The romance of evolution, and its relation to religion

BL 263 .K5 1913
Kimball, John C. b. 1832.
The romance of evolution,
and its relation to

CO 1 ! 1925

THE ROMANCE OR^^
EVOLUTION

AND ITS RELATION
TO RELIGION

BY
JOHN C. KIMBALL

BOSTON

AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION

1913

Copyright, 1913
AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION

PREFACE

The writer of these essays was a vigorous
thinker and a man of conspicuous gifts of
public speech. Through his love for natural
beauty he was early led into scientific research
and he made himself one of the most convincing
of the interpreters of the philosophy of evolu-
tion. He combined a scientific habit of mind
with a deep interest in spiritual realities. He
was independent in judgment, sincere in utter-
ance and vivid and picturesque in his capacity
to translate truth into terms of life.

John C. Kimball was born at Ipswich, Mass.,
on the 23d of May, 1832. He graduated at
Amherst College in 1854 and after teaching for
several years entered the Harvard Divinity
School where he graduated in 1859. From
I860 to 1871 he was the minister of the First
Parish Church in Beverly, Mass., though dur-
ing two of these years he served as chaplain of
the Eighth Massachusetts Volunteers. For
two years he did effective pioneer work on the
Northwest coast, and then returned to New
England to hold pastorates of five years at

IV

PREFACE

Newport, R. I., ten years at Hartford, Conn.,
and four years at Sharon, Mass. In 1904 he
built a house at Greenfield, Mass., where he
made his home with his daughter and her fam-
ily until his death on February 16, 1910.

Mr. Kimball was a man of a wide range of
reading, thorough, exact and untiring. He
was sometimes truer to his convictions than to
his convenience and preferred the approval of
his own conscience to the applause of the multi-
tude. He was accustomed to speak his mind
with great freedom not only upon the philo-
sophical and religious beliefs which he cher-
ished, but also upon the vexing social problems
of his generation. He was upright and down-
right, courageous and persistent. He was also
remarkably productive, for in spite of his busy
life of study and of pastoral service he wrote
unceasingly upon the subjects and in behalf of
the causes which enlisted his enthusiasm. A
graphic article of his appeared in the Spring-
field Republican on the day before his death,
and another in the Christian Register on the
day after his death.

Many of the essays in this book were pre-
pared for delivery as lectures before the Brook-
lyn Ethical Society and were also delivered at
the Meadville Theological School and before
various clubs and scientific societies in different

PREFACE v

parts of the country. Several of them were
also probably used as sermons or may have
grown out of sermons. They are remarkable
for their combination of dramatic language
with scientific accuracy, and for a certain
pungency and persuasiveness of style which
makes them real and lasting contributions to
the literature which deals with the contacts of
science and religion.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER pAQE

I The Romance of Scientific Discovery . . 1

II What Evolution Is 29

III The Three Great Stages of Evolution . . 46

IV The Proofs of Organic Evolution ... 64
V Evidence of Inorganic Evolution ... 84

VI The Evolution of Life 103

VII The Evolution of Love 118

VIII The Evolution of Society 136

IX The World's Coming Better Social State . 158

X How Evolution is Related to Religion . 191

XI Does Evolution Necessitate a First Cause? 200

XII What Becomes of the Fatherhood of God

Under Evolution? 228

XIII A Spirit World as the Necessary Outcome

of This World's Evolution 255

XIV The Warrant for Prayer Under Evolution 287

XV The New Meaning and Position of Work

Under Evolution 310

THE
ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

THE ROMANCE OF SCIENTIFIC
DISCOVERY

Poetry and physics, chivalry and chemistry,
what concord could they have with each other?
The minstrel's song and the laws of mathe-
matics, how can a man serve them both? What
possible sympathy can there be between the old
world of fancy peopled with gods and fairies
and full of mystery, and the new world of
science inhabited, two-fifths, by Brown, Smith
and Robinson, laid off in lots, lighted with gas
and run through with railroads ?

The first effect of scientific discovery was
beyond question the destruction and dissipation
of a great deal that was peculiar and beauti-
ful in the old realms of poetry and romance.
The elements lost their personality amid the
fumes of the chemist's retort. Naiads and dry-
ads fled away from the streams and the woods.
1

2 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

The completed belt around the globe of geo-
graphical discovery left no room on its sur-
face for Spencer's gorgeous Faerie Land. A
hard, prosaic earth, destitute of all that could
charm the fancy or feed the taste, was the
early morning scene of the scientific day; and
it is no wonder that under its influence phi-
losophy and life became for awhile unromantic
and material and that the soul should some-
times cry out for the warmth and grace of the
old imaginations.

Nor is it to be denied that even now there
are some aspects and associations of science
in which it is difficult to find much that is pre-
eminently romantic. The enthusiasm of the
medical student inviting his lady-love to an
elegant dissection will not compare artistically
with that of the olden knight asking her to the
cutting and slashing of a tournament. The
chemical and physiological view of Amelia her-
self as composed of four simple elements,
oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen, mixed
up with a few earths and salts, and arranged
in two hundred and forty bones, seven hundred
muscles and a variable amount of nerves and
adipose tissue is beyond question less adapted
to lyrical expression than the old conception
of her as all purity and sweetness, warmed with
love and set forth in lily cheeks and raven hair.

THE ROMANCE OF SCIENCE 3

The teaching that poetry itself and all
thought depend for their excellence on the
amount of phosphorus secreted in the brain,
and that the best way to get them is to eat
plenty of eggs, cheese and fish, contrasts very
badly from the romantic point of view with the
classic image of the bard feeding on dew and
dreams and pouring out verses from the crea-
tive impulse of his own soul. The elective
affinities of acids and alkalies cannot be wrought
into novels and poems by any known process
of the art so effectively as the affinities of loving
hearts. Then, too, the scientific way of select-
ing a wife and falling in love, going first to a
phrenologist and getting a chart of her skull
with all its bumps, combativeness, destructive-
ness and the like marked upon it, then to the
physiologist to find out whether her tempera-
ment is bilious or phlegmatic, then to the
family physician to make sure she is free from
scrofula and consumption and then to the
woman herself to exchange, not vows but charts
and certificates, is not certainly on the face of
it quite so romantic as where Arthur and
Amelia fall in love with each other at first sight,
and after the requisite number of haunted
castles, diabolic rivals and cruel partings rush
exactly at the end of the second volume ecstatic
into each other's arms.

4 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

This destructive and prosaic side of science,
however, is only its beginning, only the clearing
away of the old rubbish to lay the foundation
of a nobler and fairer structure. Its first
object is indeed truth, truth whatever the ugli-
ness and humility of its outlines may be. But
truth and beauty in their final result are always
sure to blend together and always nourish and
require in those who follow them to the end
something at least of their own grand and he-
roic qualities. Truth here, the same as else-
where, is found to be stranger than fiction, the
world effect, however prosaic its surface may
be, to have roots which go down to infinite
depths of mystery. And scientific discovery
dealing with these truths and facts has come
already to a revelation, lit up the world too with
a light, that for romance and wonder surpasses
all that was ever seen or dreamed of in the
grandest days of old.

Look, first, at the new realms it has opened
before the astonished eye to be traveled
through and explored. It would seem to the
superficial glance as if the opportunity was
about exhausted for the adventurer to go forth
into regions strange and pastures new. The
outside of the planet has been fully traveled
over and explored. No Nina, Pinta and Santa
Maria can sail forth to-day for new worlds

THE ROMANCE OF SCIENCE 5

over untraversed seas; no Robinson Crusoe
come to isles rising out of the deep that the foot
of civilized man never has pressed ; no new Hud-
son and Joliet and De Soto hope to find mighty
rivers, lakes and bays all fresh to bear their
names. And as we look over the map and see
everything plain and clear, every nook and
cape from the jungles of India to the wolfs
long howl on Oonalaska's shore, we can but wish
for new worlds to explore, wish we could stand
again with the world-seeking Genoese as he set
sail the first time for the wonderful West, climb
with Balboa the steeps of Darien for the first
glimpse of the mighty undreamed-of Pacific,
follow Cook with only the through ticket of his
own pluck in putting the girdle of a ship's
wake around the mysterious globe and float
with some new Joliet and La Salle down the
Mississippi's ever ebbing tide, — wish that we
had some fresh food for that hunger of ad-
venture which gnaws forever in the human soul.
It is this very thing, however, that is being
done for us on the grandest scale by natural
science. This outer earth that was explored
by voyagers and travelers of two centuries
ago is only the binding and outer leaf of a vast
volume thousands of pages thick and reaching
back through myriads of years, every one of
which is a realm with oceans and continents and

6 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

a flora and fauna of its own waiting to be ex-
plored. Mighty streams of electricity, mag-
netism and light are flowing around us whose
sources are as much a mystery as those of
Egypt's great enigma for 3000 years, and
with a tide that will take the voyager through
realms that surpass in novelty anything which
ever lay on the banks of the Amazon and Miss-
issippi. The tiniest drop of water is shown
under the microscope to be a globe crowded
with strange forms of life, and, most likely,
with its own capes and islands which no Ma-
gellan has yet circumnavigated or more than
begun to explore. Marco Polo starting out
on his travels through the strange countries
and peoples of Asia had nothing before him
which could rival what awaits the learner of
natural history to-day in every grove and sod
and fallen tree. What isles of fronded palm
rising out of southern seas, what plumage of
tropic birds and mysteries of leaf and flower
unfolded to the first travelers in Yucatan and
Brazil, what novelties of custom, dress and lan-
guage in Abyssinia and far Timbuctoo and up
the Indus and the Nile can surpass the combi-
nations of that magic realm which opens upon
us with ever more and more of wonder in the
chemist's laboratory ! And looking above, what
is the whole earth, all its continents and isles

THE ROMANCE OF SCIENCE 7

and mountain peaks and glittering seas in com-
parison with those archipelagoes of light and
piled-up shores of worlds which await the
voyager across the ocean depths of space. It
is said of a celebrated Hellenic scholar who
spent his whole life in writing a treatise on the
declension of the Greek noun that he regretted
on his death-bed that he had tried in his studies
to cover so much ground, remarking that if he
should live his life over again, he should confine
it wholly to the dative case. So with the
realms of science. The fields, instead of being
exhausted, are found continually to be but the
doors into yet wider domains. We live still on
the border-land of vast, mysterious worlds.
Strange woods and fruits and bits of carving
are drifting to our feet to-day from over the
great sea of the unknown as they did to those
of Columbus four centuries ago. Unseen
barks fanned with the breath of mind are
fitting out from a thousand little ports again
to plow untraversed depths for other realms on
the great globe of truth. New Balboas climb
mountain chains still to behold vast Pacifies
stretching farther on. Reports come to us
every year of capes doubled in some far-off
realm the human mind for ages had struggled
with in vain. And as the first intimation which
its discoverers had of America with all its vast-

8 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

ness and wonder was a faint light glimmering
out of the night shadows, so with each year's
progress there sparkles some gleam of truth
out of the darkness beyond, which is found ever
and ever to be the herald of a new untrodden
world.

