This Simian World

There is plenty of whimsicality in the literary market. Most of it, unfortunately, has that note of the facetious spinster which the New England magazines have made so famous. Mr. Clarence Day's whimsicality is quite virile; it is the expression of a naturally ingenuous mind; "innocent" in the Nietzschean sense and not incapable of a certain gentle philosophic malice. In "This Simian World" Mr. Day invades the animal kingdom in the spirit of La Fontaine in order to discover man; his aim is to aid the dissemination of a realistic view of life. Are we or are we not Simians? [he asks]. It is no use for any man to try to think anything else out until he has decided first of all, where he stands on that question.... If we are fallen angels, we should go this road: if we are super-apes, that. Mr. Day entertains the question, but not too long; he not only asserts that we are Simians, he points out the danger of becoming under-simianized: “Look at Mrs. Humphry Ward and George Washington. Worthy souls, but no flavour." And he then shows how the decision bears upon education. politics, industry, etc., the right line in each case being that which is most congruous with our own nature and best fitted to develop it. Mr. Day is at his cleverest in his account of natural selection. He surveys the possibilities of all the other animals, suggests what the world would have been like if the cats, the pigs or the elephants had become the masters and created a feline, a porcine or an elephantine civilization, and shows why the Simians won the race. In effect. he draws an ethic from Darwinism, one that compares more than favourably with Herbert Spencer’s. —The Freeman, Volume 1 [1920]