158 THE CKEED OF SCIENCE, KELIGIOUS AND MORAL. 



animals, can no longer be made, if once the Darwinian 

 doctrine of man's descent be admitted. And, indeed, 

 long before Darwin's doctrine had been heard of, Bishop 

 Butler almost admitted that the arguments for man's 

 immortality apply equally to the case of the brutes ; all 

 of them except one, specified as peculiar to mankind, 

 namely, our capacity for intellectual life independent of 

 the body, after ideas had been once gained through the 

 senses ; an exception which he would scarce have made 

 if he. had known all that Science, after the research of a 

 century and a half, has since revealed to us in physiology, 

 psychology, and natural history; if he had only fully 

 realized the truth that the very highest life of the in- 

 tellect and the soul is, at bottom, conditioned by physio- 

 logical processes, and that the intelligence as well as the 

 moral qualities of the brutes differs not in nature, but 

 only in degree from our own.* 



But the doctrine of man's descent once granted, there 

 can be no arbitrary exclusion of the brutes, and no special 

 elevation of man to the privilege of a future life. And 

 that man is, indeed, descended from the lower animals, 

 in particular from some extinct variety of the ape species, 

 is the undoubting conviction of the best biologists, who 

 alone are competent to pronounce an opinion on the ques- 

 tion; a conclusion, moreover, which, though deducible from 

 Darwin's theory of development as an evident corollary, 

 is also supported by so much independent evidence drawn 

 from comparative anatomy and embryology, that it would 



* See Butler's Analogy, ch. 1, lt On a Future Life;" in which he 

 speaks of the " natural immortality of brutes," and even of the possibility 

 of their being endowed with latent mental and moral capacities, though 

 it does not seem to have occurred to him that they have actual faculties 

 of this sort, both of which are clearly manifested in all social com- 

 munities, as the ants, bees, and many others (see Darwin's Descent of Man, 

 vol. i. ch. ii. and iii.). 



