TIME AND CHANGE 



Certain characters, he says, are adaptive or suited 

 to their purpose from the start; they do not have 

 to be fitted to their place by natural selection. 

 Huxley uses the word "predestined" — all the life 

 of the globe and all the starry hosts of heaven are 

 working out in boundless space and in endless time 

 "their predestined course of evolution." Darwin 

 must have had in mind the same mysterious some- 

 thing when he said that man had risen to the very 

 summit of the animal scale, but not through his own 

 exertions. Not by his own will or exertion, surely, 

 any more than the embryo in its mother's womb 

 develops into the full-grown child by its own exer- 

 tion or than our temperaments and complexions 

 and statures are matters of our own wills and choice. 

 Something greater than man and before him, to 

 which he sustains the relation that the unborn child 

 sustains to its mother, must enter into our thought 

 of his origin and development. 



The great evolutionists have been very cautious 

 about seeking to go behind evolution and name the 

 Primal Cause. In such an attempt science would at 

 once be beyond soundings. Darwin and Huxley 

 were reverent, truth-loving men, but they hesitated 

 as men of science to put themselves in a position 

 where no step could be taken. 



Slowly man emerges out of the abyss of geologic 

 time into the dawn of history, and science gropes 

 about like a man feeling his way in the dark or, at 



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