"The unclothed and unprotected condition of the human body, its comparative slowness of foot; the absence of teeth adapted for prehension or for defence; the same want of power for similar purposes in the hands and fingers; the bluntness of the sense of smell, so as to render it useless for the detection of prey which is concealed;--all these are features which stand in fixed and harmonious relation to the mental powers of man. But, apart from these, they would place him at an immense disadvantage in the struggle for existence. This, therefore, is not the direction in which the blind forces of selection could ever work .... Man must have had human proportions of mind before he could afford to lose bestial proportions of body." But it is in the intellectual and spiritual part of man's nature that the greatest difficulty in the way of the application of these theories arises. The strongest argument of all against them is one which is incapable of proof, since it arises not from facts around us, but from our own self-consciousness--our realization of our own powers--and so, to each individual man it must vary in apparent strength, in proportion as he realizes what he is, and what it is in his power to become. The very outcry that has been raised against Mr. Darwin's proposition is a proof of this. The theory of the descent of man, as he propounds it, was felt to be an outrage upon the universal instincts of humanity. But, because this objection rests upon such a foundation, it is incapable of being duly weighed and investigated as an argument, and we proceed therefore to such considerations as are within our reach.