n out of the rib of man:
this account, when ideally taken, is so inexpressibly comprehensive,
pregnant, and deep--when taken really, so perfectly improbable. It will be
likewise difficult to believe that even the old readers of the account--at
least those of them who looked deeper and were more enlightened--took with
extreme {318} literalness the expression, that God breathed into the
nostrils of man who is dust of the ground, the breath of life. The third
chapter has still other features from which we have at least to assume that
the author did not at all intend to give importance to an extremely literal
conception of it. Now, if the second account is the more ideal one, the
meaning of it is: that man, his being, his aim, his primitive history, is
made the centre of the entire description, and around him all the rest is
grouped; while in the first account he appears to be more the end of the
whole creation--as he presents himself to natural investigation in the real
process of creation, as the last member in the chain, not as the centre in
a circle or a star. Now if that is the case, if the second account of
creation, having man as its centre, is the more ideal, then we certainly
must not overlook the fact that in the ideal account man is called dust of
the ground. Then the nature of dust also belongs, from the ideal point of
view, so necessarily to the nature of man that the question, whether the
connection of this man who is dust of the ground, with this ground, is
brought about through the form of a preceding animal organism, or not, is
no longer of importance. Therefore, if we oppose the animal ancestry of man
for the general reasons that we do not wish to descend from something
lower, that lower nevertheless is present as dust of the ground. And if we
oppose such a pedigree on account of the ugliness and wickedness which
exist in the animal world, we have to point to the fact that, on the one
hand, mankind also has stains which are uglier than those which disfigure
the wildest beast of prey, and that, on the other hand, the animal world
shows features which {319} are so noble that no man need be ashamed of
them. It is certainly a right feeling to which Darwin, in his "Descent of
Man," gives expression, when he says: "For my own part, I would as soon be
descended from that heroic little monkey who braved his dreaded enemy in
order to save the life of his keeper, or from that old baboon who,
descending from the mountai