564 NATURE CROWNED IN MAN 



retical complement of fumbling and muddling in practical 

 affairs. 



For practical purposes the most important feature of tlie 

 contrast we have been working at lies in the role that the 

 extra-organismal plajs in the history of human society, and 

 here we venture to quote a striking passage from a well- 

 known evolutionist, Dr. Chalmers Mitchell, the secretary 

 of the Zoological Society of London. 



We are familiar with Kant^s beautiful passage beginning: 

 '' Two things fill my mind with ever renewed wonder and 

 awe the more often and deeper I dwell on them — the starry 

 vault above me, and the moral law within me.'' 



'' We may well agree," says Chalmers Mitchell, " that the 

 starry vault is a supreme example of the reality and external- 

 ity of the physical universe. ... I assert as a biological 

 fact that the moral law is as real and as external to man 

 as the starry vault. It has no secure seat in any single 

 man or in any single nation. It is the work of the blood 

 and tears of long generations of men. It is not in man, 

 inborn or innate, but is enshrined in his traditions, in his 

 customs, in his literature and his religion. Its creation 

 and sustenance are the crowning glory of man, and his con- 

 sciousness of it puts him in a high place above the animal 

 world. Men live and die; nations rise and fall, but the 

 struggle of individual lives and of individual nations must 

 be measured not by their immediate needs, but as they tend 

 to the debasement or perfection of man's great achievement " 

 (1915, p. 107). 



