The Works of Daniel Webster, Volume 1Webster, Daniel
History
The Works of Daniel Webster, Volume 1
Webster, Daniel
United States -- Politics and government -- 1815-1861
But it is true, also, that his own animal organization gives him
superiority, and is among the most wonderful of the works of God on
earth. It contributes to cause, as well as prove, his elevated rank in
creation. His port is erect, his face toward heaven, and he is
furnished with limbs which are not absolutely necessary to his support
or locomotion, and which are at once powerful, flexible, capable of
innumerable modes and varieties of action, and terminated by an
instrument of wonderful, heavenly workmanship,--the human hand. This
marvellous physical conformation gives man the power of acting with
great effect upon external objects, in pursuance of the suggestions
of his understanding, and of applying the results of his reasoning power
to his own purposes. Without this particular formation, he would not
be man, with whatever sagacity he might have been endowed. No
bounteous grant of intellect, were it the pleasure of Heaven to make
such grant, could raise any of the brute creation to an equality with
the human race. Were it bestowed on the leviathan, he must remain,
nevertheless, in the element where alone he could maintain his
physical existence. He would still be but the inelegant, misshapen
inhabitant of the ocean, "wallowing unwieldy, enormous in his gait."
Were the elephant made to possess it, it would but teach him the
deformity of his own structure, the unsightliness of his frame,
though "the hugest of things," his disability to act on external
matter, and the degrading nature of his own physical wants, which
lead him to the deserts, and give him for his favorite home the torrid
plains of the tropics. It was placing the king of Babylon sufficiently
out of the rank of human beings, though he carried all his reasoning
faculties with him, when he was sent away to eat grass like an ox. And
this may properly suggest to our consideration, what is undeniably
true, that there is hardly a greater blessing conferred on man than his
natural wants. If he had wanted no more than the beasts, who can say
how much more than they he would have attained? Does he associate,
does he cultivate, does he build, does he navigate? The original impulse
to all these lies in his wants. It proceeds from the necessities of
his condition, and from the efforts of unsatisfied desire. Every want,
not of a low kind, physical as well as moral, which the human breast
feels, and which brutes do not feel and cannot feel, raises man by so
much in the scale of existence, and is a clear proof and a direct
instance of the favor of God towards his so much favored human
offspring. If man had been so made as to desire nothing, he would
have wanted almost every thing worth possessing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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