Part 13 (1/2)

So much in compliment of mankind. Now this same marvelous creature, man, has a critical spirit. He is endued with a quality of progression. The motive power in this progression is dissatisfaction. Let us listen to the sages when they drop eulogy and become out of conceit with themselves.

”MAN IS IMPROVABLE,”

says Horace Mann. ”Some think he is only a machine, and that the only difference between a man and a mill is, that one is carried by blood and the other by water.” Says Pascal: ”What a chimera is man! what a singular phenomenon! what a chaos! what a scene of contrariety! A judge of all things yet a feeble worm; the shrine of truth, yet a ma.s.s of doubt and uncertainty; at once the glory and the scorn of the universe.

If he boasts, I lower him; if he lowers himself I raise him; either way I contradict him, till he learns he is a monstrous, incomprehensible mystery.” ”Make yourself an honest man,” says Carlyle sarcastically, ”and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.” This remark sprang, probably, from a reading of

WHATELEY'S COMPARISON

of a rogue with a man of honor: ”Other things being equal, an honest man has this advantage over a knave, that he understands more of human nature: for he knows that _one_ honest man exists, and concludes that there must be more; and he also knows, if he is not a mere simpleton, that there are some who are knavish. But the knave can seldom be brought to believe in the existence of an honest man. The honest man _may_ be deceived in particular persons, but the knave is _sure_ to be deceived whenever he comes across an honest man who is not a mere fool.” ”Man is

TOO NEAR ALL KINDS OF BEASTS--

a fawning dog, a roaring lion, a thieving fox, a robbing wolf, a dissembling crocodile, a treacherous decoy, and a rapacious vulture.”

This was the poet Cowley's opinion. ”Of all the animals” scolds Boileau, ”which fly in the air, walk on the ground, or swim in the sea, from Paris to Peru, from j.a.pan to Rome, the most foolish animal, in my opinion, is man.” People must be very bad, indeed, who get opinions as low as the two last quoted. That rapacious vulture George Peabody! that dissembling crocodile William Cowper! that robbing wolf Girard! that thieving fox Charles Sumner! that fawning dog Napoleon Bonaparte! and those most foolish animals Louis Aga.s.siz and Isaac Newton! It does not well become the weakest links in a chain to boast that they gauge that chain's strength, for the chain can be greatly strengthened, upon this easy discovery of those weak links, by simply dropping them out of connection.

And now comes the query: ”What is man?” He has always been more or less at a loss for some striking and succinct statement of his peculiar characteristics--of the mark that separates him from other animals.

Diogenes Laertius says that Plato having defined man to be a two-legged animal without feathers, he (Diogenes) plucked a c.o.c.k, and, bringing him into the school, said ”Here is Plato's man.” From this joke there was added to the definition ”With broad flat nails.” Even this definition is just as faulty, as it does not exclude many species of the monkey. Again it was thought that man was the only being who laughs. Says Addison, poetically: ”Man is the merriest species of the creation; all above and below him are serious.” But scientists refuse to accept this distinction as accurate. ”Man is an animal

THAT COOKS HIS VICTUALS,”

says Burke. ”So does the buzzard” (in the sun) say the learned men. ”Man uses tools,” says another. ”So does the beaver--the ourang-outang hurls stones, and fights with clubs,” say the scientists. Finally, says Adam Smith, in his ”Wealth of Nations:” ”Man is an animal that makes bargains; no other animal does this--one dog does not change a bone with another.” We must be satisfied with this, I suppose, but it is a very faulty declaration, for I have seen one dog change a bone with another, in which instance a big dog traded with a little dog, and impressed the little dog with the desirability, under the circ.u.mstances, of the smaller of two bones! And I am not sure but that

ALL BARGAINS, WHETHER HUMAN OR CANINE,

are of that stripe, wherein the superior of two bone or money getters acquaints the inferior with the good points of a bad bargain. Buffon, at the beginning of his Natural History, is unable, even, to give any line of demarcation between vegetable and animal substances, and perplexes the mind with an infinitude of faulty attempts, in turn showing the weak spot in each. ”For man is a plant,”

SAYS PLUTARCH,

”not fixed in the earth nor immovable, but heavenly, whose head, rising, as it were, from a root upwards, is turned towards heaven.” ”A man ought to carry himself in the world,” says Henry Ward Beecher, continuing and building on Plutarch's thought, ”as an orange-tree would, if it could walk up and down in the garden,--swinging perfume from every little censer it holds up to the air.”

Know then thyself, presume not G.o.d to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.

This is the declaration of the great poet Pope, and a glance across the world's literature will show that the mandate was unneeded. For ages before the birth of the celebrated ”wasp of Twickenham,” mankind had been at study on the subject. ”The burden of history” says George Finlayson, ”is what man has been; of law, what he does; of physiology, what he is; of ethics, what he ought to be; of revelation, what he shall be.” ”Man is the product of his own history,” says Theodore Parker. ”The discoverer finds nothing so grand or tall as himself, nothing so valuable to him. The greatest star is that at the end of the telescope--

THE STAR THAT IS LOOKING, NOT LOOKED AFTER,

nor looked at.” ”Man is greater than a world, than systems of worlds; there is more mystery in the union of soul with the physical than in the creation of the universe.” This sentence is by Henry Giles. To the first portion of it I give unqualified belief. I believe, too, with John Ruskin, that ”the basest thought possible concerning man is that he has no spiritual nature; and the foolishest misunderstanding of him possible is, that he has, or should have, no animal nature. For his nature is n.o.bly animal, n.o.bly spiritual--coherently and irrevocably so; neither part of it may, but at its peril, expel, despise, or defy the other.”

”Man is the metre of all things,” says Aristotle,

”THE HAND

is the instrument of instruments, and the mind is the form of forms.”