, knowing that my colleagues have learned
to respect nothing but evidence, and to believe that their highest duty
lies in submitting to it, however it may jar against their inclinations.

But desiring, as I do, to reach the wider circle of the intelligent
public, it would be unworthy cowardice were I to ignore the repugnance
with which the majority of my readers are likely to meet the conclusions
to which the most careful and conscientious study I have been able to
give to this matter, has led me.

On all sides I shall hear the cry--"We are men and women, not a mere
better sort of apes, a little longer in the leg, more compact in the
foot, and bigger in brain than your brutal Chimpanzees and Gorillas.
The power of knowledge--the conscience of good and evil--the pitiful
tenderness of human affections, raise us out of all real fellowship with
the brutes, however closely they may seem to approximate us."

To this I can only reply that the exclamation would be most just and
would have my own entire sympathy, if it were only relevant. But, it is
not I who seek to base Man's dignity upon his great toe, or insinuate
that we are lost if an Ape has a hippocampus minor. On the contrary, I
have done my best to sweep away this vanity. I have endeavoured to show
that no absolute structural line of demarcation, wider than that between
the animals which immediately succeed us in the scale, can be drawn
between the animal world and ourselves; and I may add the expression of
my belief that the attempt to draw a psychical distinction is equally
futile, and that even the highest faculties of feeling and of intellect
begin to germinate in lower forms of life. [7] At the same time, no one
is more strongly convinced than I am of the vastness of the gulf between
civilized man and the brutes; or is more certain that whether 'from'
them or not, he is assuredly not 'of' them. No one is less disposed
to think lightly of the present dignity, or desparingly of the future
hopes, of the only consciously intelligent denizen of this world.

We are indeed told by those who assume authority in these matters, that
the two sets of opinions are incompatible, and that the belief in
the unity of origin of man and brutes involves the brutalization and
degradation of the former. But is this really so? Could not a sensible
child confute by obvious arguments, the shallow rhetoricians who would
force this conclusion upon us? Is it, indeed, true, that the Poet, o