Let us be disinterested. Let us
sacrifice ourselves, and, above all, our children, to raise the general
average of human invention and attainment to the highest possible mark. To
be sure, we are working in the dark. We do not know, not even if we are
Huxley do we know, at what point in the grand, universal scale we shall
ultimately come in. We know, or think we know, about how far below us
stand the gorilla and the seal. We patronize them kindly for learning to
turn hand-organs or eat from porringers. Let us hope that, if we have
brethren of higher races on other planets, they will be as generously
appreciative of our little all when we have done it; but, meanwhile, let
us never be deterred from our utmost endeavor by any base and envious
misgivings that possibly we may not be the last and highest work of the
Creator, and in a fair way to reach very soon the final climax of all
which created intelligences can be or become. Let us make the best of
dyspepsia, paralysis, insanity, and the death of our children. Perhaps we
can do as much in forty years, working night and day, as we could in
seventy, working only by day; and the five out of twelve children that
live to grow up can perpetuate the names and the methods of their fathers.
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