Sigmund Freud remarked that each major science has made one
signal contribution to the reconstruction of human thought—and
that each step in this painful progress had shattered yet another
facet of an original hope for our own transcendent importance in
the universe:
Humanity has in course of time had to endure from the hand of
science two great outrages upon its naive self-love. The first was
when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe,
but only a speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable . . . The second was when biological research robbed
man of his particular privilege of having been specially created
and relegated him to a descent from the animal world.
(In one of history's least modest pronouncements, Freud then stated
that his own work had toppled the next, and perhaps last, pedestal
of this unhappy retreat—the solace that, though evolved from a
lowly ape, we at least possessed rational minds.)
But Freud omitted one of the greatest steps from his list, the
bridge between spatial limitation of human dominion (the Galilean
revolution), and our physical union with all "lower" creatures (the
Darwinian revolution). He neglected the great temporal limitation
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