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A LIMIT TO EVOLUTION.

THE limit to evolution here referred to, is the limit which some persons assert and some deny to exist between man and the lower animals. Granting, if only for argument's sake, the truth of evolution, can man have been evolved from the lower animals, or must his origin have been due to some different action from that by which animals arose ? The great difference between man and the lower animals consists not in his body, but in his mind. In order, therefore, to examine this question, we must begin by looking a little carefully into our cwn minds and by examining our own acts and mental nature.

Now we all know that we perceive ourselves, other people, and a variety of objects about us. Also that we can recollect them and reason about them and express our opinions by words or signs. This is what every sane man can do in every country in the world. But besides these intellectual endowments, we have certain other powers and capacities which we ought very carefully to note.

In the first place we have all a power of feeling (we possess sensitivity), and we have many different kinds of feelings, apart from our intellect. Thus we all have appetites and desires, which, however they may be controlled by reason, are in no way due to reason any more than are feelings of pleasure and pain, with which new-born babes and even idiots are endowed. We do not need intellect in order to feel hungry or that we may make a hearty meal. We all of us have also the power of feeling special sensations, as of some colour or musical tone, or of bitterness or warmth; and feelings which have been experienced may again be reproduced in the imagination, wherein images arise which are faint reproductions of before-felt sensations.

We may next note our wonderful power of memory: not that intellectual faculty which we exercise in seeking to recall the past to mind, or by which the past flashes forth uncalled into consciousness, but that lower kind of memory, which we may distinguish as sensuous memory. This it is which enables us to perform a multitude of actions not only without the very intervention of our conscious

intelligence, but so that the intervention of that intelligence may actually impair its action. We have familiar examples of this kind of memory in such acts as walking, running upstairs, playing the piano, &c. Almost everyone who plays by heart knows that, if he happens to stumble in playing a familiar melody, his best plan is to turn away his mind from what he is doing and try to play it automatically. In other words, the melody is recalled by trusting entirely to that retentive sensuous memory which has become, as it were, imbedded in the nerves and muscles-the memory of the imagination.

We have, again (and this it is very important to note), a power of associating together sensations and imaginations in groups, and in groups of groups; so that when one or more of the thus associated feelings is freshly experienced, all the other feelings which have become associated therewith tend to be aroused also. Examples of this habit abound. The sound of a dinner-bell, the sight of an expanded umbrella, may instantly arouse in our minds images of food or of rain. It is not only that we intellectually know that the dinner-bell calls us to dinner, and that the umbrella is probably expanded on account of rain; but these associated images may arise before such thoughts, and images of the kind will often persist in spite of our efforts to expel them. In hearing, after an interval of many years, some melody of early days, very vivid images may be aroused. The old man may become in imagination a youth once more, and seem to feel his feeble limbs again treading the rhythmical measures of the waltz and his arm sustaining the pressure of a form dear to his memory. Thus we come to have those complex associations of pleasurable or painful feelings which we call sensuous emotions, some of which may be occasionally aroused in us apart from the exercise of our reason.

We have, moreover, not only these pleasurable and painful feelings. We also possess an innate spontaneous tendency to rest in, or to pursue and plunge deeper into, whatever we find to be pleasurable, and also to avoid whatever is painful.

Again, when we act, we have a certain vague feeling of our selfactivity. Our intellectual consciousness of what we may be doing is not here referred to, but that feeling which accompanies our actions when our attention is quite turned away from them-as when we walk unconsciously along, immersed in thought. It is plain that we do have this feeling, for if our progress is accelerated by something external-as a gust of wind-we immediately have a different and contrasted feeling. We have, indeed, a feeling of our passivity as well as of our activity; a power of feeling (apart from the intellect), the violent action upon us of anything external, and therefore a power of feeling (as well as of intellectual perceiving) a difference between our activity and our passivity-i.e. a feeling resulting from that difference.

If we draw a chain across our hand, we have feelings which, correspond with the succession of its parts as they pass, and a feeling corresponding with the termination of that succession when the motion has come to an end. It is the same in hearing a series of sounds and seeing a series of objects in a line. In each case we have feelings corresponding with the succession of the things felt, and in each case the feelings are themselves successive. In so far, then, as there is a physical resemblance between series of things felt, there is a resemblance between the feelings they induce. There is, indeed, no feeling of succession itself. Succession' is only apprehended by our intellect. But, nevertheless, there is a distinct set of feelings which are severally connected with different orders of succeeding things. Just in the same way, in exploring any solid object with our eyes and hands, we have the intellectual perception of its three dimensions of length, breadth, and thickness; but we also have a number of feelings of touch, of pressure, of movements of arms and fingers, &c., and thus we come to have a group or plexus of feelings corresponding with the extension of the object felt, together with feelings corresponding with its limits-that is, with the felt terminations of its extension. Thus, also, we come to have certain plexuses or groups of feelings corresponding with the shapes of bodies; and we also get feelings corresponding with the sizes of bodies, according as they force us to extend our arms or fingers more or less widely to embrace them, or to move our head and eyes more or less extensively to survey them. Similarly, by the singleness of impressions, or by their multitude (as in a sharp hailstorm), we come to have feelings related to the unity and multiplicity, and others corresponding with the motion and cessation of motion (or rest) of the bodies which affect our senses.

