MAN IN NATURE 487 



imation to ourselves in emotional development, and this is 

 perhaps one of the points that fits them for such human asso- 

 ciation. In approaching the higher psychical endowments, the 

 affinity of man and the brute appears to diminish and at length 

 to cease, and it is left to him alone to rise into the domain of 

 the rational and ethical. 



Those supreme endowments of man we may, following the 

 nomenclature of ancient philosophy and of our Sacred Scrip- 

 tures, call " pneumatical " or spiritual. They consist of con- 

 sciousness, reason, and moral volition. That man possesses 

 these powers every one knows ; that they exist or can be de- 

 veloped in lower animals no one has .succeeded in proving. 

 Here, at length, we have a severance between man and material 

 nature. Yet it does not divorce him from the unity of nature, 

 except on the principles of atheism. For if it separates him 

 from animals, it allies him with the Power who made and 

 planned the animals. To the naturalist the fact that such 

 capacities exist in a being who in his anatomical structure so 

 closely resembles the lower animals, constitutes an evidence of 

 the independent existence of those powers and of their spiritual 

 character and relation to a higher power which, I think, no 

 metaphysical reasoning or materialistic scepticism will suffice 

 to invalidate. It would be presumption, however, from the 

 standpoint of the naturalist to discuss at length the powers of 

 man's spiritual being. I may refer merely to a few points 

 which illustrate at once his connection with other creatures, 

 and his superiority to them as a higher member of nature. 



And, first, we may notice those axiomatic beliefs which lie at 

 the foundation of human reasoning, and which, while appa- 

 rently in harmony with nature, do not admit of verification 

 except by an experience impossible to finite beings. Whether 

 these are ultimate truths, or merely results of the constitution 

 bestowed on us, or effects of the direct action of the creative 

 mind on ours, they are to us like the instincts of animals in- 