Look, too, at the qualities of mind and char-
acter which are employed in carrying on this
wonderful work. The stock picture of the nat-
ural philosopher as an ugly, dried-up old man
gazing bewildered at the stars or stooping use-
less over a few withered leaves, and with no heart
or imagination, nothing but the cold dry light
of intellect, is the very opposite of what is true.
Nearly all great discoveries have been made in
the fire and freshness of youth or in the rich-
ness and strength of maturity. Newton was
but twenty-five years old when the idea of
gravity as the power which held the planets in
their orbits first began to draw him into its
great circle of truth. Laplace at the age of
twenty-four had already won his place in the
French Academy of Sciences. Leverrier's great
discovery of Neptune, nothing less than giving
to astronomy a new world, shed its luster on
him at the age of thirty-five. Kepler at
twenty-three had already begun that canvass-
ing of the stars which made him at last the
legislator of the skies; and Galileo was only

THE ROMANCE OF SCIENCE 9

eighteen when he won his first laurels in that
campaign, the brightest Italy ever saw, which
ended with the conquest of half a dozen new
kingdoms to the empire of truth.

The picking up of dry, dead facts is only the
beginning of their work. Enthusiasm, love,
gallantry, courage, imagination, not a few
of the finest qualities which go to make up a
manly and heroic character are brought to
bear in carrying it on. No Red Cross knight
in Spencer's Faerie Realm loving the holy
Una, no army of Crusaders under Godfrey de
Bouillon or Richard the Lionhearted, launch-
ing themselves out to rescue the Holy City from
the hands of the Infidel, ever exhibited more
heroism and devotion than those with which the
picked army of scientific discoverers, age after
age, have gone forth to the service of truth.
They, too, have had their Holy City to be re-
deemed from the hands of ignorance and super-
stition. Out into unknown realms through
toil, difficulty, want and darkness they have
forced their way, past bodies of fact con-
scripted from every land; huge columns of
figures trained with more than a soldier's skill,
have been marshaled by them around its walls.
Strange weapons out of the chemist's labora-
tory, vast batteries of the far-reaching tele-
scope, all the subtle enginery of the cal-

10 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

cuius and the higher mathematics, have bat-
tered against its defenses. And then, perhaps,
as it still held out, the scientific imagination,
daring and dashing as the most romantic
knight of chivalry's golden age, has sallied
forth in some brilliant charge up to the gates
and over all barriers, and been the first to raise
the shout of victory. No workman who was a
mere dry formalist and nothing else has ever
succeeded. It is the same genius dealing with
everlasting harmonies that in the one case has
given us the philosophy of creation and in the
other its song. The discovery of the solar
system was as true a poem as any that was ever
put in verse. The imagination of Newton was
what first leaped forward and seized the great
law of gravitation, his figures and facts only
coming up afterwards to support the position
already taken. Copernicus, Leibnitz, Newton,
Herschel, Franklin, Kepler, even old Galileo
himself in spite of his single act of weakness,
were not only first-class philosophers, but first-
class men. They wrought not for wealth, not
for applause, not for any mean and selfish
motive, but for truth, for stars of honor that
sparkled only in some far-off skies, for kingdoms
to rule in which only the mighty forces of na-
ture were their subjects, for treasures to lay up
which had no prices quoted in any markets of

THE ROMANCE OF SCIENCE 11

earth. Their love was truth. And when her
bright form was won, how often with great
strong hearts and all knights' chivalry and un-
flinching faith behind the sharp edge of intellect,
have they stood up for her against the neglect
and scorn of the world. "The book is written,"
said the enthusiastic Kepler when he had com-
pleted the great work which made him legislator
of the skies, "to be read either now or by pos-
terity, I care not which, it being willable to
wait a century for a reader as God has waited
2000 years for an observer."

Nor is the vindication of this faith and the
way in which science has come up from its
humble birth and won the homage of the Church
and the world the least thing in its romance.
No boy starting out of his cottage home in
life's bright morning, friendless and alone, his
whole capital the brave heart in his breast and
the little bundle of clothes at his back, to win
a place in the world ever began lower down or
went through a series of more trying adven-
tures. Philosophy out of its empyrean heights
looked down on its plodding methods with con-
tempt. If there was one thing which war and
trade and the world at large regarded as more
impracticable and of less value to themselves
than another, it was its truths and speculations.
And religion, — Roger Bacon languishing for

12 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

ten years in a Franciscan prison as the penalty
of his meddling with retorts and gases ; Kepler
obliged to turn aside right in the midst of his
most brilliant discoveries and spend five years
in defending his old mother from the charge of
witchcraft ; Copernicus hesitating to reveal the
truth of the material heavens for fear of losing
his place in the New Jerusalem; Galileo work-
ing out the shining problems of astronomy on
the walls of the Inquisition ; these are types of
the position it occupied age after age. The
demonstrations of geometry were confuted
with a bull of the pope ; little bits of Scripture
brought to bear against the most established
facts of nature ; the earth made to stand still by
putting in prison the man who said it moved,
and each new discovery of reason confronted as
an answer with all the antiquity of faith. Yet
against these obstacles the young stripling step
by step has won his shining way to the fore-
most places in the realms of truth and power,
his path marked not more by the brilliancy of
his own discoveries than by the thousand errors
and superstitions he has split open and battered
down among his foes. There never was another
career, even on the pages of the novelist and
poet, that was more romantically successful or
such a testimony to the force and skill of simple
truth, never one that on the whole has been

THE ROMANCE OF SCIENCE 13

more nobly or modestly used. What if he is a
little overbearing sometimes to his old antago-
nist the church, or rather to the old spirit of ec-
clesiasticism and priestcraft and likes to give it
now and then a sharp thrust? It is only poetic
justice. A few years ago an eccentric amateur
of science in Brooklyn, N. Y., was terribly an-
noyed by urchins who came and rang his door-
bell at all times of the day and night, making
their escape before ever he could get to the
door. He bore it patiently awhile; but at last
attached the bell-wire to a powerful electric
battery, and with a smile, calmly awaited the
result. It was not long before a band of
urchins silent and sly crept up to give it
another pull ; and not long again before there
was a terrible outcry of pain from an amazed
pair of lips, and a very hasty exit of the whole
band with their feelings woefully shocked. So
with the priests that age after age have gone
to the house where science lives, calling it up
day and night on all sorts of frivolous charges
and often dragging it away to dungeon-cells
and midnight tribunals, — it is not an un-
pleasant thing to see that now there is a power-
ful battery attached to the door-handle and that
every time they go near it, they, too, come
away terribly shocked.

But if not in religion, yet surely in every-

14 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

thing else science has proved itself the advocate
and friend of what is noblest and best in human
progress ; has come back in its manhood to the
old neighborhood from which as a boy it went
in such poverty and disgrace, as the large-
hearted and munificent benefactor. Specula-
tive philosophy is proud to own it brother.
Every vessel that crosses the seas, every art
and industry, every sphere of our common life,
is enriched by its bounties. No god of the old
Olympic knights, going down to mingle in the
wars of men, ever carried such a tremendous
presage of victory with him as the side to which
it now goes in battle. And when the old spirit
of personal heroism and the new one of science
are combined as they were in that grandest
product of our civil war, the noble old Far^-
ragut, it is hard telling which shows to the
most advantage, the one as the hero of Mobile
Bay lashed to the mast of the Hartford damn-
ing the torpedoes and taking his flagship into
the very hell of the fight, or the other as the
same hero at New Orleans, ranging his fleet
two and three miles away, and amid all the
excitement of a battle dropping a shell with
the accuracy of a clock every thirty seconds
for six days into the heart of the beleaguered
forts, — only this being certain, that nothing on
this earth can stand them both, nothing be

THE ROMANCE OF SCIENCE 15

found in the famous wars of old that can equal
for romantic valor these battles fought with
manhood's heart of fire in science' ribs of steel.
Look, too, at some of the special incidents in
this brilliant career. The smallest events open
up with dramatic ingenuity into the grandest
fields of action. Vast Amazons and Missis-
sippis of truth out of springs far back in the
mountains that a pebble might have stopped.
How like another story of the oriental genii
rising out of their casket up to the very heavens
is the record of galvanism with the telegraph
and all its vast stretch of wonders, originating
from the twitching of a frog's leg hung up
accidentally with a copper hook on an iron nail,
and that the telescope which has been to science
as another eye out of which it has looked how
far and discovered wonders how great, should
owe its existence to the little son of a spectacle-
maker playing with the glasses in his father's
shop ! Who can remember without a thrill that
silent hour of night under the fair Italian skies
when Galileo turned the Tuscan optic glass the
first time to the heavens and beheld what no
mortal man had ever gazed on till then : phases
of Venus, the rings of Saturn, the mountains on
the moon and the four satellites of Jupiter;
the dividing hour of the old astronomy from
the new? What is there in the most romantic

16 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

novel's description of the meetings of Arthur
and Amelia, in the depths of the forest, after
their long parting, that is more thrilling
or has a more wonderful series of events grow-
ing out of it than the scene when Franklin went
out into the fields that summer afternoon to
meet and woo the lightning, — the black thunder-
cloud in the background angry, one might
think, at the prospect of losing its long secret,
the little kite stooping out of the sky as an
angel bearing a message unheard of before in
all its annals, the silent earth around hushed as
if to catch the first whisper of the new truth
yearned for more than summer shower, the long
moment's agony of doubt, and then the bristling
up of the little threads beneath its tread as
the mighty secret along its slender way came
rushing down, the heroine of science into its
hero's arms? Who is not willing to forgive
apples which from the times of Adam and Eve
down to the ones we ourselves ate green as chil-
dren through those of Paris and Helen have
often pla}7ed such a conspicuous part in human
destiny all their maligner influence for the
sake of the one noble specimen, sweet and rich
with so many precious truths, that fell before
Newton's eyes bringing with it the great law
of gravitation? And what is there in any
chase that knightly band went forth to, out of

THE ROMANCE OF SCIENCE 17

baronial hall with winding horn and mettled
steed and eager hound in the proud days of
old, equal in excitement and grandeur and
romance to that on which Leverrier started
forth one glorious morn, his game another
world, the forest in which it roamed a wilderness
of stars, the only footprints it was known ever
to have made, the perturbations of another
planet two billions of miles away so slight as to
carry it only a few minutes out of its course,
and with simply his long array of figures and
algebraic signs, as the hounds, with which to
hunt it down, — what victory, too, more grand
than when after seventeen months' pursuit over
paths and through depths of far-off space not
even thought had ever trod before, his trained
and faithful band hemmed in and brought to
bay a monster world three billions of miles
away from earth which human eye had never
known till then, so that writing to his friend in
Germany where to look, having no glass him-
self, the telescope the next night was turned
to the spot, and lo, there it was within a single
degree of where the figures had pinned it down.
And the results of scientific discovery, the
majestic facts which year after year it has
brought to light, how they appeal to wonder,
to admiration, to the imagination, to our sense
of the beautiful and sublime, to almost every

18 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

faculty of our being that poetry itself has ever
reached. The human body, the body of the
humblest Amelia that ever charmed the rustic
eye, though resolved by the first touch of
science into only a few salts and gases, is shown
by its deeper reading to be a magnificent pal-
ace, the masterpiece of nature struggled up to
through myriads of years and put together
with a skill, style and beauty of finish that no
architecture of the middle ages, no artist of
to-day ever devised for princely blood, a throne
of the spirit where a thousand subtle forces
form a realm as wide as the universe, and pay
their homage, worthy in its glory of all the
most enthusiastic lover has ever put in song.
Matter itself, the mere dust which is blown
about our streets and pressed beneath our feet,,
the despair of the poet, the symbol of all that
is vile and worthless, the thing which even
theology has made the type of death and source
of evil, rises up under its magic touch endowed
with laws and qualities, and possibly arranged,
each particle of it, in world systems as rich
and harmonious as those of the brightest stars
above, and with a substance as immortal and
for aught we can now say as godlike as that
of the purest human soul. It opens the bosom
of earth, this earth it was accused at first of
rendering so prosaic and commonplace, and

