1 9 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



make to me whether I am sprung from an ape or an angel ? The one 

 main fact is that, somehow or other, I am here. How I came here may 

 be a very interesting question to speculative persons, but my thoughts 

 and sensations and faculties are the same on any hypothesis. Sunlighi 

 is just as bright if the sun was once a nebulous mass. The conven- 

 ience of our arms and legs is not in the slightest degree affected by the 

 consideration that our great-great-grandfathers were nothing better 

 than more or less movable stomachs. The poet's imagination and 

 the philosopher's reason are none the worse because the only sign 

 of life given by their ancestors was some sort of vague contractility 

 in a shapeless jelly. Our own personal history, if we choose to 

 trace it far enough back, has taken us through a series of changes 

 almost equally extensive, and we do not think any the worse of our- 

 selves on that account. Our affections and our intellectual faculties 

 are in existence. They are the primary data of the problem, and as 

 long as we are conscious of their existence we need not worry our- 

 selves by asking whether they began to exist by some abrupt change 

 or gradually rose into existence through a sei'ies of changes. There is 

 still quite as much room as ever for the loftiest dreams that visit the 

 imaginations of saints or poets. The mode in which we express 

 ourselves must, of course, be slightly altered; but, so long as the same 

 instincts exist which sought gratification in the old lang-uas-e, we need 

 not doubt but they will frame a new one out of the changed materials 

 of thought. The fact that religion exists is sufficient demonstration 

 that men feel the need of loving each other, of elevating the future 

 and the past above the present, of rising above the purely sensual 

 wants of our nature, and so on ; the need will exist just as much, 

 whether we take one view or other of a set of facts which, on any 

 hypothesis, happened many thousands of years before we were born, 

 and in regard to which a contented ignorance is far from being an 

 impossible frame of mind. One can understand, after a little trouble, 

 how it was that at a particular period of history people fancied that 

 disinterested love would leave the world, and a moral chaos be pro- 

 duced, if it should be made to appear that it was not literally true that 

 we are all descended from a man who was turned out of a garden for 

 eating an apple. The infidels who assailed, and the orthodox who 

 defended that dogma, really believed that it was an essential corner- 

 stone in the foundations of all religion, which, once removed, nothing 

 but a universal crash could follow. Even the statement that it might 

 possibly be an allegory instead of an historical record nearly frightened 

 our prosaic ancestors out of their wits. Remove one brick from the 

 cunningly-adjusted fabric of orthodoxy, prove that a line of the 

 Hebrew Scriptures was erroneous, and God would vanish from the 

 world, heaven and hell become empty names, all motives for doing 

 good be removed, and the earth become a blank and dreary wilderness. 

 In remote country towns and small clerical coteries some vestiges of 



