AND OTHER ANIMALS. 103 



On the other hand, it will be seen that certain animals 

 may, with perfect propriety, be said to have a kind or degree 

 of religious feeling, including the recognition and worship 

 of a god in the person of man, or of idols in the form of 

 fetiches. 



4. Moral sense, including ideas of good and evil, the sen- 

 timent of justice, conscience, sense of decency. But, as has 

 been shown by Buchner, Houzeau, and others, notions of 

 good and evil do not exist among all men. In other chap- 

 ters it is pointed out that ideas of justice or right, that 

 feelings of decency or shame, that that combination or 

 essence of moral qualities known as conscience, are as cer- 

 tainly present in certain animals as they appear to be absent 

 in countless numbers of men. 



5. Self -consciousness. The distinction drawn by meta- 

 physicians between consciousness and self-consciousness is 

 too refined for practical purposes. Whatever self -conscious- 

 ness may be, if it can be proved to be absent in the lower 

 animals the probability is that, like so many presumably pe- 

 culiar human attributes, it is equally wanting in whole races 

 of man. According to Max Muller, the assertion as to self- 

 consciousness is 6 either right or wrong according to the de- 

 finition of the word; ' and the same may be remarked of almost 

 every one of the alleged moral or mental distinctions between 

 man and other animals. Miss Cobbe and other authors hold 

 that self- consciousness is necessarily associated with moral 

 responsibility and abstract ideas, both of which are attributes 

 of certain of the higher animals. Professor Huxley, too, ap- 

 parently denies that self-consciousnesss is a good distinction, 

 or a distinction at all. f By perceiving objects as external, 

 they [the lower animals] practically recognise the differ- 

 ence between the self and the not self.' The supposed dis- 

 tinction of self-consciousness was first pointed out by the 

 schoolmen of the Middle Ages. Bayle, however, argues 

 against it (Wardrop). Among its leading modern upholders 

 was the late Professor Goodsir, of Edinburgh, but his defi- 

 nition of ordinary consciousness as instinctive in animals and 

 rational in man is based on an utterly untenable distinction. 



6. Potentiality. Much is made a great deal too much 



