f man: as they are
mortal, man must be so too." "Animals have minds: the merely psychical
passes away with the body. But man has spirit in addition. It is
imperishable." These and many other assertions were made on one side or
the other. And both sides made precisely the same mistake: they made the
belief in the immortality of our true nature dependent upon a proof that
the soul has a physical "substantial nature," which is to be regarded as
an indestructible substance, a kind of spiritual atom. And on the other
hand they overlooked the gist of the whole matter, the true
starting-point, which cannot be overlooked if the religious outlook is not
to be brought into discredit. It is undoubtedly a fundamental postulate,
and one which the religious outlook cannot give up, that the human spirit
is more than all creatures, and is in quite a different order from stars,
plants, and animals. But absolutely the first necessity from the point of
view of the religious outlook is to establish the incomparable value of
the human spirit; the question of its "substantial nature" is in itself a
matter of entire indifference. The religious outlook observes that man can
will good and can pray, and no other creature can do this. And it sees
that this makes the difference between two worlds. Whether the bodily and
mental physics in both these worlds is the same or different, is to it a
matter rather of curiosity than of importance.

What occurs or does not occur within the animal mind is, as a matter of
fact, wholly hidden from us. We have no way of determining this except by
analogy with ourselves, and therefore our idea of it is necessarily
anthropomorphic. And apologists are undoubtedly right when they maintain
that this is far too much the case. To reach a more unprejudiced attitude
towards the customary anthropomorphisation of animals, it is profitable to
study Wundt's lectures on "The Human and the Animal Mind" (see especially
Lecture XX.). Perhaps it is true that, notwithstanding all the
much-praised cleverness, intelligence and teachableness of elephants,
dogs, and chimpanzees, they are incapable of forming "general ideas,"
"rules," and "laws," of forming judgments in the strict sense, and
constructive syllogisms, that they have only associations of ideas, and
expectations of similar experience, but no thinking in conceptual terms,
and cannot perceive anything general or necessary, that they recognise _a
posteriori_ but not _a priori_