...
I strongly recommend all the young men and young women of the United
States to whom it may be eligible, to overhaul the well-freighted
fleets, the literatures of Italy, Spain, France, Germany, so full of
those elements of freedom, self-possession, gay-heartedness, subtlety,
dilation, needed in preparations for the future of the States. I only
wish we could have really good translations. I rejoice at the feeling
for Oriental researches and poetry, and hope it will go on.
DARWINISM--(THEN FURTHERMORE)
Running through prehistoric ages--coming down from them into the
daybreak of our records, founding theology, suffusing literature, and
so brought onward--(a sort of verteber and marrow to all the antique
races and lands, Egypt, India, Greece, Rome, the Chinese, the Jews,
&c., and giving cast and complexion to their art, poems, and their
politics as well as ecclesiasticism, all of which we more or less
inherit,) appear those venerable claims to origin from God himself, or
from gods and goddesses--ancestry from divine beings of vaster beauty,
size, and power than ours. But in current and latest times, the theory
of human origin that seems to have most made its mark, (curiously
reversing the antique,) is that we have come on, originated, developt,
from monkeys, baboons--a theory more significant perhaps in its
indirections, or what it necessitates, than it is even in itself. (Of
the twain, far apart as they seem, and angrily as their conflicting
advocates to-day oppose each other, are not both theories to be
possibly reconcil'd, and even blended? Can we, indeed, spare either of
them? Better still, out of them is not a third theory, the real one,
or suggesting the real one, to arise?)
Of this old theory, evolution, as broach'd anew, trebled, with indeed
all-devouring claims, by Darwin, it has so much in it, and is so
needed as a counterpoise to yet widely prevailing and unspeakably
tenacious, enfeebling superstitions--is fused, by the new man, into
such grand, modest, truly scientific accompaniments--that the world of
erudition, both moral and physical, cannot but be eventually better'd
and broaden'd in its speculations, from the advent of Darwinism.
Pages:
527
528
529
530
531
532
533
534
535
536
537
538
539
540
541
542
543
544
545
546
547
548
549
550
551