88 THE CREED OF SCIENCE, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL. 



exhaustion be pushed sufficiently far, there may result 

 the permanent perverted function of the cerebral organs, 

 which is at once the cause and the physical correlate of 

 that chaos in consciousness which we call insanity the 

 state where reason and virtue are alike unthroned. Our 

 moralists did not know or did not sufficiently ponder the 

 fact that virtue, as well as reason, may be attacked and 

 destroyed by disorder in. the cerebral atoms, or that both 

 may be perverted long before they are destroyed, by 

 prolonged disorder even in the general bodily machinery, 

 truths which are now becoming the commonplaces of 

 mental physiology, but which have not even yet been 

 taken up by the moralist and assigned their proper 

 place and weight in the sphere of ethical speculation or 

 construction. 



Our past philosophers did, indeed, know that man 

 was an animal. This was a very old proposition, that 

 did much service in the various treatises on the school 

 logic ; nevertheless, the philosophers by no means dreamt 

 of the full truth and significance of this well-worn and 

 universally accepted proposition. Man is an animal, as 

 Science teaches, and nothing more; and an animal he 

 remains till the latest day of his earthly sojourn. He is 

 an animal all too surely, and descended from a long line 

 of animal ancestors, stretching backwards to the very 

 dawn of life ; and however far he may appear in certain 

 directions to have transcended his animal origin, and to 

 have put on spiritual or angelic nature ; whatever height 

 he has reached in thought, or art, or virtue ; still the 

 animal sleeps at the bottom of his being, a fundamental, 

 heavy thing, never to be got rid of, which ever and anon 

 wakes into aggressive and unreasoning life, and which 

 ever pulls him down again to the earth after his most 

 aspiring spiritual flights. There still exists in all of us, 



