animals continued to be evolved out of the lower, this approach to a reasoning power became in the ape a true mental faculty; and, at length, in the numberless gradations of structure intermediate between the ape and the man, we reach those intellectual faculties which distinguish the latter by an enormous interval from all the other animals. "If," says Mr. Darwin, "no organic being, excepting man, had possessed any mental power, or if his powers had been of a wholly different nature from those of the lower animals, then we never should have been able to convince ourselves that our high faculties had been gradually developed. But it can be shown that there is no fundamental difference of this kind."[34] I will not here ask how far this is theoretical assumption. I shall endeavor to examine in another place the evidence which is supposed to show that the mental powers of man are in no respect fundamentally different, or different in kind, from the powers in the other animals to which the distinguished naturalist gives the name of "mental" powers. At present I am still concerned with the parallelism between the Platonic and the Darwinian theory; and I again ask whether the latter is not the former reversed, in respect to the process by which reason in the one case becomes lost, and that by which in the other case it becomes developed out of something to which it bears no resemblance? Plato supposes the creation of pure reason, or mental power, in the shape--to use the counterpart of a physical term--of a non-physical, spiritual intelligence, or mind. It remains always of this nature, but the successive animals which it is required to inhabit on earth undergo such degradations that the immortal reason loses in them the power to control their actions; nothing is left to govern in them but mere instinct, and this at last sinks into its lowest manifestations. Darwin, on the other hand, supposes the first creation to have been a very low animal of a fish-like structure, with the lowest capacity for voluntary action of any kind, but impelled to act in a certain way by superimposed laws of self-preservation; that in the infinitude of successive generations these laws have operated to produce numberless gradations of structure, in the growth of which fixed habits have become complex instincts; that further gradations have developed these instincts into something of mental power, as the successive higher animals have become evolved out of the lower ones, until at length the intellect of man has been "gradually developed" by a purely physical process of the action of organized matter.