approach toward deducing man from the inferior animals and may find a variety of species to be the result of one genus. The struggle of life may shape limbs, or bones, or wings, or lungs, or the organs of sight and of digestion, and from some old unity a great variety of life might proceed and much might be explained by that phrase "the survival of the fittest," but all these changes fall under the law of utility and leave unexplained the prevalence of the beautiful. If the nightingale is the offshoot of an oyster that is no reason why this bird should sing a beautiful song in the silent night. That such a rich melody should be poured out in that silence when music can be heard and when the human heart most wishes to hear the notes are not results which can fall under the law of "survival of the fittest," for while the laws of use may lighten the wing of the ostrich and in a million years transform him into an eagle, and while rabbits chased by hounds for a million years might make a kangaroo out of their old rabbit-hood and make the hound rival an arrow or a rifle-ball, no such development will ever make the rabbit sing a beautiful song in the quiet midnight. Nor will any amount of peril and mutation of climate and food explain the tail of the bird-of-paradise, nor the eyes in the tail of a peacock. Nor can the theories of evolution make that proud bird spread out fanlike his gorgeous colors. In the department of the beautiful the law of physical evolution fails. The materialistic philosophy will not explain the spots on a guinea-fowl, nor the stripes on a tiger, nor the tints of a rose, nor the perfume of a violet. But man is the only creature that appreciates all this infinite decoration. The tiger does not admire his own frescoed covering; nor is the bird-of-paradise any more of an esthete than is a hen or a goose. Man alone sees and appreciates the world of ornamentation, and therefore may we conclude him to be all alone in the domain of life-not an animal, but a unique. |