f the unseen, and striving, however wildly and
fantastically, to become an angel and not an ape, I will say the hermit,
and not the Caesar, is the civilised man.

There are plenty of histories of civilisation and theories of
civilisation abroad in the world just now, and which profess to show you
how the primaeval savage has, or at least may have, become the civilised
man. For my part, with all due and careful consideration, I confess I
attach very little value to any of them: and for this simple reason that
we have no facts. The facts are lost.

Of course, if you assume a proposition as certainly true, it is easy
enough to prove that proposition to be true, at least to your own
satisfaction. If you assert with the old proverb, that you may make a
silk purse out of a sow's ear, you will be stupider than I dare suppose
anyone here to be, if you cannot invent for yourselves all the
intermediate stages of the transformation, however startling. And,
indeed, if modern philosophers had stuck more closely to this old
proverb, and its defining verb 'make,' and tried to show how some person
or persons--let them be who they may--men, angels, or gods--made the
sow's ear into the silk purse, and the savage into the sage--they might
have pleaded that they were still trying to keep their feet upon the firm
ground of actual experience. But while their theory is, that the sow's
ear grew into a silk purse of itself, and yet unconsciously and without
any intention of so bettering itself in life; why, I think that those who
have studied the history which lies behind them, and the poor human
nature which is struggling, and sinning, and sorrowing and failing around
them, and which seems on the greater part of this planet going downwards
and not upwards, and by no means bettering itself, save in the increase
of opera-houses, liquor-bars, and gambling-tables, and that which
pertaineth thereto; then we, I think, may be excused if we say with the
old Stoics--[Greek text]--I withhold my judgment. I know nothing about
the matter yet; and you, O my imaginative, though learned friends, know I
suspect very little either.

Eldest of things, Divine Equality:

so sang poor Shelley, and with a certain truth. For, if, as I believe,
the human race sprang from a single pair, there must have been among
their individual descendants an equality far greater than any which has
been known on earth during historic times. But that equality was at
b