157 



anxious that its views be fairly stated and placed 

 beyond misrepresentation. This is what we have 

 especially aimed at in the preceding pages — putting 

 the argument suggestively rather than contending 

 dogmatically for its adoption. Surely men may 

 discuss the merits of an hypothesis without com- 

 mitting themselves to its opinions ; charitably they 

 may listen to the beliefs of another without foregoing 

 their own convictions. By no other method will 

 human knowledge ever be increased ; upon no other 

 principle can truth ever be established. 



Our seventh proposition, therefore, is that man's 

 origin being placed far beyond the limits of his own 

 experience, resolves itself into a question of natural- 

 history research and philosophical inference ; that man 

 being inseparably associated with the great scheme 

 of vitality, the same methods of investigation must 

 be applied to him as to the other members of 

 that scheme j and applying these methods — partly 

 from physiological observation of variations in exist- 

 ing species, and partly from palseontological discovery 

 of similar variations in extinct species — ^we arrive at 

 the inference that there has been a gradual develop- 

 ment of higher from lower and antecedent life-forms, 

 and this for man as well as for other animals. And 

 finally, that this inference of vital development, under 



