269 



just as the animal is corporeally and psychically far higher 

 than the plant, so in his corporeal, psychical, and spiritual 

 nature is man far higher and distinct from the animal. There- 

 fore, says Professor Goodsir, " Man, in virtue of his possession 

 of a spiritual principle, by which alone he is capable of thought 

 and speech, and is impressed with the belief of moral truth 

 and divine agency, stands alone among organized beings of the 

 globe/' * 



80. And again : — To my apprehension, man^s possession 

 of a spiritual principle entirely excludes him from the scale of 

 mere animal being, even although he possesses an animal 

 body." t 



81. But Professor Goodsir does not stop here. He proves to 

 my mind, absolutely without any drawback, that man could 

 never have been evolved, even physically, from the animal. He 

 remarks: '^An organism adapted to a spiritual end, and 

 capable of acting in space in the most perfect manner, must be 

 more highly developed than one not so adapted. { 



82. The limits of this paper will not permit me to adduce 

 Professor Goodsir's evidence upon this point. But I must 

 quote him once or twice more. " Why,'^ he asks, should man 

 alone, of all the living beings on the globe, have been left so 

 unfettered that his welfare should depend on his own choice ? " 

 And he continues: Herein lies the great mystery of humanity, 

 on the existence of which depends that religiosity which is 

 characteristic of every form of the human race. The conscious- 

 ness of untruth and of error, in some form or other, exists in 

 every modification of man ; and it is equally certain that all 

 the vicissitudes of human history and all the distress against 

 which man has had to struggle, have been directly due to his 

 tendency to untruth, and his liability to error.'^ § 



83. From these extracts it will be observed that a great and 

 a good man did not hesitate to support his scientific investiga- 

 tions by direct references to the records of Revelation. He laid 

 it down as a principle, that although we are not to look to 

 the revealed record for scientific forms of statement, we are 

 nevertheless, from its character, entitled to assume that whenever 

 statements are made bearing on the intellectual, moral, and 

 religious departments of the economy of man, in their relations 

 to his material economy and conditions of present and future 

 existence, the sense or bearing of these statements will not only 

 be not contradictory, but, on the contrary, confirmatory of the 

 scientific results of human research. On the grounds already 



^ Anatomical Memoir vol. i. p. 271. 

 t Ojp. cit, p. 275. X Oi). cit, p. 276. § Op. ciL, p. 277. 



VOL. VII. U 



