The conception of man as an animal, at first entertained only in a narrow zoological sense, has gradually extended in significance, and is now beginning to be understood as a guiding principle in the study of all the activities of the individual and the species. In the early days such a conception was regarded by non-scientific thought as degrading to man, and as denying to him the possibility of moral progress {67} and the reality of his higher æsthetic and emotional capabilities; at the same time, men of science found themselves compelled, however unwillingly, to deny that the moral activities of man could be made consistent with his status as an animal. It may still be remembered how even the evolutionary enthusiasm of Huxley was baffled by the incompatibility he found to subsist between what he called the ethical and the cosmical processes, and how he stood bewildered by the sight of moral beauty blossoming incorrigibly amidst the cruelty, lust, and bloodshed of the world. The passage of time has tended more and more to clear up these lingering confusions of an anthropocentric biology, and thought is gradually gaining courage to explore, not merely the body of man but his mind and his moral capacities, in the knowledge that these are not meaningless intrusions into an otherwise orderly world, but are partakers in him and his history just as are his vermiform appendix and his stomach, and are elements in the complex structure of the universe as respectably established there, and as racy of that soil as the oldest saurian or the newest gas. Man is thus not merely, as it were, rescued from the inhuman loneliness which he had been taught was his destiny and persuaded was his pride, but he is relieved from perplexities and temptations which had so long proved obstacles to his finding himself and setting out valiantly on an upward path. Cut off from his history and regarded as an exile into a lower world, he can scarcely fail to be appalled and crushed by the discrepancy between his lofty pretensions and his lowly acts. If he but recognize that he himself and his virtues and aspirations are integral strands in the fabric of life, he will learn that the great tissue of reality loses none of its splendour by the fact that near by where the pattern {68} glows with his courage and his pride it burns with the radiance of the tiger, and over against his intellect and his genius it mocks in the grotesques of the ape. The development of an objective attitude towards the status of man has had, perhaps, its most significant effect in the influence it has exercised upon the study of the human mind. The desire to understand the modes of action of the mind, and to formulate about them generalizations which shall be of practical value, has led to inquiries being pursued along three distinct paths. These several methods may be conveniently distinguished as the primitive, the human, and the comparative.