THE ROMANCE OF SCIENCE 19

reveals it through myriads of years all filled
with animals and plants, scenery and action,
that for strangeness, variety, for picturesque-
ness and dramatic unfolding, make the gods, the
fairies and genii, the myths and marvels of the
Arabian Nights, the Norse Edda and the old
classic mythologies only as the crudest shadows,
yea, tells out of its cavern mouths and stony
throats and lava tongues, the history of cre-
ation with a fullness of detail and a wealth of
illustration that not even the religious vision
had ever given it before; — carries us back
through the long ages of the past to that far
day when the globe was all a molten ocean
with surges of fire that swept from pole to
pole ; tells of a time when chaos and night sat
brooding o'er the dark profound, when the roar
of the hurricane above was answered from hour
to hour by the crash of the earthquake be-
neath; a time when continents rose and fell as
the tides of the sea, and mountains were doubled
as bits of cloth and the world as a bird in its
shell under the spirit that brooded over the
deep was taking its first rude shape; turns us
onward to the scene when the first beam of
sunlight broke through the Cimmerian darkness,
when the first rock raised its head above the
ocean surges, when the first blade of grass sent
its shaft life-laden out of the soil and when the

20 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

first bird broke with its voice the long discord
of the elements and sent over a wilderness world
its harmony, prelude of what the angels sang
and prophecy of the anthem in which all its
myriad children are at last to join.

So with the realms above, so with the phe-
nomena which, day by day, are passing before
our eyes. There is not one it does not clothe
with beauty, not a poetic myth of the olden
time it sets its foot upon, that it does not lift
in its place a score of grander truths. The
myriad particles of vapor rising up everywhere
on electric wings from the watery surface of
the globe, marshaling themselves in cloud
squadrons over the summer sky and coming
to the relief of drouth-beleagured cities and
fields in the long serried columns of pattering
rain, then making the whole world, from dewy
flower and evening sky to woman's cheek and
childhood's form, flame up afresh with loveli-
ness, are surely no unfitting counterpart to the
old myth of how Venus the goddess of beauty
was born from the foam of the sea. It can
hardly be spoken of as a loss even to poetry
that the lightnings of the summer shower in-
stead of being the angry flashes of Jove's
wrath are recognized as the subtle lances
that electricity is shooting through a thousand
monsters of miasma and disease in a mighty

THE ROMANCE OF SCIENCE 21

war it is waging for the welfare of man.
The moon as the lover's lamp and the queen
of night and with all the pretty epithets which
the poet has hung around it is now trivial in
its appeal to the imagination as compared
with the thought of science that it is the dead
child in the great household of worlds, a globe,
once indeed with its verdant fields and swarm-
ing cities, its throbbing hearts and eager
minds, its poems and knowledge and civiliza-
tion and history, but now every vestige gone,
as gradually through the long ages of the
past the air and water on which they lived
were combined with its solid elements, leaving
it to swing forever a gilded tomb in the silent
sky. What is the classic fable of the sun as a
fiery chariot that Phoebus is driving with flam-
ing steeds across the azure arch, to the vision
that blazes upon us through the telescope and
spectrum, of a molten world, composed of the
same elements as our own earth, only twelve
hundred and fifty thousand times as large, a
world where the winds and clouds are vaporized
metal and the heavens melted brass, where the
oceans and rivers are made of liquid gold, where
fountains bubble up with fire and the showers
descend in silver rain, where the snow-drifts are
quartz and diamond and the dewdrops literally
are precious stones. How the old notion of the

%% THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

heavens as an arch, covered over with the ab-
surd figures of men and beasts, is dwarfed be-
fore the splendid truth of astronomy that they
are the boundless reaches of space filled with
myriads of suns and worlds and systems of
worlds endless in variety, by the side of which
our own earth is but a grain of sand on the
sea-shore, many of them so far away that
light itself is ages in coming to tell their story ;
yet all bound together with harmonious laws
and peopled, it may be, with a myriad forms
of conscious life, a single dash of science that
in place of the old intelligences it has swept
away, gives us what crowds of beings for the
fancy to play among! The story of the an-
cient argonauts launching out for four years
along the untraversed shores of the classic,
world in search of the golden fleece and appeal-
ing so with their strange adventures to our
young imaginations, who will say it is not
more than matched to-day by the astronomic
story of our whole earth and its kindred worlds
launched on the soundless depths of space
sweeping onwards for millions of years under
breaths no sails are raised to catch, spoken
ever and anon by flaming comets, plunging
through meteoric streams that blaze with
phosphorescent light around their prows,
rounding in the course of ages vast sidereal

THE ROMANCE OF SCIENCE £3

capes, beholding the star groves they have
left myriads of miles away close slowly up be-
hind them, and bound for a golden fleece to be
reached at last who shall say on what far
astral shore !

Then, too, there are some of the fairest
dreams of the ancient philosophy that the
magic hand of science is touching, only to
transmute into a still grander reality. The
old Ptolemaic notion of the music of the
spheres finds its consummation in the beauti-
ful fact that the waves of light which make
the different colors, pulsing out forty and
sixty thousand of them to an inch and at the
rate of one hundred and ninety-two thousand
miles a second, all have a rhythmic relation to
each other just as much as the waves of sound,
and that planets and suns and stars, the whole
vast host of the heavens above us, are actually
moving onward to melodious measures and with
literal truth "forever singing as they shine."
In the autumn of 1859 as the astronomer
Carrington was watching the sun with a power-
ful telescope, a bright spot was seen suddenly
to leap upon its surface, and instantly the self-
registering magnetic apparatus of the Kew
Observatory was sharply disturbed, a violent
magnetic storm began its sweep over the earth,
telegraphic offices were set on fire, brilliant

24 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

auroras flamed up in the northern and south-
ern hemispheres, a thousand human lives hang-
ing by subtle threads in hospitals and sick-
rooms were cut off or lengthened out, and the
magnetic wave sweeping onward from the con-
fines of earth dashed in amid the asteroids,
made the huge body of Jupiter thrill from pole
to pole, played a moment over Saturn's silver
rings, rolled over the shores of far-off Nep-
tune, and spent its force, who shall say in what
far-off depth of stellar space. It makes of
the solar system not only a vast unmeaning
machine bound together with the laws of grav-
ity but a mighty organ whose keys, far down
in the sun's depths of light and heat and mag-
netism and actinic force, have need only to
be touched by the divine fingers and lo, a
new song of life and death, a new march of
peace and war, is played through uncounted
worlds, a hint, is it not, of how spirit acts
on spirit and how the touch of prayer is made to
send its thrill, and of hate its shudder amid the
realms of soul ; at any rate affording a grander
reading than any commentary of theology has
ever given of the Apostle's words: "We are
members one of another." Light itself, so sub-
tle, so wonderful, so swift, so like a flash of
spirit, has not only been measured and picked
apart, and its threads of color untwisted and

THE ROMANCE OF SCIENCE 25

made to give up the inmost secrets of its own
being, but is actually found under the eye of
science to be written over in its spectral lines
with a language impressed upon it by every
substance which has sent it out, a language
which can be read as surely as that of the
printed page, and which it conveys as swiftly
as though Ariel had indeed brought its mes-
sage sliding down to earth on a sunbeam's
slanting ray, and which tells us of the very
things of which the heavenly orbs are
made, tells us of salt in Sirius and bismuth
and lime in Beltegeux ; that they burn
hydrogen gas in far-off Eta Argus, and
that there are parts of the Milky Way in the
heavens above us which literally are paved
with gold. The Darwinian theory of Crea-
tion, recognizing only one great tree of life
rooted far down amid Ihe rocks of the geologic
ages, growing upwards for myriads of years
and sending out of itself all the world has
ever known of being, thought and civilization,
a theory full of mystery, full of romance,
aye, and in spite of all the Church has said
against it full of religion too; a theory un-
proved as yet, but bearing on its brow the very
lineaments again of all past truth, what is it
but a new and grander form of Yggdrasil, the
mystic tree of life, bearing the natives on its

26 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

branches and having memory and hope, having
all history and philosophy and literature in
the whisper of its leaves, the wonderful ash
that plays such a part in the old Scandinavian
mythology. Science unpoetic, science filling
the world only with dreary facts ! Why, under
its magic touch what is the whole universe but
a mighty romance whose characters are stars
and planets and the elements, not less than
human beings ; whose chapters the geologic
ages, and scenery the gorgeous heavens and
vastness of stellar space; a romance of most
startling interest whose far beginning we have
read and some new page of which is published
from day to day, but whose plot, so intricate
and wonderful, no human skill can unravel, and
whose denouement in the eternity to come
science alone, science without the subtler sight
of faith, must try in vain to tell.

And this fact, the fact that with all its
powers it is not able of itself to solve the great
problem of the universe, brings us finally to
the thought that science is not wanting in
that element which is needed to make every ro-
mance complete, the element of love and mar-
riage. Ages ago it was not only the friend
but the lover and betrothed of religion.
Born amid the retorts and crucibles of old
Friar Bacon and nourished awhile under the

THE ROMANCE OF SCIENCE 27

sheltering roof of the Church, religion knelt
with it beside the altar, captured not a few of
its tools, some of which, as the crucible, bear
names of her betrothal down to this present
day, and lavished upon it all the fervor and en-
thusiasm of her early love. But like so many
other lovers they soon had their quarrel. The
one was proud, aristocratic, conservative, or-
thodox; the other earth-born, democratic, radi-
cal, heterodox. Sharp words passed between
them; their hands and their paths parted.
But it is a separation which cannot last for-
ever. Religion, though it has had many other
lovers, — philosophy, logic, wealth, literature
and state, has never met one yet that has come
so near to her heart as this. And science,
though it has grown rich and strong and found
a glorious happiness in its work, is still home-
less, incomplete and with a yearning ever and
anon for the help which only religion can give.
They are, after all, complements of each
other, the one masculine, daring, strong, the
other reverent, loving, tender, — both the chil-
dren of God, both embodiments of the ever-
lasting truth, both sent to earth on a mission
of love. And at last the one liberalized and
the other sanctified they shall make up their
quarrel and stand together as lovers again be-
fore the great altar of nature. God himself

28 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

shall perform their marriage rite, the fairest
stars of heaven sparkle as the jewels around
their brow; earth brings its flowers from ten
thousand fields to throw at their feet, all the
harmonies of this lower world join with the
choirs above in singing again as their wedding
song: "Glory to God in the highest, peace
on earth, good will to men." And the
romance of scientific discovery shall be com-
plete in its finding what is richer than all the
jewels of earth, fairer than the brightest orbs
of night, grander than all the laws of matter, —
the pearly gates of the spirit world, the luster
of the immortal soul, the heaven-born laws and
the long-lost love of a sweet and true religious
faith.

