4 THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN REASON. 



highest psychical powers of any brute — is, as he says, 

 "a most interesting and important" one, and is, in 

 Professor Huxley's words, an "argument fraught with 

 the deepest consequences." 



The doctrine which Mr. Romanes, Professor Huxley, 

 Professor Haeckel, Mr. Herbert Spencer, and others 

 agree in asserting — the doctrine of the essential bestiality 

 of man — is declared by one of the ablest and most 

 honest and outspoken teachers of that school. Professor 

 Ray Lankester — to be the very flower and culmination 

 of modern philosophy.* 



Very worthy, then, in our opinion, is Mr. Romanes's 

 work of the most careful and candid consideration — a 

 work on which he has lavished so much time and labour. 



He has been very unreasonably blamed for attaching 

 the importance he has to the question of " difference 

 of kind," and for affirming f that such a difference 

 involves a difference of origin ; and it has been asserted 



■^ His words are, " Darwin, by his discovery of the mechanical 

 principle of organic evolution, namely, the survival of the fittest in 

 the struggle for existence, completed the doctrine of evolution, and 

 gave it that unity and authority which was necessary in order that 

 it should reform the whole range of philosophy. The detailed 

 consequences of that new departure in philosophy have yet to be 

 worked out. Its most important initial conception is the derivation 

 of man by natural processes from ape-like ancestors, and the 

 consequent derivation of his mental and moral qualities by the 

 operation of the struggle for existence and natural selection from 

 the mental and moral qualities of animals. Not the least impor- 

 tant of the studies thus initiated is that of the evolution of 

 philosophy itself. Zoology thus finally arrives, through Darwin, 

 at its crowning development ; it teaches, and may be even said to 

 comprise, the history of man, sociology, and psychology" (" Encyc. 

 Brit.," vol. xxiv. p. 820). 



t As he does on p. 3, in a note. 



