II OBJECTIONS 155 



capacities ; and will discern in his long progress 

 through the Past, a reasonable ground of faith in 

 his attainment of a nobler Future. 



They will remember that in comparing civilised 

 man with the animal world, one is as the Alpine 

 traveller, who sees the mountains soaring into the 

 sky and can hardly discern where the deep 

 shadowed crags and roseate peaks end, and where 

 the clouds of heaven begin. Surely the awe- 

 struck voyager may be excused if, at first, he 

 refuses to believe the geologist, who tells him that 

 these glorious masses are, after all, the hardened 

 mud of primeval seas, or the cooled slag of sub- 

 terranean furnaces of one substance with the 

 dullest clay, but raised by inward forces to that 

 place of proud and seemingly inaccessible glory. 



But the geologist is right ; and due reflection 

 on his teachings, instead of diminishing our 

 reverence and our wonder, adds all the force of 

 intellectual sublimity to the mere aesthetic intui- 

 tion of the uninstructed beholder. 



And after passion and prejudice have died 

 away, the same result will attend the teachings of 

 the naturalist respecting that great Alps and 

 Andes of the living world Man. 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 



