640 VIS MEDICATRIX NATURE 



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 imdertone. 



§ 4. Humanist Value of the Study of Animate E volution, 



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 vitae, 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 



