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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: Unless above himself he can
Exalt himself, how mean a thing is man.
But I cannot forget that many an old Greek poet or sage, and many
a sixteenth and seventeenth century one, would have interpreted
the monkey's heroism from quite a different point of view; and
would have said that the poor little creature had been visited
suddenly by some "divine afflatus"--an expression quite as
philosophical and quite as intelligible as most philosophic
formulas which I read nowadays--and had been thus raised for the
moment above his abject selfish monkey-nature, just as man
requires to be raised above his. But that theory belongs to a
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