Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/655

Rh about the middle of the fifth century remarks in his commentary on the first chapter of Genesis, that God created the beasts of the earth and the cattle after their kind on the same day on which he created man, in order that these creatures might be there ready to serve him.

But it would be superfluous to multiply examples of the influence of this anthropocentric idea as it has worked itself out in the history of mankind. Every science has had to encounter its opposition, and it has been a stumbling-block in the way of every effort to enlarge human knowledge and to promote human happiness. It has tended to check the progress of hygienic research and sanitary reform; for if man is of such exceptional importance that his conduct or misconduct can bring down epidemics upon whole communities and vast continents as visitations of divine wrath, whoever seeks to ward off or to stay these punishments is guilty of a sacrilegious attempt to parry the blow aimed at the wicked by the arm of the Almighty, and, by thus setting himself in antagonism to God, becomes in fact an ally and adversary of the devil. Thus vaccination was denounced, not on the ground taken by its present opponents, that it is useless as a preventive of smallpox and a prolific source of other diseases, but on account of its real or supposed prophylactic effectiveness, since it impiously wrenched from the hand of the Deity one of his most fatal weapons of retribution.

To what absurdities of presumption the anthropocentric conception has paved the way is evident from the belief, once universally entertained, that the sun, moon, and stars were placed in the firmament with express reference to man, and exerted a benign or baleful influence upon his destiny from the cradle to the grave. Owen Glendower's bombastic boast—

 ". . . At my nativity The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes, Of burning cressets; and at my birth The frame and huge foundation of the earth Shaked like a coward"—

was well answered by Hotspur: "Why, so it would have done at the same season if your mother's cat had but kittened, though yourself had ne'er been born." And yet this fulsome brag of the Welsh swashbuckler was only an extravagant statement of what the captious Henry Percy and his contemporaries all held to be virtually true. Poe embodies the same sentiment in his youthful poem, Al Aaraaf, and would fain preserve this brighter world of his fancy from the contagion of human evil—