minimize them, so as to pass over to what seems to them a satisfactory
if not an easy series of transitions. If Life is after all only a
"property" of matter, then given life, a brain may be produced; and as
mind is always manifested in the presence of (and apparently
indissolubly united with) brain structure, it is not a much greater leap
to accept _life_ as a property of _matter_ than it is to take _thought_
as a property of a certain _specialized physical structure_. It is true
that the distance is great between the instinct of an animal and the
abstract reasoning power of a Newton or a Herbert Spencer; but (as we
are so often told) the difference is of degree not of kind, and as the
brain structure develops, so does the power and degree of reason. As to
the difference in man, that he is the only "religious" animal--the one
creature that has the idea of God--that is a mere development of the
emotions in connection with abstract reasoning as to the cause of
things. No part of our mental nature is more common to the animal and
the man than the emotional; and if in the one it is mere love and
hatred, joy and grief, confidence and fear, in the other the emotions
are developed into the poetic sense of beauty, or the awe felt for what
is grand and noble; and this insensibly passes into _worship_, the root
of the whole being fear of the unknown and the mysterious. That is the
general line of argument taken up.

Even accepting the solution (if such it maybe called) of the two first
difficulties--life added spontaneously or aboriginally to matter, and
thought and consciousness added to organism--still the rest of the path
is by no means so easy as might at the first glance appear. Development
in brain structure certainly does not always proceed _pari passu_ with a
higher and more complex reasoning. In actual fact we find high
"reasoning" power, quite unexpectedly here and there, up and down the
animal kingdom. Some _insects_, with very little that can be called a