It has always seemed to us truly extraordinary that Christians should have raised such a shriek of disgust at the "degrading" notion that man was made out of the lower animals, when the very Bible they defended described him, with splendid common sense, as made out of red mud. But it is stranger still that philosophers who have accepted in a healthier spirit the genial fact of our kinship with the other creatures, should try to revive the silly and vulgar prejudice against the animal world in order to throw discredit on the moral dignity of man or woman. To refuse to judge of souls, laws, creeds or tendencies on their own merits is the perfection of cosmic snobbery. To inquire whether a man's father did not keep a shop is far less snobbish than to inqure whether his ancestor did not keep a tail.
G. K. Chesterton, "Woman and the Philosophers," from The Speaker (26 January 1901).
