640 VIS MEDICATRIX NATURAE 



the beautiful but the good with her approval ; and when we 

 carefully consider the process of Natural Selection itself, do 

 we not get from it a deep and ancient ethical message that 

 the individual must be content to subordinate himself to the 

 species, even to lose himself in its progressive life? There 

 is an ethical undertone. 



4. Humanist Value of the Study of Animate Evolution. 



Nature's music does not cease on a merry chord, but 

 perhaps it has a healing power. There is at all events, a 

 tonic virtue in contemplating the evolutionary process of 

 which mankind is an outcome. It is not a small thing, 

 forsooth, that we are part and parcel of an Order of Nature 

 which has evolved for millions of years like a long-drawn- 

 out drama to finer and finer issues; that the process of 

 evolution has in the main " the unity of an onward advanc- 

 ing melody " ; that all through the ages, apart from blind 

 alleys, life has been slowly creeping and sometimes quickly 

 leaping upwards ; that while there have been many mys- 

 terious losses even of branches from the great arbor vitse, the 

 flowers have become consistently finer. There was a time 

 when there were no backboned animals; then fishes ap- 

 peared, then amphibians, then reptiles, then birds and mam- 

 mals, and then, after various tentatives, mankind each age 

 transcending its predecessor. 



As we look back, then, on the world-becoming, we see that 

 finer and finer actors have appeared from epoch to epoch 

 on the crowded stage, and the situations have become more 

 and more intricate. A great web has been passing for in- 

 computable ages from the loom of time hunger and love its 

 warp and woof but the pattern has become more and more 

 subtle, and it sometimes seems as if it were picturing a 



