Question

What are examples of exaggeration, irony, and humor in this text? What is the main point of this text? What would be a good title for this text?

One is obliged to concede that in true loftiness of character, Man cannot claim to approach even the meanest of the Higher Animals. It is plain that he is constitutionally incapable of approaching that altitude; that he is constitutionally afflicted with a defect which must make such approach forever impossible, for it is manifest that this defect is permanent in him, indestructible, ineradicable. I find this Defect to be the Moral Sense. He is the only animal that has it. It is the secret of his degradation. It is the quality which enables him to do wrong. It has no other office. It is incapable of performing any other function. It could never have been intended to perform any other. Without it, man could do no wrong. He would rise at once to the level of the Higher Animals.
Since the Moral Sense has but the one office, the one capacity--to enable man to do wrong --it is plainly without value to him. It is as valueless to him as is disease. In fact, it manifestly is a disease. Rabies is bad, but it is not so bad as this disease. Rabies enables a man to do a thing which he could not do when in a healthy state: kill his neighbor with a poisonous bite. No one is the better man for having rabies. The Moral Sense enables a man to do wrong. It enables him to do wrong in a thousand ways. Rabies is an innocent disease, compared to the Moral Sense. No one, then, can be the better man for having the Moral Sense. What, now, do we find the Primal Curse to have been? Plainly what it was in the beginning: the infliction upon man of the Moral Sense; the ability to distinguish good from evil; and with it, necessarily, the ability to do evil; for there can be no evil act without the presence of consciousness of it in the doer of it.
And so I find that we have descended and degenerated, from some far ancestor--some microscopic atom wandering at its pleasure between the mighty horizons of a drop of water per-chance--insect by insect, animal by animal, reptile by reptile, down the long highway of smirchless innocence, till we have reached the bottom stage of development--namable as the Human Being. Below us---nothing. Nothing but the Frenchman. There is only one possible stage below the Moral Sense; that is the Immoral Sense. The Frenchman has it. Man is but little lower than the angels. This definitely locates him. He is between the angels and the French.
Man seems to be a rickety poor sort of a thing, any way you take him; a kind of British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities. He is always undergoing repairs. A machine that was as unreliable as he would have no market. On top of his Specialty--the Moral Sense--are piled a multitude of minor infirmities; such a multitude, indeed, that one may broadly call them countless. The higher animals get their teeth without pain or inconvenience. Man gets his through months and months of cruel torture; and at a time of life when he is but ill able to bear it. As soon as he has got them they must all be pulled out again, for they were of no value in the first place, not worth the loss of a night's rest. The second set will answer for a while, by being reinforced occasionally with rubber or plugged up with gold; but he will never get a set which can really be depended on till a dentist makes him one. This set will be called "false" teeth--as if he had ever worn any other kind.

Answer 1

• What are examples of exaggeration, irony, and humor in this text?

Examples of exaggeration in the text include describing man's Moral Sense as being "permanent, indestructible, ineradicable" and as "a disease" that is "without value" and "manifestly ... the Primal Curse." There is irony in calling the Moral Sense the "secret of [man's] degradation" and in comparing it unfavorably to rabies. Humor can be seen in the passage's comparison of man to a "rickety poor sort of a thing," to a machine that is "unreliable," and to being "between the angels and the French."

• What is the main point of this text?

The main point of the text is that the author believes the Moral Sense to be a negative aspect of humanity, which makes man different and inferior to the "Higher Animals." The author argues that the Moral Sense only enables humans to do wrong and that without it, man would be on par with the "Higher Animals."

• What would be a good title for this text?

A good title for this text could be "The Degrading Effect of the Moral Sense" or "The Inferiority of Man and the Curse of the Moral Sense."