TIME AND CHANGE 
Certain characters, he says, are adaptive or suited 
to their purpose from the start; they do not have 
to be fitted to their place by natural selection. 
Huxley uses the word “predestined” — all the life 
of the globe and all the starry hosts of heaven are 
working out in boundless space and in endless time 
“their predestined course of evolution.” Darwin 
must have had in mind the same mysterious some- 
thing when he said that man had risen to the very 
summit of the animal scale, but not through his own 
exertions. Not by his own will or exertion, surely, 
any more than the embryo in its mother’s womb 
develops into the full-grown child by its own exer- 
tion or than our temperaments and complexions 
and statures are matters of our own wills and’choice. 
Something greater than man and before him, to 
which he sustains the relation that the unborn child 
sustains to its mother, must enter into our thought 
of his origin and development. 
The great evolutionists have been very cautious 
about seeking to go behind evolution and name the 
Primal Cause. In such an attempt science would at 
once be beyond soundings. Darwin and Huxley 
were reverent, truth-loving men, but they hesitated 
as men of science to put themselves in a position 
where no step could be taken. 
Slowly man emerges out of the abyss of geologic 
time into the dawn of history, and science gropes 
about like a man feeling his way in the dark or, at 
218 
