The Destiny of Man | Page 5

by going back to fossil ages that we can
supply the missing links of continuity. In the desperate struggle for
existence no peculiarity, physical or psychical, however slight, has
been too insignificant for natural selection to seize and enhance; and
the myriad fantastic forms and hues of animal and vegetal life illustrate
the seeming capriciousness of its workings. Psychical variations have
never been unimportant since the appearance of the first faint
pigment-spot which by and by was to translate touch into vision, as it
developed into the lenses and humours of the eye.[2] Special organs of
sense and the lower grades of perception and judgment were slowly
developed through countless ages, in company with purely physical

variations of shape of foot, or length of neck, or complexity of stomach,
or thickness of hide. At length there came a wonderful moment--silent
and unnoticed, as are the beginnings of all great revolutions. Silent and
unnoticed, even as the day of the Lord which cometh like a thief in the
night, there arrived that wonderful moment at which psychical changes
began to be of more use than physical changes to the brute ancestor of
Man. Through further ages of ceaseless struggle the profitable
variations in this creature occurred oftener and oftener in the brain, and
less often in other parts of the organism, until by and by the size of his
brain had been doubled and its complexity of structure increased a
thousand-fold, while in other respects his appearance was not so very
different from that of his brother apes.[3] Along with this growth of the
brain, the complete assumption of the upright posture, enabling the
hands to be devoted entirely to prehension and thus relieving the jaws
of that part of their work, has coöperated in producing that peculiar
contour of head and face which is the chief distinguishing mark of
physical Man. These slight anatomical changes derive their importance
entirely from the prodigious intellectual changes in connection with
which they have been produced; and these intellectual changes have
been accumulated until the distance, psychically speaking, between
civilized man and the ape is so great as to dwarf in comparison all that
had been achieved in the process of evolution down to the time of our
half-human ancestor's first appearance. No fact in nature is fraught with
deeper meaning than this two-sided fact of the extreme physical
similarity and enormous psychical divergence between Man and the
group of animals to which he traces his pedigree. It shows that when
Humanity began to be evolved an entirely new chapter in the history of
the universe was opened. Henceforth the life of the nascent soul came
to be first in importance, and the bodily life became subordinated to it.
Henceforth it appeared that, in this direction at least, the process of
zoölogical change had come to an end, and a process of psychological
change was to take its place. Henceforth along this supreme line of
generation there was to be no further evolution of new species through
physical variation, but through the accumulation of psychical variations
one particular species was to be indefinitely perfected and raised to a
totally different plane from that on which all life had hitherto existed.
Henceforth, in short, the dominant aspect of evolution was to be not the

genesis of species, but the progress of Civilization.
As we thoroughly grasp the meaning of all this, we see that upon the
Darwinian theory it is impossible that any creature zoologically distinct
from Man and superior to him should ever at any future time exist upon
the earth. In the regions of unconditional possibility it is open to any
one to argue, if he chooses, that such a creature may come to exist; but
the Darwinian theory is utterly opposed to any such conclusion.
According to Darwinism, the creation of Man is still the goal toward
which Nature tended from the beginning. Not the production of any
higher creature, but the perfecting of Humanity, is to be the glorious
consummation of Nature's long and tedious work. Thus we suddenly
arrive at the conclusion that Man seems now, much more clearly than
ever, the chief among God's creatures. On the primitive barbaric theory,
which Mr. Darwin has swept away, Man was suddenly flung into the
world by the miraculous act of some unseen and incalculable Power
acting from without; and whatever theology might suppose, no
scientific reason could be alleged why the same incalculable Power
might not at some future moment, by a similar miracle, thrust upon the
scene some mightier creature in whose presence Man would become
like a sorry beast of burden. But he who has mastered the Darwinian
theory, he who recognizes the slow and subtle process of evolution as
the way in which God makes things come to pass, must