692 Causes and Course of Organic Evolution 



It would be impossible here and now to discuss the char- 

 acter, influence, life-work, and ultimate religious power that 

 each of these proenvironers and so preachers of new spiritic 

 effort illustrated. The first of the three we shall alone con- 

 sider now% as being the dominant spirit for the continued for- 

 ward and upward energizing of the most advanced nations 

 of the world. 



The pure, noble, unselfish, philanthropic, and eminently 

 proenvironing life of Christ has had willing testimony paid 

 to it by such diverse personalities as Agrippa, Constantine, 

 Mahomet, Charlemagne, Hyder Ali, Napoleon, Renan, and 

 Emerson. But the surpassing beauty, the humanizing value, 

 and the unrivaled religious power of Christ's life has been 

 largely minimized by many of his followers, who, measuring 

 his doctrines and life alongside those of other high religious 

 teachers, have tried to rival and even outstep the religious 

 systems these teachers inaugurated, by inventing and adding 

 on silly miraculous tales, as well as other unnatural and super- 

 fluous embellishments. 



The supreme value of Christ's life, of his cumulated teach- 

 ing, and of the religious system that — in its purity — flowed 

 from that teaching, consists in the clear unfailing recognition 

 that the great and terribly real law of "struggle for existence 

 and survival of the fittest" can only be overcome and made 

 subservient to niankind's further advance by the far higher 

 law of social cooperation and social desire for the most satisfying in- 

 dividual and social life. 



As is pointed out in a succeeding chapter, this social law 

 constantly manifests itself along the entire scale of animal 

 life, and evolves to a degree that corresponds approximately 

 to the mental dignity of each group studied, unless such group 

 persistently selects and lives along carnivorous lines. There- 

 fore the animals inferior to man which exhibit the highest 

 social organization, the herbivorous ungulate mammals, the 

 social birds, various insect groups such as bees and ants, mam- 

 mals like the beaver, the dog, and the elephant, also some monk- 

 eys — to name them in what seems approximately ascending 



