284 The Scottish Naturalist. 



him whenever he went abroad from himself to explain anything, 

 is here too in his hand and employed by him without his 

 observing that he is doing it. 



Equipt, then, for the problem of the animal soul with a com- 

 petent knowledge of the philosophy of the human mind, the 

 next point of method is to have the question stated in the form 

 in which it may go to proof in the manner most favourable for 

 the reception of evidence and the attainment of a correct find- 

 ing. On being asked, How can you prove that animals have 

 not self-consciousness and will, and are not personal in their 

 mental nature ? one might say, I would prefer not to take up 

 the subject in the form of that negation at all. I should leave 

 it to those who hold to the animal soul being the same as ours 

 to prove their affirmation. The form in which I would prefer 

 to take up and support the opposite side is this positive one — 

 that animal phenomena are explainable from other causes than 

 self-consciousness and will, i.e., automatic causes. That, how- 

 ever, would unnecessarily narrow the method of proof. Cer- 

 tainly the question presents itself very naturally, and indeed 

 very obtrusively, in the form in which it would be thus put 

 aside. Perhaps the very first facts that would strike a stranger 

 when he compared the animal kingdom with man, are facts that 

 would go far to solve the problem in the negative form, that 

 animals have not self-consciousness or will. In animals, there 

 is no progressiveness in mental faculties, mental habits, or in 

 mental products. Their intelligence is not an intelligence that 

 makes any advance either appreciably great or at all permanent. 

 This is one of the most obtrusive distinctions between them 

 and man. Utter fixity and finality characterize them ; onward 

 movement, expansiveness, and growth, him. But this inherent 

 power of educability and progressiveness is in man the result 

 and manifestation of personality, of self-consciousness and will. 

 Every human soul is shewn to be a home or centre of self- 

 conscious, self-determined, self-regulating force. Animals failing 

 to produce the effects must be held to be destitute of the cause. 

 As they have not put self-consciousness and voluntary power to 

 use in the only way in which experience tells us they operate, 

 they must be held to be without such power. It cannot be 

 said they are hiding their talents in a napkin. We must hold 

 they have not got the talents till they are seen putting them to 

 use. How is it that their bounds are fixed, like those of the 

 sea, that they cannot pass them — that the power of self-culture 



