PROFESSOR VIROHOW AND EVOLUTION. 625 
by their fruits. There is on all hands a growing repug- 
nance to invoke the supernatural in accounting for the 
phenomena of human life; and the thoughtful minds just 
referred to, finding no trace of evidence in favor of any 
other origin, are driven to seek in the interaction of social 
forces the genesis and development of man's moral nature. 
If they succeed in their search and I think they are sure 
to succeed social duty will be raised to a higher level of 
significance and the deepening sense of social duty will, it 
is to be hoped, lessen, if not obliterate, the strifes and 
heartburnings which now beset and disfigure our social 
life. Toward this great end it behoves us one and all to 
work; and devoutly wishing its consummation, I have 
the honor, ladies and gentlemen, to bid you a friendly 
farewell. 
CHAPTER XXXVII. 
PROFESSOR VIECHOW AND EVOLUTION. 
THIS WORLD of ours has, on the whole, been an inclem- 
ent region for the growth of natural truth; but it may be 
that the plant is all the hardier for the bendings and 
buffetings it has undergone. The torturing of a shrub, 
within certain limits, strengthens it. Through the strug- 
gles and passions of the brute, man reaches his estate; 
through savagery and barbarism his civilization; and 
through illusion and persecution his knowledge of nature, 
including that of his own frame. The bias toward natural 
truth must have been strong to have withstood and over- 
come the opposing forces. Feeling appeared in the world 
before Knowledge; anc^ thoughts, conceptions, and creeds, 
founded on emotion, had, before the dawn of science, 
taken root in man. Such thoughts, conceptions, and 
creeds must have met a deep and general want; otherwise 
their growth could not have been so luxuriant, nor their 
abiding power so strong. This general need this hunger 
for the ideal and wonderful led eventually to the differen- 
tiation of a caste, whose vocation it was to cultivate the 
mystery of life and its surroundings, and to give shape, 
name, and habitation to the emotions which that mystery 
aroused. ' Even the savage lived, not by bread alone, but 
in a mental world peopled with forms answering to his 
