1876.] Biological Controversy and its Laws. 221 
station, actually sought to prevent his wife from getting into 
the same compartment as himself, whilst all the time he 
was most anxious to secure a seat for her. Are we to pro- 
nounce him endowed merely with “quasi- intelligence”? 
We may surely decide that the attempt to ereCt “ reason ” 
into an absolute criterion for distinguishing between man 
and beast is an utter failure, and that its hopelessness will 
be more and more recognised the more profound and the 
more accurate our knowledge of the animal world becomes. 
Vast as is the superiority of our own species over even the 
highest brute, the difference is not of kind, but of degree. 
We cannot help pointing out as significant the assertion 
that if the ants could be proved to be rational they would 
be inserts merely in form ! 
We pass on to the last remaining point, the moral life, 
and ask if here can be found the absolute distinction which, 
mirage-like, has fled as we have followed ? One of the 
charges brought against the so-called “ Agnostics ” is that 
they confound virtue with pleasure. This accusation is 
urged in a chapter in which he seeks to show that “ percep- 
tions of right and wrong, and of our power of choice and 
consequent responsibility, are universally diffused amongst 
mankind, and constitute an absolute character separating 
man from all other animals.” Here, as usual, dissidents 
are criticised sometimes singly and sometimes collectively, 
all being, by implication at least, held answerable for any 
error or oversight, real or imaginary, detected in the writings 
of any one, and for its assumed consequences. Now, that 
some modern writers may have forgotten that an aCtion 
highly pleasurable to the doer is not necessarily virtuous, 
we shall not seek to deny. In so doing they have been 
probably influenced by a more or less conscious reaction 
against the opposite error so dominant in the Dark Ages, 
and at all other times of rampant ecclesiasticism — that an 
aCtion was to be regarded as vicious in the exaCt proportion 
of its pleasurableness, even though no person were injured, 
whilst sufferings and privations by which no one was bene- 
fited were deemed virtuous and meritorious. Of these two 
opposite errors the modern one is assuredly the less dan- 
gerous. But it is very curious that Mr. Mivart, well 
acquainted as he must be with the writings of Mr. Herbert 
Spencer, has not thought proper to allude to his criterion 
for distinguishing evil from good. To this we are therefore 
obliged to call attention : — “ From whatever assumptions 
they start, all theories of morality agree that conduct whose 
total results, immediate and remote, are beneficial, is good 
