GREAT STEPS IN EVOLUTION 111 



Contrariwise, our bio-sociology tends to 

 justify the so-called " unpractical." It is 

 essentially the free-living and self-supporting 

 creatures that really get on, that evolve in the 

 best sense. So the idealist adventurer, who 

 loves to meet the " bright eyes of danger," 

 who goes out to seek love and face death, has 

 true success in life, brief though it be; and this 

 not merely from the " romantic " point of 

 view the philistines fancy confined to novels, 

 but from that rising standpoint of evolutionist 

 realism of which morals in one age, religion 

 in another, and now art in our own, have each 

 been the presage. Thus in facing the ugliest 

 facts of lowest life we see them give way to 

 the noblest hopes of our own evolution. In 

 education, then, let us not fear to apply this 

 escape from economics of the baser sort, that 

 science f alseliest so called ; and thus have done 

 with the current obsessions of the money- 

 world, of most ease with least labour, of 

 getting something for nothing; perhaps above 

 all, of that seeking after the assured life of 

 petty, sedentary functionarism, which is be- 

 coming a main curse of civilization we now 

 see why. 



Out in the fields, on hill, at sea, facing the 

 buffetings of wind and wave, working with 

 our fellows, and there content neither with 



