“If it be inquired in what the still more remarkable difference consists, it is by no means easy to reply. By some it will be said that man, while similar in the organisation of his body to the lower tribes, is distinguished from them by the possession of an imma terial soul, a principle capable of conscious feeling, of intellect and thought. To many persons it will appear paradoxical to ascribe the endowment of a soul to the inferior tribes in the creation, yet it is difficult to discover a valid argument that limits the possession of an immaterial principle to man. The phenomena of feeling, of desire and aversion, of love and hatred, of fear and revenge, and the perception of external relations manifested in the life of brutes, imply, not only through the analogy which they display to the human faculties, but likewise from all that we can learn or con jecture of their particular nature, the superadded existence of a principle distinct from the mere mechanism of material bodies. That such a principle must exist in all beings capable of sensation, or of anything analogous to human passions and feelings, will hardly be denied by those who perceive the force of arguments which metaphysically demonstrate the immaterial nature of the mind. There may be no rational grounds for the ancient dogma that the souls of the lower animals were imperishable, like the soul of man : this is, however, a problem which we are not called upon to discuss ; and we may venture to conjecture that there may be immaterial essences of divers kinds, and endowed with various attributes and capabilities. But the real nature of these unseen principles eludes our research : they are only known to us by their external manifestations. These manifestations are the various powers and capabilities, or rather the habitudes of action, which characterise the diiferent orders of being, diversified according to their several destinations.”
Dr Prichard here puts forward distinctly the time-hon oured doctrine which refers the mental faculties to the operation of the soul. The view maintained by a dis tinguished comparative anatomist, Professor Mivart, in his Genesis of Species, ch. xii., may fairly follow. " Man, according to the old scholastic definition, is a rational animal (animal rationale}, and his anirnality is distinct in nature from his rationality, though inseparably joined, during life, in one common personality. Man s animal body must have had a different source from that of the spiritual soul which informs it, owing to the distinctness of the two orders to which those two existences severally belong." Not to pursue into its details a doctrine which has its place rather in a theological than an anthropological article, it remains to be remarked that the two extracts just given, however significant in themselves, fail to render an account of the view of the human constitution which would probably, among the theological and scholastic leaders of public opinion, count the largest weight of adherence. Accordingto this view, not only Hf e but thought are functions of the animal system, in which man excels all other animals as to height of organisation ; but beyond this, man em bodies an immaterial and immortal spiritual principle which no lower creature possesses, and which makes the resemblance of the apes to him but a mocking simulance. To pronounce any absolute decision on these conflicting doctrines is foreign to our present purpose, which is to show that all of them count among their adherents men of high rank in science.
II. Origin of Man.—Available information on this great of creation problem has been multiplied tenfold during the present l evolu- generation, and the positive dicta of the older authorities a,re now more and more supplanted by hypotheses based on biological evidence. Opinion as to the genesis of man is divided between the theories of the two great schools of biology, that of creation and that of evolution. In both schools the ancient doctrine of the contemporaneous appear ance on earth of all species of animals having been abandoned under the positive evidence of geology, it is admitted that the animal kingdom, past and present, includes a vast series of successive forms, whose appearances and dis appearances have taken place at intervals during an im mense lapse of ages. The line of inquiry has thus been directed to ascertaining what formative relation subsists among these species and genera, the last link of the argu ment reaching to the relation between man and the lower creatures preceding him in time. On both the theories here concerned it would be admitted, in the words of Agassiz (Principles of Zoology, pp. 205-6), that "there is a manifest progress in the succession of beings on the surface of the earth. This progress consists in an increasing simi larity of the living fauna, and, among the vertebrates espe cially, in their increasing resemblance to man." Agassiz continues, however, in terms characteristic of the creationist school: "But this connection is not the consequence of a direct lineage between the faunas of different ages. There is nothing like parental descent connecting them. The fishes of the Pakeozoic age are in no respect the ancestors of the reptiles of the Secondary age, nor does man descend from the mammals which preceded him in the Tertiary age. The link by which they are connected is of a higher and immaterial nature; and their connection is to be sought in the view of the Creator himself, whose aim in forming the earth, in allowing it to undergo the successive changes which geology has pointed out, and in creating successively all the different types of animals which have passed away, was to introduce man upon the surface of our globe. Man is the end towards which all the animal creation has tended from the first appearance of the first Palaeozoic fishes." The evolutionist school, on the contrary, maintains that different successive species of animals are in fact connected by parental descent, having become modified in the course of successive generations. Mr Darwin, with whose name and that of Mr Wallace the modern development theory is especially associated, in the preface to his Descent of Man (1871), gives precedence among naturalists to Lamarck, as having long ago come to the conclusion " that man is the co-descendant with other species of some ancient, lower, and extinct form." Professor Huxley, remarking (Man's Place in Nature, 1863, p. 106) on the crudeness and even absurdity of some of Lamarck's views, dates from Darwin the scientific existence of the development theory. The result of Darwin's application of this theory to man may be given in his own words (Descent of Man, part i. ch. 6):—
“The Catarhine and riatyrhine monkeys agree in a multitude of characters, as is shown by their unquestionably belonging to one and the same Order. The many characters which they possess in common can hardly have been independently acquired by so many distinct species ; so that these characters must have been inherited. But an ancient form which possessed many characters common to the Catarhine and Platyrhine monkeys, and others in an inter mediate condition, and some few perhaps distinct from those now present in either group, would undoubtedly have been ranked, if seen by a naturalist, as an ape or a monkey. And as man under a genealogical point of view belongs to the Catarhine or Old World stock, we must conclude, however much the conclusion may revolt our pride, that our early progenitors would have been properly thus designated. But we must not fall into the error of supposing that the early progenitor of the whole Simian stock, including man, was identical with, or even closely resembled, any existing ape or monkey.”
discussed apart from the full problem of the origin of species. The homologies between man and other animals which both schools try to account for; the explanation of the intervals, with apparent want of intermediate forms, which seem to the creationists so absolute a separation between species; the evidence of useless "rudimentary organs," such as in man the external shell of the ear, and the muscle which enables some individuals to twitch their ears, which rudimentary parts the evolutionists claim to be only explicable as relics of an earlier specific condition, these, which are the main points of the argument on the origin of man, belong to general biology. The philo sophical principles which underlie the two theories stand for the most part in strong contrast, the theory of evolution
tending toward the supposition of ordinary causes, such as