Introduction: The Problem

Extract

We must therefore see the whole varied congeries of living things as a single very ancient Being, of inconceivable vastness, and animated by one Spirit.—SAMUEL BUTLER, God the Known and God the Unknown.

Science has opened all kinds of perspectives. In particular it has shown life as a slow upward-evolving process. It has shown that there is something in evolution which we must call progress, and it has shown that we ourselves are now trustees for any evolutionary progress that remains to be made.—JULIAN HUXLEY, Science and Social Needs, 1936.

What, then, is the difference between the central unifying faculty of reason in man, out of which language arose, and the corresponding central faculty in the animals, which expresses itself in a few natural cries; and how in our present state of knowledge can this difference be distinctly brought into view and described in a concrete way? This is a complex question, and can be best answered for our purpose by breaking it into four parts.