The Matter of man can never become human. A metaphysic or metaphor of man is of two terms:--Man is a Will to an impossible Divinity by way of an impossible Humanity. For four score years or five score, a heart-beat between the two eternities, some dozen elements are elected or doomed to consciousness as man: and to this consciousness is imparted by the manner of his generation an insignificant heritage of accumulated tendency, impulse and impression: so insignificant, within recorded time, that it may be ignored. It has been suggested that out of man, the descendant of a lower animal, something higher than man may be evolved. The suggestion does not commend itself to me. I know of no data that can make the Evolution of Species from three or four originals by Natural Selection a credible assumption. The age of miracles is past. When we ask for a sign we are referred to the evolution of a new species of louse. If any mortal thing, elephant or microscopic insect, is still unprovided, by all means let it have its complement of lice: all-bounteous nature is not likely to be wanting in that department. That Matter should produce a new form of degenerate life in which it is especially prolific is no proof of the Evolution of Species by Natural Selection. The appearance of a new pedicular degraded-hemipterous insect in a hitherto inverminate habitat ensures certainly a due degree of phthiriasis where no phthiriasis was before--a consummation to rejoice the moral order of pediculina, and doubtless confirming the metaphysician of the parasitic world in his doctrine of the Universe as a Will to be Suctorial; but such an isolated phenomenon is not necessarily an illustration of the method of evolution, and might be called with greater probability an act of special creation. To me it is an instance of the material, poetic or imaginative style of Matter in its mood of depravity--a mood analogous to that in which literature produces Sinon, Tartuffe, Parolles, Chivy Slyme. A poetical metaphysic or metaphor is that of the Universe as Imagination becoming Phenomena. As in the Matter of a poet--nourished by the past, productive in the present, and sending forth aerial roots into the future--thoughts, imaginings, shapes, and legends of infinite variety, uncalled arise, and unlaboured become; so in the Matter of the earth--which is Matter of the Universe, from all eternity to all eternity, which is all memory, all imagination, all energy--life in infinite variety arises and becomes: not by the breaking up of species, although that may be a side-show at the world's fair, but by the appearance of species the staple of evolution proceeds. If one speck or clot of protoplasm can arise and become, and after becoming, can evolve an organism, millions of specks of protoplasm can arise and become, each evolving a different organism, and the whole constituting an unbroken chain of being: not evolution in a straight line, but cubic evolution, a pullulation of species. Consider it: there must be similarities without any necessity for either lineal or collateral evolution, although these are both thrown in by exuberant nature: if the organisms are vertebrate, then they must all have backbones; if they are invertebrate they will be, all of them, without backbones; if the generation is viviparous the mother--plant or animal--will suckle her young; if the generation is oviparous the mother--plum-tree, grain, poultry, or spider--will produce eggs: but to suppose that a fish changes into a bird, and a bird into a beast by Natural Selection, as it is at present understood, is to demand from man a credulity that could die a martyr's death to prove that the earth is flat. It is not a wanton mark of interrogation which I place against the Darwinian theory of the Origin of Species. What seems to me the subtle beginning of the one thing to be dreaded, a new anthropomorphism, demands resistance. On the threshold of Darwin's theory of the Evolution of Species by Natural Selection a danger-signal warns the jealous observer. The probability that allied species were descended from a common parent had sunk deeply into Darwin's mind; "but for some years," he writes, "I could not conceive how each form became so excellently adapted to its habits of life. I then began systematically to study domestic productions, and after a time saw clearly that _man's selective power was the most important agent_." (Darwin's Letter to Professor Haeckel of 8 October, 1864.) The italics are mine.