eir faces as infants. Whatever wild image
one employs it cannot keep pace with the panic of the human fancy, when
once it supposes that the fixed type called man could be changed. If
some millionaire wanted arms, some porter must grow ten arms like an
octopus; if he wants legs, some messenger-boy must go with a hundred
trotting legs like a centipede. In the distorted mirror of hypothesis,
that is, of the unknown, men can dimly see such monstrous and evil
shapes; men run all to eye, or all to fingers, with nothing left but one
nostril or one ear. That is the nightmare with which the mere notion of
adaptation threatens us. That is the nightmare that is not so very far
from the reality.

It will be said that not the wildest evolutionist really asks that we
should become in any way unhuman or copy any other animal. Pardon me,
that is exactly what not merely the wildest evolutionists urge, but some
of the tamest evolutionists too. There has risen high in recent
history an important cultus which bids fair to be the religion of the
future--which means the religion of those few weak-minded people who
live in the future. It is typical of our time that it has to look
for its god through a microscope; and our time has marked a definite
adoration of the insect. Like most things we call new, of course, it is
not at all new as an idea; it is only new as an idolatry. Virgil takes
bees seriously but I doubt if he would have kept bees as carefully as
he wrote about them. The wise king told the sluggard to watch the ant, a
charming occupation--for a sluggard. But in our own time has appeared a
very different tone, and more than one great man, as well as numberless
intelligent men, have in our time seriously suggested that we should
study the insect because we are his inferiors. The old moralists merely
took the virtues of man and distributed them quite decoratively and
arbitrarily among the animals. The ant was an almost heraldic symbol of
industry, as the lion was of courage, or, for the matter of that, the
pelican of charity. But if the mediaevals had been convinced that a
lion was not courageous, they would have dropped the lion and kept the
courage; if the pelican is not charitable, they would say, so much the
worse for the pelican. The old moralists, I say, permitted the ant to
enforce and typify man's morality; they never allowed the ant to upset
it. They used the ant for industry as the lark for punctuality; they
looked up at the