312 EVOLUTION AND MAN S PLACE IN NATURE 



which must be endured, bringing gain out of 

 endurance. There is not space for dwelling on this 

 wide range of action. Our main interest here centres 

 on the evil inheritance, and on personal relation to 

 that. Here, where things look darkest, the distinc- 

 tiveness of rational powers is apparent. This is a 

 power not within the area of the physical, but capable 

 of controlling it, so as even, in some degree, to modify 

 it, by success of rational effort, sustained from day to 

 day. Interpretation of rational power, and of its laws, 

 shows that human life, even at its worst, is never so 

 low as animal life, even when in all visible aspects 

 it seems lower. There is more hope of a profligate, 

 than of the vicious animal. Place full in view the 

 saddest results of heredity, and however bad the 

 case, the man is not doomed. He has the power 

 to see the evil, the power to separate it from what 

 he regards as his true self, the power to struggle 

 against it, the power to gain the mastery, even if it 

 be through sore battle, with bitter sense of pain 

 and peril, waged bravely during a long and very 

 weary campaign. 



There are people to whom this description of moral 

 conflict in its physical relations will read as exaggera 

 tion. Fortunate people ! And truly fortunate race 

 also, even when facing its darkest social .problems, 

 for the worst types of inheritance are not the common ; 

 and the worst are not hopeless. The history of progress 

 is carrying an ever increasing number of the race to a 

 more favourable starting-point. The lamp of religion 

 has cheered the most desperate, whose children s 

 children have opened their eyes on scenes more hope 

 ful, with only a thin shadow of an ancestor^ sorrow, 



