XI 



THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US 



I TAKE the title of this paper from those great 

 hnes in Whitman beginning — 



" Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me " — 



in which he launches in vivid imaginative form 

 the whole doctrine of evolution some years before 

 Darwin had published his epoch-making work on 

 the "Origin of Species." 



" I see afar down the huge first Nothing, and I know I was even 

 there." 



I do not know that Whitman had any concrete 

 belief in the truth of the animal origin of man. He 

 read as picture and parable that which the man of 

 science reads as demonstrable fact. He saw and felt 

 the great truth of evolution, but he saw it as written 

 in his own heart and not in the great stone book of 

 the earth, and he saw it written large. He felt its 

 cosmic truth, its truth in relation to the whole 

 scheme of things; he felt his own kinship with all 

 that lives, and had a vivid personal sense of his debt 

 to the past, not only of human history, but also to 

 the past of the earth and the spheres. And he felt 

 this as a poet and not as a man of science. 



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