THE DOCTRINE OF DESCENT. 283 



designates man, to be in perfect harmony with these 

 sublimest thoughts. 



Our previous reflections and deductions would lack 

 their conclusion were man to be excluded, could not 

 and must not all that is said of the genesis and connec- 

 tion of animal being, be directly applicable to the know- 

 ledge of his nature also. The repugnance to the doctrine 

 of Descent, the doubt with regard to it, the indignation 

 lavished upon it, are all concentrated on its applicability 

 and application to man ; and if the body be perforce 

 abandoned to us, the mental sphere of man is at least 

 to remain inscrutable, a noli tangere to the investigation 

 of nature. A few years ago, it was a consolation to the 

 opponents of the doctrine of Descent that Darwin had 

 not directly pronounced himself with respect to man. 

 Anger was vented on his adherents, who had out- 

 darwined Darwin. To this was added the unfortunate 

 misapprehension that the champions of the doctrine of 

 Descent made the human race proceed from the en- 

 noblement of the orang, chimpanzee, or gorilla in short, 

 from extant apes. 



But from the first appearance of the Darwinian doc- 

 trine, every moderately logical thinker must have re- 

 garded man as similarly modifiable, and as the result of 

 the mutability of species ; and Darwin has now told us, 

 in his work on the " Descent of Man," why he did not 

 enunciate this self-evident inference in his first book ; 

 he did not wish thereby to strengthen and provoke pre- 

 judice against his view. Knowing human weakness, he 

 withheld the conclusion. " It seemed to me sufficient," 

 he says, " in the first edition of my ' Origin of Species, 1 

 that by this work ' light would be thrown on the origin 



