XI 
THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US 
I 
~ TAKE the title of this paper from those great 
lines in Whitman beginning — 
“ Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me” — 
in which he launches in vivid imaginative form 
the whole doctrine of evolution some years before 
Darwin had published his epoch-making work on 
the “Origin of Species.” 
“T see afar down the huge first Nothing, and I know I was even 
there.” 
I do not know that Whitman had any concrete 
belief in the truth of the animal origin of man. He 
read as picture and parable that which the man of 
science reads as demonstrable fact. He saw and felt 
the great truth of evolution, but he saw it as written 
in his own heart and not in the great stone book of 
the earth, and he saw it written large. He felt its 
cosmic truth, its truth in relation to the whole 
scheme of things; he felt his own kinship with all 
that lives, and had a vivid personal sense of his debt 
to the past, not only of human history, but also to 
the past of the earth and the spheres. And he felt 
this as a poet and not as a man of science. 
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