Consciousness is still held by most people to be a noumenon or noumenal phenomenon; mind being conceived by them to be something quite apart from brain, and this in face of the self-evident concomitance of the two. Now when we scan this distinction for an underlying difference, we find it to be due solely to man's desire for distinction. To put it unflatteringly, it is nothing but part and parcel of our innate human snobbery.
Darwin's doctrine was held for many years by most religious folk to be impious, and is still so held by a few of them. It was thought to deny a special creator. What it really denied were special creatures. So far as God was concerned, all it did directly was to remove him to a proper height above his handicraft; it was man whom it treated with scant respect by linking him with the brutes. Darwin committed the unpardonable sin of recognizing his own poor relations. The justice of such recognition has now nearly universally been conceded, and to-day practically nobody disputes the essential kinship of all living things. But the snobbish instinct that opposed it still survives, as it is bound to survive so long as we remain
