EVOLUTION THE MASTER-KEY 



is to become real, it is we that must make it so. 

 Evolution teaches us that the task is possible, but 

 that it is our task. Let us look at the brief his- 

 tory of this grave and dangerous error. 



Scarcely more than a hundred years ago great 

 words were on men's lips: formalism and formu- 

 lism were tottering; Wordsworth felt that "bliss 

 was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young 

 was very heaven " ; Beethoven, soon to be betrayed, 

 had not yet indignantly torn from the title-page 

 of the "Eroica" symphony the name of that in- 

 comparable criminal who consumed eight millions 

 of human lives; men had once again discovered 

 that progress is possible. 



The intervening century has added more to the 

 sum of human knowledge than any of its prede- 

 cessors; and in the dawn of the twentieth century 

 men are coming to apply certain now established 

 truths of the scholar and the student to the facts 

 of every day. In a word, last century established, 

 on an inexpugnable basis, the idea that change is 

 orderly and universal the idea of evolution. And 

 in especial are men concerned with change as il- 

 lustrated in their own bodies many folk under- 

 standing by evolution merely the assertion of 

 man's simian origin. Man, then, being descended, 

 as Stevenson has it, from "Probably Arboreal," 

 has undoubtedly made progress. Not only so : his 

 progress is part of a universal process or immu- 

 table law; hence, while our predecessors of a cen- 

 tury ago had concluded that progress is possible, 

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