298 UNIVERSAL EVOLUTION 



and ethics. Yet, if the rulers, priests, and teachers, all 

 through historical time, had comprehended, and put 

 in use, a free democratic form of society, or govern- 

 ment, in which the natural rights of man, as deter- 

 mined by the people themselves, had been enforced under 

 the Golden Rule, even the ignorant masses might have 

 been much more able, than they now are, to govern 

 themselves, independent of hereditary rulers, and unfit 

 codes. It must be understood, that a better and more 

 intelligent comprehension of a code, and its sanction 

 in phenomenism, will be evolved, only when the ma- 

 jority are ready for it intellectually. This change will 

 be, and should be only gradual, in fact, so imperceptible 

 as not to produce a single reaction. This is the way 

 important evolutions take place. The ancestral line 

 of man has gradually evolved from the lower to higher 

 orders; not only in historical time, but in all time 

 preceding that; from the formation of the first cell 

 to the present heterogeneous organism, classified by 

 Cuvier is bimana. There never was a period of that 

 evolution, when the correspondence between the or- 

 ganism, and its environment, was perfect in a way 

 that would be ideal. But it was the best for the or- 

 ganism at the time. It was this that maintained the 

 survival of the fittest, and worked out in a natural way, 

 the general rhythmical upward tendency of the line, 

 toward its present culmination in complex man. 



METHODS OF EVOLUTION ARE BEST. This sentence is 

 used in "Origin of Species:" "When we no longer look 

 at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, 

 as something wholly beyond his comprehension; when 

 we regard every production of nature, as one which 

 has had a long history; when we contemplate every 

 complex structure and instinct, as the summing of 



