150 Darwin as an Anthropologist 
thinker, that Darwin takes his place among the greatest men of science 
of the nineteenth century. 
To appreciate fully the immortal merit of Darwin in connection 
with anthropology, we must remember that not only did his chief 
work, The Origin of Species, which opened up a new era in natural 
history in 1859, sustain the most virulent and widespread opposition 
for a lengthy period, but even thirty years later, when its principles 
were generally recognised and adopted, the application of them to 
man was energetically contested by many high scientific authorities. 
Even Alfred Russel Wallace, who discovered the principle of natural 
selection independently in 1858, did not concede that it was applicable 
to the higher mental and moral qualities of man. Dr Wallace still 
holds a spiritualist and dualist view of the nature of man, contending 
that he is composed of a material frame (descended from the apes) 
and an immortal immaterial soul (infused by a higher power). This 
dual conception, moreover, is still predominant in the wide circles of 
modern theology and metaphysics, and has the general and influential 
adherence of the more conservative classes of society. 
In strict contradiction to this mystical dualism, which is generally 
connected with teleology and vitalism, Darwin always maintained the 
complete unity of human nature, and showed convincingly that the 
psychological side of man was developed, in the same way as the body, 
from the less advanced soul of the anthropoid ape, and, at a still more 
remote period, from the cerebral functions of the older vertebrates. 
The eighth chapter of the Origin of Species, which is devoted to 
instinct, contains weighty evidence that the instincts of animals are 
subject, like all other vital processes, to the general laws of historic 
development. The special instincts of particular species were formed 
by adaptation, and the modifications thus acquired were handed on 
to posterity by heredity; in their formation and preservation natural 
selection plays the same part as in the transformation of every other 
physiological function. The higher moral qualities of civilised man 
have been derived from the lower mental functions of the un- 
cultivated barbarians and savages, and these in turn from the social 
instincts of the mammals. This natural and monistic psychology of 
Darwin’s was afterwards more fully developed by his friend George 
Romanes in his excellent works Mental Evolution in Animals and 
Mental Evolution in Man’. 
Many valuable and most interesting contributions to this monistic 
psychology of man were made by Darwin in his fine work on The 
Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, and again in his sup- 
plementary work, The Expression of the Emotionsin Manand Animals. 
To understand the historical development of Darwin’s anthropology one 
1 London, 1885; 1888, 
