Summary 237 



ment, for a time so like that of the higher Primates, 

 in the similarity of humanoid and anthropoid func- 

 tions, and in the existence of "tentative men" who 

 came before Homo. We may recognize all this soli- 

 darity without abating in the least our appreciation 

 of Man's apartness — in reason, in language, in vivid 

 self -consciousness, and in moral agency. 



3. But Darwin also sought to show how demon- 

 strable factors of variation, heredity, and selection 

 may have operated in Man's emergence. Our knowl- 

 edge of these factors remains confessedly slight and 

 vague, but the inquiry is still young, and it is bad 

 thinking to use our confession of ignorance of the 

 factors as if it implied any dubiety as to the fact of 

 Man's natural evolution — a fact in the sense that all 

 the scientific evidence points to that mode of emer- 

 gence. 



4. The tax to pay on the Darwinian conclusion is 

 twofold. There is a tendency to think less nobly than 

 we ought to think of Man and the height of his call- 

 ing. But value is independent of origin, and Man 

 remains "the summit of the whole." Secondly, the 

 idea of Man's natural evolution is repugnant to some 

 to whom it seems inconsistent with the idea of his 

 being "the child of God." But it is not permissible to 

 pick and choose our science according to our liking, 

 and the idea of God as the Will behind a process of 

 evolution is not less conceivable than the idea of God 

 as acting by special creation. 



In any case, there can be no radical antithesis be- 

 tween the scientific description of Man as the outcome 



