146 



FACTS AND FANCIES 





premises. Without knowledge, culture, and 

 training, man is more helpless than any brute. 

 With the noblest and highest capacities, he 

 may devise and follow habits of life more base 

 than those of any mere animal. Thus there 

 is an almost immeasurable difference between 

 the Godlike height to which man can attain by 

 the right use of his powers and the depth to 

 which ignorance and depravity may degrade 

 him. It follows that the degradation of the 

 lower races of men is as strong a proof of 

 the difference between man and the lower 

 animals as is the elevation of the higher races. 

 Both are characteristic of a being emancipated 

 from the control of instinct, knowing good and 

 evil, free to choose, and differing in these 

 respects from every other creature on earth. 

 Such is man as we find him ; and we may 

 well ask by what process animal instinct could 

 ever spontaneously develop human freedom and 

 human reason. 



But we might have evidence of such a pro- 

 cess, however strange and improbable it might 

 at first sight appear. We might be able to 

 trace man back in history or by prehistoric 

 remains to greater and greater approximation 

 to the lower animals, and might thus bridge 



