222 SCIENCE AND THE HUMAN MIND 



lower, and the thoroughgoing selectionist may reply 

 that our judgment is itself formed by natural selection, 

 and thereby is framed to appreciate and rate as higher 

 that which, in reality, merely has survival value 

 that which, in fact, has permitted us to exist. From 

 the purely naturalistic standpoint, there seems no 

 escape. We have to accept an absolute judgment 

 by some other standard of what is high and low, 

 good and evil, if we seek another outlook. 



Indeed, it may be pointed out that the order in 

 which we place creation is largely a matter of race 

 and racial religion. To the oriental Buddhist, exist- 

 ence is an evil, consciousness a greater evil. To him, 

 then, logically, the highest form of life is a simple cell 

 of protoplasm in the tranquil depths of the ocean's 

 bed, and all the evolution of the ages is in truth 

 downward from that calm ideal, which is itself a fall 

 from the inorganic matter that probably preceded it. 



Of all the sciences regenerated by Darwin, none 

 gained more benefit than anthropology, the com- 

 parative study of mankind. Indeed, it 

 y ' is hardly too much to say that modern 

 anthropology took its rise from the Origin of Species. 

 Huxley's study of human skulls was the beginning 

 of that exact measurement of physical characters on 

 which so much of the science now depends, and the 

 ideas of natural selection and evolution underlie all 

 succeeding work. 



Yet the ground had been prepared for anthropology 

 also. The same love of novelty, the same eager 

 curiosity, the same acquisitive collector's instinct, 

 which introduced the plants and animals of other 



