300 THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN REASON. 



If the reader of these concluding remarks will calmly 

 consider the dictates of his own reason, he will, we are 

 persuaded, clearly see there is no evidence for him that 

 a break cannot take place in nature of a kind and in a 

 mode he is unable to imagine : while he must admit 

 that, as regards the first introduction of life and 

 sensitivity,* such a breach of continuity must have taken 

 place. His reason will further tell him that he is 

 impotent to imagine the first introduction of either life 

 or sensitivity, or to picture to himself the mode in which 

 a creature that did not possess the faculty of feeling, 

 could have been endowed with that wonderful and 

 unprecedented power. With a mind informed and 

 strengthened by a free inquiry of this kind as to what 

 reason declares, let him ask himself whether he has 

 evidence that, in a world in which at least two breaches 

 of continuity have certainly occurred, and two novel 

 natures (the living and the sensitive), essentially 

 different in kind, have somehow come to be, — let him 

 ask himself whether, under these circumstances, a third 

 breach of continuity and the uprising f of a third new 

 nature — a rational nature — is a thing impossible or even 

 improbable ? With a mind thus freed from the mists of 

 imaginary prejudice, let the reader next consider the 

 arguments in favour of a difference of kind between 

 man and brute — the presence in the former and the 

 absence in the latter of intellect, as manifested by 

 language, and, above all, by language expressing moral 



* See above, p. lo. 



f As to the origin of man, see " On Truth," p. 521. 



