same way there must have been a propitious circumstance to transform the
monkey into man. I think so, in fact; and this propitious circumstance
well deserves to be studied with attention.

Man presents characteristics which distinguish him profoundly from the
animal races: no one disputes it. He possesses speech; he is capable of
religion; he exhibits the varied phenomena of civilization, while the
animals succeed one another generations after generations in the
unrecorded obscurity of a life for ever the same. Suppose we admit that
human phenomena presented themselves at first in a very elementary form;
in rudiments of language and rudiments of religion,--although the
historical sciences do not quite give this result:--still suppose the
case that at a given moment a branch of the monkey species presented the
germ, as little developed as you please, but real, of new phenomena. One
variety of the monkey species has been endowed with speech, has become
religious, capable of civilization, and the other varieties of the
species have not offered the same characteristics, although they have
had the same number of ages in which to develop themselves. Observe well
now my process of reasoning. Remark attentively whether I oppose
theories to facts, whether I substitute oratorical declamations for
arguments. I grant the hypotheses best calculated, as commonly thought,
to contradict my theses. I assume that natural history demonstrates by
solid proofs that the first man was carried in the bosom of a monkey;
and I ask: What is the circumstance which set apart in the animal
species a branch which presented new phenomena? What is the cause? That
monkey-author of our race which one day began to speak in the midst of
his brother-monkeys, amongst whom thenceforward he had no fellow; that
monkey, that stood erect in the sense of his dignity; that, looking up
to heaven, said, My God! and that, retiring into himself, said: I!--that
monkey which, while the female monkeys continued to give birth to their