8 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



6. The youngest and most perfectly developed twig of the primates 

 is man, who sprang from a series of manlike apes toward the end of 

 the Tertiary period. 



Verily, the picture is not alluring, but we have been forced to 

 accept it as truth of life. And from truth of life even Apollo himself 

 must never flee. Nay, it is here or nowhere that his kingship must 

 be finally estabHshed. 



Ine\'itably the attitude of our poets toward the doctrine vnll show 

 something of the di\'isions clea\'ing the rest of mankind. In the up- 

 ward march from the primal slime through countless forms of pithe- 

 coid and still lowHer ancestors, one band of thinkers will see either a 

 "splendid accident," or at most the operation of an utterly incom- 

 prehensible power to which we are of absolutely no concern. In this 

 same ascent another band of thinkers will trace a "beneficent Omnipo- 

 tence" operating through all nature, from the tiniest ion, or electron, 

 or nucleus of energy, or whatever may have been the fijst particle of 

 matter, to the final crown of the universe, which is man. 



Of the newer poets who accept the former solution, with all its 

 connotations, we may find an unflinching example in Mr. William 

 Watson. This hardy singer, in a prose argument to "The Hope of the 

 World," accepts freely, but not gladly, the "splendid accident" 

 theor>'. And he goes on to assert that in view of our present knowl- 

 edge "the heroic course is rather to reject than to welcome the solace 

 of an optimism, which apparently rests upon no securer foundation 

 than that of instinctive hope alone." 



But in \'iew of the ease with which an extremist of Mr. Watson's 

 tjpe maybe arraigned for "flippancy, youthful certainty, slap-dash 

 pseudo-science" and other terrible things, let us try to appreciate 

 his real attitude toward the great question of religious faith by glan- 

 cing at one of his sonnets, which well deserves quotation for its intrinsic 

 worth :^ 



Dismiss not so, with light hard phrase and cold, 



Ev'n if it be but fond imagining, 



The hoi)e whereto so passionately cling 



' Poems, Vol. H, p. 20, 1905. 



