Page:The Monist Volume 2.djvu/85

73. articulate speech, assuredly my whole analysis would be destroyed: the human mind would be shown to present a quality different in origin and, therefore, in kind from all the lower orders of intelligence: the law of continuity would be interrupted at the terminal phase: an impassable gulf would be fixed between the brute and the man."

And Prof. Max Miiller criticises the position of Professor Romanes in an article on Thought and Language (The Monist, Vol. I. No. 4, p. 582); he says: "My learned friend, Professor Romanes, labors to show that there is an unbroken mental evolution from the lowest animal to the highest man. But he sees very clearly and confesses very honestly that the chief difficulty in this evolution is language and all that language implies. He tries very hard to remove that barrier between beast and man. ... Professor Romanes is, I believe, a most eminent biologist, and the mantle of Darwin is said to have fallen on his shoulders. Far be it from me to venture to criticise his biological facts. But we see in his case how dangerous it is for a man who can claim to speak with authority on his own special subject, to venture to speak authoritatively on subjects not his own."

It is not at all my intention to appear on the battle-field as a peacemaker between these two generals, or to settle the problems that arise from the conflict between philology and biology. That will be better done by the parties concerned, and I am rather inclined to speak with Schiller when he thought of the struggle beween the transcendentalist philosopher and the empirical naturalist:

"Enmity be between you! Your alliance would not be in time yet.
 * Though you may separate now, Truth will be found by your search."

I look forward with great interest to further discussions which will bring out with more clearness the positions of both parties, and it is not impossible that both parties as soon as they have better understood each other, will agree much better than either of them expected. But it may be permitted me to make a few comments upon a proposition that is involved in this conflict, which, however, properly considered, is neither of a philological nor a biological nature. This is the idea of the continuity of evolution. Prof. Max Müller says somewhere that, if a Darwinian means an evolutionist, he had been a Darwinian long before Darwin. "How a student of the science of language," he says, "can be anything but