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For our political language was made to express a routine conception of government. It comes to us from the Eighteenth Century. And no matter how much we talk about the infusion of the "evolutionary" point of view into all of modern thought, when the test is made political practice shows itself almost virgin to the idea.
We moderns of evolutionary smattering have our own ideas of how cave men dwelt; and we don't want those ideas disturbed. The cave men ask Jack London if you don't believe it were hairy monsters, not quite tailless, just cotton-tail-rabbity in their caudal appendage hairy monsters, who munched raw beef and dragged women by the hair of the head to pitch-black, dark as night, smoke-begrimed caves.
And one is left again wondering why, if almighty intelligence could make all things straight in the next world, why the same intelligence could not have made the necessary corrections in this one. The truth is that the God of the evolutionary process is as much a myth as is the god of special creation. He has all the blemishes of the other one one step removed.
In order that you may be prepared to ridicule these pseudo-scientists who come to you with guesses instead of facts, let me give you three recent bits of evolutionary lore. Last November I was passing through Philadelphia and read in an afternoon paper a report of an address delivered in that city by a college professor employed in extension work.
It is true that we find human nature, as yet, for the most part, in very crude conditions; its divine qualities are not clearly seen. It does not yet appear what we shall be. But we have learned, in our evolutionary studies, that no living thing ought to be judged in the earlier stages of its development; we must wait to see the perfected type before we can make up our minds about it.
The link is one of feeling, primarily, though it has associated with it, in an indissoluble way, purpose and action. The existence of the social instinct is undisputed; its explanation is varied and ranges from the mystical to the evolutionary. This does not explain hate, racial and individual.
Withal, the brilliant work of Bayliss and Starling stands as the third great foundation stone, the first Claude Bernard's and the second Brown-Séquard's, in the architecture of the modern concepts of the internal secretions. The glands of internal secretion, the history of which, as tools of thought, I reviewed in the previous chapter, have each an interesting evolutionary story.
If it betook itself from the body and lived on, there was no reason to invent another death for it; thus arose the conception of their immortality, which, at that evolutionary stage, did not appear as a consolation, but as fate, against which a man cannot strive, and often enough, as among the Greeks, as a positive misfortune.
The evolutionary changes which we observe in the earth and in man are in fact a single process, working through a variety of manifested forms. From this conception of the parallel evolution of earth and man light falls also on the historic event represented by van Helmont's discovery.
Therefore they claim that when the evolutionary development of matter reached a certain stage, God appeared on the scene and endowed certain forms with the principle of animal life, in its lowest elements.
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