II

WHAT EVOLUTION IS

This old world of ours, though so monoto-
nous and prosaic in its ordinary events, has
had ever and anon its special incidents, incon-
spicuous at the time, but which, as seen now,
are thrilling beyond anything romance has
ever devised. One such was when the first hu-
man hand struck a spark of fire out of earth's
physical darkness, sending its light down the
long vista of civilization's future ; another when
the first human mind struck the idea of deci-
mal notation out of its mental darkness, giving
to progress an intellectual helper second only
to what fire has been in its physical realm; yet
another when Faust first put his movable type
together, sending out over the world the light
of thought ; others when the words liberty and
love first trembled on the lips of society and
religion, — and others still, when Columbus,
voyaging with his three ships across the sea,
first beheld this new world, and Galileo, voy-
aging with his optic glass across space first
29

30 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

saw the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus
and this new universe, and Newton, voyaging
with his figures across a sheet of paper, first
beheld the secret of what holds all worlds and
the universe itself together. But, after all,
none of these have surpassed in significance
the proclamation a generation ago of the great
doctrine of evolution, none given the world a
light so splendid or wrought in its other ideas
'changes so vast. Ridiculed and trampled
down at first, as all seed truths are sure to be;
charged with making man a monkey and God
a monad, it has won to itself, in a single genera-
tion, the faith of all scientific thinkers, the
homage of newspapers and reviews, and the
respect of pulpits and theological schools.
Though not by any means new in its material,
though itself an evolution on whose parts all
sciences and all thinkers from the very begin-
ning of mind have been working, it is most em-
phatically a new use of the material, a putting
together in one vast structure of what hith-
erto had been regarded as separate buildings.
Other philosophies, to be sure, have attempted
the same thing with regard to special depart-
ments of the universe, — some its cosmogony,
some its organic kingdoms, some its society
and politics, and some its religion and ethics,
but the grandeur of evolution is that it shows

WHAT EVOLUTION IS 31

how one set of principles runs through the
product of everything, from the making of a
weed to the making of a world, and from the
lowliest realm of matter up to the loftiest
reach of society and the soul; to the striking
out of a spark which lights up all the past as
well as all the present, and reveals the connect-
ing link of all worlds in time, as gravity does all
worlds in space. And though it is not by any
means complete, has many missing links to be
supplied and some of its territory fiercely in
dispute, its main principles are settled as sure
as truth itself, and transcending all the other
grand contributions of our age to the world's
progress, it bids fair to be the one thing which
is to make the nineteenth century forever
memorable in the history of human thought.

Who will say that such a subject is not one
which every person living in the world to-day
ought to know something about? It is not a
mere far-off speculation, not a department of
knowledge which belongs properly to a £ew
professional philosophers, but one which is full
of great practical truths, one which embraces
the laws of all healthy living and successful
work, one which affects the aspect of every
object the whole universe has to show.

Several years ago, while exploring with a
party of friends one of the many crablike arms

S3 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

with which Puget Sound on the western side
of our country crawls back from the sea up
into the land, our boat anchored for the after-
noon in a picturesque spot under the Olympic
Mountains to allow the amateur artists on
board, mostly ladies, to make a sketch of its
beautiful scenery. Suddenly the silence of
lead-pencils which had reigned supreme for an
hour or so, was broken by the horrified ex-
clamation of a feminine voice : "Oh ! oh ! oh !
we're all adrift." It was occasioned by a
change of the tide, which up there among the
innumerable inlets it has to visit, often loses
all sense of its obligations to the almanac and
the moon, a change from ebb to flow that was
bearing our boat from its anchor a cable's
length the other way. On coming to a stand
again, which it did in a few moments, most
of the artists recognized the changed per-
spective and began their sketches all over
again, but others, hating to lose their previ-
ous work, went on and finished up what they
had started upon by adding to it the incom-
pleted things, some as they remembered them
and some as they now appeared. At the close
of the afternoon we organized an extempore
art exhibition in which the wholly new pic-
tures, though somewhat hasty, showed up
fairly well. But the others ! Besides the hor-

WHAT EVOLUTION IS S3

rifled jerk of the pencil where the exclamation
"we're all adrift" had come in, as unmeaning in
art as the sudden quirk was in chirography
which" used to adorn our writing books at the
district school at the point where the master
had come up from behind and rapped our
knuckles with his ruler to keep us from mak-
ing crooked lines, — besides this, the most ludi-
crous results had arisen from the mixing up in
them of the two perspectives, the houses and
logs with both ends visible, the dog, the Indian
and the white man each with a double back-
ground, and a beautiful waterfall and long
vista through the woods, which could not be
seen at first, compelling a place for themselves
in the final sketch ; and as we compared the two
sets of work, we all concluded that the best
way to make pictures when the tide has turned,
is to drop the old sketches and draw every ob-
ject from its new point of view. Well, what
took place with our tugboat on Puget Sound,
has taken place in our day with the bark of
thought on the sea of life. Its tide has
changed, the great tide of philosophy, and
changed with it the point of view from which
the whole universe is to be seen.

There are some beholding the change who
are exclaiming in horror that we are all adrift ;
some who refuse to recognize it, going right

34, THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

on with their work as if still at the old crea-
tion standpoint ; and some, who while recog-
nizing that they are at a new position, think
that the only safe way is to mix up the two
views in their work, — look at nature and nat-
ural science from the standpoint of evolution,
and at religion and ethics from that of crea-
tion, and who, with a miracle of perspective
such as the devoutest saint painter of the mid-
dle ages never dreamed of, represent the Bible,
Jesus, Christianity and our human nature as
having at the same time a natural and a su-
pernatural origin. But evidently, if we would
not make our work ridiculous, the only true
way is to lay aside reverently all forms of it
drawn from the old position, keeping only the
ripened skill gained from it, and do everything
now from the new standpoint of evolution.

Preeminently is such a change needed with
regard to religious work. Its great eternal
objects, God, man, the universe, duty, virtue
and immortality, are indeed the same in them-
selves, but their perspective, their lights and
shadows, and their relations to each other and
to the eye which sees them, these have widely
changed. Their supernatural sides and ends,
those which from the old standpoint were often
the only ones seen, have disappeared, and their
natural ones come, as never before, into view.

WHAT EVOLUTION IS 35

Henceforth, if we are to have any complete
and harmonious religion at all, it must be the
one which evolution reveals. And it is a most
remarkable coincidence that now, when under
the influence of science and criticism and the
world's changed spiritual atmosphere men's
faith in the written Bible as an authority is
being so rapidly weakened, this larger, unwrit-
ten Bible, with its new interpreter, should so
naturally and commandingly sweep into its
place.

What, then, is evolution? We all know the
famous definition of it given by Herbert Spen-
cer: "An integration of matter and concomitant
dissipation of motion during which the matter
passes from an indefinite, incoherent homo-
geneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity,
and the retained motion undergoes a parallel
transformation." It is a definition which is
admirable for scholars who have the strength
of mental jaw that is necessary to crack open
the nut of hard words and get out their inner
meat of meaning. But there is a much shorter
and easier one for those who like their intel-
lectual food more free of shells, which expresses
its central idea equally well. It is that simply
of growth, is the doctrine that everything
which now is or ever was or ever will be, in-
cluding the universe itself with all its changes,

36 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

is the outcome by natural laws and forces of
all its preceding states. It is not a principle
thus stated which in itself is very new or
startling, is what men have always known and
held to be true of some things in the universe,
as the flower, the tree, the animal, the state,
but is something they had hardly thought of
before as holding good with reference to the
universe as a whole. They were like the negro
girl Topsy, who, when told that God made her,
loudly denied the statement as ascribing to
that individual too exclusive a credit, affirming
that what God made was "just a little tot so
high" and that "she herself had growed the
rest," — only the theologians laid the chief
stress on God's part of the world affirming that
he made the universe so high that all it had
growed itself was a little tot here on earth.
Evolution, therefore, merely extends to the
whole what everybody had thus believed in
part, — teaches that it all grew, earth and oak,
universe and animal, solar system and soul.
Arcturus and his suns, Adam and his sons —
give allopathically in suns and stars the truth
which others had administered homeopathically
in acorns and animalcules, and set forth also,
as never before, the method of its one growth.
What converted me to it at first was not Dar-
win or Spencer, but an illustrated lecture on

WHAT EVOLUTION IS 37

the growth of an egg into a chicken which was
given years ago by a naturalist who was then
a decided anti-evolutionist. He drew repre-
sentations of what took place in the egg each
day, from its condition as a simple homogene-
ous cell through its segmentation, gastraea
stage, separation into ento-, endo-, and meso-
blast, and unfolding of these into intestines,
heart, lungs, bones, brain, eyes, feathers, wings,
till out of that one material, without any out-
side help, there came the living, many-organed
animal, able thenceforth, till man's need of
chicken broth came round, to take care of itself.
And as I saw the process, I said to myself, and
said afterwards to him, "Why, what is this but
a type of the very thing which evolution claims
has taken place with this whole universe, —
the segmentation of its nebulous egg into solar
systems, then their folding over into the three
layers of suns, planets and satellites, and,
finally, their gradual development into the
backbone of continents, the arteries and heart
of rivers and seas, the limbs of genera
and species, and the eyes and wings of
mind and soul?" He answered: "But there
is a life principle in the egg without which it
never could have taken place ;" to which I
replied, "True, and so as a Christian I have
always believed there is in the universe, — that

38 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

it is not a dead universe, but a live one, — has
been so from the start; and if this little finite
life of an egg can evolve within itself a
chicken, why not in the same way the infinite
life of a nebula evolve the universe?" I did
not see the lecturer again till five years had
passed away; and then, to my delight, I found
that he, too, was a full-fledged Darwinian lec-
turing on evolution, had got his fledging, as
he told me, the same as I had mine from
the wings of that chicken. And the best way
in which for anyone to prepare his mind for a
flight into the loftier regions of this whole
subject is for him to begin as Darwin himself
did with the familiar everyday phenomena
which are right around him — go out into the
barnyard and dove-cote to learn the origin of
species, study the flower in the crannied wall
to know what God and man is, and touch the
hem of the garment of nature's great miracle-
worker in weed and worm, to get a knowledge
of the mystic virtue out of which come sun
and star.

The growth of inorganic things, sun and
star and the world at large, is indeed differ-
ent, in many respects, from that of seed and
egg, the one being the result, apparently, of
external forces, while the other is the unfolding
of a principle from within. But the differ-

WHAT EVOLUTION IS 39

ence is one of degree rather than of kind.
The egg and the seed are dependent on outside
warmth and food and a suitable environment
for their growth, while who has ever watched
the shaping of a crystal, each particle going
to its own exact place without outside help ;
or the wonderful combinations of chemistry
where each element selects, unaided, its own af-
finity ; and not felt that equally with organic
growth its controlling power was within? How
inevitable in the world around us is each new
state of things the outcome by natural laws
and forces of its preceding state, and that
again of some other, and so back as far as
mind can go? Who has not had repeated ex-
periences in his own career, of how little in-
cidents, chance meetings and careless words
too insignificant, apparently, to be noted even
in the minutest diary, have been the grains of
mustard-seed out of which have come great
trees in whose branches all the birds of his life's
air have made their nests? What is all history
but a process in which every event is at once
a fruit of the past and a seed of the future,
a seed which often grows more wonderfully
than any that was ever planted in garden or
nourished with food? Moses carried from the
Nile a few select principles of the old Egyptian
civilization, leaving its massive tree to die, and

40 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

out of them developed what splendors of
Hebrew thought. Jesus, a direct product of
Hebraism, scattered on the soil of Palestine,
— he himself called them only seeds, — and to-
day half the world is eating what they grew to.
Almost three hundred years ago a couple of
vessels crossed the sea, one with slavery, the
other with liberty, in its hold; and, planted
on the same soil and influenced by the same
environment, read on a thousand pages of
American history written out in black and
white and red, what they ripened to. Two
hundred years later a descendant of that old
Puritan stock, mobbed, ridiculed, despised, sent
forth his ringing cry : Emancipate the slave !

