Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/40

26 would have the disadvantage of forcing upon us, if we accepted it, a whole series of similar hypotheses, such as prophecy, the soul and immortality, all of which are incapable of proof, and can not be sustained by our reason, while at the same time they are in direct opposition to all the laws of nature, which we know to be fixed and unyielding facts. If we descend from the universe to our race, to man, we see in him, as a necessary consequence of our conceptions of material nature, merely a Jiving being, fitting perfectly into its allotted place in the ranks of living organisms, and governed in all things by the common laws of the organic world. We can discover no proofs of any special favors or privileges granted to man more than those enjoyed by every other animal or vegetable organism. We believe that the development of the human as well as of all other races, was perhaps first made possible by sexual selection, and certainly promoted by it; and that the struggle for existence, using the term in its most comprehensive sense, shapes the destinies of nations as well as of the most obscure individual and is the foundation for all forms of political and social life.

This is our conception of the universe, our belief. Upon this base are founded all our principles, and our conceptions of justice and morality. It has become an elementary constituent part of our civilization. We inhale it with the air we breathe. It has become impossible to close our intellects against it. The pope who denounced it in his encyclical, was under its influence. The Jesuits try in vain to save their pupils from its taint, by bringing them up in an artificial atmosphere of mediæval theology and scholastics, as a marine animal is kept alive in an inland aquarium, by salt water brought from the distant sea; but they are already filled