COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY. 29 



economy, and we think that they will not deny their application 

 to various African and Oceanic tribes. ee Ideas, abstract ideas, 

 arise from their own domain ; the past, that which preceded 

 their birth ; the future, that which will follow their death, does 

 not occupy their attention ; the present is their only business 

 in life. They do not demand ' Whence do I come ? What am 

 I ? Where am I going ? And they have no idea whatsoever of 

 a Divinity/"* Bayle, Maupertuis,f andM. Flourens have, one 

 after another, declared how difficult it is to fix a limit, to say 

 where the intellect of animals ceases, and where that of man 

 commences. That limit escapes even ourselves ; whilst separ- 

 ating two terms specifically distinct we only see one continued 

 line from the other vertebrate animals to mankind, without any 

 clearly defined demarcation, the organism only of one mam- 

 mifer as separated by an unbroken limit from the organism 

 of another. It is a chain of which the links, if we wish, 

 may go on increasing from one extremity to the other, follow- 

 ing a given progression, but without ceasing to be like, and 

 consequently comparable amongst themselves. A certain 

 number of links may be wanting, but the mind re-establishes 

 them, and the continuity, although an abstraction, is not the 

 less real. It is even, if we may say so, the track of a hyper- 

 bolic curve, interrupted here and there, of which only the arcs 

 remain, quite different, and all, however, reducible by the mind 

 to one and the same system. 



Unity of composition is the condition of all harmony, the 

 necessary rule of nature. As to ourselves, we only see every- 

 where the same faculties, extended and developed among the 

 superior vertebrate animals ; having even acquired among 

 mankind the singular property of aggrandising -itself almost ad 

 infinitum, confined among other vertebrata, enclosed in a small 

 circle, where they can even escape our own means of knowledge. 



But there is everywhere the same nature, everywhere things 

 are alike. Life is unity ; we do not share it one with another ; 



* Maire, Society Havraise d' Etudes Diverses, 1855-1856. We can make the 

 same comparison with a passage almost similar from Maupertuis, Essai Phi- 

 losophique sur I' fane des Betes, 1728, p. 134. 



f Essai Philosophique sur VCcnie des B&tes, 1728, p. 95. 



