88 fHE COMING OF MAN 



tain lines of development while it weeds out and discards a 

 host of others. 



Here nature has the last word. Man can become her part- 

 ner, and she will make him ruler over many things; but he 

 is responsible to her and to God for his use of the power del- 

 egated to him. She demands a strict accounting, and every 

 day is a day of judgment. She is a stern mistress, a hyper- 

 calvinist. 



We are all experimenters. Nature sets the test, lays down 

 the rules, assigns the marks, awards the prize and there 

 seems to be no appeal. Our bodily and mental structure and 

 functioning, our laws, our deepest convictions, our social ways, 

 our moral codes and ends are all being slowly but surely tested 

 in her great experimental laboratory of life. Much of our 

 discomfort and pain is due to our neglect and reckless dis- 

 regard or criminal ignorance of what really constitutes con- 

 formity to Nature's ways and laws ; it is her premonitory warn- 

 ing of her threatened fatal box on the ear. 



In one word, man, good and bad and imperfect as he is, is 

 the result of a process of selection of those living beings who 

 are best conformed to, and embody and express in life, the 

 laws of nature. Huxley's liberally educated man " is as com- 

 pletely as a man can be in harmony with her. He will make 

 the best of her and she of him. They will get on together 

 rarely, she as his ever beneficent mother, he as her mouth- 

 piece, her conscious self and interpreter." 



Speaking of " natural knowledge " he goes on to say: 

 " There are blind leaders of the blind, and not a few of them, 

 who can see nothing in the bountiful mother of humanity but 

 a sort of comfort grinding machine. According to them, the 

 improvement of natural knowledge always has been, and al- 

 ways must be, synonymous with no more than the improve- 

 ment of the material resources and the increase of the grati- 

 fications of men. Natural knowledge is, in their eyes, no real 

 mother of mankind, bringing them up with kindness, and, if 

 need be, with sternness in the way they should go, and in- 

 structing them in all things needful for their welfare, but 



