CONCLUSION 101 



before his bellowings. Man is not a god, nor in 

 any imminent danger of becoming one. He is not 

 a celestial star-babe dropped down among mundane 

 matters for a time and endowed with wing possi- 

 bilities and the anatomy of a deity. He is a 

 mammal of the order of primates, not so lament- 

 able when we think of the hyena and the serpent, 

 but an exceedingly discouraging vertebrate com- 

 pared with what he ought to be. He has come 

 up from the worm and the quadruped. His 

 relatives dwell on the prairies and in the fields, 

 forests, and waves. He shares the honours and 

 partakes of the infirmities of all his kindred. He 

 walks on his hind-limbs like the ape ; he eats 

 herbage and suckles his young like the ox; he 

 slays his fellows and fills himself with their blood 

 like the croccdile and the tiger ; he grows old and 

 dies, and turns to banqueting worms, like all that 

 come from the elemental loins. He cannot exceed 

 the winds like the hound, nor dissolve his image 

 in the mid-day blue like the eagle. He has not the 

 courage of the gorilla, the magnificence of the 

 steed, nor the plaintive innocence of the ring-dove. 

 Poor, pitiful, glory-hunting hideful ! Born into a 

 universe which he creates when he comes into it, 

 and clinging, like all his kindred, to a clod that 

 knows him not, he drives on in the preposterous 

 storm of the atoms, as helpless to fashion his fate 

 as the sleet that pelts him, and lost absolutely in 

 the somnambulism of his own being. 



