It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in Man for his nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could co...nscientiously have traced man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the doctrine of Evolution.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All that blesses the step of the antelope all the grace a giraffe lifts to the highest leaves... all steadfastness and pleasant gazing, alien to ennui, dwell secretly behind man's misery.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I would have every man so much like a wild antelope, so much a part and parcel of nature, that his very person should thus sweetly... advertise our senses of his presence, and remind us of those parts of nature which he most haunts. I feel no disposition to be satirical, when the trapper's coat emits the odor of musquash even; it is a sweeter scent to me than that which commonly exhales from the merchant's or the scholar's garments. When I go into their wardrobes and handle their vestments, I am reminded of no grassy plains and flowery meads ... but of dusty merchants' exchanges and libraries rather.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The difference between humans and other organisms is that humans, having discerned something of how evolution works, are now able ...to confront their choices consciously. That is not the same as saying that we can now control evolution. I don't know how much of a difference it is in effect: we may be able to perceive our choices and still be unable to choose and act. By overpopulating the planet as we are now doing, for example, we are making an evolutionary choice just as unplanned as that of our hominid ancestors when they began cracking antelope and other hominids over the head with sticks. Nevertheless, we do differ from the first hominids in our having some notion of the implications of our behavior.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »