early
shown. On the other hand, we willingly admit that the study of the social
and all other instincts and impulses which are common to man and animals,
and which in man form the object and instrument of his moral activity, has
for us the highest interest, inasmuch as the only problem is to explain the
conditions and prerequisites of moral self-determination--or, historically
speaking, the conditions {123} and prerequisites of the origin of morally
acting beings. Furthermore we have to say here also that condition and
prerequisite are not identical with cause, and it is precisely the _cause_
of moral responsibility and of the origin of such morally responsible
beings, which has not yet been discovered by the Darwinian theory.

The followers of Darwin enter still less into the discussion of the
question as to the origin of self-consciousness and of moral
self-determination. Haeckel--who, in his "Natural History of Creation" and
in his "Anthropogeny," expounds his whole evolution theory in all its
antecedent conditions and consequences--has, indeed, much to say of the
different faculties of the soul of man and animals. He traces these
faculties in the case of man down to the lowest state of the most degraded
races, and in the case of animals from the kermes up to the bee, from the
lancelet-fish to the dog, ape, elephant and horse; and he also treats of
the so-called _a priori_ knowledge which "arose only by long-enduring
transmission, by inheritance of acquired adaptations of the brain, out of
originally empiric or experiential knowledge _a posteriori_," (Vol. II,
345). But we look in vain in his works for a treatment of the question as
to the origin of the Ego--of self-consciousness. Nowhere does he enter into
the analysis of the psychological ideas; he only compares the psychical
utterances of different creatures, and thinks the whole problem solved when
he says: "The mental differences between the most stupid placental animals
(for instance, sloths and armadillos) and the most intelligent animals of
the same group (for instance dogs and apes) are, at any rate, much more
considerable than the differences in the {124} intellectual life of dogs,
apes, and men." Or: "If these brutish parasites are compared with the
mentally active and sensitive ants, it will certainly be admitted that the
psychical differences between the two are much greater than those between
the highest and lowest mammals--between beaked animals, pouched