286 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [pt. ii. 



these inadequate instances, our critics ask us how it is 

 possible to imagine that a race possessed of such a godlike 

 intellect, such a keen SBstlietic sense, and such a lofty soul, 

 should ever have descended from a race of mere brutes. 

 And again they ask us how can a race endowed with such a 

 capacity for progress be genetically akin to those lower races 

 of which even the highest show no advance from one genera- 

 tion to another. Confronted thus by diificulties which reason 

 and imagination seem alike incompetent to overcome, they 

 too often either give up the problem as insoluble, or else — 

 which amounts to nearly the same thing — have recourse to 

 the dens ex machind as an aid in solving it. 



Influenced, no doubt, by some such mental habit as this 

 Mr. St. George Mivart declares that, while thoroughly agree- 

 ing with Mr. Darwin as to man's zoological position, he 

 nevertheless regards the difference between ape and mush- 

 room as less important than the difference between ape and 

 man, so soon as we take into the account " the totality ot 

 man's being." ^ In this emphatic statement there is a certain 

 amount of truth, though ]\Ir. Mivart is not justified in imply- 

 ing that it is a truth which the Darwinian is bound not to 

 recognize. The enormous difference between civilized man 

 and the highest of brute animals is by no one more emphati- 

 cally recognized than by the evolutionist, who holds that to 

 the process of organic development there has been super- 

 added a stupendous process of social development, and who 

 must therefore admit that with the beginning of human 

 civilization there was opened a new chapter in the history of 

 the universe, so far as we know it. From the human point 

 of view we may contentedly grant that, for all practical 

 purposes, the difference between an ape and a mushroom is 

 of less consequence than the difference between an ape and 

 an educated European of the nineteenth century. But to 

 take this educated European as a typical sample of mankind 

 » Nature, April 20, 187L 



