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the Philosopher, or the Artist whose genius is the glory of his age, is
degraded from his high estate by the undoubted historical probability,
not to say certainty, that he is the direct descendant of some naked
and bestial savage, whose intelligence was just sufficient to make him a
little more cunning than the Fox, and by so much more dangerous than
the Tiger? Or is he bound to howl and grovel on all fours because of the
wholly unquestionable fact, that he was once an egg, which no ordinary
power of discrimination could distinguish from that of a Dog? Or is the
philanthropist or the saint to give up his endeavours to lead a noble
life, because the simplest study of man's nature reveals, at its
foundations, all the selfish passions and fierce appetites of the merest
quadruped? Is mother-love vile because a hen shows it, or fidelity base
because dogs possess it?

The common sense of the mass of mankind will answer these questions
without a moment's hesitation. Healthy humanity, finding itself hard
pressed to escape from real sin and degradation, will leave the brooding
over speculative pollution to the cynics and the 'righteous overmuch'
who, disagreeing in everything else, unite in blind insensibility to
the nobleness of the visible world, and in inability to appreciate the
grandeur of the place Man occupies therein.

Nay more, thoughtful men, once escaped from the blinding influences
of traditional prejudice, will find in the lowly stock whence Man has
sprung, the best evidence of the splendour of his capacities; and will
discern in his long progress through the Past, a reasonable ground of
faith in his attainment of a nobler Future.

They will remember that in comparing civilised man with the animal
world, one is as the Alpine traveller, who sees the mountains soaring
into the sky and can hardly discern where the deep shadowed crags and
roseate peaks end, and where the clouds of heaven begin. Surely the
awe-struck voyager may be excused if, at first, he refuses to believe
the geologist, who tells him that these glorious masses are, after all,
the hardened mud of primeval seas, or the cooled slag of subterranean
furnaces--of one substance with the dullest clay, but raised by inward
forces to that place of proud and seemingly inaccessible glory.

But the geologist is right; and due reflection on his teachings, instead
of diminishing our reverence and our wonder, adds all the force
of intellectual sublimity to the