24 THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM 



distrust theories of sudden appearance. No ethnographer 

 now admits any other origin but evolution for religion, 

 morality, social organisation, industry, agriculture, clothing, 

 language, art, science, or letters. In some cases, such as 

 language, we have little or no analogy to guide us, because 

 every savage tribe has articulate speech ; yet we do not 

 doubt the fact of the evolution of language, because it is 

 not clearly beyond the range of evolution. Thus we look 

 round on the whole rich inheritance of modern civilised 

 man, and say that every part of it was evolved. It seems 

 very far, indeed, from the life of the brute, but we know 

 that only the untrained imagination finds any difficulty in 

 that. The historical period is so short in comparison with 

 the whole life of humanity (which some experts put at 

 700,000 years, and very few put at less than 100,000 years) 

 that a thousand rudimentary stages may have preceded. 



It is the same with the origin of man himself. For a 

 long time the old theory of a sudden appearance was stub- 

 bornly maintained. To-day every anthropologist of dis- 

 tinction in the world holds the evolution of man, and 

 Church leaders (such as the Bishop of London and the 

 Dean of Westminster) urge their laity to resist no longer. 

 A few experts still raise difficulties about the evolution of 

 man's mind from that of the lower animals. We shall see 

 that the science of prehistoric man has swept these away. 

 Sir Oliver Lodge says "it is probably true that our life and 

 that of the animals are branches of one fundamental vitality." 

 In any case, the one great difficulty alleged is that man's 

 mind could not have been evolved from that of a lower 



