Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 1.djvu/521

Rh ; which will lead them to a life of virtue and happiness.

Is it not very extraordinary that mankind in general should so readily acknowledge their resemblance to the Yahoo, whose similitude to man consists only in the make of its body, and the evil dispositions of its mind; and that they should see no resemblance to themselves, in a creature possessed of their chief characteristical marks, reason and speech, and endowed with every virtue, with every noble quality, which constitute the dignity of man's nature, which distinguish and elevate the human above the brute species? Shall they arraign the author of writing a malignant satire against human nature, when reduced to its most abject brutal state, and wholly under the dominion of the passions; and shall they give him no credit for the exalted view in which he has placed the nobler part of our nature, when wholly under the direction of right reason? Or are mankind so stupid, as in an avowed fable, to stop at the outside, the vehicle, without diving into the concealed moral, which is the object of all fable? Do they really take the Yahoo for a man, because it has the form of a man; and the Houyhnhnm for a horse, because it has the form of a horse? But we need not wonder that the bulk of makind should fall into this errour, when we find men pretending to the utmost depths of wisdom, avowing themselves of the same mind. The learned Mr. Harris, in his Philological Inquiries, has the following passage: "Misanthropy is so dangerous a thing, and goes so far in sapping the very foundations of morality and religion, that I esteem the last part of Swift's Gulliver (that I mean relative to his Houyhnhnms and Yahoos) Rh