Article July 11, 1964 Issue

Signs of the Times

Loren Eiseley

Professor Loren Eiseley University Professor of Anthropology and the History of Science University of Pennsylvania in the 1963 Blashfield Address American Academy of Arts and Letters New York, New York

As an evolutionist I never cease, to be astounded by the past. It is replete with more features than one world can realize. Perhaps it was this that led the philosopher Santayana to speak of men's true natures as not adequately manifested in their condition at any given moment, or even in their usual habits. "Their real nature," he contended, "is what they would discover themselves to be if they possessed self-knowledge, or as the Indian scripture has it, if they became what they are."

I who write these words on paper cannot establish my own reality. I am, by any reasonable and considered logic, dead.... There is no life in the carbon in my body. As the idea strikes me —and believe me it comes as a profound shock—I run down the list of elements. There is no life in the iron, there is no life in the phosphorus, the nitrogen does not contain me the water that soaks my tissues is not I. What am I then? I pinch my body in a kind of sudden desperation. My heart knocks, my fingers close around the pen. There is, it seems, a semblance of life here.

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