It is also to be noticed that in these accounts of the origin of language, the essential element of reason is always quietly smuggled in as a matter of course. Thus Mr. Darwin's wisest of the pithecoids was able to "think of" a device for the information of his fellows. There is not the smallest doubt that any creature which had got so far as _that_ would find what he wanted. It is but the old case of the man who was sure he could have written Hamlet had he had a mind to do so. Like him, the ape might have made the invention, if he had a mind to make it;--only he had not got the mind. So too, Professor Romanes' missing links use tones and signs which acquire "more and more" the character of true speech: which could not be unless they contained some measure of that character already. But it is just the first step thus ignored which spans the gulf between man and brute. There is another factor upon which, in conjunction with these suppositions, great stress is wont to be laid, namely that of time; it being apparently taken for granted that if only time enough be given anything whatever may come about. Thus Professor Romanes tells us[121] that his imaginary _Homo alalus_, or speechless man, must probably have lived for an "inconceivably long time," before getting far enough on the road towards speech to give him such an advantage as enabled him to crush out his less accomplished congeners; and that even after this point was reached, another "inconceivable lapse of time" must have been required to turn him into _Homo sapiens_, or man as he actually is. Immense intervals, he further tells us, must have been consumed in the passage through various grades of mental evolution; "The epoch during which sentence-words prevailed was probably immense"; "It was not until æons of ages had elapsed that any pronouns arose." Meanwhile, there is no scrap of evidence that as a matter of fact any thing of all this ever happened at all, and as Bunsen has observed no millions of years, even were millions available at discretion, could ever supply the want of the faculty without which nothing in the way of language could ever be accomplished. (_c_) _Free-will._--Here is another human faculty which Du Bois-Reymond declares never to have been accounted for by natural causation, and he greatly doubts whether it should not be classed among the problems that must be for ever insoluble. Professor Haeckel, as we have seen, gets rid of all difficulties on this score by laying it down that "the freedom of the will is not an object for critical scientific inquiry at all, for it is a pure dogma, based on an illusion, and has no real existence."