Man's Place in Nature 225 



tiousness, and savagery. There is no cause for 

 wonder. By restoring the undesirable stimuH we 

 have reawakened the beast in the man, the ape 

 once more gibbers folly and the tiger whets his 

 teeth. We have given new life to the latent 

 germs of brutality, which, otherwise, would gradu- 

 ally die away. 



The Yoke of Natural Selection. — A third corollary 

 is not less important. There is one sense, at least, 

 in which we can never "return to nature," unless 

 we cease to be human. We can never resume the 

 yoke of natural selection which even early man 

 began to wriggle out of, which man has been more 

 and more effectively throwing off as the ages have 

 passed. Professor Ray Lankester has put this 

 point with splendid clearness.: 



"The mental qualities which have developed in Man, 

 though traceable in a vague and rudimentary condition 

 in some of his animal associates, are of such an unprece- 

 dented power and so far dominate everything else in his 

 activities as a Hving organism, that they have to a very 

 large extent, if not entirely, cut him off from the general 

 operation of that process of Natural Selection and sur- 

 vival of the fittest which up to their appearance has been 

 the law of the living world. They justify the view that 

 man forms a new departure in the gradual unfolding of 

 Nature's predestined scheme. Knowledge, reason, self- 

 consciousness, will, are the attributes of Man. 



"Nature's inexorable discipline of death to those who 

 do not rise to her standard — survival and parentage for 

 those alone who do — has been from the earliest times more 



