of their environment. These capacities have respect to future possibilities of culture. But prolepsis, anticipation, involves intention and a will. He contends further,1-that even as to his body, Man is a clear and palpable and positive exception to the theory of Evolution. Το produce the human frame required, he says, the intervention of some special agency. He adverts to the peculiar disposition of the hair on man, especially that nakedness of the back which is common to all races of men, and to the peculiar construction of the hand and foot. "The hand of man," he tells us, " contains latent capacities and powers which are unused by savages, and must have been even less used by palæolithic man and his still ruder predecessors. It has all the appearance of an organ prepared for the use of civilized man, and one which was required to render civilization possible." Again speaking of the "wonderful power, range, flexibility, and sweetness of the musical sounds producible by the human larynx," he adds, "the habits of savages give no indication of how this faculty could have been developed." "The singing of savages is a more or less monotonous howling, and the females 1 "Natural Selection," pp. 332-360. seldom sing at all." "It seems as if the organ had been prepared in anticipation of the future progress of man, since it contains latent capacities which are useless to him in his earlier condition." 1 Mr. Wallace is in perfect agreement also with christian theism in the value he attaches to man's "capacity to form ideal conceptions of space and time, of eternity and infinity-the capacity for intense artistic feelings of pleasure, in form, colour, and composition-and those abstract notions of form and number which render geometry possible," as well as with respect to the non-bestial origin of moral perception." 2 And beyond all this, he considers Man as not only placed "apart, as the head and culminating point of the grand series of organic nature, but as in some degree a new and distinct order of being." "When the first rude spear was formed to assist in the chase; when fire was first used to cook his food; when the first 1 On this subject, indeed, even Mr. Darwin himself admits that "neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least direct use to man in reference to his ordinary habits of life; they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed."-Descent of Man, vol. ii. p. 333. 2 "Natural Selection," pp. 351, 352. seed was sown or shoot planted, a grand revolution was effected in nature, a revolution which in all the previous ages of the earth's history has had no parallel, for a being had arisen who was no longer necessarily subject to change with the changing universe, a being who was in some degree superior to nature, inasmuch as he knew how to control and regulate her action, and could keep himself in harmony with her, not by a change in body, but by an advance in mind.” Against facts like these, of what avail are Mr. Darwin's ingenious speculations? The answer may be given in the words of Professor Mivart. It is the same high authority that pronounced Mr. Darwin's "Origin of Species" to be "a puerile hypothesis," and its distinctive characteristic, "a conception utterly irrational; "1 who now adds, "Thus, then, in our judgment the author of the Descent of Man' has UTTERLY FAILED in the only part of his work which is really important: and if Mr. Darwin's failure should lead to an increase of philosophic culture on the part of physicists, we may therein find some consolation for the injurious effects which his work is likely to produce on too many of our half-educated classes." 2 1 "Lessons from Nature,” p. 300. 2 Ibid., p. 184. Nor is this all. Man is something more than an intellectual animal. He is a free moral agent and, as such,-and with the infinite future which that freedom opens out before him -he differs from all the rest of the visible universe by "a distinction so profound that no one of those which separate other visible beings is comparable with it. The gulf which lies between his being as a whole, and that of the highest brute, marks off vastly more than a mere kingdom of material beings, and man, so considered, differs far more from an elephant or a gorilla than do these from the dust of the carth on which they tread."1 "Lessons from Nature," p. 184. |