Mr Graham’s letter2
Nor can I fail to feel the force of your words when you say that the “horrid doubt always arises in your mind whether the convictions of mans mind which have been developed from the minds of the animals are at all trustworthy.”3
This I take ⟨to⟩ me⟨a⟩n whether the fact that such convictions are developed from the minds of the animals ought to shake our faith in their trustworthiness. I utterly fail to perceive the force of such an argument. I can conceive all sorts of arguments again⟨s⟩t the intuitions of the human mind. I see for instance how impossible it is to carry out the analogy with the 5 senses by obtaining a consensus as to the objective facts from all who have those intuitions. But I fail entirely to perceive how such argum⟨e⟩nts are strengthened by the Evolution theory of mans faculties.
Surely no one would say that this view throws any shadow of suspicion on mans reasoning faculties, which are in like manner developed & which actually are shared by the animals Why is the case different with the faculty which gives data?
Please cite as “DCP-LETT-13268,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on