uty in form, and of nobility in character,
which stand in the chaos of creation between the Living and the Dead, to
separate the things that have in them a sacred and helpful, from those
that have in them an accursed and destroying, nature; and the power of
Athena, first physically put forth in the sculpturing of these [Greek:
zoa and erpeta], these living and reptile things, is put forth, finally,
in enabling the hearts of men to discern the one from the other; to know
the unquenchable fires of the Spirit from the unquenchable fires of
Death; and to choose, not unaided, between submission to the Love that
cannot end, or to the Worm that cannot die.

101. The unconsciousness of their antagonism is the most notable
characteristic of the modern scientific mind; and I believe no credulity
or fallacy admitted by the weakness (or it may sometimes rather have
been the strength) of early imagination, indicates so strange a
depression beneath the due scale of human intellect, as the failure of
the sense of beauty in form, and loss of faith in heroism of conduct,
which have become the curses of recent science,[122] art, and policy.

102. That depression of intellect has been alike exhibited in the mean
consternation confessedly felt on one side, and the mean triumph
apparently felt on the other, during the course of the dispute now
pending as to the origin of man. Dispute for the present, not to be
decided, and of which the decision is to persons in the modern temper of
mind, wholly without significance: and I earnestly desire that you, my
pupils, may have firmness enough to disengage your energies from
investigation so premature and so fruitless, and sense enough to
perceive that it does not matter how you have been made, so long as you
are satisfied with being what you are. If you are dissatisfied with
yourselves, it ought not to console, but humiliate you, to imagine that
you were once seraphs; and if you are pleased with yourselves, it is not
any ground of reasonable shame to you if, by no fault of your own, you
have passed through the elementary condition of apes.

103. Remember, therefore, that it is of the very highest importance that
you should know what you _are_, and determine to be the best that you
may be; but it is of no importance whatever, except as it may contribute
to that end, to know what you have been. Whether your Creator shaped you
with fingers, or tools, as a sculptor would a lump of clay, or gradually
r