THE IMMORTALITY OF THE HIGHER, ANIMALS. ere THE EDITOR OF
THE " SPEOTATOR.1 $111,-1 cannot presume to occupy your columns with a discussion of the grounds of faith in human immortality, but I am anxious to say that your correspondent Mr. White seems to me to ignore the strongest of them, and to twist the lesson of the doctrine of Evolution right round till, instead of forming a new aid to faith, lit has become in his hands a fresh difficulty. If mankind had, as he suggests, waited for the advent of Christ to inherit or to know -of a future life, we could no longer hold that the sense of immor- tality is a given fact of human consciousness, traceable to the Creator, and therefore worthy of reliance. If only regenerated
Christians survive dissolution, we can no longer find in the spectacle of failure and guilt and woe the prophecy of a world where "somehow good shall be the final goal of ill." In arguing that the higher animals may possibly share the lofty destiny as well as the nobler feelings of man, I only proceeded on the track which the doctrine of evolution has made plain before our steps. All life, it teaches, is a continual uprising from the lower form to the higher, from the unconscious to the conscious, from sentience to intelligence, from matter to mind. Of a super- natural addition to human nature effected by the Incarnation, I know nothing. Of a natural universal development of the spiritual from the animal life, of the temple within the scaffolding, I can form a conception,—faint indeed, of course, but yet fully consonant with religion, and not in disaccord with science. Such a view alone seems to afford an explanation of the existence of the mate- rial world and of this whole scene of struggling life consonant with our idea of the goodness and grandeur of God.-1 am, Sir, PanozooisT.
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