MIND AND CONSCIENCE IN OUR POOR RELATIONS. 43 
debate. More to the purpose perhaps was the fact that many 
animals showed great sympathy for each other, and were capable 
of magnanimity, unselfishness, and charity. These manifestations 
of kindly feeling were, it was true, usually restricted to the 
creature's own kind ; but it was a limitation of universal occur- 
rence in the history of the moral effort of primitive man. Win- 
wood Reade said: " Some travellers describe savages as demons 
incarnate, while others describe them as angels of light. It is not 
difficult to reconcile these statements. The savage outside his 
clan is almost without virtue, and inside his clan is almost without 
vice." Their poor relations did but follow the example of their 
cousins, when they let their kindness follow kind. Domestic 
animals — dogs particularly — extended the range of their affections 
and sacrifices to other animals and to man. Mental life was always 
in communion with a larger order than the law of its own kind, 
and was ever reaching upward — alike in brute, in savage, and in 
man — to that which was more than self. If they admitted the 
correctness of Mr. Darwin's definition, "A moral being is one who 
is capable of comparing his past and future actions or motives, and 
of approving or disapproving of them," then Mr. Romane's dog (of 
whose conscientiousness the lecturer related a remarkable story) 
was a moral being; and if they rejected that definition as inade- 
quate, then they must be very careful that the one they offered in 
its place did not exclude from the domain of moral law large 
numbers of the beings now called men. The lecturer concluded 
with the expression of a hope that " we who meet in the name of 
that Athena whose breath the Greeks believed to be the life of all 
living things, may find that even more than is the interest with 
which we watch the play of atoms in their mystic dance, is the 
interest with which we can contemplate the iris of life glowing 
with sevenfold colour and giving dignity, hope, and promise to the 
lowliest thing that lives." 
