a few competent guides and devote his attention to them. Darwin's book, of course, he will read, also Spencer's 'Biology,' and the volumes of Alfred Russel Wallace. In addition, the works of Haeckel should be studied, and for a good general outline of the subject in lucid language Fiske's chapters in 'Cosmic Philosophy' will be found specially valuable, also his little book 'Through Nature to God.' Professor Arthur Thomson writes a really brilliant book on the subject entitled 'Animal Life,' and Professor Geddes has dealt in a highly suggestive manner with some aspects of the biological problems raised by Darwin. Huxley, in his own brilliant literary style, makes the whole subject specially attractive. A book of marked suggestiveness is Hinton's 'Life in Nature.' Upon no account should Merz's 'History of European Thought' be neglected. These are merely a selection from a huge mass of literature to which Darwin's great work has given birth, but the busy reader who masters them will have a very complete grasp of the doctrine of evolution as applied to the great field of organic Nature.

CHAPTER XI.

SCIENCE THE ORIGIN OF MAN.

IN dealing with the origin of man we enter a profoundly controversial region. Science and philosophy have long busied themselves with the origin of life, but so long as the discussion stopped short at man it remained for the most part in the academic arena. By his epoch-making work, Darwin shifted the whole subject from the academy to the market-place. If life, from the humblest speck of protoplasm to the most complex forms of organic matter, is subject to the law of evolution, why should man be exempt? If plants and animals were not specially created, but were the products of a great development process, why should man be excluded from the process and treated as a unique species? So far as the bodily structure of man is concerned it is difficult

to resist the arguments of Darwin and his followers. Man's body is shown to agree in all essential particulars with other mammalia.

Every detail of structure which is common to the mammalia as a class is also found in man, while he only differs from them in such ways and degrees as the various groups of mammals differ from one another."

All seems plain sailing till we come to mind. The question which faces the Darwinian is this-By what conceivable theory can consciousness, with all its marvellous manifestations, from the humble gropings of a savage to the highest mental activity of a Newton, be affiliated to protoplasmic evolution? Of course the scientist pure and simple need not trouble himself with the question of origins. He may accept consciousness in its most rudimentary form as a fact of Nature, and from that starting-point may proceed psychologically to trace the process of mental evolution from its simplest to its most complex manifestation. But this is to leave a gap where the Darwinians do not wish a gap. If their theory is to hold the field philosophically as well as scientifically, there must

be no gap; man's conscious life must be shown to rise by almost imperceptible gradations from the unconscious life of Nature.

Intelligence must be explained as the outcome of natural selection. Here is just the difficulty. Natural selection assumes the existence of something to be selected. Given the existence of plants and animals endowed with life, it is not difficult to understand how in the struggle for existence their powers should be developed among those who survive. It is easy to understand the survival of the fittest. What is difficult to understand is the rise of intelligence as we find it in some of the animals, and in its highest form in man, from the keen competition of species whose lives rest on the instinctive and the automatic.

Now Darwinism, as interpreted by its leading supporters, implies that mind is simply a highly specialised form of matter, and as such is developed along with the body by natural selection. That means the development of the conscious from the non-conscious. Is this conceivable? Not only is it not conceivable, but the most authoritative utterances

of psychology are to the effect that mind is something totally distinct from matter; by no conceivable process can the mental and the material be assimilated. On this point Spencer is quite explicit. In his early editions he leaned to the materialistic theory of mind, but in his later editions he frankly admits that the process known as Consciousness cannot be identified with waves of molecular motion propagated through nerves and nerve centres; a unit of feeling has nothing in common with a unit of motion. In this view the distinguished psychologist, Professor Hoffding, is at one with Spencer. Observe the inconsistencies into which thinkers like Tyndall and Huxley got when they tried to make Darwinism the foundation of a complete philosophy of man. According to these writers, matter contains in itself "the promise and potency of all kinds of life." Yet both of them admit that matter and mind cannot possibly come under the category of cause and effect. If matter contains in itself "the promise and potency of all kinds of life," clearly mind should be a highly specialised form of matter. Yet both Tyndall and