o it. Even the animal possesses strong altruistic
instincts, impulses towards companionship, pairing, and caring for its
young, and some have seen in this the beginnings of morality. But morality
is a matter of the spirit, which begins with the idea of duty and rises to
the recognition of an ideal of life. Nowhere else do we see so directly
and emphatically the incomparability of the natural-psychical and the
spiritual as in the idea of duty and an ideal of life, although the
contrast is equally great at all points of the spiritual life.

Finally and highest of all, we have the capacity of the human spirit to
rise to religion and the greatest heights of feeling. In science and art,
in morality and religion, the spirit possesses itself. And as such it is a
unique and strange guest in this world, absolutely incomparable with
anything beneath or around it. It may, perhaps, be true that the psychical
difference between the ape and man is smaller than that between the ape
and unicellular organisms (though we really can know nothing about that).
But nowhere in the animal world does the psychical overstep the limits of
purely natural existence, of striving after and being prompted by the
directly and purely natural ends of a vegetative and animal instinctive
life, physical pleasure, self-preservation, and the maintenance of the
species.

And there is more than this. However different the psychical equipment may
be at different animal stages, it has one thing in common in them all, it
is absolutely limited to what is given it by nature. An animal species may
last for a million years. But it has no history. It is and remains the
same history-less natural product. In this respect the animal is not a
step in advance of the stone or the crystal. The only thing it can achieve
is to express more or less perfectly the character of the species. This is
the utmost height of its capacity. But for man this is only the
starting-point, and the really human begins just there. What is implicit
in him as _homo sapiens_, a member of a zoological order, is nothing more
than the natural basis upon which, in human and individual history, he may
build up an entirely unique and new creation, an upper story: the world
and life of the spirit.

It is also erroneous to regard the gradual development of the psychical
capacities at the different levels of animal evolution as the development
of and preparation for the human spirit. It is not the spirit, b