The Universal KinshipMoore, J. Howard (John Howard)
Philosophy
The Universal Kinship
Moore, J. Howard (John Howard)
Evolution; Human beings; Sociology
not made in the image of the hypothetical creator of heaven and
earth, but in the image of the ape. Man is not a fallen god, but a
promoted reptile. The beings around him are not conveniences, but
cousins. Instead of stretching away to the stars, man’s pedigree
slinks down into the sea. Horrible revelation! Frightful antithesis!
Instead of celestial genesis and a ‘fall’—long and doleful
promotion. Instead of elysian gardens and romance—the slime.
Instead of a god with royal nostrils miraculously animating an
immortal duplicate—a little lounging cellule, too small to be seen
and too senseless to distinguish between midnight and noon. But the
situation is not half so horrible as it looks to be to those who see
only the skin of things. Is it not better, after all, to be the
honourable outcome of a straightforward evolution than the offspring
of flunky-loving celestials? Are the illustrious children of the ape
less glorious than the sycophants of irrational theological systems?
Darwin dealt in his quiet way some malicious blows to human conceit,
but he also bequeathed to a misguided world the elements of its
ultimate redemption.
The supposed psychical gulf between human and non-human beings has
no more existence, outside the flamboyant imagination of man, than
has the once-supposed physical gulf. It is pure fiction. The
supposition is a relic of the rapidly dwindling vanity of
anthropocentricism, and is perpetuated from age to age by human
selfishness and conceit. It has no foundation either in science or
in common-sense. Man strives to lessen his guilt by the laudation of
himself and the disparagement and degradation of his victims. Like
the ostrich, who, pursued by death, improvises an imaginary escape
by plunging its head into the desert, so man, pursued by the
vengeful correctives of his own conscience, fabricates a fictitious
innocence by the calumniation of those upon whom he battens. But
such excuses cannot much longer hold out against the rising
consciousness of kinship. Psychology, like all other sciences, is
rapidly ceasing to attend exclusively to human phenomena. It is
lifting up its eyes and looking about; it is preparing to become
comparative. It has come to realise that the mind of man is but a
single shoot of a something which ramifies the entire animal world,
and that in order to understand its subject it is necessary for it
to familiarise itself with the whole field of phenomenon. The soul
of man did not commence to be in the savage. It commenced to be in
the worm, whose life man grinds out with his heel, and in the
bivalve that flounders in his broth. The roots of consciousness are
in the sea. Side by side with physical evolution has gone on
psychical evolution; side by side with the evolution of organs and
tissues has gone on the evolution of intellect, sensibility, and
will. Human nature and human mind are no more _sui generis_ than are
human anatomy and physiology. The same considerations that prove
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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