UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 
“Science and Immortality.” It is very pronounced 
in Alfred Russel Wallace; in fact, in his later work 
his anthropomorphism is rampant. He has cut more 
fantastic tricks before the high heaven of science 
than any other man of our time of equal scientific 
attainments. What a contrast to the sane, patient, 
and truth-loving mind of Darwin! Yet Darwin, it 
seems to me, humanized his birds when he endowed 
the females with human femininity, attributing to 
them love of ornament and of fine plumage, and 
making this love of ornamentation the basis of his 
theory of sexual selection. It seems as though in 
that case he could not find the key to his problem, 
and so proceeded to make one — a trick to which 
we are all prone. 
Since science dehumanizes nature, its progress as 
science is in proportion as it triumphs over the an- 
thropomorphic character which our hopes, our fears, 
our partialities, in short, our innate humanism, has 
bestowed upon the outward world. Literature, on 
the other hand, reverses this process, and humanizes 
everything it looks upon; its products are the fruit 
of the human personality playing upon the things of 
life and nature, making everything redolent of hu- 
man qualities, and speaking to the heart and to the 
imagination. Science divests nature of all human 
attributes and speaks to impersonal reason alone. 
For science to be anthropomorphic is to cease to be 
science; and for literature to be anything else is to 
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