something analogous to a language of their own; they can indicate certain emotions and give warning, and so forth, to their fellows.  But that language could never develop into human language, or the animal will (such as it is) ever rise to a human will, or animals become endowed with self-consciousness, unless they could acquire the power of voluntarily abstracting the mind from one subject or part of a subject and fixing the attention on another.  We cannot formulate any process of change whereby the lower state could pass on to or attain to the higher in this respect.

[Footnote 1:  We can of course follow the sort of mental development which is traceable when we consider the origin of our own sagacious and faithful dogs in the wild prairie dog:  but this development is always in contact with the mind of man, and is, as it were, the result of man’s action, as man’s development in mind and soul is the result of God’s action.]

Therefore again we conclude that the higher reason is a gift ab externo.

If we take a step further to the “spiritual” or “moral” faculties of man, we have the same difficulty intensified, if indeed it does take a new departure.  To examine the question adequately would require us to go into the deep waters of psychology; and here we should encounter many matters regarding which there may be legitimate doubt and difference of opinion, which would obscure and lead us away from our main line of thought.

This I would willingly avoid.  But it is quite intelligible, and touches on no dangerous ground, when we assert that there is a distinct ascent—­an interval again raising developmental difficulties, directly we pass from the intellectual to the moral.  We may wonder at the high degree of intelligence possessed by some animals; but we are unable to conceive any animal possessing a power of abstract reasoning, having ideas of beauty (as such), or of manifesting what we call the poetic feeling.  And still more is this so when we look at the further interval that lies between any perception of physical phenomena, any reasoning in the abstract, or investigation of mathematical truth, and the overmastering sense of obligation to the “moral law,” or the action of the soul in its instinctive possession of the conception of a Divine Existence external to itself.  It is because of this felt difference that we talk of the “spiritual” as something beyond and above the “mental.”

The distinction is real, though we must not allow ourselves to be led too far in attempting to scan the close union that, from another point of view, exists between the one and the other.

In a recent number of “The Edinburgh Review,[1]” the author complains of Bishop Temple thus:  “He uses the word spiritual in such a way that he might be taken to imply that we had some other faculty for the perception of moral truths, in addition to, and distinct from, our reason.”  And the writer goes on to make an “uncompromising assertion of reason as the one supreme faculty of man.  To depreciate reason (he says) to the profit of some supposed ‘moral’ illative sense, would be to open the door to the most desolating of all scepticisms, and to subordinate the basis of our highest intellectual power to some mere figment of the imagination.”