The fundamental error is to suppose that man is a material outgrowth, and that bodily cognizance of good or evil constitutes his happiness or misery. Theorizing from mushrooms to monkeys, and from monkeys to men, amounts to nothing in the right direction, and very much in the wrong. If we classify mortals as mineral, vegetable, or animal, an egg is the author of the genus homo; but there is no reason why man should begin in the egg, rather than in the more primitive dust, like the figurative Adam.
Brains are within the craniums of animals. To say then that brain is man, is to furnish the pretext for saying that man was once a brute, an assertion which must be met with the reply. If once he was a brute, he will be again, according to natural perpetuation of identity.
What is man? Brains, heart, blood, the material structure? If he is but a material body, when you amputate a limb, you must take away a portion of the man; the surgeon can destroy manhood, and the worms annihilate it. But the loss of a limb, or injury to a tissue, is sometimes the quickener of manliness; and the unfortunate cripple may present more of it than the statuesque athlete, — teaching us, by his very deprivations, that “a man's a man, for a' that.”
Admitting that matter (heart, blood, brains, the so-called five personal senses) constitutes man, we fail to see how anatomy can distinguish between the brute and humanity, or determine when man is really man, and has progressed farther than his progenitors. If quadruped and biped possess the constituent parts of man, they must, to some extent, be human; and, by parallel reasoning, man must be a brute.
