Thursday, January 10, 2013

The Enfant Terrible of Natural History

Is Man a development of the beast? Why, certainly. Did you not know that you were a brute once? That when your bodily frame first came into existence, you had no right to be thought higher in the scale of creation, more precious in the sight of God, than the unborn young of an animal?...And if it should prove that our bodies, this slime we were formed from, is part of a coherent system of gradual biological evolution, we are still, as intellectual creatures, the enfant terrible of Natural History, a cuckoo's egg in the nest of bewildered Creation.

Ronald Knox, The Beginning and End of Man