"And his air-sown, unheeded words
In the next age are flaming swords"

on the points of which blossom Gettysburg
and Appomattox Court House, and, added to
the human race, four millions more of free
men. And with the great field of all time
filled with such things as these, who will say
that there is any better definition of evolution
than to call it simply growth.

In subsequent lectures I shall speak of the
various stages and factors of this growth, of
its bearing on the several doctrines of religion,
and of how beautifully it lights up and explains

WHAT EVOLUTION IS 41

some of the darkest features of nature and
society, and intensifies our hope for a better
future alike here and beyond the grave; and
I shall try to do it not by doctoring the
genuine article with any pious supernatural
drugs, not by covering up its secular week-
day working limbs with any tailor-made Sun-
day clothes, but by presenting it from the
scientific standpoint exactly as it is, looking
squarely at its darker and more terrible aspects,
and only putting in words the higher meanings
which its own dumb lips are speaking in signs.
At the opening meeting of a class for its study
which I had in Hartford, Conn., made up from
people of all faiths and of no faith at all, I
laid down a similar platform, — said I should
not try to twist it into the support of any doc-
trine or any church, but aim, first of all, to get
at its own exact truth, and asked that they
would then join with me in recognizing what-
ever either of religion or anti-religion that
truth itself might stand for. Conducted thus,
many people who could not have been drawn by
a cart-rope into a professedly religious service,
felt free to come into what was only by nick-
name "Mr. Kimball's Prayer Meeting," and
though some sensitive souls were now and then
troubled with the shock it gave to their old
ideas, it was merely to come out afterwards into

42 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

a richer new faith, and at the close of the first
year, one young man representing many others,
said to me, "Until I came to these meetings I
was a downright atheist; and if you had at-
tempted to use them directly for my conver-
sion, I should have taken the alarm at once
and fled, but when you proposed that we should
all be ready simply to look where the thing
pointed, I could not refuse ; and now I want to
tell you that while I am very far from being a
full noon-day Christian, I have got the first
gleam of light on religion that I ever had, and
that I am so well pleased with it that I am
going to follow it up and try for more."

Does not the conception of the universe as
the outgrowth, all through, of its own inherent
forces without the need of an outside Creator,
fairly viewed, increase a thousandfold rather
than diminish its real religious significance?
It is only savagery which thinks that a thing
to be done by Deity at all, must be done by him
from the outside, and each thing by a separate
act9 — it is the first step of science to recognize
that it may be done more divinely from within,
and by the hand reaching from one thing into
another of natural cause and effect. When
we were children, and little baby brothers and
sisters came into the family, and we older ones
were curious as to where they came from, our

WPIAT EVOLUTION IS 43

modest aunts and fathers used to tell us that
the doctor brought them, an answer with which,
inasmuch as that functionary was always
around at such times, most of us were satis-
fied. But now and then an inquisitive youth
will ask the question back of that, as to where
the doctor got them, an inquisitiveness for
which, as we well know, its exhibitor was gen-
erally given a slap on the back and told to go
to bed. And that was the old way of answer-
ing the question as to where new species of
animals, plants and worlds came from, that a
doctor Deity brought them, an answer with
which multitudes of grown children were once
satisfied, though occasionally even then an in-
quisitive scientific brother would ask yet fur-
ther where Dr. Deity got them, resulting,
alas, how often, in having a theological father
shut up his mouth forever and send him to a
graveyard bed. But now man has grown up
to manhood, and there is no longer any reason
even in the prudery of theology why he should
not be told the whole exact truth, — that species
come from species, and worlds from worlds, by
a power within themselves; that the universe
itself, with all its grandeur, was once a mere
embryo babe in the womb of time; and that
nature everywhere, as its name implies, is what
forevermore is being born, evolution every-

44 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

where what forevermore is growing up. The
very last thing with which to charge such a
view is irreligion. Who that has not had his
eyes blinded with custom, can go out into his
garden in springtime, and see the humblest
plant making its way without spade or hoe out
of the dark soil, unfolding, unschooled, its
needed stalk and leaves, and painting and carv-
ing its flower and fruit from an ideal within
itself, and not feel a thrill of wonder? Who can
take his little daughter in his arms, a mere lump
of flesh, and behold feature after feature round-
ing into beauty and faculty after faculty into
brightness, till glorious womanhood is reached,
all by a power which he knows is not his own,
and not feel that here is a temple above all that
art has ever built, in which to worship, here an
image transcending any that Angelo ever
carved or Raphael ever painted, before which
to bow? And to look with the eye of science
on this whole universe sending up its first
tender shoot out of matter's primeval soil, and
carving on it the stalk of constellations and
the leaves and fruit of satellites and suns, and
to behold a baby-world shaping itself into the
features of sea and continent, unfolding on
its cheek the beauty of sunsets and flowers, and
growing up into the faculties, one after another,
of love and thought and soul, — if there is any-

WHAT EVOLUTION IS 45

thing, anywhere which can give man a sense of
the Infinite Mystery, is it not such a sight —
anything, anyhow, which can move him to re-
ligion, is it not such a marvel?

Ill

THE THREE GREAT STAGES OF
EVOLUTION

Evolution was defined in my last lecture as
only the more scientific term for what is ordi-
narily known as growth. But what is growth?
The idea commonly prevailing that it is merely
an increase of size, loses sight of its most es-
sential features, and is one which, in the in-
terests alike of science and morality, we need
most emphatically to get rid of. You have
heard the story of the old deacon, who mistak-
ing the label which had dropped from his wife's
spool of cotton for a piece of court-plaster,
deliberately placed it, one Sunday morning, on
his naturally enormous nose so that as he went
round for the contributions, all the smiling
congregation read on it, "Warranted to hold
out 200 yards." And yet, ridiculous as the
deacon's mistake was, how many are the million-
aires, and how many the cities, and nations, and
even churches, that as the evidence of their
growth, are striving consciously and proudly
46

THREE STAGES OF EVOLUTION 47

to label its one enormous feature with precisely
the same outward assurance. What we need
to learn is that the chief element of all real
growth is interior, the arrangement of its
material, whether more, or less, into new organs,
and these into the capacity for new functions.
The growing nation is not the one which is
adding Canadas and Cubas and Hawaiian
Islands to its borders and half-breed millions
to its population, but the one which is adding
arts and sciences, and a higher civilization, and
a better internal organization to the extent
and people it already has ; the growing church,
not the one that is increasing in noses and
square feet, but the one which is increasing in
knowledge and square conduct ; and as regards
the individual, it is not till he has done growing
as an animal that he grows fastest of all as a
man. So with evolution. It is a process which
goes on within, an increase in organs and
functions ; and there are three great stages to
it, each of them independent of any outward
enlargement, which to get a clear idea of it,
need to be carefully studied.

The first is that of homogeneity, or same-
ness, a stage in which the material to be evolved
is all of one kind in one condition and without
any division whatever into organs or parts. It
is a stage whose recognition is one of the great

48 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

distinctive points in the modern Spencerian idea
of evolution, as against the idea of it which
once prevailed. The old theory held that the
starting place of all growth was a minute
image of its adult form, a germ in which every-
thing existed exactly as it was afterwards to
be, only on a smaller scale; and it was thought
that if science merely had a microscope power-
ful enough, it would see in every cell a portrait
of the future animal, and in every seed a pic-
ture of what was to rise from it as a full-grown
plant, a theory, very singularly, which in a
modified form lies at the foundation of Weis-
mann's famous doctrine of heredity. As a
matter of fact, however, the most powerful
microscopes, instead of revealing any such
images in the germinal cells of animals and
plants, are able to find in them only a minute
particle of almost wholly unorganized proto-
plasm, with no more resemblance to what grows
from it than a bed of clay has to a completed
and many-roomed brick house. And though it
is doubtful whether there is anything in the
universe now which is at its perfectly homo-
geneous stage, even its raw material having
been ages ago wonderfully elaborated, yet,
whenever we do go back to the starting-point
of any of its special forms, we find infallibly
an approach to such a stage. The oak begins

THREE STAGES OF EVOLUTION 49

its growth as an acorn, without root or limb
or trunk; the animal as a blending of two pro-
toplasmic cells, without muscle, bone or brain;
all life as we go down the rocks, in simpler and
simpler forms till its two kingdoms unite in
one protistic root. Society, at first, had no
distinction of classes, or occupations, or institu-
tions, or property, or even of wives and chil-
dren, each of its members being at once hunter,
warrior, farmer, mechanic, and all things being
held in common. Even in the realm of mind, the
five senses of the earliest animals were merged
together in that of feeling alone ; all their fac-
ulties in those of nutrition, reproduction and de-
fense. Language, to start with, was only a sin-
gle guttural sound; grammar for ages only a
noun and verb ; mathematics only a counting of
five and ten; and religion only a superstitious
fear. Back of all history the earth itself was a
molten globe without mount or meadow, sea or
shore. And going back still further, evolution
holds that the universe as a whole, — all worlds,
all animals and plants, all matter and all that
matter has ever been or will be, — was simply a
nebulous mist, homogeneous in substance and
all diffused in space, or, as the old Bible has
it, was "without form and void."

It was an original state of things which, es-
thetically viewed, was dreary enough; a cloud

50 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

unrelieved with even the possibility of a silver
lining, but one which from the standpoint of
evolution was full of profoundest interest.
What mother bending over the undeveloped
face of her babe asleep in its cradle, ever found
it dull and dreary, — did not read in its un-
written lines entrancing prophecies of a mighty
future, and in its unprinted features whole
volumes of heroic deeds and shining virtues ;
and when the undeveloped face was that of a
baby universe lying asleep in its cradle of space,
how much more fascinating to the scientific eye
its apparent blankness. As Henry Ward
Beecher was walking along a country road one
day, he came across a boy playing in the mud,
and thinking to quiz him a little, he inquired
what he was doing. "Making a meeting-house,"
replied the boy. "Yes," said Mr. Beecher, "I
see the meeting-house, but where is the
minister? Wrhy don't you make him, too?"
"Because," answered the boy, glancing at the
cloth of his inquisitor, and taking in the situ-
ation,— "because there wasn't mud enough here
to make a minister with." But in nature's
original mud there was no such deficiency.
Space was filled with enough of it to make not
only ministers and meeting-houses with, but all
even of the subtlest things they have ever stood
for, since. And though it had no actual image

