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Accepting his arguments in other papers, we must acknowledge that man 
and some of the highest order of animals are organized in the same way, 
and are made of the same material. If we compare man and some of the 
higher apes, we shall find no difference between them organically ; and yet, 
what an immense difference we shall find in their endowments ! I do not 
think any one has ever attributed to the animal the possession or con- 
sciousness of any sort of abstract thoughts or ideas. I have never seen 
any indication that an animal has been found to have any sense of absolute 
right or wrong, or idea of geometrical abstractions or abstract beauty. I 
cannot imagine a dog or an ape admiring scenery, and, although they have 
tongues like our own, you never find these tongues used for the purpose of 
articulate language. Articulate speech may be mocked by animals, as in 
the case of parrots, but it is never used by animals themselves in communica- 
tion with one another. Such language as animals do possess is always the 
same for all times and all purposes. Cocks crow and dogs bark now just as 
they did when they came out of the Ark ; but man, even in the lowest 
stages of barbarism, forms a language suitable to his own purposes, and 
always changing. Professor Max Muller tells us that where there are no 
written documents to keep language together, — as among some of the tribes of 
Africa, for instance — language changes its form in twenty years. Words 
which are, as it were, the slang phrases of one generation become embodied 
in the ordinary language of the next, and take the place of other words 
which had been used before. This changeable articulate speech, and these 
powers of perceiving moral ideas and abstract truths, constitute, to my mind, 
differences as great as any of the structural or chemical differences by which 
great groups of animals are separated from one another. I cannot help 
believing, therefore, that there is some higher faculty implanted in man than 
you find in the lower animals, and I cannot understand how mere protoplasm, 
without some higher power, should have made all that difference. With 
regard to Mr. Wheatley’s paper, there are so many interesting remarks in it, 
so many glimpses of truth, that one feels disinclined to say anything hard of 
it ; but the way some of the questions of fact have been handled by the 
author illustrates the danger of people taking up subjects like this without 
the fullest information. In several instances Mr. Wheatley should have 
learnt a little more of what I may call the grammar of the subject ; but it 
would be unkind to say more than that, inasmuch as our Vice-President 
(Mr. Brooke) has drawn attention to one of the most glaring instances of 
that kind. 
The Chairman. — As no one seems willing to continue the discussion, 
I will now bring it to a close. The last time I was here I said so much on 
this subject that I hardly know how I can supplement it now, although 
I know it is one which is capable of the widest discussion. I think a 
great deal of obscurity arises in these matters from the necessary imperfec- 
tion of the words we use. For instance, the whole of this discussion has had 
relation to the existence of a certain matter called vitality, as opposed to 
inorganic forces. It is admitted that the particles of matter composing the 
