SPEECH. 165 



Lastly, just as this is the place where my opponents take a 

 stand, so, as they freely allow, it is the only place where they 

 can take a stand. If once this chasm of speech were bridged, 

 there would be no further chasm to cross. From the simplest 

 judgment which it is possible to make, and therefore from the 

 simplest proposition which it is possible to construct, it is on 

 all hands admitted that human intelHgence displays an other- 

 wise uniform or uninterrupted ascent through all the grades 

 of excellence which it afterwards presents. Here, then, and 

 here alone, we have what Professor Max Miiller calls the 

 Rubicon of Mind, which separates the brute from the man, 

 and over which, it is alleged, the army of Science can never 

 hope to pass. 



In order to present the full difficulty which is here en- 

 countered, I will allow it to be stated by the ablest of my 

 opponents. As President of the Biological Section of the 

 British Association in 1879, Mr. Mivart expressed his matured 

 thought upon the subject thus : — 



"The simplest element of thought seems to me to be a 

 'judgment,' with intuition of reality concerning some * fact,' 

 regarded as a fact real or ideal. Moreover, this judgment is 

 not itself a modified imagination, because the imaginations 

 which may give occasion to it persist unmodified in the mind 

 side by side with the judgment they have called up. Let us 

 take, as examples, the judgments, 'That thing is good to eat,' 

 and ' Nothing can be and not be at the same time and in the 

 same sense.' As to the former, we vaguely imagine * things 

 good to eat ;' but they must exist beside the judgment, not in 

 it. They can be recalled, compared, and seen to co-exist. So 

 with the other judgment, the mind is occupied with certain 

 abstract ideas, though the imagination has certain vague 



say that a calculating machine really calculates, or predicates the result of its 

 calculations, as it would be to say that a musical-box composes a tune because it 

 plays a tune, or that the love of Romeo and Juliet was an isosceles triangle, because 

 their feelings of affection, each to each, were, like the angles at the base of that 

 figure, equal. But, as I have said, I take it that Professor Huxley must here 

 have been writing in some ironical sense, and therefore purposely threw bia 

 criticisms into a preposterous form. 



