Doubtless We All Possess The Feeling In Some Degree - The Sense
Of Loneliness And Desolation And Dismay At The Thought Of An
Uninhabited World, And Of Long Periods When Man Was Not.
Is
it not the absence of human life or remains rather than the
illimitable wastes of thick-ribbed ice and snow which daunts
us at the thought of Arctic and Antarctic regions?
Again, in
the story of the earth, as told by geology, do we not also
experience the same sense of dismay, and the soul shrinking
back on itself, when we come in imagination to those deserts
desolate in time when the continuity of the race was broken
and the world dispeopled? The doctrine of evolution has made
us tolerant of the thought of human animals, - our progenitors
as we must believe - who were of brutish aspect, and whose
period on this planet was so long that, compared with it, the
historic and prehistoric periods are but as the life of an
individual. A quarter of a million years has perhaps elapsed
since the beginning of that cold period which, at all events
in this part of the earth, killed Palaeolithic man; yet how
small a part of his racial life even that time would seem if,
as some believe, his remains may be traced as far back as the
Eocene! But after this rude man of the Quaternary and
Tertiary epochs had passed away there is a void, a period
which to the imagination seems measureless, when sun and moon
and stars looked on a waste and mindless world.
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