wer place? Are there lower motives, for
which the very laws of evolution forbid us to live, just as truly as
they forbid a man's living for stomach or brute strength instead of
brain and mind? Are these lower powers merely the foundation
on which the higher motives and powers are to rise in their
transcendent glory? This is the question which we now must face,
and it is of vital importance.

We have come to one of the most important and difficult subjects of
zooelogy. Let us distinctly recognize that it is not our task to
explain the origin of mind, or even of a single mental faculty. I
shall take for granted what many of you will not admit, that the
germs of all man's highest mental powers are present undeveloped in
the mind, if you will call it so, of the amoeba. The limits of
this course of lectures have required us to choose between
alternatives, either to attempt to prove the truth of the theory of
evolution, or taking this for granted, to attempt to find its
bearings on our moral and religious beliefs. I have chosen the
latter course, and here, as elsewhere, will abide by it. I should
not have followed such a course if I did not thoroughly believe that
man also, in mind as well as body, is the product of evolution. But
this is no reason for your accepting these views. You are asked only
to judge impartially of the tendencies of the theory. We take for
granted, I repeat, that all man's mental faculties are germinally,
potentially, present in protoplasm; we seek the history of their
development.

We must remember, further, that the science of animal or comparative
psychology is yet in its infancy. Even reliable facts are only
slowly being sifted and recorded in sufficient numbers to make
deductions at all safe. And even of these facts different writers
give very different explanations. As Mr. Romanes has well said, "All
our knowledge of mental faculties, other than our own, really
consists of an inferential interpretation of bodily activities--this
interpretation being founded on our subjective knowledge of our own
mental activities. By inference we project, as it were, the human
pattern of our own mental chromograph on what is to us the otherwise
blank screen of another mind." The value and clearness of our
inferences will be proportional to the similarity of the animal to
ourselves. Thus we can educate many of our higher mammals by a
system of rewards and punishments, and we seem therefore to have
good reason