MAN AND BRUTE. 1/ 



Now, I have presented these two opinions side by side be- 

 cause I deem it an interesting, if not a suggestive circumstance, 

 that the two leading dissenters in this country from the general 

 school of evolutionists, although both holding the doctrine that 

 man ought to be separated from the rest of the animal 

 kingdom on psychological grounds, are nevertheless led to 

 their common doctrine by directly opposite reasons. 



The eminent French naturalist, Professor Quatrefages, also 

 adopts the opinion that man should be separated from the 

 rest of the animal kingdom as a being who, on psychological 

 grounds, must be held to have had some different mode of 

 origin. But he differs from both the English evolutionists in 

 drawing his distinction somewhat more finely. For while 

 Mivart and Wallace found their arguments upon the mind 

 of man considered as a whole, Quatrefages expressly limits 

 his ground to the faculties of conscience and religion. In 

 other words, he allows — nay insists — that no valid distinction 

 between man and brute can be drawn in respect of rationality 

 or intellect. For instance, to take only one passage from his 

 writings, he remarks : — " In the name of philosophy and 

 psychology, I shall be accused of confounding certain 

 intellectual attributes of the human reason with the exclusively 

 sensitive faculties of animals. I shall presently endeavour 

 to answer this criticism from the standpoint which should 

 never be quitted by the naturalist, that, namely, of experiment 

 and observation. I shall here confine myself to saying that, 

 in my opinion, the animal is intelligent, and, although an 

 (intellectually) rudimentary being, that its intelligence is 

 nevertheless of the same nature as that of man." Later on 

 he says : — " Psychologists attribute religion and morality to 



wise obtains food. He has made rafts or canoes for fishing, or crossing over to 

 neighbouring fertile islands. He has discovered the art of making fire. . . . 

 Those several inventions, by wliich man in the rudest state has become so pre- 

 eminent, are the direct results of the development of his powers of observation, 

 memory, curiosity, imagination, and reason. I cannot, therefore, understand 

 how it is that Mr. Wallace maintains that 'natural selection could only have 

 endowed the savage with a brain a little superior to that of an ape' " {Descent of 

 Man, pp. 48, 49). 



C 



