188 . president's address. 



above sense, necessary principles and universal laws ; which 

 includes self-consciousness, freedom of will, spiritual intuition ; 

 which enables man to recognise his personal existence in a 

 higher sphere than the outward and phenomenal, and his alle- 

 giance to the moral law. Of this Reason there is no trace in 

 the brutes. The first condition of thought is a subject thinking, 

 i.e., the self-conscious ego, and the thing thought. The former 

 term is wanting in the lower animals. They feel themselves, 

 but they have no conception of themselves. No parrot, it has 

 been said, has ever learned to use the personal pronoun. Ani- 

 mals exist, but they do not know that they exist. They mani- 

 fest intelligence and various forms of activity, but they take no 

 account to themselves of these powers. They never rise above 

 the present and the particular. It is reserved to man to lead 

 the double life, the life of the animal and the higher life of rea- 

 son ; to exist and to know that he exists ; to be intelligent and 

 to know that he is so ; to realise, in self-consciousness, his rela- 

 tion to the universe of being, and to draw thence motives to 

 guide the purposes of an intelligent will, and hopes and fears, 

 for which the animal has no organ, and which are to him as 

 light and darkness to the blmd. 



But, assuming that the intelligent faculties of the brutes be- 

 long exclusively to the mental region of the understanding, 

 which, metaphysicians hold, differs from that of the Reason, 

 not in degree but in kind, there is a further specific distinction 

 to be noted in the faculties common to them and to man, which 

 has an important bearing on any attempt to explain their con- 

 duet. The understanding in man ministers to his Reason. It 

 supplies or suggests the subjects on which reason is exercised ; 

 and the faculties which compose it are materially influenced by 

 this alliance, and seem to be invested with qualities which do 

 not necessarily belong to them. The faculties of the brutes, 

 though the same in kind with the corresponding ones in man, 

 differ from them in being dissevered from Reason, which exalts 

 the faculties of the human understanding and associates them 

 with qualities of thought, which in the case of the brutes must 

 be carefully separated from them. In them +he same faculties 



