WHY WE MUST BE EVOLUTIONISTS 



great system that has moved sublimely from less to more. 

 AH 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, para- 

 sitisms, 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 intel- 

 ligence, 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 ances- 

 tors 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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