202 Apartness of Man 



§4. Recoil from the Evolutionist View. 



Man's solidarity with and affiliation to the rest of 

 creation — that is the Darwinian conclusion. What is 

 the tax to pay? The first instalment is in our tend- 

 ency to think less nobly than we ought to think of 

 Man and the height of his calling. If he is not a great 

 exception, a "special creation," but the latest of a 

 succession of evolutionary masterpieces, some would 

 think less worthily of Man. If he is no "moral Mel- 

 chizedek," but the long result of time, the child of 

 the ages, affiliated to the stock of the Primates, some 

 would think that Man has lost in dignity and in 

 promise. But this is altogether fallacious. The real 

 apartness of man remains, whatever be his ancestry. 

 Shakespeare is not less great because he was once a 

 silly child, nor are Newton's achievements lessened 

 when we read that he was one of the most miserable 

 infants ever born. Value is independent of origin. 

 Whatever be his pedigree Man's apartness remains — 

 his big brain, his language, his reflective self-con- 

 sciousness, his power of conceptual inference, his 

 moral judgments, his ability to envisage and control 

 his own evolution. He remains, in Emerson's words, 

 "the man-child glorious," "the summit of the whole." 

 But the second part of the tax is more serious. It is 

 not man's affiliation merely that is difficult to harmo- 

 nize with other convictions : it is the idea of his natural 

 evolution. The discord is expressed in the reproach 

 that Darwinism has done away with God, which is not 

 perhaps such a shallow saying as it seems. For it was 



