Wallace's doctrine holds good, a higher power must
have superintended the breeding up of wolves from some inferior stock,
in order to prepare them to become dogs.
Mr. Wallace further maintains that the origin of some of man's mental
faculties by the preservation of useful variations is not possible.
Such, for example, are "the capacity to form ideal conceptions of
space and time, of eternity and infinity; the capacity for intense
artistic feelings of pleasure in form, colour, and composition; and
for those abstract notions of form and number which render geometry
and arithmetic possible." "How," he asks, "were all or any of these
faculties first developed, when they could have been of no possible
use to man in his early stages of barbarism?"
Surely the answer is not far to seek. The lowest savages are as
devoid of any such conceptions as the brutes themselves. What sort of
conceptions of space and time, of form and number, can be possessed by
a savage who has not got so far as to be able to count beyond five or
six, who does not know how to draw a triangle or a circle, and has not
the remotest notion of separating the particular quality we call
form, from the other qualities of bodies? None of these capacities
are exhibited by men, unless they form part of a tolerably advanced
society.
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