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not live
long enough: they are, for all the purposes of high civilization, mere
children when they die; and our Prime Ministers, though rated as
mature, divide their time between the golf course and the Treasury
Bench in parliament. Presumably, however, the same power that made
this mistake can remedy it. If on opportunist grounds Man now fixes
the term of his life at three score and ten years, he can equally fix it at
three hundred, or three thousand, or even at the genuine Circumstantial
Selection limit, which would be until a sooner-or-later-inevitable fatal
accident makes an end of the individual. All that is necessary to make
him extend his present span is that tremendous catastrophes such as the
late war shall convince him of the necessity of at least outliving his
taste for golf and cigars if the race is to be saved. This is not fantastic
speculation: it is deductive biology, if there is such a science as biology.
Here, then, is a stone that we have left unturned, and that may be worth
turning. To make the suggestion more entertaining than it would be to

most people in the form of a biological treatise, I have written Back to
Methuselah as a contribution to the modern Bible.
Many people, however, can read treatises and cannot read Bibles.
Darwin could not read Shakespear. Some who can read both, like to
learn the history of their ideas. Some are so entangled in the current
confusion of Creative Evolution with Circumstantial Selection by their
historical ignorance that they are puzzled by any distinction between
the two. For all their sakes I must give here a little history of the
conflict between the view of Evolution taken by the Darwinians
(though not altogether by Darwin himself) and called Natural Selection,
and that which is emerging, under the title of Creative Evolution, as the
genuinely scientific religion for which all wise men are now anxiously
looking.
THE EARLY EVOLUTIONISTS
The idea of Evolution, or Transformation as it is now sometimes called,
was not first conceived by Charles Darwin, nor by Alfred Russel
Wallace, who observed the operation of Circumstantial Selection
simultaneously with Charles. The celebrated Buffoon was a better
Evolutionist than either of them; and two thousand years before Buffon
was born, the Greek philosopher Empedocles opined that all forms of
life are transformations of four elements, Fire, Air, Earth, and Water,
effected by the two innate forces of attraction and repulsion, or love
and hate. As lately as 1860 I myself was taught as a child that
everything was made out of these four elements. Both the
Empedocleans and the Evolutionists were opposed to those who
believed in the separate creation of all forms of life as described in the
book of Genesis. This 'conflict between religion and science', as the
phrase went then, did not perplex my infant mind in the least: I knew
perfectly well, without knowing that I knew it, that the validity of a
story is not the same as the occurrence of a fact. But as I grew up I
found that I had to choose between Evolution and Genesis. If you
believed that dogs and cats and snakes and birds and beetles and
oysters and whales and men and women were all separately designed
and made and named in Eden garden at the beginning of things, and

have since survived simply by reproducing their kind, then you were
not an Evolutionist. If you believed, on the contrary, that all the
different species are modifications, variations, and elaborations of one
primal stock, or even of a few primal stocks, then you were an
Evolutionist. But you were not necessarily a Darwinian; for you might
have been a modern Evolutionist twenty years before Charles Darwin
was born, and a whole lifetime before he published his Origin of
Species. For that matter, when Aristotle grouped animals with
backbones as blood relations, he began the sort of classification which,
when extended by Darwin to monkeys and men, so shocked my uncle.
Genesis had held the field until the time (1707-1778) of Linnaeus the
famous botanist. In the meantime the microscope had been invented. It
revealed a new world of hitherto invisible creatures called Infusorians,
as common water was found to be an infusion of them. In the
eighteenth century naturalists were very keen on the Infusorian
Amoebas, and were much struck by the way in which the members of
this old family behaved and developed. But it was still possible for
Linnaeus to begin a treatise by saying 'There are just so many species
as there were forms created in the beginning,' though there were
hundreds of commonplace Scotch gardeners, pigeon fanciers, and stock
breeders then living who knew better. Linnaeus himself knew better
before he died. In the last