In one of the most celebrated passages in Thomas Hardy’s oeuvre, Henry Knight, the rationalist hero of A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), has a dramatic reckoning with the implications of Darwinian science and deep geological time. Dangling off the face of a cliff, he realises he is eye to eye with a trilobite fossil, and this prompts him to contemplate his own mortality and the fragility of civilisation as if they were equivalent. Knight readily perceives himself as an incarnation of humanist ideals, and so understands the ‘dignity of man’ to be at stake in his predicament – a presumption that Hardy ironises but also encourages us to take seriously, at least insofar as we are asked to read the situation as an allegory of humanism in crisis.Throughout the scene, Hardy emphasises that the evolutionary perspective on humanity is humiliating for a man like Knight: he is distressed not simply by an atheistic sense of death’s finality, but by the idea that he will be ‘with the small in his death’ (my emphasis).This formulation is odd but revealing.

Knight experiences his animal status as a catastrophic form of downward mobility – the trilobite is like an ‘underling’ who has the temerity to address him on terms of equality, and he imagines he will somehow continue to feel degraded by their intimacy even when he too is a fossil.In this state of extreme physical vulnerability, we might expect Knight to invest little value in his mental capacities. In fact, his abjection makes his sense of intellectual superiority all the more potent:

Knight’s sense of having been reduced to the same level as a trilobite, a form of ‘intelligence [un]worthy of the name’, paradoxically intensifies his sense of his high place within an exclusively human hierarchy of ‘brains’.Yet this hierarchy is not really an alternative system of value.