CHARLES DARWIN. 135 



in the lowly stock whence man has sprunf]^, the best evidence 

 of the splendour of his capacities ; and will discern in his long 

 progress through the Past, a reasonable ground of faith in his 

 attainment of a noble Futui'e. . . . And, after passion and 

 prejudice have died away, . . . our reverence for the nobility 

 of manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge that Man 

 is, in substance and in structure, one with the brutes ; for he 

 alone possesses the marvellous endowment of intelligible and 

 rational speech, whereby, in the secular period of his existence, 

 he has slowly accumulated and organised the experience which 

 is almost wholly lost with the cessation of every individual life 

 in other animals ; so that now he stands ... far above the 

 level of his humble .fellows, and transfigured from his grosser 

 nature by reflecting, here and there, a ray from the infinite 

 source of truth." 



Goethe sees in Nature "the living visible garment of God," and 

 Tennyson thus beautifully expresses this idea, together with that 

 of the divine origin of the spiritual nature of man : — 



*' The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills, and the plains — ■ 

 Ai-e not these, Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns ? 



Is not the Vision He ? tho' He be not that which He seems ? 

 Dreams are not true while they last, and do we not live in dreams ? 



Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb, 

 Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him ? 



Dark is the world to thee : thyself art the reason why ; 



For is He not all but thou, that hast power to feel ' I am I ? ' " 



The doctrine of Evolution, as established by Darwin, has 

 completely broken down our conception and definition of species, 

 for a species is now seen to be but a variety so far removed 

 from its nearest allies, by the dying out of intermediate forms, 

 that we are enabled to frame a distinctive description of it. A 

 similar view of the artificial character of genera has long been 

 held. jS'ow, a species exists not in Nature ; we give to it a 

 name merely for our own convenience ; so that henceforth all 

 controversies as to what is and what is not a true species, are 

 at an end, and we have only to consider which forms are 

 sufficiently distinctive to bear specific names. It has broken 

 down our belief in the distinctiveness of the animal and vegetable 

 kingdoms ; it has shown us the reason why all living things, 

 both plants and animals, are alike " in their chemical composition, 

 their cellular structure, their laws of growth, and their liability 

 to injurious influences;" why in plants and animals "sexual 

 reproduction seems to be essentially similar ; " why there are 



