74 Is Man a Finality of Organic Evolution? 
toward which all these intellectual adaptations converge, a point is reached 
which will not be passed except under a different general scheme. 
Similar remarks apply to the co-ordination existing between the material 
and the idea of the beautiful in man. The beauty and sublimity of nature 
have no relation to any other creature. Man is the consummation of a dual- 
ism; while the beautiful implies man it excludes a successor. No endowment 
beyond or higher than a response to the provisions of nature is possible. The 
beneficent provisions of the earth’s crust not only prophesy man, but they 
reach their finality in man. It was only for human uses that the coal was 
treasured in the recesses of the earth. For human uses alone the mountains 
have lifted up their burdens of iron. For human uses only the grandest 
movements of geological history elaborated and distributed a soil. It is only 
for man that the forests yield their abundant supplies of timber and fuel. For 
man the edible and medicinal vegetables were provided. For man the natures © 
of the domestic animals moulded, and their domestic attachments are directed 
to no other being. 
It may be added that vertebrate developments both points towards 
man and attains its consummationin man. The earliest fish, which in the 
waters of the Paleozoic seas, embodied in its asteological organization a 
prophecy of man; the Mesozoic reptile still pointed onward toward man; Ter- 
tiary monkeys were a higher summit of verterbrate organization, from which 
the yet higher alp of human structure was still pointed to, illumined by the 
rising dawn of the modern world. In the skeleton of man we have at last the 
fulfillment of the prophecies of ages. Man stands in the focus of all the con- 
ceptions embodied in past history. We are as little authorized to allow that 
the course of development is destined to advance beyond him as to deny that 
it has furnished intimations in all ages that it was destined to reach him. 
Consider, in the second place, man’s superiority over the brutes. Among the 
myriads of animals which populated the earth during the cycles of geological 
history supremacy was the reward only of superior force. Man gains suprem- 
acy through his intellect. Brutes dominate through the physical forces be- 
longing to matter; man, through the immaterial forces which are the attri- 
butes of Deity. The chasm which separates the intelligence of man from that 
of the brutes is broad. It is not simply a step in the easy gradations observed 
among the brutes themselves — it is a break in the chain of gradations. Even 
if not qualitatively superior to that of brutes, its sudden expansion is so 
great that its sphere of activity creates: a new quality in the being. Man is 
the first being in all the history of the world that could contemplate creation 
and abstract the intelligence displayed in it, and experience a glow of satis- 
faction in attaining to the thoughts first conceived in the mind of the Omnis- 
cient. Man is the first animal capable of contemplating Deity. In these 
extolled endowments not only does he excel the brutes, but he excels them in 
so vast a degree as to suggest the belief that the gradations of animal exist- 
ence had been concluded, and Nature had reached a full pause; the material 
part —the framework — of animality had been perfected by slow gradations; 
and now on the creation of man, Nature superadded an unprecedented endow- 
ment — a spiritual organization, which makes man both a prince and a master- 
piece of creation. . 
When we speak of man’s moral nature we touch a subject which recalls all 
that has just been said of his intellect, and affirms it with redoubled em- 
phasis. There are reasons for believing that this endowment differs in 
kind from anything in the nature of the brute. This, to the ability to under- 
stand God, adds the ability to sympathize in his moral attributes, and to 
enter into moral relations with him and with humanity. Man stands in con- 
tact with God. A farther approximation is impossible. He must be the 
limit, as he is the existing culmination of organic life. These various con- 
