GENESIS OF MAN, INTELLECTUALLY 



well-bred people with whom they are directly- 

 acquainted, and also to some extent by a few of 

 those quite exceptional men and women who 

 have left names recorded in history. Though 

 other elements are admitted into the conception, 

 these are nevertheless the ones which chiefly 

 give to it its character. Employing then this 

 conception of mankind, abstracted from these 

 inadequate instances, our critics ask us how it is 

 possible to imagine that a race possessed of such 

 a godlike intellect, such a keen aesthetic sense, 

 and such a lofty soul, should ever have de- 

 scended from a race of mere brutes. And again 

 they ask us how can a race endowed with such 

 a capacity for progress be genetically akin to 

 those lower races of which even the highest show 

 no advance from one generation to another. 

 Confronted thus by difficulties which reason 

 and imagination seem alike incompetent to over- 

 come, they too often either give up the problem 

 as insoluble, or else — which amounts to nearly 

 the same thing — have recourse to the deus ex 

 machina as an aid in solving it. 



Influenced, no doubt, by some such mental 

 habit as this, Mr. St. George Mivart declares 

 that, while thoroughly agreeing with Mr. Dar- 

 win as to man's zoological position, he never- 

 theless regards the difference between ape and 

 mushroom as less important than the differ- 

 ence between ape and man, so soon as we take 

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