EVOLUTION 247 



III 



The first inference to be drawn from man's long animal inheritance is 

 that he is primarily a creature of instinct. His driving forces are hunger, 

 sex, fear, crowd, combativeness. No one who has honestly looked into 

 himself or around at his neighbors can fail to see this. He is not a fallen 

 angel, god-descended, mixed with animal clay. On the contrary he has 

 risen from the animal level. Let us hope he is still rising, and has his eyes 

 at times fixed on the stars. Unless we keep his animal origin and bias in 

 mind, we can neither judge him fairly nor plan wisely for his future. 



A second inference, indeed the obverse of the first, is that man is not 

 a creature of reason. The zoologists when they named the human species 

 called it Hovio sapiens; man the wise! Whether they did this from egotism 

 or wishful thinking or just for a joke, they were in error; wisdom is not 

 his outstanding characteristic. Reflective thought is a late acquisition and 

 few have it in any large measure. The eighteenth and nineteenth century 

 confidence in reason is now seen not to be justified by the reality. For most 

 people, even for the best of us most of the time, reason is the servant of 

 instinct, finding excuses for what one wants or has already decided to do. 

 It is rationalization, first cousin of wishful thinking, which is not thinking; 

 it is merely wishing. Here again honest introspection will give us the 

 evidence; also observation of neighbors. If one wants proof in public life, 

 he can follow the doings of the United States Senate, the resolutions of 

 Chambers of Commerce, or the propaganda of nations at war. If he looks 

 for it in the rarefied air of abstract thought, he can dip into any book on 

 astrology or even theology. 



However, man's being primarily a creature of instinct furnishes a needed 

 conservative and conserving factor. His animal inheritance keeps him on 

 the track, keeps him from going off into all kinds of wild disintegrating 

 experiment. But had this been the only force at work, man would still 

 be on the animal level; progress would be impossible. Sane human history 

 is a balance between the conservative instinct we inherit from our animal 

 ancestors, and the use of reason to guide that instinct. 



Again, a clear appreciation of the strength of man's animal inheritance 

 shows us that it serves to qualify both our hopes and our fears. It works 

 against optimist and pessimist alike. The optimist expects that evil can 

 be overcome, and that, speedily; that some sort of golden age or millen- 

 nium is coming in the not distant future. The pessimist is sure that evil is 

 Math us to stay, and that to fight against it is a hopeless adventure. Both to 

 the extreme hopes of the optimist and to the extreme fears of the pessimist 

 the long biological-historical view is a corrective. The momentum of an 

 age-long inheritance is not easily changed. The animal in us, often at odds 

 with our idealism, will carry on indefinitely. But other forces are at work. 



