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Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
This is the declaration of the great poet Pope, and a glance across the
world's literature will show that the mandate was unneeded. For ages
before the birth of the celebrated "wasp of Twickenham," mankind had
been at study on the subject. "The burden of history" says George
Finlayson, "is what man has been; of law, what he does; of physiology,
what he is; of ethics, what he ought to be; of revelation, what he shall
be." "Man is the product of his own history," says Theodore Parker. "The
discoverer finds nothing so grand or tall as himself, nothing so
valuable to him. The greatest star is that at the end of the telescope--
THE STAR THAT IS LOOKING, NOT LOOKED AFTER,
nor looked at." "Man is greater than a world, than systems of worlds;
there is more mystery in the union of soul with the physical than in the
creation of the universe." This sentence is by Henry Giles. To the
first portion of it I give unqualified belief. I believe, too, with John
Ruskin, that "the basest thought possible concerning man is that he has
no spiritual nature; and the foolishest misunderstanding of him possible
is, that he has, or should have, no animal nature.
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