The Universal Kinship

It was in the zoology class at college. We had made all the long journey from amoeba to coral, from coral to worm, from worm to mollusk, from mollusk to fish, from fish to reptile, and from reptile to mammal—and there, in the closing pages of faithful old Packard, we found it. ‘A mammal of the order of primates,’ the book said, with that unconcern characteristic of the deliverances of science. I was almost saddened. It was the first intimation I had ever received of that trite but neglected truth that man is an animal.

But the intimation was so weak, and I was at that time so unconscious, that it was not till years later that I began, through reflection, actually to realise the truth here first caught sight of. During these years I knew that man was not a mineral nor a plant—that, indeed, he belonged to the animal kingdom. But, like most men still, I continued to think of him as being altogether different from other animals. I thought of man and the animals, not of man and the other animals. Man was somehow sui generis. He had had, I believed, a unique and miraculous origin; for I had not yet learned of organic evolution. The pre-Darwinian belief that I had come down from the skies, and that non-human creatures of all kinds had been brought into existence as adjuncts of the distinguished species to which I belonged, occupied prominent place in my thinking. Non-human races, so I had been taught, had in themselves no reason for existence. They were accessories. A chasm, too wide for any bridge ever to span, yawned between the human and all other species. Man was celestial, a blue-blood barely escaping divinity. All other beings were little higher than clods. So faithfully and mechanically did I reflect the bias in which I had grown up.

But man is an animal. It was away out there on the prairies, among the green corn rows, one beautiful June morning—a long time ago it seems to me now—that this revelation really came to me. And I repeat it here, as it has grown to seem to me, for the sake of a world which is so wise in many things, but so darkened and wayward regarding this one thing. However averse to accepting it we may be on account of favourite traditions, man is an animal in the most literal and materialistic meaning of the word. Man has not a spark of so-called ‘divinity’ about him. In important respects he is the most highly evolved of animals; but in origin, disposition, and form he is no more ‘divine’ than the dog who laps his sores, the terrapin who waddles over the earth in a carapace, or the unfastidious worm who dines on the dust of his feet. Man is not the pedestalled individual pictured by his imagination—a being glittering with prerogatives, and towering apart from and above all other beings. He is a pain-shunning, pleasure-seeking, death-dreading organism, differing in particulars, but not in kind, from the pain-shunning, pleasure-seeking, death-dreading organisms below and around him. Man is neither a rock, a vegetable, nor a deity. He belongs to the same class of existences, and has been brought into existence by the same evolutional processes, as the horse, the toad that hops in his garden, the firefly that lights its twilight torch, and the bivalve that reluctantly feeds him.

Man’s body is composed fundamentally of the same materials as the bodies of all other animals. The bodies of all animals are composed of clay. They are formed of the same elements as those that murmur in the waters, gallop in the winds, and constitute the substance of the insensate rocks and soils. More than two-thirds of the weight of the human body is made up of oxygen alone, a gas which forms one-fifth of the weight of the air, more than eight-ninths of that of the sea, and forty-seven per cent, of the superficial solids of the earth.