292 ON THE RELATIONS OF MAN 



who, disagreeing in everything else, unite in blind In- 

 sensibility to the nobleness of the visible world, and in 

 inability to appreciate the grandeur of the place Man 

 occupies therein. 



Nay more, thoughtful men, once escaped from the 

 blinding influences of traditional prejudice, will find in the 

 lowly stock whence man has sprung, 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 nobler Future. 



They will remember that in comparing civilized 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 subterranean furnaces of one sub- 

 stance 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 intuition 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 sub- 

 stance 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 organized the 

 experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation 

 of every individual life in other animals ; so that now he 

 stands raised upon it as on a mountain top, 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. 



