The distinguishing feature that is present in the English language but absent in Spanish is "capital and lowercase letters." While both English and Spanish use the Latin alphabet and have consonants and vowels, the distinction between capital and lowercase letters is a characteristic of English orthography that impacts how writing is formatted. Spanish primarily uses uppercase letters at the beginning of sentences and for proper nouns, but does not have the same extensive use of capitalization rules found in English.
Therefore, the correct answer is: capital and lowercase letters.