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 rudi- 
ments, they were, nevertheless, satisfied to assume the 
privileged 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 clas- 
sification of organisms. 
Man, as consisting of flesh and blood, seemed, indeed, 
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 juxtaposition, ac- 
cording to the analogy of their characteristics, without 
any scrutiny of the deeper causes of their divergence 
or similarity, man indisputably occupied the highest 
grade in the system of living beings. Linnzeus 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 
