WHY WE MUST BE EVOLUTIONISTS
great system that has moved sublimely from less to more. All animals are blood-relations; there is kinship throughout animate nature.
2. It is indeed a sublime picture that the evolutionist discloses—a picture of an advancement of life by continuous natural stages, without haste, yet without rest. No doubt there have been blind alleys, side-tracks, lost races, parasitisms, and retrogressions, but on the whole there has been something like what man calls progress. If that word is too “human” we must invent another.
3. One of the greatest facts of organic evolution—a fact so great that it is often not realised at all—is that there has been not merely an increase in complexity but a growing dominance of mind in life. Animals have grown in intelligence, in mastery of their environment, in fine feeling, in kin-sympathy, in freedom, and in what we may call the higher satisfactions.
No evolutionist believes that man sprang from any living kind of ape, yet none can hesitate to believe in his emergence—“a new creation”—from a stock common to the anthropoid apes and to the early “tentative men.” Long ago there was a parting of the ways—it could not be less than a million years ago: the anthropoids remained arboreal and the ancestors of the men we know became terrestrial. So far as we can judge from links that are certainly not missing, but always increasing in number, there were for long ages only tentative men like Pithecanthropus the Erect, in Java, and Eoanthropus, the Piltdown man of the Sussex Weald. Even these were rather collateral offshoots than beings on the main line of man’s ancestry. They were Hominids, but not yet Homo. What trials and siftings there seem to have been before there appeared “the man-child glorious!” Doubtless some great brain change led to clearer self-consciousness, to
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