Page:Clarence S. Darrow - Realism in Literature and Art (1899).djvu/3



Man is Nature's last and most perfect work, but, however high his development or great his achievements, he is yet a child of the earth and the rude forces that have formed all the life that exists thereon. He cannot Separate himself from the environment that gave him birth, and a thousand ties of nature bind him back to the long forgotten past and prove his kinship to all the lower forms of life that have sprung from the great universal mother, Earth.

As there is a common law of being, which controls all living things, from the aimless motions of the mollusk in the sea to the most perfect conduct of the best developed man, so all the activities of human life, from the movements of the savage digging roots, to the work of the greatest artist with his brush, are controlled by universal law, and are good or bad, perfect or imperfect, as they conform to the highest condition nature has imposed.