That Roosevelt can
do no wrong is Burroughs's opinion; and that Burroughs is always right is
Roosevelt's opinion. Both are agreed that animals do not reason. They
assert that all animals below man are automatons and perform actions only
of two sorts--mechanical and reflex--and that in such actions no
reasoning enters at all. They believe that man is the only animal
capable of reasoning and that ever does reason. This is a view that
makes the twentieth-century scientist smile. It is not modern at all.
It is distinctly mediaeval. President Roosevelt and John Burroughs, in
advancing such a view, are homocentric in the same fashion that the
scholastics of earlier and darker centuries were homocentric. Had the
world not been discovered to be round until after the births of President
Roosevelt and John Burroughs, they would have been geocentric as well in
their theories of the Cosmos. They could not have believed otherwise.
The stuff of their minds is so conditioned. They talk the argot of
evolution, while they no more understand the essence and the import of
evolution than does a South Sea Islander or Sir Oliver Lodge understand
the noumena of radio-activity.

Now, President Roosevelt is an amateur. He may know something of
statecraft and of big-game shooting; he may be able to kill a deer when
he sees it and to measure it and weigh it after he has shot it; he may be
able to observe carefully and accurately the actions and antics of
tomtits and snipe, and, after he has observed it, definitely and
coherently to convey the information of when the first chipmunk, in a
certain year and a certain latitude and longitude, came out in the spring
and chattered and gambolled--but that he should be able, as an individual
observer, to analyze all animal life and to synthetize and develop all
that is known of the method and significance of evolution, would require
a vaster credulity for you or me to believe than is required for us to
believe the biggest whopper ever told by an unmitigated nature-faker.
No, President Roosevelt does not understand evolution, and he does not
seem to have made much of an attempt to understand evolution.

Remains John Burroughs, who claims to be a thorough-going evolutionist.
Now, it is rather hard for a young man to tackle an old man. It is the
nature of young men to be more controlled in such matters, and it is the
nature of old men, presuming upon the wisdom that is very often
erroneously asso