MAN AND APES. 191 



If, however, it were made clear to us — 

 immaterial intelligences — that the dead body 

 before us had been, in life, animated, not by a 

 merely animal nature, but by an active in- 

 telligence like our own, so that the difference 

 between him and all other animals was not a 

 difference of degree but of kind — if we could 

 be made to understand that its vast power of 

 collecting and grouping sensible images served 

 but to supply it with the materials made use 

 of by its intelligence to perceive, not merely 

 sensible phenomena, but also abstract qualities 

 of objects — if we became aware that the sounds 

 uttered by it in life were not exclusively 

 emotional expressions, but signs of general 

 conceptions (such as predominate in the 

 language of even the lowest savage), then 

 the aspect of the question would be entirely 

 altered for us. 



We should probably decide that if the body 

 before us seemed to us to be so little related to 

 the informing rational soul that its existence 

 anterior to and independent of such rational 



