280 



After all, look at it steadily, and you will see that this doctrine of Man's 

 actual physical affinity to brutal forms, instead of raising new doubts, goes far 

 to explain certain admitted facts of human experience, and to lesson the 

 pressure of some old difficulties. I extract the followiug striking passage, 

 (cited by Lyell, in this connection,) from Hollands Literature of Europe. — "It 

 might be wandering from the subject of these volumes if we were to pause, 

 even shortly, to inquire whether, while the creation of a world so full of evil 

 must ever remain the most inscrutable of mysteries, we might not be led some 

 way in tracing the connection of moral and physical evil in man with his place 

 in that creation ; and especially, whether the law of continuity, which it has not 

 pleased his Maker to break with respect to his bodily structure, and which 

 binds that, in the unity of one great type, to the lower forms of animal life by 

 the common conditions of nourishment, reproduction, and self-defence, has not 

 rendered necessary both the physical appetites and the propensities which 

 terminate in self ; whether, again, the superior endowments of his intellectual 

 nature, his susceptibility of moral emotion, and of those disinterested affections, 

 which, if not exclusively, he far more intensely professes than any inferior 

 being — -above all, the gifts of conscience, and a capacity to know God, might 

 not be expected, even beforehand, by their conflict with animal passions, to 

 produce some partial inconsistencies, some anomalies at lea,st, which he could 

 not himself explain in so compound a being. Every link in the long chain of 

 creation does not pass by easy transition into the next. There are necessaiy 

 chasms, and as it were leaps from one creation to another, which, though not 

 exceptions to the law of continuity, are accommodations of it to a new series of 

 being. If Man was made in the image of God, he was also made in the image 

 of an Ape. The framework of the body of him who has weighed the stars and 

 made the lightning his slave, approaches to that of a speechless Brute, who 

 wanders in the forests of Sumatra. Thus standing on the frontier land 

 between animal and angelic natures, what wonder that he should partake of 

 both ! " 



The same thought appears in the exhortation of the most modern-minded 

 of Poets — 



"Move upward, working out the Beast, 

 And let the Ape and Tiger die." 



Let man put down within himself the ferocious and the obscene. The 

 very emotion of disgust raised by our nearest neighbours on the scale, those 

 " blurred copies " of ourselves, is not, we may be sure, without a salutary 

 purpose in the divine economy. 



Physiologv, in fine, does but bring home, in a more lively way, if that be 

 possible, one of the very oldest of human convictions, one of the very first of 

 religious lessons. Man has always perceived within himself the contest of the 

 double nature ; has always felt the downward drag of the heavy body, the 

 stirring of the brute within him. Oriental thought does but exaggerate this 

 truth in the doctrine of the inherent evil of matter ; a doctrine well known to 



Fortnightly Review, February, 1869, "On the Physical Basis of Life." The physical 

 observations detailed are of great interest. The metaphysics derived from J. S. Mill are a 

 good example of that modern philosophizing which A. de Morgan not long ago described, with 

 ecptal truth and point, as ' ' proving that everything is something else ; and nothing, any- 

 thing at all." As to the Professor's humorous caution against "lunar politics," and con- 

 cluding moral, it is impossible not to be reminded of ihejeu oV esjirit in Punch, — "What 

 is matter? Never mind! What is mind? No matter!" It is certain that physical 

 science cannot but lose by this alliance with mistaken metaphysics. Let the attempt be 

 made by all means, to reduce phenomena to a common formula. But this must not be 

 done by leaving out what is peculiar to each. It is no true science which would explain 

 away whatever it cannot explain. Let physical philosophy confess that the phenomena 

 of mind are wholly different from those with which it has to do* 



