72 ORGANIC M VOLUTION CONSIDERED 



a hundred million years. If we imagine the primor- 

 dial protoplasm to have been turned over to the man- 

 agement of purely secondary causes, to the " laws 

 impressed on matter," to run the amuck of adverse 

 circumstances during all that time, without the direct 

 supervision of the Creator, it seems to me that there 

 were millions of chances to one that this direct chain 

 would have been broken, and thus have destroyed the 

 possibility of the evolution of man. 



It was possible, according to the theory, for man to 

 be evolved in one line only, and that line was com- 

 posed of an infinite number of forms in succession, 

 the extinction of any one of which, without leaving 

 progeny, would have prevented the evolution of man. 



That blind chance, without the intervention of an 

 Intelligent Creator, could have preserved the infinite 

 ancestral line, does not seem probable. 



This evolution, according to Mr. Darwin, by virtue 

 of "the laws impressed on matter by the Creator," 

 proceeded upward from protoplasm to man, in spite 

 of the fact that there does not seem to be " any evi- 

 dence of the existence of an innate tendency toward 

 perfectibility or progressive development." 



The evolution of man assumes the preservation in 

 every instance of the most highly developed forms in 

 each of the countless generations that compose the 

 chain of evolution, unless it may be assumed that 

 ultimate forms higher than man might have been 

 evolved from beings that have perished. 



Natural selection does not, however, necessarily 

 preserve the most highly developed forms. It only 

 preserves those forms that are best adapted to com- 

 pete in the struggle for existence under the given cir- 

 cumstance's. The fact of a more highly organized 

 body, or even of greater intelligence, does not neces- 

 sarily insure preservation. 



