The antiquity of man from the point of view of religion : in answer to Mr. S. Laing's Modern science and modern thought / by F. Hugh Capron.

  • Capron, F. Hugh (Frederick Hugh), 1857-1955.
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The antiquity of man from the point of view of religion : in answer to Mr. S. Laing's Modern science and modern thought / by F. Hugh Capron. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    jaded appetites. The scene, in fact, presents to our gaze the picture of a terrible contrast—man risen to the zenith of intellectual possibility, but sunk in the abyss of spiritual death. And now the Lecturer steps forward and addresses his audience. ‘ Gentlemen,’ he says, ‘ the three pictures which have just been submitted to your notice represent three stages in the history of man. The highly intellectual but vicious animal whom you saw de- picted in the third and last picture is the lineal descendant of the Gardener and the Savage; and he represents the condition towards which mankind is even now hastening. The brutal barbarity of the Palaeolithic, the primitive and modest civilization of the Husbandman, have given place to a scientific development almost infinite, an intellectual capacity almost divine. But side by side with this wondrous growth you will have observed a corresponding decay. The purity and innocence which charac- terized our second picture have yielded to the gradual encroachments of Vice, until it may be asserted that man’s last state of immorality has become, by its very association with intellectual advance, ten times more abysmal than even the enormities of his savage progenitors. ‘ This last picture, though an attempt to present the future before your eyes, must not be regarded as wholly fanciful or illusory. While duly according to Intellect a just recognition of that vast progress