112 HAS SCIENCE DISCOVERED GOD? 



posed from without on objects, but are laws of the 

 objects' own being. And the laws governing the evo- 

 lution of life seem to be as regular and automatic as 

 those governing the movements of the planets. 



In this universe lives man. He is a curious phe- 

 nomenon : a piece of the universal world-stuff which, 

 as result of long processes of change and strife, has 

 become intensely conscious — conscious of itself, of its 

 relations with the rest of the world-stuff, capable of 

 consciously feeling, reasoning, desiring and planning. 

 These capacities are the result of an astonishingly 

 complicated piece of physical machinery — the cerebral 

 hemispheres of his brain. The limitations to our ca- 

 pacities come from the construction of our brains and 

 bodies which we receive through heredity; — with some 

 one else's body and brain, our development even in 

 the same environment could have been different. 



And these conditions in human capacity due to dif- 

 ferences In inheritance must be enormous. The 

 method of inheritance in men is identical in principle 

 with the method of inheritance in poultry or flies or 

 fish. And by means of further detailed knowledge we 

 could control it, and therefore control human capacity, 

 which is only another way of saying that man has the 

 power of controlling his own future. Or, if you like 

 to put it still more generally, that not only is he the 

 highest product of evolution, but, through his power of 

 conscious reason, he has become the trustee of the evo- 

 lutionary process. His own future and that of the 

 earth are in large measure in his hands. And that 

 future extends for thousands of millions of years. 



