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referred, I think, to training, the habit of Obedience, or to the absorbing- 

 power of some strong affection which, for the time blindly predominates. In 

 no case that I have ever heard of need it be supposed, that there has been that 

 conscious and voluntary preference of the higher to the lower ground of 

 action in which the Moral life of Man consists. The moral faculty declaring 

 "What I ought to do?" cannot conceivably exist apart from that self- 

 consciousness which, holding up a mental mirror wherein the Soul can see and 

 know itself, enables me to say, — "This is I." 



I know what moral grandeur some of the recorded actions of Animals 

 assume. But there is some illusion in our admiration of these affectionate and 

 faithful Brutes. Outwardly, their acts have all the beauty of self-forgetful 

 love. Yet how can there be self-oblivion, or self-surrender in creatures upon 

 whom the idea of self has never dawned 1 Man is apt to measure all things by 

 the standard of his own nature, and thus it is that we unconsciously attribute 

 to the lower creatures an ideal elevation of which there is no valid reason to 

 suppose them capable. 



The supposition that the Brutes are destitute of self-consciousness, also 

 best explains, I think, the difference between their intelligence and ours. The 

 mind, which is a mere theatre on which impressions and recollections make 

 their entrances and exits without the faculty of detaining or recalling them at 

 will to compare and classify, must be incapable of general ideas, and of all 

 abstract reasoning. To Man alone, it seems, is given command over his own 

 intelligence. The Dog thinks, but only Man has the power of thought. 



That God has withheld self-consciousness from the Brute creation, may 

 perhaps be thought to cast some ray of light upon another mysterious subject. 

 It may be that the gift of Immortality has, by the All-Righteous One been 

 confined to that created being in whom alone, so far as our knowledge goes, 

 He has raised the hope and expectation of it — who alone " thinks he is not 

 made to die." Yet on this dark subject it becomes all to speak with great 

 reserve. Who shall pretend even in thought, to limit His designs 1 Surely 

 we may preserve our faith in Man's great heritage, without pretending to make 

 it clear that all God's other creatures are shut out. Their destiny is nowise 

 our concern. It is a mystery which as yet transcends our knowledge ; and, 

 not improbably, our faculty of knowledge. 



In what I have just assayed to express respecting the mental charac- 

 teristic of humanity, I cannot hope to content any one who denies the 

 existence in Man of a moral faculty and free causal power. I expect no one 

 to concur who, in metaphysics, prefers Hume and Mill to Coleridge and 

 Martineau ; or who, in Ethics, holds with Paley against Bishop Butler. The 

 differentiation of Mankind from Brutes, must needs fail in the hands of a 

 Philosophy which has analysed away every Human characteristic. As little 

 can I carry with me any of the modern scientific school, which, in terms, 

 abjures materialism, and, with Hume and Comte, disclaims knowledge of effi- 

 cient causes, yet is ever seeking to refer the whole Creation, the Human mind 

 included, to a supposed primal material impulse. No one who, like Professor 

 Huxley, can think of his own mind as " the expi-ession of molecular changes," 

 in that matter of life which is common to himself and the stinging nettle, can 

 be convinced by any argument which I have here adduced. Exiling from the 

 world, as they seek to do, all present creative energy, such thinkers are bound 

 to find, in every phenomenon of the Cosmos, neither more nor less than is 

 contained in its immediate antecedent. With them, all existences are but 

 phases of one blind force, whose undulations fill all space and time ; and no 

 essential difference can be admitted to exist amongst them.* 



* This whole paragraph, with some of what precedes, has been written since the 

 delivery of the lecture, since which, also, I have read Professor Huxley's paper in the 



