has supplied a palæontological missing link. All this we must leave to the naturalists. And I feel inclined to say to Mr. Darwin what Socrates said to his disciples, " You may do with my body what you please, provided you do not imagine it to be me.' But Mr. Darwin's book contains also a theory of the origin of the human mind. And that is a part of the subject which certainly falls within the province of Philophy to consider. There is no occasion for any flutter of nervousness on the subject. Mr. Darwin, even if he establishes his theory, will not quite turn the world upside-down. The history of mankind, from Moses and Homer and Buddha to the present moment, will remain exactly as it was. Within that period at all events man remains "a creature of large discourse looking before and after." The great thoughts of poets and philosophers remain for us. The Mr. Darwin's theory is, that the human works of art and beauty remain. Man's mind, with all its capacities and charactergodlike dominion over nature goes on ex-istics, is the result of the development, panding. Music and our feelings of delight in the fair natural creation remain. The actual sense of our own capacities is unaltered. The mysterious law of duty is still in our hearts, and the feeling of relationship between the individual soul and God need not be abolished. There is nothing atheistical in Mr. Darwin's work; on the contrary, it might be described as a system of Natural Theology founded on a new basis. And I find that we have the authority of Professor Fraser for saying that the pious philosophy of Bishop Berkeley is not incompatible with the belief that human and other animal life may have been developed from inorganic conditions -if physical evidence can be found to prove this law of development." without a break, of the dim sensations of a mollusc. In this there is a psychological hypothesis implied-namely, that all intelligence is absolutely homogeneous, and that there is no difference in kind, but only in degree, between the functions of the reason in contemplating necessary truth, and those of the most elementary sense-perception. Such a hypothesis cannot be safely maintained by natural science, unless Philosophy proper, to whose department it belongs, will give her sanction to it. It is true that the different schools of philosophy are not agreed upon this point. The extreme sensationalist school would probably make no objection to this part of the Darwinian theory. But all those who maintain that there is a difNow, the sufficiency of the physical evi- ference in kind between the higher mental dence adduced by Mr. Darwin is a ques-faculties and the lower, will be justified in recording a protest against a theory | affinity with the material elements out of which, by reducing them to a common which the human embryo is formed, but origin, makes them homogeneous. Mr. Darwin, in support of his views, lays great stress on the wonderful intelligence exhibited by the ant tribes, and on the acts of reasoning performed by dogs and other animals. But in all this there is nothing new. In Coleridge's "Aids to Reflection," precisely similar instances are given of the intelligence of ants and dogs, and Coleridge does not hesitate to ascribe to these creatures a certain discursive faculty, which he identifies with the practical understanding in man. But Coleridge does not admit that discursive functions, such as those indicated, are the same in kind with the highest operations of the human mind. The chief object of his book is to show that the discursive understanding, whether practical or cognitive, is essentially different in kind from the reason, and that the reason is a faculty shared in by man alone of all the creatures on this earth. I am not now wishing to appeal to the authority of Coleridge, nor of Kant, or Plato, or any of the other great Philosophers who have taken the same view of man's reason being distinct in kind from his other faculties, as decisive against Mr. Darwin. I only wish to point out that the identity, or difference, in kind between the higher and the lower mental faculties is a question which meets us in limine, and that the solution of it, one way or the other, is an antecedent condition to accepting or rejecting the Darwinian hypoth esis. that it comes in from without, and that it - De Mr. Darwin acknowledges the vast superiority of the mental faculties in man over those of any other creature, but he bids us consider what differences exist in this respect between species or families of the lower animals; for instance, what a wonderful difference of intelligence there is between the grain-insect and the ant, though these creatures are, in many respects, closely related to one another. The question, however, remains, whether the differences between the mental powers and characteristics of different animals are not differences of degree, while those between man and the inferior creatures are differences of kind. All other animals but man seem to be under a strict limit, which they cannot pass; their faculties, however acute and wonderful, are restricted in their direction to the finding means of bodily preservation and bodily enjoyment. There is in some animals a sort of "false dawn' or glimmering precursor of the light of human reason. For instance, in the industrious soliloquy of the caged parrot, there is an appearance of what the Greeks called daywyn, or pastime, the faculties being exercised for their own sake. So, too, in the curiosity of monkeys, of which Mr. Darwin gives many