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.
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