314 A Limit to Evolution 



objects and their kinds, and sucli creatures would at once be 

 men, even if unable to articulate, and only able to give in the 

 most rudimentary way, bodily expression to their incipient 

 ideas. 



And now, in concluding, we would advert to a difficulty 

 which has perhaps impressed not a few readers. They may 

 very reasonably ask. How is it, if the doctrine of man's 

 evolution is thus rationally untenable, that so many scientific 

 men — learned zoologists and anatomists — hold it ? The answer 

 is, that the question of man's origin is a philosophic, not a 

 scientific question, and that men may be very distinguished 

 for scientific knowledge and yet be the victims of a very 

 defective philosophy. Such is conspicuously the case in the 

 present instance. The Darwinian view is supported by men, 

 and only by men, who confound ' ideas ' with ' faint revivals 

 of past feelings.' It is on this account that not one of them 

 has grappled with the essence of the question. But no pro- 

 gress can really be made in investigating thep^roblem of 

 man's origin except by those who have gained a„true_ know- 

 ledge of what man is now. The present writer is profoundly 

 convinced that the more deeply and thoroughly human 

 nature is studied, the more clear and decisive will be the 

 conviction arrived at, that the powers of mental abstraction, 

 and of language, which is its external sign, mark the most 

 interesting and impassable liinit to evolution. 