instances, there is the commencement of that love of knowledge for its own sake, which is one of the noblest of attributes. But all these tendencies in the lower animals are stopped dead, as it were, by the want of the faculty of apprehending universals. Aristotle allows that many lower animals have memory, and attain to an empirical experience sufficient for the exigencies of their daily life (Met. I. i. 2), but he denies that this ever amounts in them to general conceptions, such as would be expressed in language as laws, or rules, and such as constitute Art and Science among men. This want, then, of the faculty of universals, which we may call in a word, Reason, constitutes a great gulf between man and the lower animals, a gulf which in the present day no lower animal seems to have any possibility of overpassing. It may be thought that minds like that of Plato and Coleridge had a theological predisposition to take what is certainly the more elevated view of man's nature. But I see no reason for attributing any bias of the kind to Aristotle. Had the facts of the case seemed to him to admit of it, I should have expected Aristotle, from the general turn of his mind, to have welcomed the conception that all organic nature is one continuous chain. But he does not do so; he makes two distinct breaks in the chain of life first, where sensation comes in and differentiates the animal from the plant; and, secondly, where reason comes in and differentiates man from all other creatures. In a very interesting passage of his work "On the Generation of Animals," he says that the question of the origin of reason, and how those who share in it If this be granted, the question for phicome to do so, is very difficult and im-losophy is, whether Reason is the effect, or portant, and that there is no resource ex- the cause, of the difference in the past cept to believe that the reason has no history of man and the other creatures. Mr. Darwin passes lightly over the philosophical difficulties which arise in his way; and he somewhat loosely accounts for the development of the higher reason, by saying that "the higher intellectual powers of man, such as those of ratiocination, abstraction, self-consciousness, &c., will have followed from the continued improvement of other mental faculties; but without considerable culture of the mind, both in the race and in the individual, it is doubtful whether these higher powers would be exercised and thus fully attained." Rather, we might say that it is doubtful whether such high powers could ever have been acquired by the mere exercise of lower faculties. It is very difficult to see how, by the "struggle for existence," which is the only motive power that Mr. Darwin seems to allow us, the higher intellectual powers of ratiocination, abstraction, and self-consciousness can ever have been called into action. We can conceive how, according to the Darwinian hypothesis, man might have become more crafty than the fox, more constructive than the beaver, more organized in society than the ant or the bee; but how he can have got the impulse, when he had once made his position on the earth secure among the other animals, to follow out abstract ideas and to go working on and on, while all other creatures rested content with the sphere which they had made for themselves this is, indeed, hard to understand. Mr. Darwin would say that it is the effect. | ing to Mr. Darwin's own showing, have the And this point philosophy may very fairly means of communicating with each other, discuss with him. Philosophy may well would have shown some indication of havdemur to Mr. Darwin's account of what he ing received such a start. considers the decisive step towards the formation of reason in man. He says, 66 a great stride in the development of the intellect will have followed, as soon as, through a previous considerable advance, the half-art and half-instinct of language came into use; for the continued use of language will have reacted on the brain, and produced an inherited effect, and this again will have re-acted on the improvement of language." In other parts of his work Darwin admits, or rather claims, as an argument in favour of his theory, that many of the lower animals have a language by which they communicate to each other such ideas as they care to express. And we may ask, then, why, in their case, language, constantly used through life, has not re-acted on their brains, and produced an inherited effect, which again would have reacted on the improvement of their language? The answer to this is obvious. The animal had an impulse to express only certain ideas. The expression for these ideas was attained by its species long ago, and there is no impulse to go beyond. The beast or bird has signs or sounds to express warning, encouragement, call, wooing, love, joy, anger, defiance, fear, and perhaps a few more simple emotions or ideas. Its brain is large enough or refined enough for the entertainment of these ideas in association with certain signs or sounds, but has no development further, because language is not the cause, but the expression and effect of the mental powers. In the power of varied articu- Aristotle (to whom I must again refer) lated utterances, the parrot, the starling, has an opinion on this subject directly the magpie, and other birds, might almost contrary to that of Mr. Darwin. Arisvie with man; but with them this instru- totle admits to a certain extent, a theory ment remains dead. It has no tendency of evolution with regard to man. to re-act on