WHAT IS AFFINITY? 5 



The science of language, with its great results, dis- 

 plays the most important side of human nature — man 

 in the elevation which he has gradually acquired above 

 the rest of the living world — but it displays this side 

 alone. Although the founders of linguistic inquiry, of 

 whom we have already spoken, had already represented 

 man as first acquiring reason and becoming man, by 

 means of language proceeding from primitive rudiments, 

 they were, nevertheless, satisfied to assume the privi- 

 leged position of man as an absolute endowment, or a 

 self-evident axiom. This continued as long as natural 

 science was limited to a merely superficial classification 

 of organisms. 



Man, as consisting of flesh and blood, seemed, in- 

 deed, akin to the higher animals; but so long as their 

 descent, their actual consanguinity was not discussed, so 

 long as nothing was demanded beyond their juxtaposi- 

 tion, according to the analogy of their characteristics, 

 without any scrutiny of the deeper causes of their diver- 

 gence or similarity, man indisputably occupied the highest 

 grade in the system of living beings. Linnseus places 

 man in the order of Primates, together with bats, le- 

 murs, and apes, without, on that account, being accused 

 from pulpit and from chair of an assault on the dignity 

 of mankind. Buffon, likewise, was able, unrebuked, to 

 indulge his whim, by specially discussing our race in his 

 description of the ass. 



Only when, quite recently, the world became aware 

 that the word " affinity,'' hitherto uttered with supreme 

 indifference, was henceforth to be taken seriously and 

 literally, since that which is akin is also the fruit of one 

 and the same tree, a beam of joyful recognition thrilled 



