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Brown even believes that our "insurgent lusts and passions" are predetermining causes of heresy, so that in respect both to faith and to works they achieve our damnation. How then did we come by them? The Evolutionist frankly answers the question without fear of blasphemy on the one hand or of moral despair on the other. Mr. Brown is bound to give his answer after raising the question so vividly.
If you believed, on the contrary, that all the different species are modifications, variations, and elaborations of one primal stock, or even of a few primal stocks, then you were an Evolutionist. But you were not necessarily a Darwinian; for you might have been a modern Evolutionist twenty years before Charles Darwin was born, and a whole lifetime before he published his Origin of Species.
He has no soul I pause, remembering the ineffectual attempts of my Radiant Being to inspire human souls with a greater vision. Are we not all goats before the gaze of more finely organized creatures? The evolutionist need not be disheartened by the thought. Nature is unexhausted. Desire and experience are ever creating new forms, new organs.
Professor Martins a leading French scientist and an evolutionist says of Agassiz: "Another of these precursors of modern science is Louis Agassiz. The oldest fossil forms have a simpler organization than the later ones, and represent some stage of the embryonic development of the latter.
And yet beneath all this statesmanlike prose, touched with the special dryness of the jurist, lurk the romance of the poet and the purposeful vagueness of the modern evolutionist; the fantasy of the Hungarian, the dramatic self-consciousness of the literary artist, the heart of the Jew.
We can not be certain that any one of these has the slightest evidential value. An ardent evolutionist, Dr. Dubois, found a few bones, part ape, part human, buried in the river sands, 40 feet deep. They were scattered 50 feet apart, no two joined together. They called this strange creature pithecanthropus, and fixed its age at 750,000 years; others reduced it to 375,000 years.
He observed the analogy between the modifications induced by man and the modifications induced by nature. In fact, he was a thorough-going and convinced evolutionist, holding every salient opinion which Society still believes to have been due to the works of Charles Darwin.
Here are exhibited, in a delightfully popular form, some of the lessons that the evolutionist has taught us during the last half-century. Appropriately enough, a fine marble statue of Darwin, whose work is the fountain-head of all these lessons, is placed on the stairway just beyond, as if to view with approval this beautiful exemplification of his work.
The recognition of these facts would only be a beginning; but it would be a beginning which would avoid the cardinal error fallen into not only by the leading exponents of evolutionist morality, but also to be found in much of the ethical work of idealist metaphysicians.
The evolutionist, therefore, is bound to grapple with the following problem whenever it is clearly put before him: Here are the Faunae of the same area during successive epochs.
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