I. The Difference Between Man and Animal

In this polished Catholic philosophical literature one point will always confront you, a point that has an extraordinary way of hoodwinking the modern thinker. It is the point that always comes into evidence when there is question of the difference between man and animal. I think you will agree that the ordinary readers of Haeckel, the ordinary upholders of Haeckel, always proceed to minimise the difference between man and animal as much as possible, to arouse as much belief as they can that men as a whole is only to a certain extent a more highly developed animal. This is not done by the Catholic men of learning but they always bring forward something that appears to them as a radical difference between animal and man. They raise the point that the animal gets no further than the ordinary conception it acquires of an object by first smelling it, of another object by smelling that or inspecting it, and so on; that the animal always stops at mere detailed, unindividual ideas, whereas man has the capacity for forming deduced abstract concepts and of summing things up. This is indeed a fundamental difference, for when the matter is grasped in this way man is really definitely distinguished from the animals. The animal noticing only details cannot develop what is spiritual; abstract concepts must live in the spiritual. For this reason one has to recognise that in man there lives a soul specially adapted for forming abstract concepts; whereas the animal with its particular kind of inner life has no power of forming these abstract concepts.