Universal solidarity

The questions of the origin of man and of the future of Humanity have a capital importance, for upon their solution depends one of the principal phases of morality and of the laws that determine the relations of men among themselves, and those of Humanity with animality.

When all creations were referred to Humanity, when the Universe and all its splendors were made solely to delight its eyes, man, this superior creation, this absolute king of animate and inanimate nature, existed above all for pride and for egoism; he was the ensemble of all created perfections! God had reunited in him all the faculties and had made nothing except for him.

But progress marches; Science applies its magnifying lens to all the laws; it makes appear one by one all our basenesses and undermines all our illusions. It was not for the pleasure of our eyes that those orbs of gold were created; immutable and universal laws govern them as they govern us; they have a life apart, an existence of their own, and beings as advanced or more advanced than Humanity there pursue their incessant march through the infinite, toward the conquest of progress! Man's universal pride and egoism find themselves reduced to terrestrial proportions; man is no longer the lord of the Universe, having only God as his superior; he is a part of the superior creation, but he is not all of that creation and must recognize that if he has inferiors, he is quite imperfect for having superiors who outdistance him on the route of perfection!… Ah! would he be obliged to restrict his empire still further?… Instead of being a terrestrial dominator with assured rights, would he be no more than a parvenu? Would he be born in that obscure chaos that stirs at his feet? Could the intelligences that surround him and that rise to a notable height in the beings submitted to his domination one day equal his own? Is he no more than a human animal, and would the animal be a future man? What a painful perspective for the disdainful and their limited spirits! but what new sources of intellectual enjoyments! what an immense glow, permitting a further glimpse of the uncreated, for the progressive Spirits par excellence!… Those inferior creatures, until now considered as formless products of the divinity essaying itself toward creation, would they be no more than successive modes of one and the same being?… Would none be deprived of the benefit of its acts?… This animal that suffers, that feels, that loves, that perceives and manifests itself, could it, like man himself, make its future by its own acts? be the instrument of its future happiness? What is there revolting in such a conception? And would you not insult God, you who consider it an abjection that Humanity draws its origin from animality? In what way would animality, created by the same power, be less noble than Humanity? Since the earth turns, morality has lost the appearance of a dwarf to take on the body of a giant.

Continue your researches; study, meditate incessantly, and you will discover that Humanity is only one link of the immense chain that, from the infinitely small (the atom) leads to the infinitely great (God), and morality will have no limits, like Him who decreed it.

Channing. n [1]

[v. William Ellery Channing.]