AGE OF MAN. 313 



tween man and other animals is one of kind, and not of 

 degree only. He is not merely the highest of a series 

 of animals, as some assert, but he possesses certain qual- 

 ities that do not belong in any degree to the animals be- 

 low him. He stands in some respects alone. In phys- 

 ical structure he is, indeed, allied to other animals, be- 

 cause he lives amid the same material circumstances, 

 and has similar bodily wants. These relations with oth- 

 er things make it also necessary that he should have 

 similar instincts, and, to some extent, similar thoughts 

 and reasonings, for brutes do have a lower order of 

 reasoning that is, they draw simple inferences. But 

 here the resemblance stops. There is a certain depart- 

 ment of mind which belongs exclusively to man, and sep- 

 arates him by an impassable gulf from other animals. It 

 is the power of abstract or general reasoning that distin- 

 guishes the mind of man from that of the brute. No 

 brute, however much he may know, can ever himself 

 either discover, or receive by instruction, any general 

 principle. It is this power that gives man the knowl- 

 edge of the existence of a great First Cause, and of the 

 difference between right and wrong, and that introduces 

 him into a sphere of thought and feeling which he occu- 

 pies in common with the angels, and with the Creator 

 himself. It is this which makes him " a living soul." It 

 is from this that he is said to be created in the image of 

 God. From this come all his endless contrivance in im- 

 plements and machinery, his attainments in science, and 

 his construction of language. This subject, thus briefly 

 noticed here, is fully treated in my " Human Physiology." 

 424. A Supposition. It is the idea of some that, as 

 man is the present culmination of the animal kingdom, 

 there is still to be an onward progress, and that some 

 other being of a higher order even than man will, after 

 a while, appear upon the scene. There would be some 

 reason for this expectation if there had been a regular 

 gradation from the first dawn of life in the Silurian age, 



O 



