Such, then, are the two rival answers which, in the long dark, groping course of humanity’s childhood, human beings have given to the most important of all questions—the question: What is Man? I have said that the answers, no matter how sincere, no matter how honestly arrived at, are erroneous, false to fact, and monstrous. I have said, and I repeat, that the misconceptions involved in them have done more throughout the by-gone centuries, and are doing more to-day, than all other hindering causes, to hamper and thwart the _natural_ activity of the time-binding energies of man and thus to retard the _natural_ progress of civilization. It is not merely our privilege, it is our high and solemn duty, to examine them. To perform the great duty is not an easy task. The misconceptions in question have come down to us from remote antiquity; they have not come down singly, separately, clean-cut, clear and well-defined; they have come _entangled_ in the complicated mesh of traditional opinions and creeds that constitute the vulgar “philosophy”—the mental fog—of our time. If we are to perform the duty of examining them we have first of all to draw them forth, to disengage them from our inherited tangle of beliefs and frame them in suitable words; we have next to bring ourselves to realize vividly and keenly that the conceptions, thus disentangled and framed, are in fact, whether they be true or false, at the very heart of the social philosophy of the world; we have in the third place to detect the fundamental character of the blunder involved in them—to see clearly and coldly wherein they are wrong and why they are ruinous; we have, finally, to trace, if we can, their deadly effects both in the course of human history and in the present status of our human world.
The task of disengaging the two monstrous misconceptions from the tangled skein of inherited beliefs and framing them in words, I have already repeatedly performed. Let us keep the results in mind. Here they are in their nakedness: (1) Human beings—men, women, and children—are animals (and so they are natural): (2) human beings are neither natural nor _super_natural, neither wholly animal nor wholly “divine,” but are _both_ natural and _super_natural _at once_—a sort of mysterious hybrid compound of brute and gods.