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forms of life? If I am able to interpret his utterances correctly, he 

 did not; on the contrary, he seems to have been at pains to express his 

 dissent from such a doctrine, — which, as we have seen, was familiar 

 enough to the men of science of his time. There are several distinct 

 passages in the 'Ideen' in which Herder discusses the relation of man 

 to the animal kingdom; and, in order that the reader may have the 

 means of deciding for himself what Herder's position was, I will cite 

 them at some length. "There are those," he says (Bk. III., ch. 6), 

 "who have, I will not say degraded man to the rank of a beast, but 

 have denied to him the character of his race, and would make him 

 out to be a degenerate animal (ausgeartete Thier) which in striving 

 after a higher perfection has wholly lost the distinctive qualities 

 (Eigenheit) of its species. This, however, is manifestly contrary to 

 the truth and to the evidence of natural history; man obviously has 

 characteristics that no animal possesses, and performs actions of which 

 both the good and the evil belong to him alone. . . . Since every animal 

 remains true upon the whole to the character of its species, and since 

 we alone have free will instead of necessity for our ruling power, then 

 this difference must be investigated as a fact — for fact it undeniably is. 

 The other questions — how man came by this distinctive characteristic; 

 whether it was his from the beginning, or is adventitious and acquired : 

 these are questions of a purely historical sort. Now, setting aside all 

 metaphysics, let us confine ourselves to physiology and experience." 

 Herder then points out the anatomical peculiarities of man, particularly 

 those which, as Daubenton had shown, are connected with his greatest 

 peculiarity, the upright attitude. And in view of these considerations 

 Herder concludes thus : ' ' Would the human animal, if he had been for 

 ages in an inferior state — and if he had been formed as a quadruped 

 in his mother's womb, with wholly different proportions — would he have 

 left that state of his own accord and have raised himself to an erect 

 posture ? Out of the faculties of a beast, which would ever be drawing 

 him backward, could he have made himself a man, and, even before he 

 became a man, have discovered human speech ? If man had ever been a 

 four-footed animal, if he had been such for thousands of years, assuredly 

 he would remain such still; and nothing but a miracle of new creation 

 could have made him what he now is. Why, then, should we embrace 

 unproved, nay totally self-contradictory, paradoxes, when the structure 

 of man, the history of his species and, as it seems to me, the whole 

 analogy of the organization of our earth, lead us to another conclusion ? 

 No creature that we know has ever departed from its original organ- 

 ization and adapted itself to another contrary to it; for it can operate 

 only through the powers that inhere in its organization, and Nature 

 is abundantly able to hold each living being fast in that state to which 

 she has assigned it. In man everything is adapted to the form he now 



