The Victorian era of British history was a period marked by a renaissance of enlightened thought and a renewed interest in using science to improve society, yet this supposed path to human evolution was paved with abjection, destruction and sacrifice. As a result of the increased professionalization of university sciences and recent breakthroughs in scientific theories, “progress,” as we call it, has coalesced in the form of some of the greatest scientists, scholars, and philosophers of the modern era. Yet with these advances has come a growing awareness of humanity's recalcitrant status as the product of an irrational and inescapable animality. Many members of the scientific community worked fervently to identify what made humans exceptional among the vast lineage of animals from which Charles Darwin had discovered that we evolved. Indeed, many have suggested that humanity and the natural world share many distinctions – or perhaps are one and the same – including author Robert Louis Stevenson, for whom “literature tend[ed] naturally to assert the metaphysical connection between humans and animals” (Danta 57 ). Yet some sought to extinguish this link between the animal world to sanctify the kingdom of man, and Stevenson explores the resulting Darwinian nightmare in his novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The eponymous Dr. Henry Jekyll, such an esteemed scientific mind and apparently an exemplar of Victorian enlightenment and virtue, indeed possessed the same spirit of renouncing “the animal” that so pervaded the soft underbelly of Victorian academia. Doctor Jekyll's failure, therefore, represents the definitive recognition by Victorian science of the fact that the "inner animal" is in reality a primordial, integral and inextinguishable aspect... in the middle of the paper... it recognized that the humanity is irrevocably bound to this earth along with all its fellow inhabitants, Doctor Jekyll sought to divide these conjoined, codependent worlds and drive out the corrupt animal - Hyde - in its heart. Philosophically, Jekyll commits a grave and unforgivable crime against human nature, yet even Kant, the great architect of idealistic systems, would scoff at the futility of Jekyll's project from its inception. Without the contamination of the samples, an “unknown impurity” (Stevenson 61), Jekyll would not have been able to perform the transformation to purify himself. But the final irony of Dr. Henry Jekyll's tragic story is that his mission is actually a complete success: in destroying the animal within, he completely destroys himself - man and animal - both a senseless sacrifice on the altar of science..