Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/341

Rh, became at any moment the Word of God. In the history of the individual, so far as his physical structure is concerned, science can trace each step from the microscopic cellular germ to the fully developed man. If we believe that man as man is an immortal soul, though we can not say when he became so, or that, strictly speaking, he ever did become so, we need not be surprised to meet the difficulty again in the evolution of man from lower forms.

In both cases man is what he is, whatever he came from. We do not say a man is not rich because we have found out how he made his fortune. We do not say the eye can not see because we can trace it back to a speck of pigment sensitive to light. Whether God formed man literally "from the dust of the ground," or raised him by progressive selection to what he is; whether, in scientific language, man rose to manhood "by the final arbitrament of the battle for life"; or whether, as Mr. Wallace thinks, there is a certain amount of "unearned increment" to be accounted for, man is still man, "the glory and the scandal of the universe." Darwin, feeling "the extreme difficulty, or rather impossibility," of conceiving the universe as not being the work of "a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man," is driven back into agnosticism by the question, "Can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animals, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?" Yet when Darwin, in all the wealth of his scientific experience, and all the strength of his disciplined reason, gives us his matured judgment on the processes of Nature, who would dream of saying," How can I trust the conclusions of a man who was once a baby"? We trust him for what he is, and not for what he was. And man is man, whatever he came from. And what is man?—

 "Distinguished link in being's endless chain! Midway from nothing to the Deity! A beam ethereal sullied and absorpt! Though sullied and dishonored, still divine! Dim miniature of greatness absolute! An heir of glory! a frail child of dust! Helpless immortal! insect infinite! A worm! a God! "

What a piece of work is man [says Hamlet]. In action, how like an angel; in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

Man is a part of Nature [it has been said], and no artificial definitions can separate him from it. And yet in another sense it is true that man is above Nature—