MATERIALISM AND ITS LESSONS. 677 



countless ages. Each new insight into natural phenomena on the part 

 of man, each act of wiser doing founded on truer insight, each bettered 

 feeling which has been developed from wiser conduct, has tended to 

 determine by degrees a corresponding structural change of the brain, 

 which has been transmitted as an innate endowment to succeeding gen- 

 erations, just as the acquired habit of a parent animal becomes some- 

 times the instinct of its offspring ; and the accumulated results of these 

 slow and minute gains, transmitted by hereditary action, have culmi- 

 nated in the higher cerebral organization, in which they are now, as it 

 were, capitalized. Thus the added structure embodies in itself the 

 superior intellectual and moral capacities of abstract reasoning and 

 moral feeling which have been the slow acquisitions of the ages, and 

 it gives them out again in its functions when it discharges its func- 

 tions rightly. If we were to have a person born in this country with 

 a brain of no higher development than that of the low savage desti- 

 tute, that is, of the higher nervous substrata of thought and feeling 

 if, in fact, our far remote prehistoric ancestors were to come to life 

 among us now we should have more or less of an imbecile, who could 

 not compete on equal terms with other persons, but must perish, unless 

 charitably cared for, just as the native Australian perishes when he 

 comes into contact and competition with the white man. The only 

 way in which the native Australian could be raised to the level of 

 civilized feeling and thought would be by cultivation continued 

 through many generations by a process of evolution similar to that 

 which lies back between our savage ancestors and us. 



That is one aspect of the operation of natural law in human events 

 the operation of the law of heredity in development, in carrying man- 

 kind forward, that is, to a higher level of being. It teaches us plainly 

 enough that the highest qualities of mind bear witness to the reign of 

 law in nature as certainly as do the lowest properties of matter, and 

 that if we are to go on progressing in time to come, it must be by 

 observation of, and obedience to, the laws of development. But there 

 is another vastly important aspect of the law of heredity, which it 

 concerns us to bear sincerely in mind its operation in working out 

 human degeneracy, in carrying mankind downward, that is, to a lower 

 level of being. It is certain that man may degenerate as well as 

 develop ; that he has been doing so both as nation and individual ever 

 since we have records of his doings on earth. There is a broad and 

 easy way of dissolution, national, social, or individual, which is the 

 opposite of the steep and narrow way of evolution. Now, what it be- 

 hooves us to realize distinctly is, that there is not anything more mi- 

 raculous about the degeneracy and extinction of a nation or of a family 

 than there is about its rise and development ; that both are the work 

 of natural law. A nation does not sink into decadence, I presume, so 

 long as it keeps fresh those virtues of character through which it be- 

 came great among nations ; it is when it suffers them to be eaten away 



