so ably appreciated them, remarks, they deserve the most careful study from a philosophic and even from a social point of view, independently of their scientific importance. For such animals should be regarded henceforward as accessory members of the Great being, a title to which they have a far higher claim than many useless members of the human race, who have never been anything but a burden to Humanity. Those who doubt this should think of the privation that Humanity would suffer even now by the loss of these subordinate allies."

Comte goes on to show that the services of animals to Humanity were most valued in Fetichist and even in Polytheist times. "But the simpler beliefs of early days have been swept away by the more ambitious visions of monotheistic and metaphysical philosophies, which have injured the heart no less than the intellect. This long-continued error will be carefully avoided by the final religion. The true dignity of animal life will be re-asserted as a practical and philosophic truth.........So long as Biology remains an isolated subject, the protests of theologians and metaphysicians against the attempts to identify man with the lower animals are without much validity. But when Biology is subordinated to Sociology, this comparison will be recognised as the true explanation of human greatness. Varying the candid expression of a hero who knew what ambition was, we may say that it is better to be the first of animals than the lowest of angels." Zoology knows nothing of angels.

"So the highest notions of Sociology, and even of moral science, have their first germs in Biology, for the minds of really philosophical power which are able to detect them. For instance, it becomes easier for us to grasp our sublimest theoretic conception if we learn to look on each species of animals as potentially a Great Being. Actually, it is more or less abortive, from the inferiority of its organisation and the growing predominance of man. For a collective or social existence is the form to which the life of relation, which is the characteristic feature of animality, necessarily leads. But this result, which all aim at, cannot, on one and the same planet, be attainable by more than one of the sociable species "—for reasons which will be given in our next lecture.

As for the three laws of animal life, says Comte, the first consists in the need of alternate exercise and rest, which is felt throughout the whole of the life of relation, with no

exception for our noblest attributes. (The life of nutrition knows no pause or rest.) "This intermittence, which is the characteristic of the animal functions, is naturally connected with the beautiful observations of Bichat on the constant symmetry of the organs answering to those functions. Half of each organ can be in action while the other half remains passive. The second law, which here, as elsewhere, presupposes the preceding one, without being a consequence from it, proclaims the tendency of each of these intermittent functions to habitual exercise-that is to say, the function has an inherent tendency to reproduce itself spontaneously when the original impulse has ceased. This law, the law of habit, finds its natural complement in that of imitation, nor are the two really distinct. According to the profound remark of Cabanis, the aptitude to imitate others is but the result of the aptitude to imitate oneself at least, in every species capable of sympathy. "Man is a born imitator. As a child, he imitates consciously and unconsciously those with whom he is brought into contact. There is no trick of the body or the mind that he will not catch if left to himself; and his likeness to his parents comes in some part from his habit of constantly regarding their every look and gesture, and his desire, albeit hardly formed in his own mind, to reproduce it. In his games and plays he reproduces-and, when most alone, he represents to himself in rude and touching fashion-the occupation of man in later life.

Wordsworth finely says of him (and poets are commonly more prescient than philosophers) :

"Behold the child among his new-born blisses,
A six-years' darling of a pigmy size!
See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
With light upon him from his father's eyes!
See at his feet some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learnèd art;
A wedding or a festival,

A mourning or a funeral ;

And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song:
Then will he fit his tongue

To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
But it will not be long

Ere this be thrown aside,
And with new joy and pride

The little actor cons another part;

Filling from time to time his humorous stage,' With all the Persons down to Palsied Age, That Life brings with her in equipage;

As if his whole vocation

Were endless imitation."

This tendency, spontaneous at first, is of incalculable good if we bring it under control by duly regulating it, as it will enable us gradually to reproduce in ourselves and for ourselves better aptitudes for living, thinking, and actingnobler types of the true, the beautiful, and the good, than we now see either in our own persons or in those of others. But we must make the imitation a conscious imitation, and deprive it, as far as we can, of its primitive character; and this can only be done through much and long-sustained effort. If the question were purely an individual one, we might shrink from this effort: but, when we think how largely and how advantageously we may influence the lives and thoughts of others, our contemporaries and descendants, surely we shall spare no effort, whatever it may cost us to make it.

The law of habit, if we rightly look at it, is at once terrible and beneficent: terrible as showing its far-reaching and disastrous consequences to our descendants, if our habits are evil, in giving a force altogether untold to the words, "visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children until the third and fourth generations, &c.," leaving them a heritage of sadness and woe; and beneficent beyond expression, if our habits be good, since we modify those who come after us, and consciously help to fashion them to good and noble uses. The good and evil men do live after them as the results of their habits. An opium-eating Coleridge has a drunken son. A profligate Gordon has a profligate Byron. Madness or idiocy is handed down as an inheritance. These are cases known to everybody. They are too pronounced to escape notice. But those habits which are known to us only-which the world does not recognise and note-are equally inherited. How all-important it is that they shall be such that we need never blush for them, or for their consequences; that in the quietness of thought, or in the busy avocations of our hurried lives, they shall not come as the Eumenides, snake-tressed and finger-threatening! If we will be at the trouble to mould ourselves after noble types and heroic shapes; if we will live holily and disin

terestedly; if we will cultivate under every disadvantage
the charity that hopeth all things, believeth all things,
endureth all things; if our minds become temples for all
lovely forms to dwell in, we need be under no fear for the
future of our children and friends. If they catch anything
from us, it will be the happy contagion of nobleness and
goodness; and well will it be for us, for them, and for society
at large, should the infection spread beyond all hopes of
cure. As George Eliot says in "The Spanish Gipsy" :-
"Shall men bequeathe

The fancies of their palates to their sons,
And shall the shudder of restraining awe,
The slow-wept tears of contrite memory,
Faith's prayerful labour and the food divine
Of fasts ecstatic-shall these pass away
Like wind upon the waters tracklessly ?"

We shall contemplate the future without inquietude, and go forth to meet it without dread, conscious of the rectitude of our intentions and practices.

"Lastly," Comte continues, "the third law of the Animal life, in subordination to that of habit, consists in the capacity of improvement, both in the statical and dynamical point of view, inherent in all the phenomena of relation. In all alike exercise strengthens the functions and organs; prolonged disuse tends to weaken them. This last law rests on the two others, but is distinct from them. It sums up the whole theory of Animal life, as...... was the case with the last law of Vegetable life."

"By a combination of these two great laws-each the last of its respective series-you form a seventh law of life, that of hereditary transmission. This deserves a distinctly scientific appreciation, although, logically, it is only a necessary consequence of the preceding laws. As every function or structure in the animal world is perfectible up to a certain point, it is clear that every living being's capability of reproducing its like may fix in the species the modifications which have taken place in the individual, supposing those modifications to have taken sufficient root. It follows that there is a power of improvement (limited, but continuous), Dynamical in the main, but also Statical in every race whatever, each generation in succession contributing its quota. This important faculty, in which the two systems of Biological laws find a natural expression, is susceptible of greater development in proportion as the race is higher.