THE DOCTRINE OF DESCENT. 283 
designates man, to be in perfect harmony with these 
sublimest thoughts. 
Our previous reflections and deductions would lack 
their conclusion were man to be excluded,—could not 
and must not all that is said of the genesis and connec- 
tion of animal being, be directly applicable to the know- 
ledge of his nature also. The repugnance to the doctrine 
of Descent, the doubt with regard to it, the indignation 
lavished upon it, are all concentrated on its applicability 
and application to man; and if the body be perforce 
abandoned to us, the mental sphere of man is at least 
to remain inscrutable, a zoli tangere to the investigation 
of nature. A few years ago, it was a consolation to the 
opponents of the doctrine of Descent that Darwin had 
not directly pronounced himself with respect to ‘man. 
Anger was vented on his adherents, who had out- 
darwined Darwin. To this was added the unfortunate 
misapprehension that the champions of the doctrine of 
Descent made the human race proceed from the en- 
noblement of the orang, chimpanzee, or gorilla—in short, 
from extant apes. 
But from the first appearance of the Darwinian doc- 
trine, every moderately logical thinker must have re- 
garded man as similarly modifiable, and as the result of 
the mutability of species; and Darwin has now told us, 
in his work on the “Descent of Man,” why he did not 
enunciate this self-evident inference in his first book ; 
he did not wish thereby to strengthen and provoke pre- 
judice against his view. Knowing human weakness, he 
withheld the conclusion. “It seemed to me sufficient,” 
he says, “in the first edition of my ‘ Origin of Species,’ 
that by this work ‘light would be thrown on the origin 
