capable of retrospection, introspection, insight, and foresight; the past is ever connected with our present, not merely as a series of remembrances, but as experiences positively influential during every conscious moment of life, as that through which the soul, the ego ipse, has gone, and which belongs to it still as actually forming both its history and its character. These are personal possessions and properties of which the inferior possessors of life, mere animals, indicate no consciousness. Hence we can never call any visible creature but man a person; man alone connects himself with the past and the future, with a feeling of their connection and of his own indissolubleness and identity through all bodily and outward changes whatever. It is a matter of felt personal blame if a man becomes aware of neglecting an opportunity of improving his personal standing as to self-respect. This feeling is different from that of conscience, which shows the evil of moral dereliction, sin; this feeling shows the folly and logical impropriety of not being informed and wise in proportion to advantages, not such a person as one ought to have been. It is, again, the person, meaning thereby all that is permanent and characteristic in the individual, that is the object of love or hate. Love and hate are possible in the true sense only between human beings, because they are conscious of each other as persons. Hence, human love produces fellowships as well as compacts; and thus, because man and woman are persons, soul with soul may be so wedded as to become systematically and sympathetically one, more essential each to the other than binary stars in their mutual influence. But not to confuse the idea by attempting to illustrate what, after all, can be conceived only as a reality in one's self, the fact to be borne in mind is this: every man not so curtailed of brain-power, as like an idiot or a beast to be incapable of thinking on his own selfhood or of perceiving his proper relation to other beings, is conscious of his own personality as a moral and intellectual agent, one and indivisible. Every man says I am, and thus shows his Divine relationship, however he may abuse its grand prerogatives. 4. From the foregoing fact immediately springs another. Every man refers his origin-if he reason at all on the subject to the will of some higher personal being. Every man conscious of his own personality feels, perhaps, rather than infers, that a Person created him. This felt faith is, indeed, essential to the integrity of man's reason. Such consciousness is but a reflex action of the soul which causes every human being, who has not deliberately tried to extinguish the light that lightens every man, to own a God, in whom he lives and has his being. It is as the breath of the Divinity still moving within him, the very life of his life, the strength and spirit of the hope that is full of immortality. For what man is there in a state of rationality that expects his own personal extinction when the body dies? Reasonable man says: "I am, and therefore I shall and must be.' Reasonable man says: "I am a person, and I must worship a Person as my Creatormy hope, my end, my life, my God.' Bearing these prominent facts of man's common consciousness steadily in mind, it will be easier to consider what was the condition of the first man in respect to the use of his senses, and his power of inferring the reason and meaning of things from their qualities and connections, as well as his capacity to worship his Maker with thoughts such as David uttered in the eighth Psalm, or such as Milton imagined appropriate to the lips of the first man— These are Thy glorious works, Parent of good, Thus wondrous fair; Thyself how wondrous then! 165 CHAPTER XIV. THE FIRST MAN NOT BORN A BABY-BABOON NOR MADE A SAVAGE. 1. THE first human being could.not have been brought into this world as a babe—a wailing, helpless, naked, living mass of wants-without an instinct or a capacity to appropriate the means of maintaining life for an hour. Man could not have been created thus feeble and dependent-unless, indeed, a nurse qualified for the occasion had also been created to take care of him. Then what was she? It need not be shown that an infant left alone in any conceivable paradise or place of comfort and convenience, would have been but a most marvellous failure, and the strangest of all possible foundlings—a babe created to perish if not finding a nurse nowhere to be found. No creature demands so much tending as a new-born man-except, perhaps, a kangaroo, carried in a maternal pocket till it has imbibed life enough to shift for itself. What suitable nurse is there in this world for a human babe but a human mother? Certain mythical personages have been mythically nursed: Romulus and Remus by a wolf-but wolves in general are more inclined to devour babies than to dandle them. Though cats have suckled young rabbits, we have no authentic instance of a bereaved ape suckling a human baby. But suppose, according to the new hypothesis, some amiable feminine ape, as next akin to the Adam, or at least the Ish, variety of vetebrate development, undertook the place of foster-mother to the new-made motherless foundling in human shape. Could not she have done all that was necessary? That is an experiment not yet tried by the Zoological Society. We wonder why not, seeing so many babies in these experimental, philanthropic, Christian times are born of mothers that evince less motherly affection than any of the brutes. Have not apes been found ready to adopt babies? If not, why not? We are out in our science and philosophy. The Darwino-Huxleyan hypothesis requires not the nurse only, but the veritable mother of the first man, to have been a paulo-post baboon of the missing-link variety- neither man nor ape. Well, say there was a baboon, once upon a time, who (? that) became so very refined and superior to her ancestors, that by dint of natural taste and nice selection. of companionship she brought forth a something tending to become a man-child. Perhaps the force of imagination may have had something to do with such a supposed result; and we know, humanly speaking, imagination is very strong in the production of hypothetical oddities. But even imagination must have had some reality, some received image, to work with; and really we see not how a baboon |