A faint light

Looking so, across the centuries and the millennia,

toward the animal men of the past,

one can see a faint light, like a patch of sunlight

moving over the dark shadows on a forest floor.

It shifts and widens, it winks out, it comes again, but it persists.

It is the human spirit, the human soul,

however transient, however faulty men may claim it to be.

In its coming man had no part.

It merely came, that curious light,

and man, the animal,

sought to be something that no animal had been before.

Cruel he might be, vengeful he might be,

but there had entered into his nature

a curious wistful gentleness and courage.

It seemed to have little to do with survival,

for such men died over and over.

They did not value life compared to what they saw in themselves —

that strange inner light which has come from no man knows where,

and which was not made by us.

It has followed us all the way from the age of ice . . .

Man may grow until he towers to the skies,

but without this light he is nothing, and his place is nothing.

Even as we try to deny the light, we know that it has made us,

and what we are without it remains meaningless.

                        Loren Eiseley, The Firmament of Time