on, advance to the general concepts of hardness and weight. These are the three steps in our knowledge which Kant distinguishes as Experience, Understanding, Reason, and which, under whatever names, are commonly admitted by metaphysicians.'

Now, the lower animals have in common with us this Experience-sensuous experience of which Kant speaks. We must also attribute to them a power of associating their experience by an exercise of memory and of expectant imagination-facultas æstimativa the Schoolmen called it-which undoubtedly presents some analogy with Understanding. But it is not Understanding, for they do not possess that μun ouvberun, that synthetic memory, of μνήμη συνθετική, which we make such vast use: it is sensuous reflection proceeding by way of sensuous inference. They do not attain to intellection. They stop short at feeling. Still farther are they removed from the apprehension of general concepts, abstract ideas, universals. And such apprehension is the essential characteristic of Reason, the distinctive faculty of man, in virtue of which he is a person, according to the excellent definition of the Schoolmen: naturæ rationalis individua substantia.

Whether our race has always exercised that faculty of reason is a question unnecessary to be discussed here. Kant apparently thought that it had not. Anticipating in this, as in other instances, the conclusions of certain modern physicists, Kant 1 The Great Enigma, p. 141.

1

held that "man was not always an animal rationale, but was once merely an animal rationabile," possessing the germ whence reason developed; and that "he became rational only through his own exertions," ' extending, I suppose, over vast periods of prehistoric time. However that may be, certain it is that man, as a matter of fact, exercises this faculty of Reason, and that no other animal exhibits the capacity for it. Equally certain is it that from this faculty spring those endowments which clearly mark man off from the other animals, however acute and subtle their instincts. Marvellously acute and subtle, indeed, those instincts are, as displayed, for example, in their art. But this art is unconscious, or automatic. It is inconceivable that bees, in constructing their hexagonal cells, possess a knowledge of angles. Equally inconceivable is it to take another striking instance of animal action with a purpose-that the numerous insect tribes which lay up food for their larvæ have before them the idea of futurity. They live under the law of instinct. Man lives under a sort of hybrid law, at once instinctive and rational. They have, as their one spring of action, impulse-sensuous impulse; opegis, Aristotle calls it, and the Schoolmen, appetitus. Man has impulse and reason: opešis μerà λóyov: appetitus rationalis; μetà

1 See his curious discussion, "Vom Charakter der Gattung," in the second part of his "Anthropologie in Pragmatischer Hinsicht:" Werke, vol. vii., p. 261 (Rosenkranź and Schubert's ed.).

and that means will. It is from the self-control exercised by man in virtue of his endowment of rational will the phrase is a pleonasm: reason, pace Schopenhauer, is of the essence of will-that his activity, as a whole, is distinguished from animal activity. It is because of this endowment that we impute to him merit or demerit-words which, in their proper, or ethical sense, are inapplicable to animals. Morality is of the will. We do not hold our horses or dogs morally responsible for what they do, or leave undone; we do not praise or blame them, in the sense in which we praise or blame even a little child. Man alone is, as Aristotle defined him, "an ethical animal having perception of right and wrong, justice and injustice, and the like." This is the first great difference arising from man's endowment of reason, which marks him off from animals, and the State from animal commonwealths. The State arises, like those commonwealths, from an original necessity. But, unlike them, it "is shaped and estab lished through the free activity of the rational will, whose inner nature it reflects."1 "Man," says Spinoza, "consists in reason." So does the State. It is, in Hegel's admirable phrase, “Reason manifesting itself as Right."

Again. It is in virtue of reason that man is endowed with the attribute of verbal language to

1 1 Lasson, System der Rechtsphilosophie, p. 297.

represent thought. The voice of the animal world, even in its most melodious forms-the song of the nightingale or the lark-is only an expression of sensuous feeling. The speech of man, however rude and harsh, is informed by intellection. Hence, no doubt, it was that the old Greeks employed the same vocable-λóyos-to denote reason and word. Human language is the direct outcome of that apprehension of universal relations to which reason is essential. Hobbes maintained that man is a rational animal, because he possesses the endow. ment of language: Homo animal rationale quia orationale; but this is, if I may employ the vulgar phrase, to put the cart before the horse. The true account is that man possesses the endowment of language because he is a rational animal: "Homo animal orationale quia rationale." It is reason which generates these general signs, general names, general propositions, which make up human language, and which are the indispensable instruments of human thought. As St. Augustine said: Cogitamus, sed verba cogitamus. Sophocles, celebrating in his magnificent choral ode the wondrousness of man, notes language as among the most distinctive and stupendous of human inventions. And rightly. The whole edifice of man's greatness, in public and in private life, rests upon it. In particular-for that is the point which specially concerns us here-it is in words that man embodies

the concepts of Right, and the laws in which those concepts are formulated for the guidance of ordered human life in civil society. The difference between the murmur of bees and the articulate speech of men, indicates the measure of the difference between the State and an animal community.

Once more. Progress is the result of reason manifesting itself in will and expressing itself in language. Every thinker stores up his thought in language. Every generation transmits that treasure to the generations that shall come after. And thus has arisen the world's intellectual wealth. In the words of Abelard, "Not only is language generated by intellect, but it, too, generates intellect." Sermo generatur ab intellectu et generat intellectum.1 It is language which enables man to capitalise his gains, moral, mental, and material. It is through this endowment that "great things done endure " for our race, and lead to greater. This is what progress means. And of progress the human race only is capable. It is—

"man's distinctive mark alone:

Not God's and not the beasts': God is, they are ;

Man partly is, and partly hopes to be."

And human society, we must always remember, is the condition and instrument of this progress, in which of course it shares. The ant has not in the least varied since the day when the writer of the book of Proverbs sent the human sluggard for a les1 Quoted by Max Müller, Science of Thought, p. 41.