72 Siouoo City Academy of Science and Letters. 



I assume that my hearers accept and believe in the 

 theory of evolution. It is so generally believed to be 

 true by all educated persons that I shall offer no argu- 

 ments in its defense. We may and probably do not fully 

 understand all that it implies, but neither do we fully 

 understand the theory of gravitation, but it would be 

 hard to find an intelligent person who disbelieves the 

 theory as given to us by Newton. Evolution rules the 

 whole cosmos. Every atom in our universe is in cease- 

 less motion, acting upon and being acted upon by sur- 

 rounding atoms. Nothing is dead or inert. Now is mind 

 as we know it, a product of evolution as well as body? 

 Every student of science will answer this question in the 

 affirmative. There can be no other answer. We all know 

 that mind is a growth. Every human being comes into 

 this world with only a potential mind. The physical ap- 

 paratus that we everywhere find in connection with mind 

 is not complete at birth, and, therefore, mind can only 

 appear later, when its complementary physical organs 

 through which it is manifested are completed and ready 

 for their work. This is the individual history. Do we 

 find the same facts in the race history as in that of the 

 individual? There can be but one answer to this ques- 

 tion. As we go backward and downward toward the 

 less civilized, the barbarous, the savage, and to primitive 

 man, we find the manifestations of mind growing less 

 and less until we reach races of men whose minds are 

 little, if any, above those of the more intelligent animals 

 that are with us. Now if we find the body and mind of 

 man to be the products of evolution, that man is a direct 

 descendent of animal ancestors below him, then we can- 

 not by any reasonable thought believe otherwise than 

 that he inherited his mind as well as his body. We can- 

 not believe that when man appeared, the final and high- 

 est link in the long chain of organized beings that have 

 lived on our earth, that there Avas some kind of a super- 

 natural interference with the immutable laws of nature, 

 through which he received a new and different mind] 

 from his immediate bodily ancestors. If, as we must 

 believe, he inherited mind as well as body, then his 

 animal ancestors certainly possessed mind for him to 

 inherit. And as mind wherever we see its manifesta- 



