334 TAtf Spiritual in Animats. [May, 
John Wesley, Meinhold, Quatrefages, and their followers, 
will possibly claim the right to assume the absence of the 
religious feeling in any animal till its presence shall have 
been formally demonstrated. We deny their claim. Before 
any attribute can be selected as distinguishing one body 
from another, its presence in the former and its absence in 
the latter must both be equally proved, not merely guessed. 
That the lower animals build churches and chapels, main- 
tain a clergy, get up revival meetings, or distribute traCts, 
no one contends. But have they no dim but overshadowing 
consciousness of an Unseen Power behind, and above the 
visible and the tangible ? Does not anything to them un- 
wonted and unintelligible inspire them at times with awe, 
as contradistinguished from fear ? Have they not — espe- 
cially such as have been brought into human society — some 
vague idea of the last great change ? Do we not find 
among them, in short, many indications of that lowest stage 
of religion — whether incipient or degraded it is not our 
business to inquire — which it is now the fashion to call 
fetichism ? To us the cases lately observed and recorded by 
Mr. J. G. Romanes and others seem strongly to favour 
this view. 
But it may again be doubted whether man gives every- 
where more decided proofs of religious emotions. Unless 
this also is shown to be a rule without exception, the pro- 
posed boundary-line must again be declared at fault. To 
take only one instance : the Veddahs of Ceylon, as we are 
informed on good authority,* “ have no knowledge of a God 
or of a future state ; no temples, idols, prayers, or charms ; 
no instinCts of worship.” Are they, therefore, men or 
brutes ? 
A kindred question here presents itself. Personal immor- 
tality — a second and prolonged, or rather never-ending, life 
— is claimed as a characteristic attribute of their own race 
by all the more cultivated portion of mankind, with the ex- 
ception of a small minority of so-called materialists,! and 
is almost with one accord denied to brutes. 
Many estimable persons will therefore be shocked at the 
declaration of the late Prof. Agassiz — himself certainly no 
materialist — that “most of the arguments for human im- 
mortality apply to other animals quite as forcibly.” Take, 
* Tennent, Ceylon, vol. ii., p. 442. 
f An unhappily-chosen term. A materialist, corredtly speaking, is one who 
in opposition to the idealist ascribes to matter substantive existence indepen- 
dent of the perceiving mind. In common usage it is applied to one who 
denies the existence of spiritual beings, and who ought rather to be styled an 
“ apneumatist.” 
