400 MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT SCIENCE 



manifestations of life and consciousness are in any way 

 lessened. Those who reject the belief in " spirits " do 

 not in consequence reject the ethical and moral doctrines 

 which have too long been rendered " suspect " by the 

 shadow cast over them by ancient superstition. The 

 disappearance of that shadow will reveal friends where 

 enemies were supposed to be entrenched. 



At the meeting of the British Association in 1879 I 

 delivered an address on " Degeneration : a Chapter in 

 Darwinism." In the printed version of that address, 

 published in the same year, there are some statements 

 bearing on the matter above discussed which I reproduce 

 here, since I can still make them with conviction. 



''Assuredly it cannot lower our conception of man's 

 dignity if we have to regard him as ' the flower of all the 

 ages ' bursting from the great stream of life which has 

 flowed on through countless epochs with one increasing 

 purpose, rather than as an isolated miraculous being, put 

 together abnormally from elemental clay, and cut off by 

 such portentous origin from his fellow animals and from 

 that gracious nature to whom he yearns with filial instinct, 

 knowing her, in spite of fables, to be his dear mother." 



" A certain number of thoughtful persons admit the 

 development of man's body by natural processes from ape- 

 like ancestry, but believe in the non-natural intervention 

 of a Creator at a certain definite stage in that develop- 

 ment, in order to introduce into the animal which was at 

 that moment a man-like ape, something called ' a con- 

 scious soul ' in virtue of which he became an ape-like man." 



" No one ventures to deny, at the present day, that every 

 human being grows from the egg in utero, just as a dog or 

 a monkey does ; the facts are before us and can be scruti- 

 nised in detail. We may ask of those who refuse to admit 

 the gradual and natural development of man's conscious- 

 ness in the ancestral series, passing from ape-like forms 



