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Among the things it hadn't attained to was the easy anthropocentric attitude that is part of our civilisation. Ellen thought him very wonderful, as he stood theorising about the experiences he had described, like a lecturer in front of his magic-lantern pictures; for he was wholly given up to speculation and yet was as substantial as any man of action.
The mediaeval thinker, however freely he might exercise his powers of logical analysis in rationalizing the Christian Epic, never permitted himself to question its general anthropocentric and mystical view of the world. The philosophic mystic assumes the role of a docile child. He feels that all vital truth transcends his powers of discovery.
II, he supports this judgment by comparing the relative shortness of the existence of mankind with the length of the preceding geological periods: "Since the awakening of the human consciousness, human vanity and human arrogance have delighted in regarding Man as the real main-purpose and end of all earthly life, and as the centre of terrestrial Nature, for whose use and service all the activities of the rest of creation were from the first defined or predestined by a 'wise providence. How utterly baseless these presumptuous anthropocentric conceptions are, nothing could evince more strikingly than a comparison of the duration of the Anthropozoic or Quaternary Epoch with that of the preceding Epochs."
While the geocentric and anthropocentric illusions have been dispelled, the illusion of the immobility and eternity of classes still persists.
The Greek scientific and philosophic world was an anthropocentric world, and this comes out in the overwhelming mass of medical as distinct from biological writings that have come down to us. Such, too, is the sentiment expressed by the poets in their descriptions of the animal creation: Many wonders there be, but naught more wondrous than man: *
But in 1856 Charles Darwin came and, summarizing the results of studies that had been carried on for a century, destroyed in the name of science the superb illusion that man is the king and center of creation. The anthropocentric illusion rebelled against the word of Darwin, accusing him of lowering the human life to the level of the dirt or of the brute.
To bring nations to surrender themselves to new ideas is not the affair of a day. Comparative Theology of India; its Phase of Sorcery; its Anthropocentric Phase. VEDAISM the Contemplation of Matter, or Adoration of Nature, set forth in the Vedas and Institutes of Menu. The Universe is God. Transmutation of the World. Doctrine of Emanation. Transmigration. Absorption. Penitential Services.
Nature must be kept "in her place." Her extrava-gances are not to be admired. This anthropocentric spirit has made him what he is the ideal anti-sentimentalist and anti-vulgarian. For excess of sentiment, like all other intemperance, is the mark of that unsober and unsteady beast the crowd.
Stronger arguments can hardly be furnished against the customary teleology, or Doctrine of Design, than the fact that all more highly developed organisms possess such rudimentary organs." Besides, he calls it an anthropocentric error to look upon man as a preconceived aim of creation and a true final purpose of terrestrial life; and on page 17, of Vol.
But men live on illusions and give way but reluctantly to the progress of science, in order to devote themselves arduously to the ideal of the new truths which rise out of the essence of things of which mankind is a part. After the geocentric illusion had been destroyed, the anthropocentric illusion still remained.
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