ABSTRACT
The alleged gradually increasing differences between man and beast, and the intellectual evolution of man from the animal kingdom, these are subjects who could only be treated adequately in a special lecture on Comparative Psychology. Professor Dahl referred to the intellectual development of a child, in order to support his theory that the human soul might develop out of the animal soul by a process of natural evolution. His argument is very plausible, but it must be borne in mind that, in the case of this ontogenetic development of a child, there is present always one and the same intelligent soul, which gradually reveals its faculties as the powers of the intellect are evolved, and this evolution is essentially dependent upon that of the nervous system. In his General Morphology, and still more in his later work on Systematic Phylogeny, Haeckel certainly has taken pains to draw a tolerably clear and precise distinction between the theory of evolution and Darwinism.
