THE FUTURE EVOLUTION OF MAN 251 
that we should have descended from creatures as 
lowly as they. If evolution is true, these are among 
our near ancestors. Back of the group of primates 
lies a far less developed set of insectivorous animals, 
behind them the reptiles, behind them the fishes. 
When we get back this far we are less certain but 
most probably the worms take up the story. So our 
ancestry runs back to the very beginning, when it 
originated in the one-celled animals which are also 
the ancestors of all the rest of the animal world. If 
we are inclined to deny our ancestors in the trees, 
what shall we say of our forefathers in the seas? 
The question of course is not to be decided by our 
likes or our dislikes. If the evolution of man is true 
it will not make it less true because the process is 
not to our liking. It is our part, if this be the truth, 
to accept it as we do any other truth. Surely those 
of us who are moral of thought are not willing to 
disbelieve a truth because it is unpleasant. 
The newness of the idea is the chief reason for 
our dislike of it. This lowliness of origin should 
not be distasteful to us. Nothing about Abraham 
Lincoln seems to us more wonderful than that a 
man who towered head and shoulders above his 
generation, indeed above most generations of men, 
in his fineness of life, in his nobility of purpose, in 
the integrity of his aims, should have been of ex- 
