IS MAN THE ONLY REASONER? 507 



telligent, and lias its foundation, deepened by every increase of 

 knowledge." * 



Definiteness lias been given to the question of tbe nature of 

 animal intelligence by the new doctrine of evolution. If man is 

 descended from some lower organic form, we ought to be able to 

 make out not merely a physical but a psychical kinship between 

 him and the lower creation ; and the more favorable estimate of 

 the animal mind taken by the modern savant is of great assist- 

 ance here. Mr. Darwin has, indeed, shown in his valuable contri- 

 butions to the subject, that the rude germ of all the more charac- 

 teristic features of the human mind may be discovered in animals. 

 At the same time, Mr. Darwin's investigations in this direction 

 amounted only to a beginning. The crux of the evolutionist, the 

 tracing of the continuity of crude, formless animal inference, up 

 to the highest structural developments of logical or conceptual 

 thought, still remained. And so, the most powerful attack on the 

 theory of man's descent has come from the philosopher, the lo- 

 gician, and the metaphysical philologist, who have combined to 

 urge the old argument that conceptual thought indissolubly 

 bound up with language sets an impassable barrier between man 

 and brute. 



Mr. Darwin's unfinished work has now been taken up by one 

 who adds to the biological knowledge of the expert a considerable 

 acquaintance with psychology. In his previous volume, Mental 

 Evolution in Animals, Dr. Romanes took a careful psychological 

 survey of the animal world for the purpose of tracing out the suc- 

 cessive grades of its mental life. In his recent volume. Mental 

 Evolution in Man (Origin of Human Faculty), he essays to trace 

 forward this general movement of mental evolution to the point 

 where logical reasoning or "conceptual thought" may be dis- 

 tinctly seen to emerge. That is to say, he adroitly seeks to leap 

 the " impassable " barrier by merely denying its existence. Hu- 

 man reasoning and animal inference are not two widely dissimilar 

 modes of intellection. The one is merely a more complex expan- 

 sion of the other. If you start either at the human or the animal 

 bank you can pass to the opposite one by a series of stepping- 

 stones. In other words, the higher human product can be seen to 

 have been evolved out of the lower by a continuous process of 

 growth. 



Dr. Romanes's present contribution to the theory of evolution 

 is thus emphatically the construction of hypothetical stepping- 

 stones for the purpose of passing smoothly from the territory of 

 animal to that of human reasoning. In order to this, he has on 

 the one hand to follow up animal intellection to its most note- 



* Prof. Iluxley, Uurae, p. 104. 



