n beings
have falsely believed themselves to be animals. So, too, of the rival
belief--the belief that humans are neither natural nor supernatural but are
both at once, at once brutal and divine, hybrid offspring of beast and
god. The belief is monstrous, it is very pathetic and very sad, but its
origin is easy to understand; once invented, it became a powerful
instrument for evil men, for impostors, but it was not invented by them;
it was only an erroneous result of an honest effort to understand and to
explain. For the obvious facts created a real puzzle to be explained: On
the one hand, men, women and children--animal-hunting and animal-hunted
human beings--certainly resembled animals physically in a hundred
unmistakable ways; on the other hand, it became more and more evident that
the same animal-resembling human beings could do many things which animals
never did and could not do. Here was a puzzle, a mystery. Time-binding
curiosity demanded an explanation. What was it to be? Natural science had
not yet arisen; critical conception--conception that avoids the mixing of
dimensions--was in the state of feeble infancy. It is easy to understand
what the answer had to be--childish and mythical; and so it was--humans are
neither animals nor gods, neither natural nor _super_natural, they are
both at once, a mixture, a mysterious union of animal with something
"divine."

Such, then, are the two rival answers which, in the long dark, groping
course of humanity's childhood, human beings have given to the most
important of all questions--the question: What is Man? I have said that the
answers, no matter how sincere, no matter how honestly arrived at, are
erroneous, false to fact, and monstrous. I have said, and I repeat, that
the misconceptions involved in them have done more throughout the by-gone
centuries, and are doing more to-day, than all other hindering causes, to
hamper and thwart the _natural_ activity of the time-binding energies of
man and thus to retard the _natural_ progress of civilization. It is not
merely our privilege, it is our high and solemn duty, to examine them. To
perform the great duty is not an easy task. The misconceptions in question
have come down to us from remote antiquity; they have not come down
singly, separately, clean-cut, clear and well-defined; they have come
_entangled_ in the complicated mesh of traditional opinions and creeds
that constitute the vulgar "philosophy"--the mental fog--of our