i 5 o THE PORTAL OF EVOLUTION 



for it would fail in its most important duty, which is to form 

 beautiful ideals of exaggerated perfection, far and away above 

 the realms of stern reality, far beyond the boundaries of the 

 exactness of truth. If it did not do this, man would not, by 

 striving to attain the impossible, attain the possible, but would 

 in consequence fall far short of the possible. In just the same 

 manner if the ambitions of sanguine youth did not build 

 castles in the air, age would never even achieve the building 

 of a hut on the earth. 



Thus I might have chosen to demonstrate the degree of 

 right and wrong in a less offensive manner had I selected 

 morality and immorality in place of polygamy and monogamy 

 as my illustrative subjects, but so fine are the lines of distinc- 

 tion between these two, and so varied are, and ever must be, 

 the high and low water marks that different communities and 

 different classes of society will ever have to make the adjusti- 

 ble and ever-varying boundary lines of the more concrete 

 virtues of everyday life, that it would have necessitated a 

 volume, instead of a chapter, to have approached this subject 

 without danger of the reader not personally knowing where to 

 draw the line between the practical limits of concrete action 

 and purely abstract thought. I therefore decided it was wiser 

 to select murder and polygamy as a means of example, be- 

 cause the present magnitude of their concrete criminality 

 would prevent the reader making the mistake of confounding 

 my attempt to point out the abstract position of virtue and 

 crime and sin into the absurd idea that this chapter can con- 

 done wrong in the concrete form of his individual liberty of 

 action. This any but an idiot knows must be decided by the 

 laws that make the boundaries of the freedom of the com- 

 munity in which he lives. 



My object in going into these various branches of defini- 

 tions prior to making a short sketch of the most probable 

 manner and course of evolution is, that, to follow it easily, it 

 is in many cases necessary first of all to unburden the mind 

 from the narrow and limited ideas that social customs and 

 fashions of the age in which we live have made the customary 

 and present acceptance of such terms, so that we may look at 

 the matter under discussion from the wider standpoint, 

 namely, the position they hold as a part of the great scheme 



