The Scottish Naturalist. 151 



in expressing the favourite 'conviction, the conviction that there 

 is " no essential mental, distinction between man and other ani- 

 mals." For myself, I have to confess that I feel insuperably 

 hampered in coming to this conviction — hampered by what I 

 conceive to be facts in the case that are not having their due at 

 the hands of those who feel no difficulty. It has not been un- 

 usual, with at least students of mental philosophy, to point to 

 self-consciousness as a fundamental distinction between the two 

 series of mental manifestations. Self-consciousness is a promi- 

 nent fact of the mental nature of man. And it is held that this 

 element is not proved to be found among the manifestations of 

 the mental nature of animals. The idea of this distinction 

 seems to have occurred first to those who saw so much else 

 that nobody had seen before — the schoolmen of the middle 

 ages. (Bayle 8, 762.) I do not know if it has been so syste- 

 matically wrought out as, especially with the help of present 

 science, it might be. I suspect it has not. The most ex- 

 tended and powerful advocacy I have known it to have received 

 was at the hands of the late Professor J. Goodsir, in a course 

 of, I think, some six or eight lectures he gave about eighteen 

 years ago. Few men then or since have had equal qualifica- 

 tions, philosophical or scientific, for estimating the validity of 

 such a view. But his lectures, which he promised to his stu- 

 dents to publish, were not by himself given to the world. His 

 lamented death interfered. And in reference to his powerful 

 exposition of the view which they supported, such notes as we 

 have in his posthumous works leave us but to desiderate " the 

 touch of the vanished hand and the sound of the voice that is 

 still." Bayle argued against the distinction made on the ground 

 of self-consciousness. " It is evident to any person," he says, 

 " who is able to judge of things, that every substance which has 

 any sensation knows that it is endued with it ; and it would 

 not be more absurd to maintain that the soul of man knows 

 actually an object without knowing that he knows it, than it is 

 absurd to say that the soul of a dog sees a bird without perceiv- 

 ing that it sees it," (8, 762.) And he adds, it is a thousand 

 times more difficult to see a tree than to know the art by which 

 we see it. (p. 764.) But in so far as Bayle's self-consciousness, 

 as these words describe it, may be more than the mere con- 

 sciousness of phenomena, its presence in animals is begged or 

 claimed to be self-evident, when it ought to be proved.. Self- 

 consciousness is our consciousness of a self in our conscious- 



