Herein Lies The Fundamental Difference Between Man And
His Inferiors.
As regard his flesh and blood, his senses, appetites,
and affections, the difference is one of degree rather than
Of kind,
but in the deliberate invention of such unity of limbs as is
exemplified by the railway train - that seven-leagued foot which five
hundred may own at once - he stands quite alone.
In confirmation of the views concerning mechanism which we have been
advocating above, it must be remembered that men are not merely the
children of their parents, but they are begotten of the institutions
of the state of the mechanical sciences under which they are born and
bred. These things have made us what we are. We are children of the
plough, the spade, and the ship; we are children of the extended
liberty and knowledge which the printing press has diffused. Our
ancestors added these things to their previously existing members;
the new limbs were preserved by natural selection and incorporated
into human society; they descended with modifications, and hence
proceeds the difference between our ancestors and ourselves. By the
institutions and state of science under which a man is born it is
determined whether he shall have the limbs of an Australian savage or
those of a nineteenth-century Englishman. The former is supplemented
with little save a rug and a javelin; the latter varies his physique
with the changes of the season, with age and with advancing or
decreasing wealth. If it is wet he is furnished with an organ which
is called an umbrella and which seems designed for the purpose of
protecting either his clothes or his lungs from the injurious effects
of rain. His watch is of more importance to him than a good deal of
his hair, at any rate than of his whiskers; besides this he carries a
knife and generally a pencil case. His memory goes in a pocket-book.
He grows more complex as he becomes older and he will then be seen
with a pair of spectacles, perhaps also with false teeth and a wig;
but, if he be a really well-developed specimen of the race, he will
be furnished with a large box upon wheels, two horses, and a
coachman.
Let the reader ponder over these last remarks and he will see that
the principal varieties and sub-varieties of the human race are not
now to be looked for among the negroes, the Circassians, the Malays,
or the American aborigines, but among the rich and the poor. The
difference in physical organisation between these two species of man
is far greater than that between the so-called types of humanity.
The rich man can go from here to England whenever he feels inclined,
the legs of the other are by an invisible fatality prevented from
carrying him beyond certain narrow limits. Neither rich nor poor as
yet see the philosophy of the thing, or admit that he who can tack a
portion of one of the P. and O. boats on to his identity is a much
more highly organised being than one who cannot.
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