390 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN, 



CHAPTER XVII. 



GENERAL SUMMARY AND CONCLUDING REMARKS. 



In the present treatise I take as granted the general theory 

 of evolution, so far as it is now accepted by the vast majority 

 of naturalists. That is to say, I assume the doctrine of 

 descent as regards the whole of organic nature, morphological 

 and psychological, with the one exception of man. More- 

 over, I assume this doctrine even in the case of man, so far 

 as his bodily organization is concerned ; it being thus only 

 with reference to the human mind that the exception to 

 which I have alluded is made. And I make this exception 

 in deference to the opinion of that small minority of 

 evolutionists who still maintain that, notwithstanding their 

 acceptance of the theory of descent as regards the corporeal 

 constitution of man, they are able to adduce cogent evidence 

 to prove that the theory fails to account for his mental 

 constitution. 



Such being my basis of assumption, we began by con- 

 sidering the state of the question a priori. If, in accordance 

 with our assumption, the process of organic and of mental 

 evolution has been continuous throughout the whole region 

 of life and of mind, with the one exception of the mind of 

 man, on grounds of an immensely large analogy we must 

 deem it antecedently improbable that the process of evolu- 

 tion, elsewhere so uniform and ubiquitous, should have been 

 interrupted at its terminal phase. And this antecedent pre- 

 sumption is still further strengthened by the undeniable 

 fact that, in the case of every individual human being, 



