I 



A Limit to Evolution Z^Z 



merely animal nature, and something altogether new, a 

 capacity for apprehending abstract ideas, first appeared on 

 this planet with the coming of man. 



This consequence indisposes many persons to recognise 

 the fact of man's fundamentally different nature. They feel 

 they cannot imagine man's distinct origin. Of course they 

 cannot, for they have had no experience of anything of the 

 kind. The present writer cannot in the least imagine it. 

 But inability to imagine a thing is no ground whatever for 

 not believing that thing, if reason supplies us with good 

 evidence in its favour. We continually accept as true things 

 we cannot imagine, and we do so very properly. No one can 

 imagine the ' validity ' of an argument logically deduced from 

 its principles, but we none the less accept it and act on it. 

 Many persons believe that our world, together with the 

 whole solar system, once consisted of incandescent matter 

 and was utterly devoid of life: if they are right, then the 

 coming of life, when it came, must have constituted a new de- 

 parture. If the first living creatures were plants of some kind, 

 and were without any power of feeling, then the coming of 

 sentient life, when it came, must have been another break in 

 continuity. So also with the advent of rationality ! But 

 had we been present at man's advent we might have seen 

 nothing whatever miraculous about it. The essence of 

 humanity is reason acting as here described. It is not man's 

 bodily shape. His body, with all its processes of nutrition, 

 feeling, development, etc., is undoubtedly like that of some 

 sort of ape. But man's mere body is not man. If Swift's 

 tale about the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos was true, it would 

 be the horse-shaped Houyhnhnms who would be the true 

 men and the man-shaped Yahoos, the true brutes. Let, 

 then, the progeny of some mere animal have acquired, or 

 had infused into them — by some unimaginable process — the 

 idea of ' being ' and the power of perceiving the qualities of 