their minds; and, for want of thinks that mankind gradually invented a living mind impelling it, it is as idle as and developed the necessary arts of life; the echoes of the mountains. The differ- and that, when the necessities and the ence between man and such creatures is, pleasures were, sufficiently provided, men that man, while sharing with them the proceeded, especially in places where there faculties of articulation, was also endowed was a leisure-class, to betake themselves with reason, always tending to view things to those intellectual, scientific, and philounder the form of universals. Reason, in sophical pursuits which are most dignified, short. from all we can see or conceive of and which are sought for their own sake. the history of the world, has been the He mentions, as an instance of this, the cause, and not the effect, of human lan- development of mathematics in Egypt, as guage. Language, in itself, evidently gives being due to the priests, who were a leisno start for the development of the rea- ure-class (Metaph. I. i. 16). Aristotle, son, as distinguished from the lower un- then, considers the reason of man, so far derstanding which is concerned with self- from having been developed out of his preservation and the attainment of bodily struggle for existence, to have been resatisfaction; else the brutes, which, accord-tarded at first by the claims of the lower He necessities, and only when set free on the satisfaction of these to have begun its own spontaneous development. He draws a distinction between those faculties which we attain by exercise, and those which we possess by nature, and have only to call out and use; and he evidently places reason under the latter head. It is a question whether this view is not more in accordance than that of Mr. Darwin with the facts of the world. When we look closely into Mr. Darwin's theory of the origin and development of the human mind, it seems evident that he holds the opinion that, when man had once begun to outvie other creatures and cope with the difficulties of life by means of craft, cleverness, and intelligence, his brain grew, and new mental powers, above his immediate needs, were unconsciously developed in him, and that these new powers became the cause of all that is most distinctive in man. But if Mr. Darwin so thinks he comes round very nearly to the orthodox view, by conceding the existence of high mental powers in man antecedent to their exercise. He only gives a physical account of such powers by attributing them to the quasi-spontaneous growth of the grey matter of the brain. He does not enter upon the philosophical question whether the brain is the cause, or only the condition, of the highest mental functions; nor does he give any reason to account for the fact that a similar brain-growth does not appear to have taken place in any other of the numerous animal species of the earth, though so many of them have, for countless ages, exercised intelligence and cleverness in their respective struggle for existence. habits, is always man, and that he has the higher faculties, at all events latent, in his soul. It points to the conclusion that the human species is essentially one, and that it is strongly differentiated by the prime quality, Reasoh, from all other species which we know. The characteristics of savages are made great use of by the evolutionist philosophers in support of their theories, and Mr. Darwin assumes it as absolutely certain that we are, at all events, descended from savages, and offers it as a sort of consolation to those who may not like his ultimate conclusions -that it surely would not be more degrading to trace one's descent to a race of monkeys than to some disgusting savage tribe. But the argument from the characteristics of savages may be turned the other way. On the one hand, we have seen that the savage is not a link between the brutes and man, but is definitely man. The savage does not afford any ground for believing that the human species is gradually shaded off into other species, and he does not in this respect give any support to the Darwinian hypothesis. On the other hand, the extremely unprogressive character of savage society is an obstacle to believing that the best civilization of the world, that of the Aryan and Semitic races, can have ever taken its start from such a society in the primeval ages. In the savage races of the present day we seem to find the human faculties, not in their fresh virgin state, tending to develop into something better, but arrested and benumbed by long acquiescence in grovelling habits. Therefore I think that we are justified in regarding these races as the swamps and backwaters One point that emerges from the vari- of the stream of noble humanity, and not ous observations of Mr. Darwin is worthy as the representatives of the fountain-head of notice namely, that he finds all the from which it has been derived. Discardessentially human faculties to be existent, ing all analogies drawn from savage races though latent, in savages, independently as at present existing, I think that philosof long hereditary exercise, which, in ophy would be justified in conceiving of other parts of his theory, he considers our ancestors as possessing the human necessary for the creation and development of the human faculties. Thus he says, "The Fuegians rank amongst the lowest barbarians; but I was continually struck with surprise how closely the three natives on board H.M.S. Beagle,' who had lived some years in England and could talk a little