MAN IN NATURE 



fallible and unchanging. Yet, just as the instincts of animals 

 unfailingly connect them with their surroundings, our intui- 

 tive beliefs fit us for understanding nature and for existing in it 

 as our environment. These beliefs also serve to connect man 

 with his fellow man, and in this aspect we may associate with 

 them those universal ideas of right and wrong, of immortality, 

 and of powers above ourselves, which pervade humanity. 



Another phase of this spiritual constitution is illustrated by 

 the ways in which man, starting from powers and contrivances 

 common to him and animals, develops them into new and 

 higher uses and results. This is markedly seen in the gift of 

 speech. Man, like other animals, has certain natural utterances 

 expressive of emotions or feelings. He can also, like some of 

 them, imitate the sounds produced by animate or inanimate 

 objects ; while the constitution of his brain and vocal organs 

 gives him special advantages for articulate utterance. But 

 when he develops these gifts into a system of speech express- 

 ing not mere sounds occurring in nature, but by association 

 and analogy with these, properties and relations of objects and 

 general and abstract ideas, he rises into the higher sphere of 

 the spiritual. He thus elevates a power of utterance common 

 to him with animals to a higher plane, and connecting it with 

 his capacity for understanding nature and arriving at general 

 truths, asserts his kinship to the great creative mind, and fur- 

 nishes a link of connection between the material universe and 

 the spiritual Creator. 



The manner of existence of man in nature is as well illus- 

 trated by his arts and inventions as by anything else ; and 

 these serve also to enlighten us as to the distinction between 

 the natural and the artificial. Naturalists often represent man 

 as dependent on nature for the first hints of his useful arts. 

 There are in animal nature tailors, weavers, masons, potters, 

 carpenters, miners, and sailors, independently of man, and 

 many of the tools, implements, and machines which he is said 



