Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/517

Rh always be accurately separated from instinct, but from that power of progressive and improvable reason, which is Man's peculiar and exclusive endowment.

'It has been sometimes alleged, and may be founded on fact, that there is less difference between the highest brute animal and the lowest savage than between the savage and the most improved Man. But, in order to warrant the pretended analogy, it ought to be also true that this lowest savage is no more capable of improvement than the Chimpanzee or Orang-outang.

'Animals,' he adds, 'are born what they are intended to remain. Nature has bestowed upon them a certain rank, and limited the extent of their capacity by an impassible decree. Man she has empowered and obliged to become the artificer of his own rank in the scale of beings by the peculiar gift of improvable reason.'

We have seen that Professor Agassiz, in his Essay on Classification, above cited (p. 494), speaks of the existence in every animal of 'an immaterial principle similar to that which, by its excellence and superior endowments, places man so much above animals;' and he remarks, 'that most of the arguments of philosophy in favour of the immortality of man, apply equally to the permanency of this principle in other living beings.'

Although the author has no intention by this remark to impugn the truth of the great doctrine alluded to, it may be well to observe, that if some of the arguments in favour of a future state are applicable in common to man and the lower animals, they are by no means those which are the weightiest and most relied on. It is no doubt true that, in both, the identity of the individual outlasts many changes of form and structure which take place during the passage from the