262 THE HUMAN SPECIES 



prime causes which give him the command of the ivhole of 

 nature. All this would not have helped him unless man had 

 possessed a keener and more comprehensive perception of the 

 external world, and the great fact of a memory for details and 

 their relations to himself, which enables him to compare the 

 present with the past, and contemplate the two as one continu- 

 ous whole. It was essential for man to work so as to protect 

 himself from destruction. The work of the individual man is 

 not wasted but is bequeathed to posterity as the heritage of 

 civilisation. 



The opinions quoted make it evident that no serious thinker 

 is disposed to deny that as regards psychological development 

 man occupies the highest place ; but it must be noted that 

 natural science, and the various branches which deal with anthro- 

 pology in one direction or another, guard against the assump- 

 tion of any absolute difference between man and animals in 

 this province. 



Haeckel, as the champion of the gradual evolution both of 

 the physical and the psychical organism, is on solid ground 

 when he extends the comparison of man and apes to the mind 

 as well as the body. Comparative psychology has established 

 the relationship no less surely than comparative physiology. 



The psychological differences between man and the anthro- 

 poid apes are less than the corresponding differences between 

 the higher and lower classes of apes. 



It was inevitable that Haeckel's protest against the anthro- 

 pocentric dogma should raise the same uproar in the tents of 

 orthodoxy as did the challenge of Copernicus and Galileo to 

 the geocentric dogma. Many of Haeckel's opponents may be 

 found in the ranks of science and medicine. Reinke, Professor 

 of Botany in Kiel, is a stalwart opponent of the theory of 

 evolution ; Dr. Tiirkheim, irresolute as to Darwinism, has 

 written a book in which he rejects the possibility of the human 

 mind and intellect ever having been evolved from the animal 

 instinct. He describes in the human mind a wholly new organ, 

 the spirit, which creates ideas, and with their help gives the 

 faculty of knowledge and thought. Even the bare rudiments 

 of this are, according to Tiirkheim, absent in animals. But if 

 we are to allow that organic life came into existence in the 



