124 SUPREMACY OF MAN. 



between different individuals, classes, and races of man 

 himself. Thus the difference is not more striking between 

 different ages, sexes, and other conditions of man than be- 

 tween the lowest savage races of man and the anthropoid 

 apes, the dog, or even the ant. Pierquin held that the 

 psychical difference is less between the human infant and a 

 lower animal such as the dog than between persons of 

 different sexes in a civilised state of society ; and Houzeau 

 considers the difference between savage and civilised man as 

 great as that between man and the ape. But, whatever be 

 their extent, that such differences are simply of degree is a 

 doctrine held by the foremost naturalists of the day, and b} r 

 an increasing number of those who allow themselves to 

 study the subject of mind throughout the animal kingdom 

 dispassionately and comprehensively. That the differences 

 in question are of kind is the belief as yet, nevertheless, 

 of the majority of men, including those more ingenious 

 than ingenuous philosophers who, like Sir Alexander 

 Grant, try to evade the obvious difficulty of determin- 

 ing whether given psychical differences are of degree or of 

 kind by suggesting that they are of degree among the 

 individuals, classes, and races of man, but of kind between 

 man and all other animals. In other words, because the 

 lower animals are not man, they possess a different kind of 

 mind that, namely, which consists wholly or mainly of in- 

 stinct, as contradistinguished from man's true prerogative, 

 reason. This, however, is but a remnant of the kind of 

 vicious and futile arguments that are daily being made to 

 give way before the rapidly accumulating mass of scientific 

 evidence and inference. 



The moral and intellectual differences, then, that sepa- 

 rate cultured and savage man, or infantile and adult man, 

 or the two sexes in man, are the same in Idnd, though not 

 necessarily in degree, as those which separate man from 

 lower animals. They are quantitative, not qualitative. 

 Houzeau regards the real distinction as confined to the 

 higher potentiality of man, his higher mental powers, as 

 well as the actuality of their higher development ; and this 



