94 PRODUCTION OF NATIONALITY 



added many other kinds of flesh to his list. It 

 is impossible to make correct comparisons even 

 between say an insect and spider, two creatures so 

 closely allied that only zoologists would separate 

 them, unless we could trace the qualities of the insect 

 and of the spider respectively down to their common 

 ancestor, and in so doing we should almost certainly 

 lose all that made the comparison interesting and 

 significant, and be left with little more than the 

 qualities common to all protoplasm. Comparisons 

 between man and the different members of the animal 

 kingdom are subject to precisely the same defects. 

 It is merely futile to range up and down the animal 

 kingdom, picking a resemblance here and a resem- 

 blance there ; only the tracing back of human 

 qualities down the exact line of ancestry of man, 

 whatever that may be, could help us, and even were 

 that done, no doctrine of origin, nor proved fact of 

 origin could obliterate the distinctions between man 

 and beast. However fruitful and interesting it may 

 be to remember that we are rooted deep in the natal 

 mud, our possession of consciousness and the sense 

 of freedom is a vital and overmastering distinction. 



The second mode of evading the difficulty is the 

 special property of vitalists and of Professor Bergson 

 and his followers. It is at once more fashionable and 

 more fatal. It recognizes fully the amazing import- 

 ance of the conceptions consciousness and sense of 

 freedom as we know them in ourselves, and we have 

 no other source of information. Its way of avoid- 

 ing the apparent implications of the doctrine of 

 descent, is to associate consciousness and the sense 

 of freedom not merely with human life but with all 



