398 



SCIENCE. 



powers of Man. Apart from these, they are changes 

 which would have placed the new creature at a hopeless 

 disadvantage in the struggle for existence. It is not 

 easy to imagine — indeed, we may safely say that it is 

 impossible to ccnceive--the condition of things during any 

 intermediate steps in such a process. It seems as if there 

 could be no safety until it had been completed — until the 

 enfeebled physical organization had been supported and 

 reinforced by the new capacities for knowledge and de- 

 sign. This, however, is not the point on which we are 

 dwelling now. We are now speculating on the origin of 

 Man. We are considering him only as he is, and as he 

 must have been since he was Man at all. And in that 

 structure as it is, we see that the bodily senses have a 

 smaller relative importance than in the beasts. To the 

 beasts theses sense tell them all they know. To us they 

 speak but little compared with all that our spirit of inter- 

 pretation gathers from them. But that spirit of inter- 

 pretation is in the nature of a sense. In the lower ani- 

 mals every external stimulus moves to some appropriate 

 action. In Man it moves to some appropriate thought. 

 This is an enormous difference; but the principle is the 

 same. We can see that, so far as the mechanism is 

 visible, the plan or the principle of that mechanism is 

 alike. The more clearly we understand that this organic 

 mechanism has been a growth and a development, the 

 more certain we may be that in its structure it is sell- 

 adapted, and that in its working it is true. And the 

 same principle applies to those other faculties of our 

 mental constitution which have no outward organ to in- 

 dicate the machinery through which their operations are 

 conducted. In them the spirit of interpretation is in com- 

 munication with the realities which lie behind phenom- 

 ena — with energies which are kindred with its own. And 

 so we come to understand that the processes of Develop- 

 ment or of Creation, whatever they may have been, which 

 culminated in the production of a Being such as Man, are 

 processes wholly governed and directed by a law of adjust- 

 ment between the higher truths which it concerns him 

 most to know, and the evolution of faculties by which 

 alone he could he enabled to apprehend them. There is 

 no difficulty in conceiving these processes carried to the 

 most perfect consummation, as we do see them actually- 

 carried to very high degrets of excellence in the case of a 

 few men of extraordinary genius, or of extraordinary vir- 

 tue. In science the most profound conclusions have been 

 sometimes reached without any process of conscious rea- 

 soning. It is clearly the law of our nature, however, that 

 the triumphs of intellect are to be gained only by labori- 

 ous thought, and by the gains of one generation being 

 made the starting-point for the acquisition of the next. 

 This is the general law. But it is a law which itself as- 

 sumes certain primary intuitions of the mind as the start- 

 ing-point of all. If these were wrong, nothing could be 

 right. The whole processes of reasoning would be viti- 

 ated from the first. The first man must have had these 

 as perfectly as we now have them, else the earliest steps 

 of reason could never have been taken, the earliest re- 

 wards of discovery could never have been secured. But 

 there is this great difference between the moral and the 

 intellectual nature of Man, that whereas in the work of 

 reasoning the perceptions which are primary and intui- 

 tive require to be worked out and elaborately applied, in 

 morals the perceptions which are primary are all in all. 

 It is true that here also the applications may be infinite, 

 and the doctrines of Utility have their legitimate applica- 

 tion in enforcing, by the sense of obligation, whatever 

 course of conduct Reason may determine to be the most 

 fitting and the best. The sense of obligation in itself is, 

 like the sense of logical sequence, elementary, and, like 

 it, is part and parcel of our mental constitution. But un- 

 like the mere sense of logical sequence, the sense of mor- 

 al obligation has one necessary and primary application 

 which from the earliest moment of Man's existence may 

 well have been ail-sufficient. Obedience to the will of 



legitimate Authority is, as we have seen in a former 

 chapter, the first duty and the first idea of duty in the mind 

 of every child. If ever there was a man who had no earthly 

 father, or if ever there was a man whose father was, as 

 compared with himself, a beast, it would seem a natural 

 and almost a necessary supposition that, along with his 

 own new and wonderful power of self-consciousness, 

 there should have been associated a consciousness also 

 of the presence and the power of that Creative Energy 

 to which his own development was due. It is not possi- 

 ble for us to conceive what form the consciousness 

 would take. " No man hath seen God at any time." 

 This absolute declaration of one of the Apostles of 

 the Christian Cnurch proves that they accepted, as 

 metaphorical, the literal terms in which the first 

 communications between Man and his Creator are 

 narrated in the Jewish Scriptures. It is not necessary to 

 suppose that the Almighty was seen by His first human 

 creature walking in bodily form in a garden "in the cool 

 of the day." The strong impressions of a spiritual 

 Presence and of spiritual communications which have 

 been the turning-point in the lives of men living in the 

 bustle of a busy £nd corrupted world, may well have 

 been even more vivid and more immediate when the first 

 " Being worthy to be called a man " stood in this world 

 alone. The light which shone on Paul of Tarsus on the 

 way to Damascus may have been such a light as shone 

 on the fa'her of our race ; or the communication may 

 have been what metaphysicians call purely subjective, 

 such as in all ages of the world do sometimes " flash 

 upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude." 

 But none the less may they have been direct and over- 

 powering. The earliest and simplest conception of the 

 Divine Nature might well also be the best. And although 

 we are forbidden to suppose the embodiment and visi- 

 bility of the Godhead, we are not driven to the alterna- 

 tive of concluding that there never could have been any- 

 thing which is to us unusual in the intimations of His 

 presence. Yet this is another of the unobserved assump- 

 tions which are perpetually made — the assumption of an 

 uniformity in Nature which does not exist. That "all 

 things have continued as they are since the beginning" 

 is conceivable. But that all things should have con- 

 tinued as they were since before the beginning is a con- 

 tradiction in terms. In primeval times many things had 

 then just been done of which we have no knowledge 

 now. When the form of Man had been fashioned and 

 completed for the first time, like and yet unlike to the 

 bodies of the beasts ; when all their organs had been 

 lifted to a higher significance in his ; when his hands had 

 been liberated from walking and from climbing, and had 

 been elaborated into an instrument of the most subtle 

 and various use ; when his feet had been adapted for 

 holding him in the erect position ; when his breathing 

 apparatus had been set to musical chords of widest com- 

 pass and the most exquisite tones ; when all his senses 

 had become ministers to a mind endowed with wonder 

 and wilh reverence, and with reason and with love — then 

 a work had been accomplished such as the world had 

 not known before, and such as has never been repeated 

 since. All the conditions under which that work was 

 carried forward must have been happy conditions — 

 conditions, that is to say, in perfect harmony with its 

 progress and its end. They must have been favorable, 

 first, to the production and then to the use of those 

 higher faculties which separa'ed the new creature from 

 the beasts. They must have been in a corresponding de- 

 gree adverse to the incompatible with the prevalence ol 

 conditions tending to reversion or to degradation in any 

 form. That long and gradual ascent, if we assume it to 

 have been so, — or, as it may have been, that sudden 

 transfiguration, — must have taken place in a congenial 

 air and amid surroundings which lent themselves to so 

 great a change. On every conceivable theory, therefore, 

 of the origin of Man, all this seems a necessity of thought. 



