18 DARWINISM AND HUMAN LIFE 



Being whether in solar systems or in social 

 institutions or in living creatures. But in the 

 first the continuity is sustained in identity of 

 substance, in the second by tradition and social 

 registration, and in the third by the hereditary 

 linkage of successive generations. 



" Stated concretely, in regard to living creatures, 

 the general doctrine of descent suggests, as we 

 all know, that the plants and animals now around 

 us are the results of natural processes working 

 throughout the ages; that the forms we see are 

 the lineal descendants of ancestors on the whole 

 somewhat simpler, that these are descended from 

 yet simpler forms, and so on backward, till we 

 lose our clue in the unknown but doubtless 

 momentous vital events of pre-Cambrian ages, 

 or, in other words, in the thick mist of life's 

 beginnings/* * 



" As hi the development of a fugue," Samuel 

 Butler says, " where, when the subject and counter- 

 subject have been announced, there must thence- 

 forth be nothing new, and yet all must be new, 

 so throughout organic nature which is a fugue 

 developed to great length from a very simple 

 subject everything is linked on to and grows 

 out of that which comes next to it in order." 



The evolution idea is not only essentially simple, 

 it is also very ancient. It is as old as Aristotle 

 and older. It is perhaps as old as clear thinking, 

 which we may date from the unknown time when 

 man discovered the year, with its marvellous 

 object-lesson of recurrent sequences, and realised 

 that his race had a history. Whatever may have 



1 " The Study of Animal Life," by J. Arthur Thomson. (Murray, 

 London.) 



