THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 



184 



upon different rungs of that Platonic ladder of love v^hich 

 man was certainly not the first to make some effort 

 to climb. 



Of this I am so sure that I feel it no betrayal of my hu- 

 manity w^hen I find myself entering w^ith emotional sym- 

 pathy into a spectacle which is more than a mere show, 

 absorbing though it would be if it were no more than that. 

 Modern knowledge gives me, I think, ample justification 

 for the sense that I am not outside but a part of it, and if 

 it did not give me that assurance, then I should probably 

 agree that I would rather be "some pagan suckled in a 

 creed outworn" than compelled to give it up. 



Those very same biological sciences which have traced 

 back to their lowly origins the emotional as well as the 

 physiological characteristics of the sentient human being 

 inevitably furnish grounds for the assumption that if we 

 share much with the animals, they must at the same time 

 share much with us. To maintain that all the conscious 

 concomitants of our physical activities are v^thout ana- 

 logues in any creatures other than man is to fly in the 

 face of the very evolutionary principles by which those 

 "hardheaded" scientists set so much store. It is to assume 

 that desire and joy have no origins in simpler forms of 

 the same thing, that everything human has "evolved" ex- 

 cept the consciousness which makes us aware of what we 

 do. A Descartes, who held that man was an animal-machine 

 differing from other animal-machines in that he alone 

 possessed a gland into which God had inserted a soul, 

 might consistently make between man and the other ani- 

 mals an absolute distinction. But the evolutionist is the 

 last man who has a right to do anything of the sort. 



He may, if he can consent to take the extreme position 



