THE FUTURE EVOLUTION OF MAN 251 



that we should have descended from creatures as 

 lowly as they. If evolution is true, these are among 

 our near ancestors. Back of the group of primates 

 lies a far less developed set of insectivorous animals, 

 behind them the reptiles, behind them the fishes. 

 When we get back this far we are less certain but 

 most probably the worms take up the story. So our 

 ancestry runs back to the very beginning, when it 

 originated in the one-celled animals which are also 

 the ancestors of all the rest of the animal world. If 

 we are inclined to deny our ancestors in the trees, 

 what shall we say of our forefathers in the seas? 



The question of course is not to be decided by our 

 likes or our dislikes. If the evolution of man is true 

 it will not make it less true because the process is 

 not to our liking. It is our part, if this be the truth, 

 to accept it as we do any other truth. Surely those 

 of us who are moral of thought are not willing to 

 disbelieve a truth because it is unpleasant. 



The newness of the idea is the chief reason for 

 our dislike of it. This lowliness of origin should 

 not be distasteful to us. Nothing about Abraham 

 Lincoln seems to us more wonderful than that a 

 man who towered head and shoulders above his 

 generation, indeed above most generations of men, 

 in his fineness of life, in his nobility of purpose, in 

 the integrity of his aims, should have been of ex- 



