INSTINCT AND REASON. 97 
have ever seriously attempted, viz., the remarkable and 
significant fact, that the gradual and generally continuous 
development of material organisations has by no means 
been accompanied by even the shadow of a correspondingly 
gradual and continuous mental development. Indeed, the 
complicated instincts of some of the inferior animals (as of 
certain Articulata) are not paralleled even by the highest 
Vertebrata. We see such complicated instincts, for example 
in Bees and Ants, not gradually developed, but suddenly 
appearing in these animal communities (and then ceasing), 
which cast m the shade the highest powers claimed for the 
Dog or the Elephant; instincts which have arisen, as it were, 
from no traceable source, and which lead nowhere; neither 
being further developed in the same classes of animals, nor 
reappearing in other classes, but, forming, so to speak culs-de- 
sac of instinct-development, which, on the theory of mental 
evolution, have no meaning, nor are capable of rational 
explanation. And, moreover, even the vaunted powers of 
the very highest animals fall so far short of the intelligence 
of the lowest men that there is no conceivable explanation, 
on the theory of mental evolution, of the fact that while, 
organically (as Huxley affirms), the brain of Man differs far 
less from the brain of the chimpanzee, than that of the 
latter (chimp.) does from a pig’s brain, nevertheless, psy- 
chologically, the difference between the mental endowments 
of the lowest man and the highest animal are admitted to 
be immense. Here is a leap, which is contrary to all the 
boasted laws of continuity. If instinct and Reason are the 
same in kind, they should be continuous, and there should be 
no vast or immense difference between the manifestations of 
the one and the other across the border-line which separates 
the brute from the Man. Again, Mr. Samuel Laing, in a 
work just published. Problems of the Future, is fain to 
admit that “the difference is a very fundamental* one,” 
although with the singular perversity of his class of 
reasoners, he endeavours to minimise this fundamental or 
immense difference by referring it to “arrested develop- 
ment,” a convenient phrase which explains nothing. But a 
vast difference, an immense distance, intervenes—a distance 
really far more vast and immense than is even admitted, an 
impassable gulf which cuts away the ground of the mental 
evolutionist, and proves, beyond the shadow of a doubt, 
* In a former quotation from a writer of the same school the difference 
was declared to be not a fundamental one. 
