NATURE'S INSURGENT SON 31 



culties, the want of assurance and of exact knowledge, 

 which necessarily prevented Bacon's schemes from 

 taking practical shape, have been removed. The will to 

 possess and administer this vast territory alone is wanting. 



13. MAN'S DESTINY. 



Within the last few years an attempt to spur the will 

 of Englishmen in this direction has been made by some 

 who have represented that this way lie great fortunes, 

 national ascendancy, imperial domination. The effort 

 has not met with much success. On the other hand, 

 I speak for those who would urge the conscious and 

 deliberate assumption of his kingdom by Man not as a 

 matter of markets and of increased opportunity for the 

 cosmopolitan dealers in finance but as an absolute duty, 

 the fulfilment of Man's destiny, 1 a necessity the incidence 

 of which can only be deferred and not avoided. 



This, is indeed, the definite purpose of my discourse ; 

 to point out that civilized man has proceeded so far in his 

 interference with extra-human nature, has produced for 

 himself and the living organisms associated with him such 

 a special state of things by his rebellion against natural 

 selection and his defiance of Nature's pre-human dis- 

 positions, that he must either go on and acquire firmer 

 control of the conditions or perish miserably by the 

 vengeance certain to fall on the half-hearted meddler in 

 great affairs. We may indeed compare civilized man to 

 a successful rebel against Nature who by every step for- 

 ward renders himself liable to greater and greater penal- 

 ties, and so cannot afford to pause or fail in one single 



1 ' Religion means the knowledge of our destiny and of the means of 

 fulfilling it.' Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton sometime Bishop 

 of London, vol. ii. p. 195. 



