284 EVOLUTION AND MAN S PLACE IN NATURE 



spiritual, overlooking the fact that the limits and the 

 weaknesses of a physical life are component elements 

 in the life of mankind. Such a duality is man s life, 

 at once physical and rational, subject to lower and to 

 higher orders of law, the lower applying to the physical 

 nature, the higher governing the rational life. This 

 combination determines man s place in Nature. It 

 discovers his kinship with the animals; it accounts 

 for his lordship over them all. 



Only by sight of this two-fold nature, harmonised 

 in the individual life, is it possible to account for 

 man s place. It is a place occupied from birth, and as 

 easily held as occupied, unless the man himself set 

 lightly by the spirit within him, seeing and feeling 

 and caring mainly for the animal, and that as only 

 man can do, by using the rational power merely to 

 minister to the animal nature. It is strangely in the 

 power of the individual to wreck his humanity. 

 Nature is too potent to admit of this in animal 

 economy; Nature has left room somewhere for this, 

 the peril of the embodied spirit. 



Through this inquiry, a way is traced to a repre 

 sentation of man s life which may be accepted as in 

 cluding all the facts, doing honour to biology equally 

 with psychology. It gives a doctrine of his organic 

 life which does not break it oft from its place in 

 the order of Nature, and a doctrine of the soul, which 

 does not place it apart from the system which is 

 being wonderfully interpreted in our day, for, in the 

 midst of it, human intelligence finds unlimited scope 

 for research. 



From this point of view, we take our survey of 

 human life, still leaving exceptional gifts apart, that 