English, resembled us in disposition and in most of our mental faculties." This candid admission surely furnishes a strong argument to the opponents of the evolution theory, as applied to the intellect of man, for it points to the conclusion that man, however degraded in faculties which savages now exhibit, and in addition to them an inward impulse which led to the evolution of civilization. No mere exigencies of life or struggle for existence can have given rise to the high thoughts which led to poetry and science. Had our ancestors once been savages, savages they would have remained. But in the fairest regions of the earth, in the most favourable circumstances for leisure and consequent refinement, having rich untried faculties, and an inward impulse to exercise those faculties, they took the start which has brought us into the complex, ever changing historical scheme of civilization, power of his surface, to send to us an outside which the savage now dwells un- amount of light only inferior to that which conscious of its existence or meaning. The we receive (under the most favourable difficulty of believing that this scheme, conditions) from Venus. with all the varied products of its successive phases, such as the Bible, Homer, Sophocles, Greek art and philosophy, Roman law, Christian morality, Shakspeare, and modern physical science, can have been started and carried on even in its beginnings by savages, such as we now know them, forms a great obstacle to accepting the Darwinian hypothesis. The thought seems forced upon us that there have been elements in the history of the world of which this theory takes no account. We feel inclined to say to Mr. Darwin But in the meantime, much farther towards the south, the ruddy planet Mars will be conspicuous. He has returned to our neighbourhood after an absence of two years, and is now about to urge his way eastwards among the stars, over the constellation Leo-over the Virgin, outshining the brilliant Spica, which marks the wheat-ear in her hand, and thence his lustre waning-through the Scales, and past his rival as a red star, Antares, or the Scorpion's Heart. It may prove interesting to consider a few of the facts which astronomers have "There are more things in heaven and earth For Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." taught us about the planet of war. of all the planets, he is the one they can And with some such remark I would study best. He does not, indeed, come so take leave of these speculations, which near to us as Venus, nor does he, in the are highly interesting and valuable for telescope, present so noble an appearance the facts by which their author endeavours as Jupiter. Venus outshines him in the to support them, and which whether ulti-heavens, and Jupiter seems to show more mately accepted or not, are certain to be interesting details in the telescopic field. thoroughly sifted, and so to give an impulse to metaphysical as well as physical inquiry. I will only add that in them there is very little that is absolutely new. The facts are the facts of Mr. Darwin, but the theory is the theory of Epicurus, with the atheism removed. From The Cornhill Magazine. Yet we see Mars, in reality, far better than either of those two planets. If ever we are to recognize the signs of life in any orb of those which people space, it will be in Mars that such signs will be first traced. As Venus comes near to us she assumes the form of the crescent moon, we have but a fore-shortened view of a portion of her illuminated hemisphere, and her intensely bright light defeats the scrutiny of the most skilful observer. At the time of her nearest approach, she is lost wholly to our view in the splendour of the solar rays, DURING the present month, a somewhat her unilluminated or night hemisphere beunusual grouping of the planets is to be ing directed also towards us. With Jupiwitnessed. Mars, Venus, and Jupiter, the ter, tho case is different. When at his three most conspicuous of these wandering nearest, he is seen under most favourable orbs, will be visible at the same time. conditions, and the enormous dimensions Veuns and Jupiter must be looked for in of his belts render them very obvious and the west, where they will shine conspicu- very beautiful features for the scrutiny ously as evening stars. Nor will it be of the telescopist. But then he is some difficult to distinguish between these rival 370 millions of miles from us at such a orbs, for they will pass each other on the time, whereas Mars when most favourably 12th of May, Jupiter moving sunwards. placed for telescopic study, is but 37 milThroughout the month Venus will in-lions of miles away. A square mile on the crease in lustre, while Jupiter will diminishless markedly, indeed, but still perceptibly. The observer will have a good opportunity of comparing the splendour of these planets, the two brightest orbs in the heavens - Venus, splendid because so near to us and to the sun, Jupiter less brilliantly illuminated by the solar rays, and lying at a distance from us enormously exceeding that of Venus, but enabled, by his vast bulk and by the high reflective surface of Mars would appear a hundred times larger than a square mile on the surface of Jupiter, supposing both planets studied when at their nearest. It is clear, then, that, as respects surface-details, Mars is examined under much more favourable conditions than the giant planet Jupiter. But here the question is naturally suggested whether our own moon, which is but a quarter of a million of miles from |