ut
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,[24] 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 raised you to manhood through a series of inferior forms, is
only of moment to you in this respect--that in the one case you cannot
expect your children to be nobler creatures than you are yourselves--in
the other, every act and thought of your present life may be hastening
the advent of a race which will look back to you, their fathers (and you
ought at least to have attained the d