THREE STAGES OF EVOLUTION 51

of anything within it, it had the possibilities,
and the laws, and forces, out of which every-
thing was to come, had them, too, independent
of any disturbing environment, so that an in-
telligence knowing them all, might have read
in it then, not with a mother's fancy, but with
a mathematician's figures, the whole of its after
history, — all the starry worlds it would sparkle
with, all the races, nations, civilizations and
religions it would give rise to, all its coming
literature and science, Homer's "Iliad" in some-
thing more original than its own native Greek,
and Spencer's "Evolution" in the very atoms to
be evolved, — all its battlefields and hero deeds
and manly deaths, its every lover's vow and
maiden's yes, Beethoven's symphonies while
yet in the eternal silence, the Parthenon while
still in its elemental dust, all even that any
American Congress will ever do, its every event
till the whole thing sinks back into a nebula
again, — such the raw material, the great neb-
ulous egg, with which evolution began its work.
Its second stage is that of differentiation,
the gradual separation and variation of its
homogeneity into a myriad distinct parts. We
hear a great deal said in our day about the
blessedness of unity and equality, — are inclined
to look on dividedness and diversity as the
source of all evil, indeed have implied as much

m THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

in one of the names Deuce or Second, given to
the devil; and sometimes think that to get rid
of them and get oneness and likeness in their
place, especially as regards religion, would be
to get very near the kingdom of heaven.
There was a young man residing in Boston,
awhile ago, who was engaged to one of a pair
of twin j^oung ladies out on Commonwealth
Avenue, both of them very beautiful, and so
exactly alike that their own parents were con-
tinually mistaking one for the other. Some-
one asked him how in the world he was able,
Sunday nights, when he went to do his court-
ships, to distinguish them apart — know which
to kiss and caress and which to be only a
brother to, a question this Boston youth, who
in everything else had been taught to distinguish
carefully between tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum,
answered by saying unblushingly, "Well, to
tell the truth, I do not try." And so there are
many would-be reformers who would have every
thing in the world, especially all churches, all
creeds, all estates, all classes, so twinlike and
perfect that there would be no rivalries, no
competitions, no jealousies between them, no
person interested to get the favors of the one
any more than of the others. But nature, ex-
cept now and then to a Boston youth, does not
gratify such a desire, has made division and

THREE STAGES OF EVOLUTION 53

differentiation not lapses out of good, but a
normal and vital part of all upward progress.
The moment a thing begins to grow, it begins
to divide and to have its divisions differ, — the
seed into radicle and plumule, and then into
all the multiplied roots, limbs, leaves, tissues
and flowers of the full-grown plant; the cell
into segments, and these into all the myriad
organs: bones, brain, nerves, muscles, stomach,
heart and the like, of the adult body ; and life
itself into the animal and vegetable kingdoms,
and these into all the varied classes, orders,
genera, species and varieties that zoology and
botany are familiar with. The earth grew by
separating its original nebulous mass into
water, land and air, and these into all the long
list of natural divisions that geographical boy-
hood, with a prize in view, learns to rattle off ;
the stellar universe by separating its diffused
nebulous mist into suns, planets, satellites and
comets, having its one star differ from another
star in glory ; the nebulous mist, probably, by
differentiating matter into its sixty-seven
chemical elements; and possibly matter itself
out of some primitive substance where with
ether and force it was all one. Mind divides in
the same way into its varied appetites, affec-
tions, aspirations and faculties; speech into
languages, literatures, sentences, words; poli-

54 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

tics into parties ; philosophy into schools ; and,
under precisely the same law, is it not, religion,
into religions, sects, creeds, churches and
church splits. Even where there seems at first
an exactly opposite law, what Darwin calls
"the persistence of the type" — species of
animals and plants, the same now as in the
geologic ages, nebulae that have never func-
tioned into worlds, religions and social states
stationary since man became man, and an old
fogginess now and then in our human nature
itself which seems a part of its old primal
mist, — even in such cases it is only a subtler
method of variation, is differentiation itself
differentiated; and its result a vastly greater
diversity than would be possible under its uni-
form action.

What is the use of this dividing and differ-
ing that nature is so full of, what the part it
has to act as a stage in evolution? One of its
uses, seen especially in the organic world, is the
getting of more food. Variety is not only
the spice of life, but very largely its meal-
earner, its cook and its main dish. One of the
mathematical truths taught the youth of our
land at college, and usually forgotten as soon
as taught, is that while the bulk of bodies in-
creases in proportion to the cube of their di-
ameters, their surface increases only in pro-

THREE STAGES OF EVOLUTION 55

portion to their squares. It is a truth which
every little cell, animal and vegetable, had to
learn ages ago as the very first condition of
its continued existence; that, too, without any
colleges, or professors, or black-boards, or even
brains. For its food being taken by absorp-
tion through its surface while its use of it was
by its whole body, the larger it grew, the larger
the disproportion became between its demand
and supply, that is, every time it doubled in
thickness, it had eight times as much body that
needed food, but only four times as much sur-
face through which to get it; and the question
was, What are you going to do about it? — a
question it had at once to solve, or starve. It
solved it how? Simply by dividing its body
into two parts, and then as fast as it grew,
dividing it again, so that with the more sub-
stance to be fed, it always had in its smaller
divisions more surface through which to get
the food. I do not suppose there has ever
been since, a mathematical problem on the face
of this earth on which so much depended, —
reproduction and all the immense social system
of which it is the base. The wisdom it involved
is what the statesman of the world with all their
boasted brains, especially the Jingo part of
them, have never yet caught up. We still
think, even in our own land, that the mathe-

56 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

matical law is the other way, namely, that the
more a nation grows in bulk, the larger will
be the proportion of its growth in the means
of life, so are trying all the time to enlarge our
territory. But nature does not change her
mathematics in passing on from amoebas to
Americas, and from cells to states ; and so it is
a most remarkable fact, that while nations with-
out number, trying to perpetuate themselves
by adding to their outward size, have age after
age disappeared, that first microscopic cell,
which without book or brains solved the prob-
lem by making itself many and small, is, ac-
cording to Weismann, the one living thing on
this earth which has thus far proved itself
immortal.

It is a wisdom which nature herself has used
very largely all through her kingdom. Why
does the tree separate into its myriad branches,
twigs and leaves? Because thereby it gets
more sunshine and air to aid in its growth than
it could with them all condensed in a single
trunk. Why do animals and plants divide into
their different needs and capacities they get
orders, genera and species? Because with
vastly more nourishment out of their common
earth than they could if all were of the same
structure and had to feed on the same things.
And is not this the very reason why, in the

THREE STAGES OF EVOLUTION 57

divine economy, religion, also, has divided into
its innumerable sects, churches and creeds, —
that matter about which so many people, de-
spising the lessons of evolution, are so terribly
troubled, because it gets thereby more of the
eternal sunshine and air, and of truth and God,
than it could if it were all gathered, as so many
would have it, in a single church?

Along with the gain in food, which comes
from differentiation, is its equal gain in effi-
ciency. One of the sentences set for us to learn
penmanship by in our old writing-books, was
"Union is Strength," but coming in before that
in the copy-book of nature was the exactly
opposite maxim that division also is strength.
An army with its forces differentiated into
artillery, cavalry and infantry, officers and
men, is surely a stronger army, though as
regards the officers and men some of our militia
regiments seem to think otherwise, than the
one which has them all united in a single de-
partment. The sun which is going to make
things grow, cannot, evidently, be one in mass
with the planet on which the growing is to be
done. The apostle Paul wisely asks, "If the
whole body were an eye, where were the hear-
ing? If the whole were hearing, where were the
smelling?" What would society be as to effi-
ciency, if all its members were mechanics or mer-

58 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

chants or even ministers ? That was a wise old
deacon who thanked the Lord for his saints, but
who praised him, also, that as long as there was
so much dirty work yet in the world to be done
(it was at the close of a great political campaign
in which his party was victorious), there were
also a plenty of sinners exactly fitted for its
doing. And in the universe all through, it is its
endless diversity of taste and talent which en-
ables it to accomplish its endless diversity of
work, — the worm which crawls, things which
would have to remain forever neglected, if it
were a twin with the bird that sings or the
soul that soars.

More important still, if life had grown up a
single homogeneous unit, it would necessarily
have had as its moral qualities only selfishness
and self-regard, would have been only a single
spoiled world-child. It is because it has dif-
ferences, that each of its members has some-
body besides himself to love and enjoy; because
it has differences that it has affections and
friendships and families and society and self-
sacrifice and ethics and all the highest qualities
of soul; and with all the strife and alienations
which it also involves, who that has ever known
what love is, will say that the dividedness which
has made it possible is not worth a myriad
times over, all its cost?

THREE STAGES OF EVOLUTION 59

It is this love made possible through differ-
entiation, which opens up into the third great
stage of evolution, that of integration, or the
coordination and joining of its diversities,
each undestrojed, into a single organic whole.
Separation with all its prominence in nature
is not an end, but a means ; and as soon as the
parts have been separated long enough to be
in no danger, when left to themselves, of flowing
back again into homogeneity, the alienations
and hatreds which kept them apart die away
to make room for integration, and it is to be
especially noticed that the differences them-
selves, instead of being obliterated, are the
very things which are made use of, as with the
spring and wheels and hands and face of a
watch, to render the integration the more com-
plete. It is not a process which in nature's
workshop has to wait till differentiation is
finished before it can be entered upon, but one
which is going on side by side with it all the
time ; things like the bones of the human body,
which are differentiated from each other, being
integrated as a skeleton, and that in turn be-
coming a differentiation from the muscles and
nerves, and then with all the other parts, a
member of the body as a whole. And though
the process as yet is very far from being every-
where finished, though we have wolves and

60 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

tigers and nations and churches and social
classes separated widely from each other with
hatreds, rivalries, persecutions, tariffs and
wars, we do already have some things, as the
solar system, the human body, the family and
to some extent the world's business, in which
it has proceeded a long way, and these are
prophecies of what the whole universe, even its
religions, are destined at last to become.

What, now, is the use of integration? What
the purpose it fulfills in the economy of nature?
The answer, so far as its finite forms are con-
cerned, is plain enough. It is the same as that
with regard to differentiation, only more so,
greater efficiency in getting food and doing
work. It is commonly laid down as an indis-
putable axiom that the whole cannot be greater
than the sum of its parts, or a society have any
virtue above what is in its individual members ;
but, however true in mathematics and meta-
physics, it is utterly false as regards evolution.
Heap the parts of a watch together forever,
and, no matter how well made they may be as
parts, they will never keep time. Coordi-
nate them as an integrated whole, and they will
run on parallel with the sun itself. Add the
members of the human body one to another,
and you do not get even a live animal ; organize
them in their relations and you get a loving,

THREE STAGES OF EVOLUTION 61

thinking, aspiring man. And when all the
myriad parts of this vast universe are thus put
organically together, its races, nations,
religions, trades, professions, parties, pleas-
ures, pains, suns and stars, keeping time like
the watch, and animated with one spirit like the
body, who shall say what it will not be capable
of, for God and man?

