rites:

"Not being able to appreciate or conceive of the distinction between the
psychical phenomena of a Chimpanzee, and of a Boschisman or of an Aztec,
with arrested brain growth, as being of a nature so essential as to
preclude a comparison between them, or as being other than a
difference of degree, I cannot shut my eyes to the significance of that
all-pervading similitude of structure--every tooth, every bone, strictly
homologous--which makes the determination of the difference between
'Homo' and 'Pithecus' the anatomist's difficulty."

Surely it is a little singular, that the 'anatomist,' who finds it
'difficult' to 'determine the difference' between 'Homo' and 'Pithecus',
should yet range them on anatomical grounds, in distinct sub-classes!)

We are indeed told by those who assume authority in these matters, that
the two sets of opinions are incompatible, and that the belief in
the unity of origin of man and brutes involves the brutalization and
degradation of the former. But is this really so? Could not a sensible
child confute by obvious arguments, the shallow rhetoricians who would
force this conclusion upon us? Is it, indeed, true, that the Poet, or
the Philosopher, or the Artist whose genius is the glory of his age, is
degraded from his high estate by the undoubted historical probability,
not to say certainty, that he is the direct descendant of some naked
and bestial savage, whose intelligence was just sufficient to make him a
little more cunning than the Fox, and by so much more dangerous than
the Tiger? Or is he bound to howl and grovel on all fours because of the
wholly unquestionable fact, that he was once an egg, which no ordinary
power of discrimination could distinguish from that of a Dog? Or is the
philanthropist or the saint to give up his endeavours to lead a noble
life, because the simplest study of man's nature reveals, at its
foundations, all the selfish passions and fierce appetites of the merest
quadruped? Is mother-love vile because a hen shows it, or fidelity base
because dogs possess it?

The common sense of the mass of mankind will answer these questions
without a moment's hesitation. Healthy humanity, finding itself hard
pressed to escape from real sin and degradation, will leave the brooding
over speculative pollution to the cynics and the 'righteous overmuch'
who, disagreeing in everything else, unite in blind insensibility to
the nobleness of the visible world, and in inability to