The Scottish Naturalist. 153 



is given in all languages, that have become vehicles of a philo- 

 sophy, is not attributable to animals. The home-felt conscious- 

 ness of self, that goes, though generally unnoticed along with 

 the man in all his walks of mental action, never warms the ani- 

 mal spirit, never flits across the disk of its consciousness. A 

 lady calls her dog an affectionate "thing" perhaps; never an 

 affectionate person. 



It is at this point of the self and its consciousness, I con- 

 ceive, that the battle of identity or non-identity of the animal 

 and human souls is to be fought. It is here the day is to be 

 lost or won for the " poor brutes." Other points of the field 

 are often selected at which to make a stand. Man is said to 

 be the only creature that laughs ; the only creature that can 

 make or use a tool ; the only one that lights a fire, and so on. 

 Max Miiller says, " the true Rubicon which the brute has never 

 passed is articulate language. But if selfhood or personality 

 could be claimed for animals, they would not find much diffi- 

 culty in occupying in succession these and every other point in 

 the field. Other writers select their ground, and make a stand 

 nearer the central position. Quaterfages and others make the 

 moral and religious powers of man the ground of distinction, 

 and on that ground Quaterfages erects man into a separate king- 

 dom — raising him, in view of the totality of his attributes, out 

 of the animal kingdom altogether. Isidore St Hilaire does the 

 same ; and perhaps they are near the truth. Another distinc- 

 tion was signalised by a late Archbishop of Canterbury — Dr. 

 Sumner — as it has been by others, viz., the character of progres- 

 sive and improveable reason. Such efforts as these to find the 

 fundamental distinction are on the right track. But they have 

 struck on it, not at the beginning, but in the middle. We 

 should begin with what lies involved as the foundation of these 

 and such like powers in man, and what is awanting to be the 

 fountain from which they might issue in animals, i. <?., selfhood 

 or personality. This is the true Rubicon over which the brute 

 is not seen to pass. This, and all that lies beyond — all that 

 has this for its basis — and the characteristics just mentioned 

 have — is distinctively human. 