It is a stage of evolution which suggests in-
evitably the natural and divine ideal of church
unity, not the bringing of all men into one
creed, one ritual, one polity, but the bringing
of them, with all their diversities just as they
now are, many members, into one body, ani-
mated with one spirit. Religion has tried long
enough the making of them into one belief.
Henry Ward Beecher, going on the platform to
make an antislavery speech during the dark
days before the war, was met by a proslavery
mob who, the moment he opened his mouth,
began to hiss him down. Waiting with a smile
till they had to stop to take breath, he man-
aged to slip in the words, "You remind me of
my grandfather," when instantly there was a
hush of curiosity to hear how. "My grand-
father," said he, "was a blacksmith, and I am
sorry to say not a very good blacksmith. But
one day he thought he would make a broad-ax.
So he got a piece of steel on which, after heat-

62 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

ing it at the forge, he hammered and ham-
mered; but somehow the more he hammered the
less it looked like a broad-ax. Then he
thought 'I'll make it a common ax.' So he
heated it and hammered and hammered again,
and as he did so, the less and less it looked
like a common ax. Then he thought, 'Well,
I'll make it a hatchet,' and once more he heated
and hammered, but with the same result.
Then he got mad, and heating it white hot
he plunged it into a tub of water exclaiming:
'Well there's one thing I can do at any rate, I
can make a plaguey good hiss,' " a story which
secured Mr. Beecher a most amiable and at-
tentive audience. Well, that is exactly the
way grandfather church used to work at mak-
ing religious unity. It could take a heretic
and heat him and try to hammer him first into
a broad-ax saint, then into a common ax
one, then into a hatchet one, and then it would
get mad and heat him up in an auto-da-fe
and plunge him down into hell where at any
rate, it could make with him a plaguey good
hiss. But in either case it was very poor
blacksmithing. Evolution's way is to take
every man exactly as he is, and make the best
of him possible along his own line, feeling that
a good heretic is better in the kingdom of
heaven than to make a good hiss with him down

THREE STAGES OF EVOLUTION 63

in the kingdom of hell, and then to integrate
them all somewhere into religion's great
spiritual universe. Who shall say it is not the
way along which the whole of nature points
the finger?

Such are the three great stages of evolu-
tion, homogeneity, differentiation and integra-
tion, oneness, divergence, and, on a higher
plane, oneness again. What flower ever had
a more beautiful unfolding, what poem a plot
where one thing opened more logically into
another than this flower of the universe, this
poem of all things? It is not indeed an un-
broken progress. It has its degeneracies and
dissolutions ; has its long periods of apparent
going backward. But as a whole it is im-
measurable growth; shows in the large that
through the ages one increasing purpose runs.
It is like the Bible. It opens with a book of
Genesis, and gives us the long wandering in
the wilderness, the dividing up of the promised
land, the bloody reign of judges and kings,
and the horror of the imprecatory Psalms ; but
it gives us, also, the long line of nature's
prophets, the coming of the Son of Man, and
the vision of the New Jerusalem.

IV

THE PROOFS OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION

You remember the old classic story of how
Ulysses after the siege of Troy and his long
wanderings in many lands, proved himself on
his return home to be the rightful lord of
Ithaca and the yet-alive husband of its beau-
tiful queen. Arriving home at a time when
Penelope, believing him to be dead, and worn
out with a crowd of imperious suitors, had
promised her hand, as a means of getting rid
of them, to the one who would bend his bow
and shoot an arrow through a line of twelve
rings, he appeared among them at the trial
scene disguised as a beggar, and when their
pretentious hands, one after another, had failed
even to bend the stubborn arch, being allowed
amid much opposition and ridicule to try what
he could do, the apparent beggar having care-
fully felt over the weapon to make sure of its
condition and selected one arrow from a quiver
the others of which were left for his rivals'

hearts,

64

ORGANIC EVOLUTION 65

"Now sitting as he was, the cord he drew,
Thro' every ringlet levelling his view,
Then notched the shaft, released and gave it wing;
The whizzing arrow vanished from the string,
Sang on direct and threaded every ring,"

showing him to be the true master by a deed
which he alone of all on earth was able to do.

The story is a good illustration of how evo-
lution coming to man after its part in nature's
great struggle for existence and long journey-
ings through the material universe, proves it-
self to be the rightful lord of philosophy, and
properly entitled to the world's belief. Ap-
pearing in the lowly garb of matter among the
pompous systems of theology and metaphysics,
it has been allowed, only with much opposi-
tion and amid endless sneers, to try its hand
at that mighty cosmic problem in dealing with
which they have all so signally failed ; and now
lo, the great master having carefully with
the hand of science felt all over its segment of
matter and cord of force to learn its condi-
tion, "draws the bow and draws with ease,"
sending its arrow of explanation through all
the myriad rings which nature has set up from
circling atom and planet's orb and Milky Way
ellipse on to the farthest rounds of duty, life
and soul.

Compare it in this respect with some of the

66 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

other most noted claimants to the hand of faith.
Metaphysics for ages has been laboring at
nature's Penelopean test. What wrenchings
of intellect, what mazes of logic, what platforms
of a priori reasoning, what arrays of great
names, — Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Fichte,
Spinoza, Descartes, Carlyle, Comte, — have been
brought to bear on its solution, and yet how
empty their result. The genial Dr. Oliver
Wendell Holmes tells the story that having
got the notion in the early days of anaesthetics
that the subjective mind, when under their in-
fluence, might have marvels revealed to it, if
they could only be retained, far beyond the
reach of any ordinary intellect, made arrange-
ments on taking his first dose of ether, to
write down as soon as he should come to con-
sciousness, before it could be lost, whatever the
mighty revelation might be. Inhaling the gas
with this in mind, as his vision closed to all
earthly things the veil of eternity seemed to
be lifted, and the one great truth which under-
lies all human experiences, concentrates in itself
all wisdom and solves all the problems of the
universe, and which all the philosophers of the
ages had sought in vain, seemed to stand out
clear and distinct before his mind, and, with
returning consciousness, staggering to his feet,
he hastened to secure in black and white the

ORGANIC EVOLUTION 67

precious all-embracing sentence. And what
do you suppose it was? It read thus: "A
strong smell of turpentine prevails through-
out." And that is about the result of the
labors of the metaphysicians down through all
the ages, in getting at the secret of the uni-
verse: "A strong smell of turpentine prevails
throughout."

Another set of claimants are those of the-
ology. One of them is the doctrine that its
AlmigluVy Creator spoke it into being all at once
just as it was six thousand years ago, took an
armful of preexisting nothing and said over
it, Let there be a universe, and immediately,
without any secondary agencies, a universe
there was. At the close of a lecture on the
geology of the Pacific Coast given in Portland,
Oregon, several years ago, and illustrated with
a series of fossil bones, indicating the vast age
of the earth, an invitation was extended the
audience to come up on the platform and in-
spect the specimens close at hand. Near me
was an old Presbyterian elder, as much a fossil
as any of the dead ones out of the rocks,
"Oh," said he contemptuously, as we stood be-
fore the miocene remains of the ancestor of the
horse, the mesohippus, dug up from a thou-
sand feet below our present soil — "Oh, the ab-
surdity of a man's allowing his religious faith

68 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

to be disturbed by these old bones ! They were
created by the Lord where they were a thou-
sand years ago, exactly as the Bible tells us ;
it was just as easy for him, when he spoke,
to create dead bones under the earth as live
ones on its surface." I told the lecturer after-
wards of the remark, to which he laughingly re-
plied : "Poor old man ; he might as well go to
the graveyard yonder, where he will go soon,
and say that the Lord created all the bones
there just as they are, instead of their being
live ones first, as to say it of those in the
rocks." And so he might. It is the method
of magic. It belongs to the world of the
Arabian Nights, not that of Christian days, to
the platform of legerdemain rather than to
that of nature. Nobody ever saw it done,
even on the smallest scale. If the Bible teaches
it, which it hardly does, it was not a matter
evidently of which the writer could have had
any personal knowledge. And with it em-
bodied in persons like that old Presbyterian
elder, is it any wonder that the Penelope of
faith should have regarded it as hardly a fit
suitor for her hand and heart? Another theo-
logical claimant is that of the universe's divine
manufacture, taking its eternally preexistent
raw material and putting it together part by
part, as a carpenter does a house. It is the

ORGANIC EVOLUTION 69

theory of it which Milton so graphically de-
scribes in "Paradise Lost." He took

"The golden compasses to circumscribe
This universe and all created things.
One foot he centered, and the other turned
Round through the vast profundity obscure
Till earth self-balanced on her center hung."

And when he came to its living creatures, he
is thought to have made out of the dust the
first pair of each species full grown and com-
plete.

"The grassy clods now calved and half appeared
The tawny lion pawing to get free
His hinder parts, then springs as burst from bonds
And rampant shakes his brindled mane."

It is a picture so ludicrous that it is wonderful
how men like Agassiz and Cuvier and Linneus
and others familiar with the ordinary processes
of nature could ever believe in it as true to life.
Nobody ever saw the faintest inkling of such
a thing in the real world. And while the doc-
trine of it as having occurred "once on a time,"
like the stories we tell children, may do well
enough for the long bow of fiction, it can
hardly be regarded as deserving a place in the
solid one of fact.

70 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

Turning now to evolution as a theory of
the universe, it is to be noticed that the
proofs with which it begins, the first rings it
puts its arrow of explanation through are
not those of a far-off nebula, — but of close-at-
hand, every-day objects. There are multi-
tudes of things all around us — indeed the
woods and sea and land are full of them —
in which we can see its whole process going on
directly before our e}^es. The plant comes out
of a seed, and that seed from some other, and
so on as far back as we have any knowledge of
plants at all, each as the result of its own
inherent force and law. The grassy plains do
not now calve, but the animals themselves, and
their ancestors, and so on generation after
generation up the steeps of time. When the boy
becomes a man, it is not by having the boy
die out of him and a man created and put in
his place, but by the natural unfolding of boy-
hood into manhood. And when we wake up in
the morning and see a world around us differ-
ent in some of its aspects from any we have
ever seen before, no one, not even a Presbyterian
elder, is so simple as to think that sometime
during the night it was spoken into existence
by the Almighty just as it is, — pantaloons,
watch, primitive fields and himself, or that it
did otherwise than unfold naturally out of what

ORGANIC EVOLUTION 71

the world was on all its preceding days.
Such facts as these are of immense significance.
They show that evolution is not a mere phil-
osophical theory of the scholar, but an actual
working process of nature itself, something
which is in part true at any rate ; and with
everything in our sight going on now under its
law, it is at least a fair presumption that things
always and everywhere have been done in the
same way.

But, while it is undeniable that individuals
and things right around us originate thus from
their predecessors, it is said that even with
such a starting point, the presumption is too
great that worlds and life and species and es-
pecially man with his body, mind, and soul, all
so different from each other and those we have
actual knowledge of, could have originated in
that way, or otherwise than directly from the
Deity's own creative hand. It is here that the
struggle against evolution is most fiercely car-
ried on. Even with regard to such things,
however, though we cannot see the whole proc-
ess going on, as we can with the others, there
are a multitude of equally solid facts acting
with the presumption that we can see equally
all around us, and it is on these, as on the
measured base line from which the surveyor
gets the dimensions of a mountain peak he can-

72 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

not bodily climb to, that the evolutionist plants
himself to get his knowledge of origins up the
steeps of time which are beyond his visual
reach.

First, as regards the origin from a common
stock of the world's different species of animals
and plants, we have right before our eyes
the beginnings of such a process. Every
mother who has had two children, has had two
varieties of human beings who, along with their
resemblances, have differed somewhat from her,
and the father, and from each other in features,
temper, talent, taste, — almost every quality of
body, mind and soul; has had, therefore, two
incipient species. Every orchard and farm-
yard is filled with like illustrations of what
nature is continually doing to originate dif-
ferences out of the same stock, even within
the limits of a single generation. And though
the differences may be very slight at the start,
as with railroads running from the same depot,
nevertheless how wide they will become even
within the limits of history, the old Bible story
of the two nations which sprang from the
twins, Esau and Jacob, is evidence, — enough,
surely, when the diverging began, some of it,
millions of years before history, to account
for the world's present myriad diverse species.

