Man has risen; if he has sprung from the brutes, he can descend again to the same level.

The breath of weariness blew on their humanity and the cords relaxed; they began to go down; their minds fell on sleep, their passions awoke in gusts, heady and senseless like the wind in the gutters of the mountains; beauty was still handed down, but no longer the guiding wit nor the human heart; the seed passed on, it was wrapped in flesh, the flesh covered the bones, but they were the bones and the flesh of brutes, and their mind was as the mind of flies.

I speak to you as I dare; but you have seen for yourself how the wheel has gone backward with my doomed race.

I stand, as it were, upon a little rising ground in this desperate descent, and see both before and behind, both what we have lost and to what we are condemned to go farther downward.

And shall I--I that dwell apart in the house of the dead, my body, loathing its ways--shall I repeat the spell?
Shall I bind another spirit, reluctant as my own, into this bewitched and tempest-broken tenement that I now suffer in?
Shall I hand down this cursed vessel of humanity, charge it with fresh life as with fresh poison, and dash it, like a fire, in the faces of posterity?
But my vow has been given; the race shall cease from off the earth.