THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US 



chase; without their special adaptation to environ 

 ment, he survives when they perish. A man is 

 marked off from the animals below him, I say, as if 

 he were a being of another sphere. He looks into 

 their eyes and they into his, and no recognition 

 passes; and yet we have to believe that he and they 

 are fruit of the same biologic tree and that their 

 stem forms unite in the same trunk somewhere in 

 the abyss of biologic time. 



The rise of man from the lower orders taxes our 

 powers of belief and our faith in the divinity that 

 lurks underfoot far more than did the special crea 

 tion myth. Creation by omnipotent fiat seems easy 

 when you have the omnipotent being to begin with, 

 but creation through evolution is a kind of cosmic 

 or biologic legerdemain that baffles and bewilders 

 us. It so far transcends all our earthly knowledge 

 and experience and all the flights of our philosophy 

 that we stand speechless before it. It opens a gulf 

 that the imagination cannot clear; it opens vistas 

 from which we instinctively shrink; it opens up 

 abysms of time in which our whole historic period 

 would be but a day; it opens up a world of struggle, 

 delay, waste, failure that palls the imagination. It 

 challenges our faith in the immanency and in the 

 ceaseless activity of God in his world; it brings the 

 creative energy down from its celestial abode and 

 clothes it with the flesh and blood of animal life. 

 It may chill and shock us; it shows us that we are 



