30 ANIMAL LIFE AND HUMAN PROGRESS 



development, in habits, in instincts, passions and emotions, 

 has been recognised since the dawn of reason, and is to-day 

 recognised perhaps even more clearly by savages than by 

 civilised races. But that man is included in the animal series, 

 has been evolved from non-human animal forms, and retains 

 many psychical as well as structural evidences of that descent, 

 was a doctrine for a long time repugnant to the majority of 

 thinking persons. 



Fifty years ago it required great energy and still more 

 courage on the part of Darwin, Huxley, Lyall, Haeckel, Carl 

 Vogt and many others, to establish this proposition. And to 

 this day it remains unacceptable to a large number of people. 

 They spare no effort to evade or at least to minimise its signifi- 

 cance. " Granted," they say, " that in structure, in the manner 

 of his birth, growth and death, in his bodily functions and in 

 his lower passions and instincts, man is one with the animals, 

 yet in the possession of the faculty of reason, of self -conscious- 

 ness, and volition, he stands so far apart from all the rest of the 

 animal world that any argument on social or political ques- 

 tions, based on zoological analogy, is altogether worthless/' 



One may and does readily concede that the analogy must 

 not be pushed too far : that man has powers of self-determina- 

 tion which profoundly modify, if they do not altogether abro- 

 gate, the incidence of natural laws to which the rest of the 

 animal world is subject. Nevertheless this concession does not 

 alter the fact that man, in common with all other living things, 

 has a very complex composition, slowly built up in the past ; 

 that his whole bodily and mental constitution is, as Weismann 

 expressed it, " historical " ; the outcome of all the additions 

 and all the subtractions of his past history ; that it is through 

 and by the agency of that constitution that his reason operates 

 and finds its expression ; and that, do what he will, he cannot 

 divest himself of it, nor undo the warp and the woof of the 

 fabric that the past has woven. 



This, as it seems to me, is a very great and pregnant truth ; 

 very necessary to be borne in mind by those who frame ideal 

 schemes for the betterment of the human race. 



It is one of the aspects of the doctrine of evolution, that we 



