PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 



It does not deny, therefore, the essential difference between 

 man and the rest of nature, no more than the physico-chemical 

 explanation of an organism denies the difference between a 

 living organism and an inorganic thing. Evolution does not 

 explain man, because by its physico-chemical and biological 

 means it can never explain the spiritual in man, nor the 

 meaning of the material universe and of its inherent tendencies. 

 The best science can do — and this in itself is of the highest 

 importance — is to examine what material structures condition 

 the spiritual life. The scientist can do this, because science 

 itself is a spiritual activity, it is part of the spiritual effort of 

 man to understand himself. For man can never be what he is 

 destined to be without having also a scientific knowledge of 

 the way his spiritual activities are bound to material activities. 

 This is the consequence of man being a spirit-in-matter. In 

 and through matter he has to realize his self. It is well-known 

 in medical science how sometimes bodily structures prevent 

 man from being himself. Perhaps in the long run science will 

 succeed in improving these structures aind so open up new 

 possibilities of spiritual life for many people who now partly 

 or wholly are deprived from it. These possibilities throw a 

 new light on the problem of evolution, for they show the 

 essential difference between pre-human evolution and human 

 evolution and as a consequence also the essential difference 

 between man and the rest of nature. With man a new original 

 factor appears, the spiritual, and with it a new type of finality, 

 which takes the course of evolution in its own hand, not by 

 neglecting the blind forces of nature, but by studying and 

 directing them. Finality, on the human level, therefore, can be 

 considered as the fulfilment of the inherent tendencies of 

 matter, the unfolding of what they are meant to be. In pre- 

 human evolution the law of the survival of the fittest is one of 

 the driving forces. With human evolution a new law appears, 

 the care of man for his fellow-men, especially the weak and 

 miserable, the unfit, for with the appearance of man a kind 

 of being came into existence in which each individual was a 

 person. If it makes sense from the viewpoint of pre-human 

 evolution to speak of man as the product of material forces, 

 from the viewpoint of human evolution it makes even more 

 sense to say that the ultimate meaning of matter should be 



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