rs of a sunset, for instance, or the
profusion of beauty with which snow mountains seem to fling themselves
to the heavens in districts unpeopled and in epochs long before human
consciousness awoke upon the earth: if such a seer feels the revelation
weigh upon his spirit with an almost sickening pressure, and is
constrained to ascribe this wealth and prodigality of beauty to the joy
of the Eternal Being in His own existence, to an anticipation as it
were of the developments which lie before the universe in which He is
at work, and which He is slowly tending towards an unimaginable
perfection--it behooves the man of science to put his hand upon his
mouth, lest in his efforts to be true, in the absence of knowledge, he
find himself uttering, in his ignorance, words of lamentable folly or
blasphemy.

_Man and Nature._

Consider our own position--it is surely worth considering. We are
a part of this planet; on one side certainly and distinctly a part
of this material world, a part which has become self-conscious. At
first we were a part which had become alive; a tremendous step
that--introducing a number of powers and privileges which previously
had been impossible, but that step introduced no responsibility; we
were no longer, indeed, urged by mere pressure from behind, we were
guided by our instincts and appetites, but we still obeyed the
strongest external motive, almost like electro-magnetic automata. Now,
however, we have become conscious, able to look before and after, to
learn consciously from the past, to strive strenuously towards the
future; we have acquired a knowledge of good and evil, we can choose
the one and reject the other, and are thus burdened with a sense of
responsibility for our acts. We still obey the strongest motive
doubtless, but there is something in ourselves which makes it a motive
and regulates its strength. We _can_ drift like other animals, and
often do; but we can also obey our own volition.

I would not deny the rudiments of self-consciousness, and some of what
it implies, to certain domestic animals, notably the dog; but
domestication itself is a result of humanity, and undoubtedly the
attributes we are discussing are chiefly and almost solely human, they
can hardly be detected in wild nature. No other animal can have a full
perception of its own individuality and personality as separate from
the rest of existence. Such ideas do not occur in the early periods of
even human infancy: