NATURE 



265 



DR. MIVARTS ESSA YS. 

 Essays and Criticisms. By St. George Mivart, F.R.S. 

 (London : Osgood, M'llvaine, and Co., 1892.) 



DR. MIVART has collected in two portly volumes a 

 number of essays and critical reviews which he has 

 from time to time contributed to current monthly or quarterly 

 literature. The ground covered is tolerably extensive ; 

 from " Jacobinism " and " The French Revolution " to 

 " Weismann's Theories " and " Eimer on Growth and 

 Inheritance;" from "Austrian Monasteries" and "The 

 Greyfriars " to " Herbert Spencer " and " Hermann Lotze." 

 We have read the whole, or almost the whole, with interest, 

 and not without admiration of the author's wide know- 

 ledge, his earnest purpose, and his power of clear exposi- 

 tion. Here, however, we are chiefly concerned with those 

 essays which deal with scientific problems. They are well 

 worthy of reperusal in their present collected form, and 

 that chiefly because Dr. Mivart holds definite and in some 

 respects peculiar views on evolution, because he has the 

 advantage of some training in philosophy, because he is a 

 learned and acute critic, and because he has pre-eminently 

 the courage of his convictions. 



It is scarcely necessary to remind the readers of Nature 

 that Dr. Mivart is one of those who hold that natural 

 selection has played a quite subordinate part in the evolu- 

 tion of organisms. He believes that the concurrence of 

 certain external exciting causes acts in such a manner on 

 internal predisposing tendencies as to determine by direct 

 modification the evolution of new specific forms. Further- 

 more he affirms that, beyond the domains of merely 

 physical science (which, though much, is not everything), 

 reason demands a non-mechanical conception — namely, 

 the conception of an immanent active principle or soul 

 in everything which lives. And he contends that be- 

 tween the self-conscious reason of man and the mere 

 sensuous feeling of the higher brutes, there is a great 

 and impassable gulf fixed. These are among the more 

 important positions which the author of these " Essays 

 and Criticisms " assumes in the field of biological specula- 

 tion. And to these may, perhaps, be added his condemna- 

 tion of the doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, and 

 his belief in common-sense realism, apparently on the 

 assumption that the external reality of the objective world 

 (as opposed to its phenomenal existence) is directly ap- 

 prehended by the intellect, though it cannot be reached 

 through sensuous feeling. 



On all these matters Dr. Mivart has much that is inter- 

 esting to say, and says it in an interesting manner. It 

 would manifestly be impossible here to discuss so wide a 

 range of problems. We therefore propose to select one 

 matter— that of the relation of human reason to brute in- 

 telligence — on which to offer a few remarks. 



In the essay entitled " A Limit to Evolution," the author 

 seeks to estabUsh the impossibility of mental evolution as 

 appHed to man. He insists, and rightly insists, that the 

 great difference between man and the lower animals lies 

 not in his bodily but in his mental constitution ; and he 

 contends, again in our opinion with perfect justice, that 

 in order to examine this question we must begin by 

 NO. I 1 86, VOL. 46] 



looking a little carefully into our own minds, and by 

 examining our own acts and mental nature. As the result 

 of this examination he finds that our psychical operations 

 fall into two classes ; on the one hand, there are feeling 

 (sensitivity), imagination and sensuous memory, sensuous 

 emotion, sense-perception, and sensuous inference ; on 

 the other hand, there are intellectual perception, ideation 

 and conception, abstract ideas, and moral and aesthetic 

 concepts. " The contrast, the difference of kind" he 

 says, " which exists between this intellectual conception 

 and the various forms oi feeling' is very great." We thus 

 possess a dual psychical nature, on the one side sensuous, 

 on the other side intellectual. The sense-perceptions of 

 the one and the abstract ideas of the other " belong to 

 utterly different categories, and a nature which has this 

 power of abstraction is separated from any nature which 

 has not that power, by a gulf which is an impassable 

 limit to evolution, because feeling and intellect are both 

 thus different in nature, and progress and develop along 

 different and more or less diverging roads." But the 

 psychical powers of brutes are limited to sense-perception, 

 and give no evidence of the possession of the higher 

 faculty of ideation and conception. Therefore the 

 passage from the so-called mind of the brute to the 

 conceptual mind of man is not only impossible but 

 inconceivable. 



Such in brief is Dr. Mivart's line of argument. Now, 

 we hold that the distinction between the higher self- 

 conscious, reflective, and conceptual powers of man, 

 and his lower sensuous, non-reflective, and perceptual 

 mental activities is a valid and valuable one, and one 

 which is too often lost sight of. And we hold, further, 

 that our author is right, in the main if not entirely, in 

 denying to brutes the higher powers of conceptual 

 thought. Again, we agree with Dr. Mivart in regarding 

 the progress and development of sense-perception and 

 abstract thought as more or less divergent. Where we 

 part company with him is in the assumption, for such it 

 appears to us, that these divergent lines of development 

 cannot have a common origin. In all that he has 

 written on the subject we fail to find any adequate justi- 

 fication for this dogmatic assertion so often and so con- 

 fidently reiterated. The distinction between mere sense- 

 perception and reflective thought is frequently drawn 

 with admirable lucidity and clearness ; but the impossi- 

 bility of their having a common psychical root is merely 

 asserted with a few rhetorical flourishes. We venture 

 to question the assertion. Dr. Mivart is not, be it noted, 

 content to assume the modest but perfectly legitimate 

 scientific position that no one has yet succeeded in 

 showing the early stages of the divergence, the tentative 

 beginnings of the reflective process, the gradual focussing 

 of the mental eye upon the processes of consciousness. 

 He does not take his stand on a " not proven," but on a 

 somewhat dogmatic " impossible " — not merely an " im- 

 possible " to this or that or the other factor in evolution 

 from the nature of the factor, but broadly and generally 

 an Impossible that is as worthy of a big initial letter as 

 the Unknowable itself ! 



We cannot take leave of Dr. Mivart's volumes without 

 again calling attention to the fact that they are full of 

 matter interesting to the student of evolution. His 

 scientific conclusions are not altogether those to which 



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