re degraded than on the title-page of an American
publication in which, among the profiles of the different races of man,
the profile of the ape was made to look more human than that of the negro.

Lastly, the problem of the position of man on the threshold between the
worlds of matter and spirit has of late assumed a very marked prominence
among the problems of the physical and mental sciences. It has absorbed
the thoughts of men who, after a long life spent in collecting, observing,
and analyzing, have brought to its solution qualifications unrivalled in
any previous age; and if we may judge from the greater warmth displayed in
discussions ordinarily conducted with the calmness of judges and not with
the passion of pleaders, it might seem, after all, as if the great
problems of our being, of the true nobility of our blood, of our descent
from heaven or earth, though unconnected with anything that is commonly
called practical, have still retained a charm of their own--a charm that
will never lose its power on the mind, and on the heart of man. Now,
however much the frontiers of the animal kingdom have been pushed forward,
so that at one time the line of demarcation between animal and man seemed
to depend on a mere fold in the brain, there is _one_ barrier which no one
has yet ventured to touch--the barrier of language. Even those philosophers
with whom _penser c'est sentir_,(9) who reduce all thought to feeling, and
maintain that we share the faculties which are the productive causes of
thought in common with beasts, are bound to confess that _as yet_ no race
of animals has produced a language. Lord Monboddo, for instance, admits
that as yet no animal has been discovered in the possession of language,
"not even the beaver, who of all the animals we know, that are not, like
the orang-outangs, of our own species, comes nearest to us in sagacity."

Locke, who is generally classed together with these materialistic
philosophers, and who certainly vindicated a large share of what had been
claimed for the intellect as the property of the senses, recognized most
fully the barrier which language, as such, placed between man and brutes.
"This I may be positive in," he writes, "that the power of abstracting is
not at all in brutes, and that the having of general ideas is that which
puts a perfect distinction between man and brutes. For it is evident we
observe no footsteps in these of making use of general signs for universal
idea