And the golden stars of the heavens rose higher,
Harmoniously blending their crowns of fire,
And the waves which no ruling hand may know,
‘Midst a thousand murmurs, now high, now low,
Sing, while curving their foaming crests to the sea,
“It is the Lord God! It is He.”
The “Mécanique Céleste” of Laplace, the “Principia” of Newton, Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” the “Orientales” by Victor Hugo—are the fruits of the faculty of abstraction.
XXXII.—Appearance of Man.
In the year 1800, a being, half savage, who lived in the woods, clambered up the trees, slept upon dried leaves, and fled on the approach of men, was brought to a physician named Pinel. Some sportsmen had found him; he had no voice, and was devoid of intelligence; he was known as the little savage of Aveyron. The Parisian savants for a long time disputed over this strange individual. Was it an ape?—was it a wild man?
The learned Dr. Itard has published an interesting history of the savage of Aveyron. “He would sometimes descend,” he writes, “into the garden of the deaf and dumb, and seat himself upon the edge of the fountain, preserving his balance by rocking himself to and fro; after a time his body became quite still, and his face assumed an expression of profound melancholy. He would remain thus for hours—regarding attentively the surface of the water—upon which he would, from time to time, throw blades of grass and dried leaves. At night, when the clear moonlight penetrated into the chamber he occupied, he rarely failed to rise and place himself at the window, where he would remain part of the night, erect, motionless, his neck stretched out, his eyes fixed upon the landscape lit up by the moon, lost in a sort of ecstasy of contemplation.” This being was, undoubtedly, a man. No ape ever exhibited such signs of intelligence, such dreamy manifestations, vague conceptions of the ideal—in other words, that faculty of abstraction which belongs to humanity alone. In order worthily to introduce the new inhabitant who comes to fill the earth with his presence—who brings with him intelligence to comprehend, to admire, to subdue, and to rule the creation ([Pl. XXXII.]), we require nothing more than the grand and simple language of Moses, whom Bossuet calls “the most ancient of historians, the most sublime of philosophers, the wisest of legislators.” Let us listen to the words of the inspired writer: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”
“And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”