Words from Robert Ingersoll - 5

I think we came up from the lower animals... Now, when I first heard that doctrine, I didn't like it... I hated to believe it. I don't know that it is the truth now. I'm not satisfied upon that question; I stand about eight to seven. I thought it over. I read about it... And finally I said, "Well, I guess we came up from the lower animals." I thought it all over, the best I could, and I said, "I guess we did." And after a while I began to like it, and I like it now better than I did before. Do you know that I would rather belong to a race that started with skullless vertebrae in the dim Laurentian seas, wiggling without knowing why they wiggled, swimming without knowing where they were going; but kept developing and getting a little further up and a little further up, all through the animal world, and finally striking this chap in the dugout. And getting a little bigger, and this fellow calling that fellow a heretic, and that fellow calling the other an infidel, and so on. For in the history of the world, the man who is ahead has always been called a heretic. Recollect this! I would rather come from a race that started from that skullless vertebrate, and come up and up and up and finally produced Shakespeare, who found the human intellect wallowing in a hut and touched it with a wand of his genius and it became a palace dome and pinnacle. I would rather belong to a race that commenced then and produced Shakespeare, with the eternal hope of an internal future for the children of progress leading from the far horizon, beckoning men forward, forward and onward forever. I had rather belong to this race and commence there with that hope, than to have sprung from a perfect pair, on which the Lord has lost money every day since.

The Liberty of Man, Woman, and Child