THE NATURAL 



had been able to merge the two ideas, man and animal 

 into one, he, being a man without insurmountable preju- 

 dices, might have produced a still readable book. The 

 moment would have been favorable. People were be- 

 ginning to have some exact knowledge of animals' 

 habits. Bonnet had proved the startling relationships of 

 animal and vegetable reproduction; the essential principle 

 of physiology had been found; the science of life was 

 brief enough to be clear; one might have ventured a 

 theory as to the psychological unity of the animal series. 

 Such a work would have prevented numerous follies 

 in the century then beginning. One would have become 

 accustomed to consider human love as one form of num- 

 berless forms, and not perhaps, the most remarkable 

 of the lot, a form which clothes the universal instinct 

 of reproduction; and its apparent anomalies would have 

 found a normal explanation amid Nature's extravagance. 

 Darwin arrived, inaugurated a useful system, but his 

 views were too systematized, his aim too explanatory 

 and his scale of creatures with man at the summit, as 

 the culmination of universal effort, is of a too theologic 

 simplicity. Man is not the culmination of nature, he is 

 in Nature, he is one of the unities of life, that is all. 

 He is the product of a partial, not of total evolution; 

 the branch whereon he blossoms, parts like a thousand 

 other branches from a common trunk. Moreover, Dar- 

 win, truckling to the religiose pudibundery of his race, 

 has almost wholly neglected the actual facts of sex; 

 this makes his theory of sexual selection, as the principle 

 of change, incomprehensible. But even if he had taken 

 account of the real mechanism of love, his conclusions, 



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