DARWIN AND DARWINISM 83 



was still further developed by Haeckel in his 

 "Naturlichc Schdpfungsgeschichte" and then only 

 taken up by Darwin in his "The Descent of Man." 

 The latter book, indeed, is rightly referred to as 

 the weakest of Darwin's scientific works. Alfred 

 Russel, the prime exponent of the Darwinian prin- 

 ciple, did not accept Darwin's own assumption 

 that man's intellectual and moral faculties were 

 derived from the brute, but vaguely ascribes them 

 to the "unseen universe of spirit." 



The impossibility of an evolution of the soul 

 of man, a spiritual and simple being, from the 

 purely material brute, with no higher faculty than 

 brute instinct, is evident. But Darwinism itself, 

 rightly understood, renders impossible also the 

 concept of evolution applied to the body of man, 

 since this could never have survived that very 

 process of natural selection postulated by Darwin. 

 It must, in fact, have been eliminated from the 

 very first. As early as 1869 the Duke of Argyll 

 had already clearly demonstrated this. The very 

 direction in which the frame of man diverges 

 from that of the brute would have singled it out 

 for extermination, had it not been informed from 

 the beginning with a rational soul. 



It diverges in the direction of greater physical helplessness 

 and weakness. That is to say, it is a divergence which of all 

 others it is most impossible to ascribe to mere "natural se- 

 lection." The unclothed and unprotected condition of the 

 human body, its comparative slowness of foot, the absence 

 of teeth adapted to prehension or for defense, the same want 



