296 THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN REASON. 



For eighteen years we have looked in vain for a 

 Darwinian ready and wiUing to address himself seriously 

 to the arguments which seemed to us to demonstrate 

 the impossibility of the evolution of intellect from sense. 

 During the last half-dozen years or so we have, how- 

 ever, been more hopeful, for we thought we had some 

 reason to believe that Mr, Romanes was industriously 

 preparing himself to undertake that task. But what, 

 after all, is the result of this long preparation, these 

 arduous studies, the counsel and advice of prede- 

 cessors and contemporary sympathizers ? Do we 

 meet in this book, in spite of the pains and labour 

 which have been lavished upon it, with one really new 

 argument in defence of the cause it would sustain } 



We must confess to no small feeling of disappoint- 

 ment at finding we had no real novelty, no freshly dis- 

 covered difficulty to contend with, but had mainly to 

 occupy ourselves with the explanation of misunderstand- 

 ings and the unravelling of curiously entangled concep- 

 tions. The real contention of the author is an old and 

 familiar one, and may be thus briefly put : " The infant 

 shows no intellectual nature, therefore it has none. 

 Savages are intellectually inferior to us in varying 

 degrees, therefore their ancestors had no intellect at all." 

 The argument in favour of these assertions really reposes 

 almost exclusively on a supposed a priori probability 

 derived from that view of evolution which Mr. Romanes 

 (following Mr. Darwin, Professor Haeckel, etc.) favours. 

 But the author, as we have seen, seeks to sustain 

 these two fundamental propositions by statements and 

 representations which we have successively combated 



