LORD MONBODDO 



only ; the method by which the Higher Intelligence 

 that rules the Universe has acted through natural 

 laws. The Final, or determinative, cause* of these, as 

 of nearly every phenomenon, lies beyond the limits 

 of all human faculties. 



Among the writers of the Eighteenth Century 

 who turned their attention to the relations between 

 the lower animals and. man, one of the earliest was 

 James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, b. 1714; d. 1799, 

 whose curious combinations of Aristotelian philosophy, 

 classical learning and Orthodox religion, with 

 credulous belief and original doctrines, excited the 

 astonishment and ridicule alike of the learned and 

 the unlearned world. An earnest adherent to the 

 scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages, and be- 

 liever in the infinite superiority of -all real knowledge 

 as possessed by the ancient Greeks to that of the 

 degenerate men of his own day, he rejected the 

 Newtonian astronomy as being false and materialistic, 

 if not atheistic. He accepted, however, the belief in 

 Mermaids and Mermen, and considered as reasonably 

 well-established by credible evidences, the existence 

 of the men described by Strabo and mentioned by 

 Othello " Whose heads do grow beneath their 

 shoulders." In contradiction to the general trend of 

 his theories, he devoted a large part of his two 

 voluminous works (" The Origin of Language," 6 

 19 289 



