IN THE NOON OF SCIENCE 



upon us. "Brand," I say, but have we not always 

 recognized our animality and known that the wolf 

 and the tiger slumbered in us? We knew it through 

 a figure of speech, now we know it as a concrete 

 fact. 



Carlyle turned his back upon Huxley on the 

 streets of London because Huxley had taught that 

 mankind had an ape-like ancestor. Why is such a 

 thought uncongenial and repelling? No doubt it 

 is so. There is no poetry or romance in it as there 

 is in the Garden of Eden myth. If we could look up 

 to our remote progenitors instead of down, if we 

 could see them clothed in light and wisdom instead 

 of clothed in hair and bestiality, how much more en- 

 ticing and comforting the prospect would be! But 

 we simply cannot; we must see them adown a long 

 darkening and forbidding prospect, clothed in low 

 animal forms and leading low animal lives — a 

 prospect that grows more and more dim till it is 

 lost in the abyss of geologic time. 



Carlyle would have none of it! The Garden of 

 Eden story had more beauty and dignity. That 

 this "backward glance o'er traveled roads" repels 

 us, is no concern of science. It repels us because we 

 regard it from a higher and fairer estate. Go back 

 there and look up: let the monkey see himself as 

 man (it he were capable of it), and what would his 

 emotions be? The prehistoric man, living in caves 

 and clothed in skins, if we go no further back, is not 

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