WHAT WE OWE TO DARWIN 29 



facts relating to peculiar psychoses in child and 

 adult which we must recognise as vestigial and 

 recapitulatory. 1 



Those who feel a repugnance to the Darwinian 

 conclusion that man is descended from a humble 

 Simian ancestry should remember the marvellous 

 ascent in each individual lifetime. Neither the 

 dignity nor the value of a result is affected by 

 the historical conditions of its becoming. And 

 if man is separated off by reason (or the power of 

 conceptual inference), by morality (or the habit 

 of controlling his conduct in reference to ideals), 

 by the possession of true language or Logos, and 

 by other qualities distinctively human, then we 

 must increase our respect for, and see more in, 

 that brute creation which contained the potenti- 

 ality of all. For it is a fundamental idea of 

 evolution that there is nothing in the end which 

 is not also in the beginning. 



(VII) LIBERATION OP INTELLIGENCE. What do 

 we owe to Darwin ? A great liberation of the in- 

 telligence. Like Abraham Lincoln, who was born 

 on the same day in the same year, Darwin worked 

 for freedom, though perhaps without ever thinking 

 of it. As Prof. H. E. Crampton has said : 

 " The ' Origin of Species ' has proved a veritable 

 Magna Charta of intellectual liberties, for, as 

 no other single document before or since, it has 

 released the thoughts of men from the trammels 

 of unreasoned conservatism and dogmatism." 

 Speaking of his first impressions of the " Origin 



1 Prof. Stanley Hall gives, as an illustration, " the new psychology 

 of crime and criminals, who are so shot through, body and soul, 

 with atavisms that only the early history of the race can explain 

 them." 



