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allow that even the cell or protoplasmic life-stuff was created. Darwin gave up the idea of a Being, outside of and apart from Nature, needed to interpose at specific points in natural evolution to supplement with supernatural power. It is now asserted by his school, and all who accept the present positions of scientific speculation, that the hypothesis of a creator at all is wholly unnecessary and untenable. It is the object of my lectures to follow the lead of evolution, and see if it can make good both premise and conclusion, and to discover what physical and moral results are involved in so sweeping a revolution in our conception of Nature.

So far as man is concerned, there are practically no evolutionists left who do not affirm that he also is in the line of natural descent, and a product of the same sort as all other living forms. The primordial cell, having passed through all the lower stages of vegetable and animal life, has culminated in the animal that reasons, is possessed of self-consciousness, and that hopes for immortality. The immediate progenitor of man is presumed to have been of the ape or lemur stock, closely related to, but not identical with any existing species. That is, man and the apes are from a common ancestor. But it is an extremely narrow conception of evolution to think of it, as I fear most at present do, as simply teaching the descent of man from animals. It is at least that thread by which we feel our way back to the simplest organic creature, and then forward again by the same thread, tracing the cell through its simpler changes, and, in turn, its more complex, until the world is wealthy with myriad forms of life. A glorious march it is through munificent mazes of beauty and grace and power, until, having coursed the realm of plants, trees, and flowers, as well as the more princely realm that stretches from the sponge to the vertebrates, we at last find ourselves among the mammalia or milk-givers; at the head of these the few primates; among the primates man as king; and

among men, reaching well upward, by aspiration and inspiration toward the Infinite, Jesus, Plato, Shakespeare. Instead of saying man is descended from the ape, we should rather conceive the ape as a development of an arrested sort from the ancestor of both man and ape. And I intend to do more than this, to show you, before the close of my lectures, that a complete view of evolution carries us back altogether of all phenomena of life, to find our true origin in the womb of Infinite Life itself.

Under the forces of evolution, the one conservative and tenacious of the old, the other radical and eager for the new, I think it is possible to account for the superb life, beauty, and progressive tendencies of our world. A stout persistence of the old is constantly wrestled by an aggressive desire for the new. And it will be quite in my line to show you that moral and intellectual development follow the same law as structural; in other words, higher morals, like finer beauty, come from favorable environments antagonizing unfavorable hereditary tendencies. If you wish to make a Cornish miner into an intellectual citizen, you must remove him from depressing associations and toil. If you wish to lift the tenement-dwellers of our large cities in the scale of pure living, you must first provide them with better homes. History shows us races dropped into barbarism and ultimate extinction through the changes wrought by war, by subjection to tyranny, or by transfer to inhospitable climes. The struggle for existence ends in the survival of the fittest, but the fittest morally are the most moral and industrious; so it is that character reacts on environment as environment acts on character. Evolution is compelled to consider not only progressive change, but degeneration and lapse.

I shall now leave the two hypotheses as they stand, face to face, fully antagonistic and unreconcilable. The exact definition of the theory of a creation is the direct exercise of the will of a Being, extra-natural, originating at succes

sive periods the organisms that have peopled the earth. The careful definition of evolution is the descent of species from species, by insensibly fine gradations, during vast ages.

I have used, or shall use, the words cell and protoplasm, and primordial cell. The cell is simply an inclosing wall of matter of the simplest sort, in which is a fluid particle. The primordial cell is that cell which by supposition was first to exist. Protoplasm is life-stuff, or that composition of matter which is necessary as a matrix for life. So far as our globe is concerned, life never appears except in conjunction with protoplasm, or bioplasm, which is all the same thing. It is composed of definite proportions of four substances found as elements in nature-carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen. Wherever this compound exists life may exist. That is, added one more element, non-material, and life does and must exist. This complex substance vegetable growth originates. Animals must receive it almost wholly from the vegetable kingdom. It is not necessary to con sider that life did not exist before the cell, or even apari from protoplasm; it is only necessary to understand that as we see it manifested, it is only under such conditions. We must also bear in mind that the spectroscope has recently revealed to us that the elements that compose life-stuff are common materials of the whole universe, existing in all worlds.

It may be well also, in a preliminary view, to remember that as evolution posits of man not a fall but an ascent from simple social conditions to complex ethical relations, so it points to an endless progression ahead. It shows us not as a completed work, but leaves us on the road. It speaks of the past as without a beginning, of the future as without an end. It promises as grandly as it reveals. You will find there is no question of life, or of thought, of religion, history, philosophy, of social science or politics, that does not seek its solution in evolution. The struggle for existence still goes on, but it is more than ever a struggle

of ideas and purposes. The law of evolution is not a divine fiat or series of fiats; it is the orderly sequence of a causative principle that lies in nature and in all nature.

Taking the motto of Kant, that "Man can not think highly enough of man," I can much more readily feel pride in my ancestry when I see them, by the power in their brain-cells and their hands, forcing their way upward through the most antagonistic conditions, until, from a primitive anthropoid, they reach the dignity of the Caucasian masters of nature and rulers of the world, than I could if I saw them fallen from a godlike origin, hating their creator, and by him cast off as recreant rebels. If any one can take pride in a race totally depraved and lapsed, and fit only for eternal punishment, I can not comprehend him. Evolution is the theology of rising humanity, of honor, of faith, of hope. Creation is the theology of a great despair, ringing through all time, a terrible failure with but slight compensation, involving a religion nihilistic at the core.

LECTURE II.

THE UNITY OF NATURE.

EXCEPT for theological purposes, we never think or speak of Nature except as one-the universe, an absolute unit. True, we can not reach its confines, but we have learned to believe and to try to think of it as boundless. Early efforts to comprehend natural phenomena ended naturally in very partial and fragmentary views. The sense of unity that we embody in the words eternal, infinite, universal, the cosmos, was no more possible to primitive man than to the savage. His were perceptions, not conceptions, for the most part. His sky was a roof; his world an island or a boat set upon an elephant or a fish. Partialism slowly, by accumulation of facts, became universalism. The many dropped into the one. The discovery of the heliocentric plan of the universe, the planetary laws of motion, the universality of gravitation, caught up men's minds to a conception so grand, so severely simple, that we are unable to do more than bow to its verity.

As fast as universalism grew to be a conception, polytheism grew feeble, for the gods were only the forces behind events, imagined to act as causes. Men must find a final cause, a cause of causes. There must be a God of gods, an infinite Creator. Monotheism was a natural growth. This must ultimate in the unity of mankind; for if one God, then his work must be one; if a Heavenly Father, then are we not all his children? So, as a natural evolution, came

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