Again, we experience a certain feeling of shock when, upon the occurrence of certain sensations, other sensations, different from those which association has connected with the former, come unexpectedly upon us. Let us suppose that an orange has been so artfully imitated as not only to look like but also to feel like an orange. Being deceived to such an extent, when we cut it open and find its interior very different from what we expected, we have, of course, our intellectual perception of fact, but we also have, as I have said, a certain feeling of shock. Similarly, if the nature of any object seen by us is doubtful, we may have a feeling accompanying suspended action; and if we find out that it is in truth what we anticipated it to be, we may have, at the instant of finding this out, another different feeling of smooth and easy transition. These feelings we may distinguish as feelings induced by various congruities and incongruities between (1) sensations and (2) feelings which have become associated with them.

Thus it comes about that by the association of sensations, imaginations, feelings of pleasure and pain, feelings of activity and passivity, and groups of feelings corresponding with the succession, extension, figure, size, unity, multiplicity, motion, and rest of bodies, groups of feelings of the most varied kinds come to be formed, which groups of feelings correspond with a multitude of external objects. which have given rise to them. These groups of feelings underlie and accompany our intellectual perceptions of material things (as self-observation shows us), and therefore these groups of feelings may not improperly be termed 'sense-perceptions.'

The consideration of this power and habit which we have of associating feelings together, leads us on to yet another consequence worthy of note. When a group of feelings has become intimately associated with certain other sensations, then upon the occurrence of those other sensations an imagination of the group of feelings previously associated therewith spontaneously arises in the mind, and we have expectant feelings of their proximate actual recurrence. Thus the sensation of a vivid flash of lightning has come by association to lead to an expectant feeling of the thunder-clap to follow, and the sight of what looks like an orange, leads in a thirsty man to an expectant feeling of sweet-juiciness-quite apart from his intellectual perception of the properties of an orange or of the relation between lightning and thunder. This arousing of expectant feelings has a certain analogy with reasoning or inference, although altogether different from it essentially. We may then distinguish this kind of feeling assensuous inference.'

Another important fact to note is that our feelings, and especially our emotions, may be expressed by external signs, which are so far from being rational and intentional, that we may be unaware of them, or, if aware of them, unable to suppress them. Thus the emotion of terror shows itself by tremblings of lip and limb, a dropping of the jaw, suppressed breathing, a deadly pallor of the face, and staring eyes. With the emotion of anger, the eyes glare, the hands are often clenched and raised, and the lips compressed or possibly distorted in a fierce grin. Such signs and accompanying cries produce sympathetic effects in the beholders, and thus we have an emotional language, expressing merely our feelings, in addition to that power of speech by which we communicate our ideas. Moreover, our emotions may thus be so communicated as to give rise, by sympathy, to similar emotions in others, and this, again, is closely connected with a tendency to imitation we all possess, as to which a few remarks will be made a little further on.

Let us now glance at certain sets of bodily motions which correspond with different feelings. How wonderful, when we come to go into it, is the trivial act of a lad throwing a stone at a mark!

What must be the amount of correct co-ordination between a multiplicity of parts and their actions to produce the result! The lad's mind has little to do with it beyond his one impulse to hit the mark. He knows nothing of anatomy, but simply sets going the wonderful mechanism of his body, and this works out the result for him. In the first place the various parts of his eyes must be adjusted to see the mark distinctly. Then his body must be held in a certain position, and for this a multitude of nervous and muscular coordinations are necessary. The stone must be grasped with a certain strength, the arm thrown back to the due extent, and its muscles contracted, in co-ordination with the organ of sight, and with just that degree of vigour, as his fingers are relaxed, which shall carry the stone as desired. Different feelings accompany these actions— feelings of activity, passivity, touch, tension, &c.—and these feelings guide the action of his body as if it were a sort of automatic sensitive machine.

Thus we have, apart from the action of the intellect, a power of so regulating our various bodily movements as to produce a harmonious co-ordination, in which a number of subordinate movements are co-ordinated to produce a more general movement in obedience to sensuous impulses. That these complex and orderly combinations may take place without intellectual action and from sensuous impulses only, is plain from the fact that many idiots and sleep-walkers perform them. Even with respect to ourselves, we may set our bodily organism going in a certain direction, and then give up the mind entirely to other matters, so that we walk on, 'lost in thought,' till we are startled at finding we have reached or it may be overshot-our destination, without having once thought about our journey on the road. But the remarkable power we have of co-ordinating our motions, in response to associated sensations, is excellently shown in such a thing as playing the piano by heart. Here the actions duly follow in orderly series in connection with felt touches of the keys and heard sounds of the notes. Let a key stick, or a wire become dumb, and the automatic action ceases immediately, and the intellectual attention is aroused.

The result of all the foregoing powers of feeling and co-ordinated movements is, that we have an automatic power of uniting our various pleasurable tendencies into now one and now another dominant impulse, and of further co-ordinating our movements so as to unite them in one general movement directed to gratify such dominant impulse. As to our tendency to imitation, it is notorious that the sight of a yawn induces yawning. Such spontaneous imitation is often carried much further, notably by some idiots. Nor is it surprising it should be so, when we reflect that the sight of a motion performed by others, slightly stimulates in us those very nerves by