8o "fHE COMING OF MAN 



extinction; the sacrifice of the higher with Httle permanent 

 gain and usually loss to the lower. In higher forms of ani- 

 mals, degeneration, as a rule, does not result in existence in 

 meaner form or on a lower plane, but comparatively quick ex- 

 tinction. 



If we are convinced that this sequence of dominant func- 

 tions is a fact, that always in the successive ancestral stages 

 leading from amoeba to man, higher and higher functions have 

 risen to dominance; that attempts to reverse the sequence 

 have ended in failure and, as a rule, in extinction; we shall 

 be convinced also that future man will be more and more com- 

 pletely controlled by the highest powers and ends toward which 

 this sequence points. We shall recognize that our business 

 is the enthronement of rightness and righteous personality 

 and that all else is of secondary importance; that we live not 

 in a gladiatorial or primarily economic, but in a moral and re- 

 ligious world befitting man. Rightness of will and effort is 

 the provisional goal of human effort and progress. This in- 

 volves not so much the remaking of surrounding conditions 

 as the remaking of man himself. 



But man is not pure spirit, and the past lives in him. The 

 tiger refuses to die, and the ape is immortal. His higher 

 powers of memory, association and imagination, and the burn- 

 ing focus of attention, strengthen the hold of appetites and 

 gratifications and future rewards and punishments are as 

 if nonexistent. Every upward step in attainment of comfort 

 in art and in science, every new discovery opens new fields 

 not of carefree enjoyment but of struggle. 



It is a struggle not so much for existence as for life. Ape- 

 man descended from the trees to give battle to the hostile 

 powers of the animal kingdom and the natural world. He 

 has overcome his competitors and bends the forces of nature 

 to his will. Now he is his own worst enemy. The king is in 

 rebellion against the king, and abdication is impossible save 

 by suicide. Rex regis rebelUs. 



We have noticed that higher mammals are educable and 

 glanced at the graded school of training of primates and man. 



