290 THE REV. H. J. CLARKE ON 
remorse, man’s eyes were opened by the consciousness of 
guilt, and thus ensued a further and a sympathetic sense of 
degradation. An acute perception of responsibility in things 
supernal and relations of a spiritual kind interpreted the most 
distinctive tokens of a nature that was animal and earthly. 
Hence, among the various races of mankind, according as in 
moral growth they have advanced beyond the state of 
infancy, such sentiments prevail, and such proprieties of 
conduct are enforced by law or custom, as exhibit in their 
different stages the transition from unconscious animalism to 
recognition more or less intelligent, of spiritual requirements, 
bearing thus their testimony to the truth that man is of a 
rank superior to the nature which maintains for him a 
transient and provisional dependence on this ever-changing 
world, and that, accordingly, his lower instincts, which are 
always tending to assert themselves, and to produce obtrusive 
proof of an inferior condition, he is bound to thrust back, 
each into its proper place and office and to hold in strict 
subjection. 
These evidences of superiority constitute an unmistakably 
essential difference in regard to nature and destiny between 
man and all the lower animals. There are, indeed, com- 
parative psychologists who think it possible that nothing 
hitherto has hindered the most intelligent among these 
creatures from conceiving abstract notions, and ascending 
thus to higher intellectual grades, except an inability, purely 
physical, to utter such sounds as might serve for names; and 
that, had they chanced to bein this respect as favourably 
qualified for fixing thought by means of vocal signs as 
certain species gifted with inferior intelligence, if thei vocal 
organs had been on a par with those of “talking birds, some 
would by this time have acquired the faculty of speech, but 
that, since they are structurally dumb, their psychic evolution 
is proportionably slow. Yet, even were there ground for 
the belief that herem les the obstacle to so enormous an 
expansion of their reasoning powers as this endowment 
would imply, it was not by the process of abstraction and of 
generalisation from observed phenomena, nor was it through 
communication made to him in words, that man became 
aware that his condition, relatively to the thoughts which 
had begun to agitate his soul, was one of degradation. 
“ Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of 
the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not 
eat?” (Genesis ii, 11.) Addressed to man, regarded as 
awakened to a moral consciousness of self, these questions 
