The Destiny of Man | Page 6

take afar higher
view. He sees that in the deadly struggle for existence which has raged
throughout countless aeons of time, the whole creation has been
groaning and travailing together in order to bring forth that last
consummate specimen of God's handiwork, the Human Soul.
To the creature thus produced through a change in the direction in
which natural selection has worked, the earth and most of its living
things have become gradually subordinated. In all the classes of the
animal and vegetal worlds many ancient species have become extinct,
and many modern species have come into being, through the unchecked
working of natural selection, since Man became distinctively human.
But in this respect a change has long been coming over the face of
nature. The destinies of all other living things are more and more
dependent upon the will of Man. It rests with him to determine, to a

great degree, what plants and animals shall remain upon the earth and
what shall be swept from its surface. By unconsciously imitating the
selective processes of Nature, he long ago wrought many wild species
into forms subservient to his needs. He has created new varieties of
fruit and flower and cereal grass, and has reared new breeds of animals
to aid him in the work of civilization; until at length he is beginning to
acquire a mastery over mechanical and molecular and chemical forces
which is doubtless destined in the future to achieve marvellous results
whereof today we little dream. Natural selection itself will by and by
occupy a subordinate place in comparison with selection by Man,
whose appearance on the earth is thus seen more clearly than ever to
have opened an entirely new chapter in the mysterious history of
creation.

IV.
The Origin of Infancy.
But before we can fully understand the exalted position which the
Darwinian theory assigns to man, another point demands consideration.
The natural selection of psychical peculiarities does not alone account
for the origin of Man, or explain his most signal difference from all
other animals. That difference is unquestionably a difference in kind,
but in saying this one must guard against misunderstanding. Not only in
the world of organic life, but throughout the known universe, the
doctrine of evolution regards differences in kind as due to the gradual
accumulation of differences in degree. To cite a very simple case, what
differences of kind can be more striking than the differences between a
nebula, a sun, a planet like the earth, and a planet like our moon? Yet
these things are simply examples of cosmical matter at four different
stages of cooling. The physical differences between steam, water, and
ice afford a more familiar example. In the organic world the perpetual
modification of structures that has been effected through natural
selection exhibits countless instances of differences in kind which have
risen from the accumulation of differences in degree. No one would
hesitate to call a horse's hoof different in kind from a cat's paw; and yet

the horse's lower leg and hoof are undoubtedly developed from a
five-toed paw. The most signal differences in kind are wont to arise
when organs originally developed for a certain purpose come to be
applied to a very different purpose, as that change of the fish's
air-bladder into a lung which accompanied the first development of
land vertebrates. But still greater becomes the revolution when a certain
process goes on Until it sets going a number of other processes,
unlocking series after series of causal agencies until a vast and
complicated result is reached, such as could by no possibility have been
foreseen. The creation of Man was one of these vast and complicated
results due to the unlocking of various series of causal agencies; and it
was the beginning of a deeper and mightier difference in kind than any
that slowly evolving Nature had yet witnessed.
I have indicated, as the moment at which the creation of mankind began,
the moment when psychical variations became of so much more use to
our ancestors than physical variations that they were seized and
enhanced by natural selection, to the comparative neglect of the latter.
Increase of intellectual capacity, in connection with the developing
brain of a single race of creatures, now became the chief work of
natural selection in originating Man; and this, I say, was the opening of
a new chapter, the last and most wonderful chapter, in the history of
creation. But the increasing intelligence and enlarged experience of
half-human man now set in motion a new series of changes which
greatly complicated the matter. In order to understand these changes,
we must consider for a moment one very important characteristic of
developing intelligence.
The simplest actions in which the nervous system is concerned are
what we call