PSYCHIC GRADATIONS. 127 



the higher animals (for instance, their mechanical 

 instincts) thus come to appear in the light of innate 

 impulses. We have to explain in the same way the 

 origin of the "a priori ideas" of man; they were 

 originally formed empirically by his predecessors. 1 



In the superficial psychological treatises which 

 ignore the mental activity of animals and attribute 

 to man only a " true soul," we find him credited also 

 with the exclusive possession of reason and conscious- 

 ness. This is another trivial error (still to be found 

 in many a manual, nevertheless) which the compara- 

 tive psychology of the last forty years has entirely 

 dissipated. The higher vertebrates (especially those 

 mammals which are most nearly related to man) have 

 just as good a title to " reason " as man himself, and 

 within the limits of the animal world there is the 

 same long chain of the gradual development of reason 

 as in the case of humanity. The difference between the 

 reason of a Goethe, a Kant, a Lamarck, or a Darwin, 

 and that of the lowest savage, a Yeddah, an Akka, a 

 native Australian, or a Patagonian, is much greater 

 than the graduated difference between the reason of 

 the latter and that of the most " rational " mammals, 

 the anthropoid apes, or even the papiomorpha, the 

 dog, or the elephant. This important thesis has been 

 convincingly proved by the thoroughly critical com- 

 parative work of Romanes and others. We shall not, 

 therefore, attempt to cover that ground here, nor to 

 enlarge on the distinction between the reason and 

 the intellect ; as to the meaning and limits of these 

 concepts philosophic experts give the most contra- 

 dictory definitions, as they do on so many other 



1 Vide The Natural History of Creation. 



