INTRODUCTION 



some respects the most striking result, of certain laws that 

 hold throughout the animal and plant worlds. The more 

 extended and more profound study of living things has 

 revealed the manifold forms of animal life as one great series, 

 in which the more complex are traceable by descent — or 

 rather by ascent — from primitive simpler ancestral forms ; and 

 man is seen to have had his origin in a prehuman and sub- 

 human animal stock, a stock which itself had in its time 

 slowly attained to qualities and powers that made possible 

 the attainment of man's own present estate. We can recog- 

 nize in that estate a nature that relates us to much we might 

 fain discard, and yet a nature that has been a passport for 

 our further travel upward and has qualified us to achieve 

 not only what man in the aggregate has achieved but what 

 individual man at his best stands for. Thus, so far as face 

 images forth mind, the reflection that from some simian 

 grimace there has been evolved with the progress of time 

 the smile of Mona Lisa is an exhortation to fortify man in 

 his effort to gratify his yearning for higher things and for 

 a yet more highly perfected future. 



The creation of man perceived as a gradual and still opera- 

 tive evolutionary process, which, besides bringing him into 

 existence is still moulding him and will not leave him where 

 he is and as he is, bears broadly and profoundly on the inter- 

 pretation of all human activities. This perception affords 

 him new guidance in tracing to their origins his instincts, 

 his emotions, his interests, and his reasoning power. In the 

 light of this perception civilization and the history of civiliza- 

 tion acquire fresh meanings; human society — its customs, 

 its duties, and its growth — stand visible from a new angle 

 and in truer perspective. There is incumbent, therefore, on 

 every thinking man and woman, faced with the responsi- 

 bilities of citizenship, an obligation to inform himself or 



[xii] 



