MAN AND BRUTE. 19 



distinction as one of degree — and, therefore, that the school 

 represented by Mivart is wrong in regarding it as one of kind, — 

 the time will then have arrived to consider, in the same con- 

 nection, these special faculties of morality and religion. Such, 

 therefore, is the method that I intend to adopt. The whole of 

 the present volume will be devoted to a consideration of " the 

 origin of human faculty " in the larger sense of this term, or 

 in accordance with the view that distinctively human faculty 

 begins with distinctively human ideation. When this matter 

 has been thoroughly discussed, the ground will have been 

 prepared for considering in subsequent volumes the more 

 special faculties of Morality and Religion.* 



* Sundry other and still more special distinctions of a psychological kind have 

 been alleged by various writers as obtaining between man and the lower animals — 

 such as making fire, employing barter, wearing clothes, using tools, and so forth. 

 But as all these distinctions are merely particular instances, or detailed illustrations, 

 of the more intelligent order of ideation which belongs to mankind, it is needless 

 to occupy space with their discussion. Here, also, I may remark that in this 

 work I am not concerned with the popular objection to Darwinism on account of 

 " missing-links," or the absence of fossil remains structurally intermediate between 

 those of man and the anthropoid apes. This is a subject that belongs to palaeon- 

 tology, and, therefore, its treatment would be out of place in these pages. Never- 

 theless, I may here briefly remark that the supposed difficulty is not one of any 

 magnitude. Although to the popular mind it seems almost self-evident that if 

 there ever existed a long series of generations connecting the bodily structure of 

 man with that of the higher apes, at least some few of their bones ought now to 

 be forthcoming ; the geologist too well knows how little reliance can be placed on 

 such merely negative testimony where the record of geology is in question. 

 Countless other instances may now be quoted of connecting links having been 

 but recently found between animal groups which are zoologically much more 

 widely separated than are apes and men. Indeed, so destitute of force is this 

 popular objection held to be by geologists, that it is not regarded by them as 

 amounting to any objection at all. On the other hand, the close anatomical 

 resemblance that subsists between man and the higher apes — every bone, muscle, 

 nerve, vessel, etc., in the enormously complex structure of the one coinciding, 

 each to each, with the no less enormously complex structure of the other — speaks 

 so voluminously in favour of an uninterrupted continuity of descent, that, as before 

 remarked, no one who is at all entitled to speak upon the subject has ventured to 

 dispute this continuity so far as the corporeal structure is concerned. All the few 

 naturalists who still withhold their assent from the theory of evolution in its 

 reference to man, expressly base their opinion on those grounds of psychology 

 which it is the object of the ])rescnt treatise to investigate. 



