ETHICS AND ALTRUISM 247 



begin to formulate a new ethical code, and a new phil- 

 osophy. He will look around, to see what can be done to 

 increase his correspondence with this kindred environ- 

 ment. Proficiency in biology and kindred science will 

 teach him, that his pedigree reaches back to the very 

 beginning of the universe ; that the interaction of matter 

 and motion, beginning with the atoms of the nebula, 

 continuing in the molecule, in the crystal, and the 

 sphere, did not produce a unit, mobile and adaptable 

 enough to enter into the formation of organic life, until 

 the alembic of perhaps untold eons had refined the 

 matter, by the immeasurable heat, and chemical action, 

 of an evolving universe. 



If there was any beginning to life, it was, when the 

 laboratory of nature had worked upon the material long 

 enough to first produce the universe, as we now see it, 

 before the organic unit, now called a cell, could be 

 evolved, and from that previous product of Nature's 

 refinery, man finds himself evolved, by the same slow 

 process of growth and elimination. 



What dignity and nobility does this hypothesis give 

 to man! It makes him the apotheosis of cosmic, not 

 personal forces. He is the product of the ages, and akin 

 to all that has gone before. There is not only reason, 

 and dignity, in this view of the place of man in the uni- 

 verse, but warmth and glow, which no other hypothesis 

 can give. 



This view of man makes him a product of nature. 

 He comes from the matter of the earth, which is the 

 same as that of the universe, and his mental power is 

 thus derived. 



This natural derivation of man means, that the 

 human organism, as it is now developed, was evolved 

 phylogenetically, from an order of lower organisms, 



