DARWINISM. 39 



necessary in the case of each individual man, 

 unless indeed Mr. Wallace is prepared to face the 

 alternative that the spiritual nature, once given, 

 is transmitted with the " germ-plasma " from 

 parent to child ? A few pages later on we are 

 told that the progressive manifestations of life in 

 the vegetable, the animal, and man, which Mr. 

 Wallace distinguishes as unconscious, conscious, 

 and intellectual, are only different "degrees of 

 spiritual influx," and therefore do not break the 

 continuity of the whole. But if, as Mr. Wallace 

 holds, this spiritual nature, in all the degrees below 

 man, works uniformly by natural selection, there is 

 a strong probability that the law of its work will 

 be the same in its highest operation, while if it 

 works by some other law, we should expect to 

 be able to trace the beginnings of this law in the 

 world of vegetable and animal life. 



Mr. Wallace's anthropology is only less puzzling 

 than his metaphysics. The several stages in the 

 continuous process are said to be marked by the 

 transition from inorganic to organic, from vege- 

 table to animal, and from brute to man. With 

 regard to the second of these, if Mr. Wallace had 

 emphasized the contrast between vegetable and 

 animal, in the strictly scientific region, we should 

 not have dared to criticize him. But when he 

 distinguishes them as unconscious and conscious 

 life, we are tempted to ask Are the protophyta 



