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festations of instinct or rationality in the latter for any germ ot 

 a moral sense, of a spirit of religious worship, or the anticipa- 

 tions of that higher life and immortality, which Socrate.s, Plato, 

 and the wisest of heathen philosophers shared with Paul and 

 Augustine, and which are dimly present even in the savage 

 mind. I feel constrained to reject, even as an hypothesis, the 

 gift of reason, and the " living soul," by any conceivable pro* 

 cess of descent. All the arguments based on heredity and 

 environment, instead of helping to account for the exceptional 

 genius of a Plato, an Aristotle, a Dante, a Shakespeare, or a 

 Newton, only make more obvious the incompatibility of such 

 manifestations with any evolutionary theory. Geology may 

 reveal the onward march through countless ages, refashioning 

 continents, and advancing in orderly progression from the low- 

 est to ever higher organisms. One common plan of structure 

 may be traced throughout geological time, amid all the mani- 

 fold diversities of vertebrate life ; even as one law is found to 

 pervade and control the whole visible universe ; but 



"Though worlds on worlds in myriad myriads roll 

 Round us, each with differing powers 

 And other forms of life than ours : 

 What know we greater than the soul ?" 



Life is as great a mystery as ever ; and that which humanity 

 comprehends as its immortal essence can have no relation to 

 any progressive development of mere physical structure. 

 The mind is the standard of humanity. Man alone, savage 

 and civilized alike, looks before and after. Nature and expe- 

 rience alike confirm the radical distinction between him and 

 the irrational creation. Psychology can only know the physi- 

 cal as subjective. Nevertheless in that faculty of reason : 

 the distinctive essential of man, whereby he is able, not only 

 to look forth on the visible heavens and realize in some 



