116 THE WHENCE AND THE WHITHER OF MAN 



chosen the latter course, and here, as elsewhere, will 

 abide by it. I should not have followed such a course if 

 I did not thoroughly believe that man also, in mind as 

 well as body, is the product of evolution. But this is no 

 reason for your accepting these views. You are asked 

 only to judge impartially of the tendencies of the 

 theory. We take for granted, I repeat, that all man's 

 mental faculties are gerininally, potentially, present in 

 protoplasm ; we seek the history of their development. 

 We must remember, further, that the science of ani- 

 mal or comparative psychology is yet in its infancy. 

 Even reliable facts are only slowly being sifted and re- 

 corded in sufficient numbers to make deductions at all 

 safe. And even of these facts different writers give 

 very different explanations. As Mr. Romanes has 

 well said, " All our knowledge of mental faculties, other 

 than our own, really consists of an inferential interpre- 

 tation of bodily activities this interpretation being 

 founded on our subjective knowledge of our own men- 

 tal activities. By inference we project, as it were, the 

 human pattern of our own mental chrornograph on 

 what is to us the otherwise blank screen of another 

 mind." The value and clearness of our inferences will 

 be proportional to the similarity of the animal to our- 

 selves. Thus we can educate many of our higher 

 mammals by a system of rewards and punishments, and 

 we seem therefore to have good reason to believe that 

 fear and joy, anger and desire, certain powers of per- 

 ception and inference, are in their minds similar to our 

 own. But fear in a fish is certainly a much dimmer 

 apprehension of danger than in us, even if it deserves 

 the name of apprehension. And the mental state 

 which we call " alarm " in a fly or any lower animal is 



