bject;
he will see it in different proportions and in different lights
according to the angle and the distance from which he regards it. The
subject under discussion in the present case is human nature itself; and
as we all know, men have formed very different estimates of themselves
and their species. On the one hand, there are those who love to dwell on
the grandeur and dignity of man, and who swell with pride at the
contemplation of the triumphs which his genius has achieved in the
visionary world of imagination as well as in the realm of nature.
Surely, they say, such a glorious creature was not born for mortality,
to be snuffed out like a candle, to fade like a flower, to pass away
like a breath. Is all that penetrating intellect, that creative fancy,
that vaulting ambition, those noble passions, those far-reaching hopes,
to come to nothing, to shrivel up into a pinch of dust? It is not so, it
cannot be. Man is the flower of this wide world, the lord of creation,
the crown and consummation of all things, and it is to wrong him and his
creator to imagine that the grave is the end of all. To those who take
this lofty view of human nature it is easy and obvious to find in the
similar beliefs of savages a welcome confirmation of their own cherished
faith, and to insist that a conviction so widely spread and so firmly
held must be based on some principle, call it instinct or intuition or
what you will, which is deeper than logic and cannot be confuted by
reasoning.

[Sidenote: The view of the pettiness and insignificance of man.]

On the other hand, there are those who take a different view of human
nature, and who find in its contemplation a source of humility rather
than of pride. They remind us how weak, how ignorant, how short-lived is
the individual, how infirm of purpose, how purblind of vision, how
subject to pain and suffering, to diseases that torture the body and
wreck the mind. They say that if the few short years of his life are not
wasted in idleness and vice, they are spent for the most part in a
perpetually recurring round of trivialities, in the satisfaction of
merely animal wants, in eating, drinking, and slumber. When they survey
the history of mankind as a whole, they find the record chequered and
stained by folly and crime, by broken faith, insensate ambition, wanton
aggression, injustice, cruelty, and lust, and seldom illumined by the
mild radiance of wisdom and virtue. And when they turn their eye