FIFTH day's sitting. 109 



nine pages on language, without coming to the point, he 

 gives us one page on " these high faculties " which, he tells 

 us, " several recent writers make the sole and complete 

 distinction between man and the brutes." This looks more 

 like again avoiding a difficulty than boldly meeting it. 

 Will your Lordship observe, also, that here again Mr. 

 Darwin is begging the question he professes to discuss ? 

 He takes it for granted that man's mental powers were 

 gradually developed, which is just the point now in debate. 

 He thus, as usual, tries to prove his hypothesis by assuming 

 it to be true. 



Lord G. It would be more satisfactory, certainly, if Mr. 

 Darwin would bring forward proof of the gradual develop- 

 ment of man's mental powers. But it would be difficult to 

 show that we moderns, notwithstanding all the advantages 

 we unquestionably have over the ancients, possess loftier 

 mental powers than were displayed by them. Mr. Darwin 

 will not venture to say that Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and 

 many others, were not, in this respect, fully abreast of 

 ourselves. 



Darwin. " No one supposes," my Lord, " that one of the 

 lower animals reflects whence he comes or whither he goes 

 — what is death or what is life — and so forth. But can we 

 feel sure that an old dog, with an excellent memory and 

 some power of imagination, as shown by his dreams, never 

 reflects on his past pleasures in the chase ? and this would 

 be a form of self-consciousness. On the other hand, as 

 Biichner has remarked, how little can the hard-worked wife 

 of a degraded Australian savage, who uses hardly any 

 abstract words, and cannot count above four, exert her self- 

 consciousness, or reflect on the nature of her own existence ! " 

 (Vol. i. p. 52.) 



Lord G. If your hypothesis is to stand, Mr. Darwin, it 