Then, wide apart as the existing species

ORGANIC EVOLUTION 73

may be at their extremes, man and monad, for
instance, there is between them a regular
series of connecting links and especially of
structural resemblances, — homologies, as they
are called, which make it as easy as going up-
stairs, for the one to have arisen from the an-
cestors of the other. As Emerson prophet-
ically wrote,

"A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings,
And striving to be man, the worm
Mounts up through all the spires of form."

They all alike, whether animals or vegetables,
are endowed with the same great mystery of
life, — all alike are born and eat and reproduce
and grow old and die. Lordly man shares his
backbone and heart and muscles and brain with
the pig, the monkey, the lizard and the fish.
Creatures as wide apart as the whale, the
quadruped and the bird, have either rudimen-
tally or fully developed their double lungs and
four limbs and warm blood; and even in the
realms of mind and soul, fear, hate, love, cu-
riosity and conscience, rising to their climax in
humanity, rest their base on the brute. Not cre-
ation, but modification is everywhere Nature's
law. When wings are wanted for a bird, she
does not make them outright, but, like a thrifty

74 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

woman with a last year's bonnet, refashions
them out of an old reptile's forelegs ; or even a
place in which to hold a human brain, she
does not build a fresh skull, but, like a wise
mother with a growing girl, simply lets out the
tucks from the top of a monkey's backbone.
Ladies would be surprised to know what some
of the most apparently distinctive charms they
are so proud of are vamped over from, in the
anatomy of their despised lower relatives.
The rounded cheeks of children thought to aline
them with cherubs, and so conspicuous in Ra-
phael's pictures, are really a connecting link be-
tween them and a species of ape, where they
are used as the places in which to stuff food.
And, with so many known cases in which the
organs of one species are made from those of
another, how direct the inference that species
themselves are but the varied outgrowths of
one primitive protoplasmic life.

It is an inference derived from surface facts,
which is confirmed most strikingly by the
deeper ones of paleontology. The rocks of the
earth are a mighty, many-paged volume in
which are printed and pictured, by the animals
and plants themselves, a history of their growth
into species, genera, orders, and the like, be-
ginning, as under evolution ought to be the
case, with those which were the most simple

ORGANIC EVOLUTION 75

and protoplasmic, and branching out as we go
up, like the limbs of a tree, into those which are
on the page that is being written to-day. A
few years ago, while a party of scientists were
exploring the ruins of ancient Nineveh, they
came across a brick on which was the print of
a dog's foot, evidently made there three thou-
sand years before by his stepping on it when
the soft clay was laid out in the sun to dry,
another brick very possibly being thrown at
him for his mischief. Since then vast empires
have risen, and kings and statesmen and war-
riors and scholars without number have written
their names on the scroll of fame only to have
how many of them fade into oblivion ; the
mighty Nineveh itself has risen to glory and
perished ; but what a satire on human renown ; —
the mark made by that little dog remains a
memorial of himself as clear-cut to-day as
when he signed it in that far-off age. So
when nature was building this great city that
we call earth, her animals were continually
treading on its soft clay, or getting their whole
bodies entombed in its mud ; and what ages,
what empires, what religions they have sur-
vived, to tell us, as no logic could, evolution's
splendid truth. The Connecticut Valley is full
of such prints, varying in their length from
one inch to eighteen, and in their stride, from

76 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

half a foot to three yards. When I was in
college, they had just been investigated by
President Hitchcock, and were thought by him
to be those of birds and classified as such.
But other geologists doubted. The sandstone
belonged to a period that was too early for
birds. Moreover, it was found that some of
them had left the marks of tails dragged be-
hind them, a most remarkable thing for ani-
mals which had no such appendage. So the
controversy ran high; and it was never settled
till Darwin's "Origin of Species" was published,
when it was found that both sides were right, the
tracks having been made just as some of the
old reptiles were evolving into birds, and pos-
sessed, therefore, some of the characteristics
of each, reptilian tails and avian feet, — a
splendid instance of how one higher truth will
often reconcile the contradictions of two op-
posing half truths. The rocks are crammed
with such connecting links, branches of life's
tree, separate above ground which underneath
unite in ever fewer and fewer limbs ; and
though some needed ones are yet missing, new
ones are being found every year, and enough
already exist to make a chain capable by it-
self alone of holding up the whole truth of
Darwinian evolution.

It is not in the rocks alone, however, with

ORGANIC EVOLUTION 77

their dead forms that we find such a chain,
but also in the animal nature itself, a similar
one made up of living links, that upholds the
same great truth. It is a most interesting
and astounding fact that each individual of a
species including even man, repeats hastily in
its own growth, some before birth and some
afterwards, a series of all the forms along its
own line that are below it in the scale of being.
Nature seems to believe very strongly in re-
views, and so, at the beginning of each new
term of her school, makes the pupil spend the
first weeks before taking up any new studies, in
running over everything from a, b, c, up, that
as advance work she had been ages upon. The
simplest and probably the earliest form of life
that appeared on earth, was a single proto-
plasmic cell, and it is as such that every crea-
ture, Socrates and Shakespeare, amoeba and
ascidium makes his start to-day. Organization
begins now, as doubtless it did at first, with the
folding over of a layer of cells into a minute
sac, the gastra?a stage, and it is in such a
sac that every child of nature's school above
the cell, no matter where he is going to gradu-
ate, has for awhile to carry his luncheon, his
eye-glasses and also his brains. It is a fishy
story, but not less a scientifically true one, that
all vertebrates, no matter how much they after-

78 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

wards live on the land and dread the water,
even the small boy, pass through an embryonic
period of having gills and being able to live
only in a fluid environment. Each of the
upper classes, however select the society it is
going to confine itself to after birth, not ex-
cepting a college fraternity, has its time of
being only a reptile and amphibian. And if
an examination is made at the age of four
weeks, not even the smartest scientific com-
mitteeman can find any difference in form or
faculty between a bird, a dog, a tortoise and
a man. The lower animals when they come to
their species, graduate out into the world, that
is, are born, but those which are destined for
a higher rank, like the pupils in a college, keep
on through the upper grades, and even after
they are born take a sort of resident graduate
course, during which some of the topmost
stages are passed through. It is such ones
that we do not have to go into any ghastly
dissecting room to see, but that are beautifully
visible in the great living-room of nature. I
was in a lady's parlor a while ago, where on
the center table was a glass basin in which a
tadpole was evolving from a fish into a frog,
as refined and nice as the unfolding of a bud
into a flower. Who has not watched with
wonder the blossoming of a lowly worm into

ORGANIC EVOLUTION 79

one of those winged flowers we call butterflies?
There are good scientific reasons for the epithet
so often applied to the small boy, "You little
monkey," that being exactly the post embry-
onic stage at which he has arrived; and every
mother who holds in her arms a child, holds
there a little animal that she is to see continue
right along the process that was begun before
birth, and stage by stage unfold through the
PuPPy> tne tiger, the ape and the savage up
at last into the man.

What does all this mean, — what its cause?
Why, it is simply a phase of heredity, the off-
spring's inheriting the peculiarities of its an-
cestry,— there is no other explanation of it;
but just as certainly as the unfolding likeness
of a child to its parents and its grandparents
shows its descent from them, just so certainly
its unfolding likeness to the various species of
animals one after another, its ontological par-
ents and grandparents, proves its descent from
their loins. It is the genealogical table in the
great Bible of nature written afresh in each
copy by the patriarch species themselves, reach-
ing, less divine, less certain than the genea-
logical graves, corresponding microscopically
with the record there which is written out in
full length ; and who will say it is less interest-
ing, less divine, less certain than the genea-

80 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

logical tables that we find on the printed
Hebrew page?

Nor is this all. Every animal not only
passes in its growth through all the stages that
its ancestry has passed through, but retains,
also, in its own form, remnants here and there of
what they were ; has in it a living paleontology
corresponding with the fossil one that is found
in the rocks ; splint bones to the horse which
are simply shriveled-up toes whose diminishing
can be traced right down through five different
species ; rudimentary teeth and hairs and pelvic
bones in whales ; suppressed hind legs in snakes ;
a mingling of the convex and concave vertebra?
of reptiles and birds in the old connecting links
between them ; gill arches in lizards ; and in
man, over fifty such things, some of them, as
the caecal appendage to the intestines, not only
useless, but often of great harm, — now and
then, also, single animals that have atavistic
marks which belong to others widely different,
as horses with zebra stripes, and human beings
with the extra fingers and toes of far-off am-
phibian forms. Who can believe that an Al-
mighty Being making his creatures all at once
out of new material would have mixed in them
these resemblances of other creatures? Are
they not rather the very things we ought to
find under the view that the organs of one

ORGANIC EVOLUTION 81

species are modified to make those of others,
and not yet wholly shriveled up by disuse?
When a white man was captured by the Indians
in the early wars of our country and carried
off into the wilderness, his way of marking the
trail so that it could be followed, was to leave
behind here and there an old shoe, or a frag-
ment of dress, or the broken branch of a tree ;
and pioneer scouts became very skilful in fol-
lowing such trails and capturing the captive
back. And that is what nature has done in her
long journey from monad up to man, she has
left old shoes and bits of dress and broken twigs
at each camp along the way, and evolution adds
to all its other proofs of being on the right
trail, by simply going after her and picking
them up.

When Ulysses made his famous archery con-
test at the court of Ithaca, having once let the
arrow fly from the twanging bow, it had, of
course, to go through all the rings at once
under its single impulse, without any stopping
to be shot again, or let the spectators rest.
But the rings of nature that evolution has to
shoot its arrow through are more than twelve,
and I must leave those which are beyond the
range of species — such as life, mind, society,
religion and the inorganic world, to be tried
for in another lecture. In closing the work

82 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

already attempted, however, let me call at-
tention to the wonderful way in which the
proofs reenforce each other and make a united
whole. The first consists in showing that
throughout the organic world, as it now is,
there is a regular gradation of species, both
those of animals and plants, from the lowest up
to the highest, and multitudes of cases in which
the organs of the one are simply modifications
of those which are in the others. This is the
classification argument. The second consists in
showing that the remains of animals and plants
found in rocks, constitute, in a general way, a
similar series unfolding from the lowest up,
ever nearer and nearer, into the ones that we
have on earth to-day. This is the paleonto-
logical or phylogenetic argument, and, as you
see, greatly strengthens the other. But these
proofs, though they show the grades, neither
of them shows one grade actually producing the
other, and so with these alone it might still be
said that the Creator simply made the parents
of each species a separate pair. To answer
this we have the third argument, derived from
embi^ology, showing in the growth of each in-
dividual animal a repetition on a small scale,
and in a few weeks of the process by which the
organic world at large, and through long ages,
was produced, and, what is more, showing one

ORGANIC EVOLUTION 83

species actually producing that above it which
is next in order. This is the ontogenetic ar-
gument. And then, binding all the rest to-
gether, we have the remnants of organs in the
higher species of each series, the living, the
geological, and the embryo one, that were of
great use in some lower species, but are of no
service now. This is the rudimentary argument.
The Bible tells us that a threefold cord cannot
be broken, but here is a fourfold cord. How
could anything be more finely knit together?
It is not customary to speak of logic as a thing
of beauty. It is ordinarily regarded as in-
congruous as it was for the medical student to
invite his lady-love to go with him not to the
theater, but to the most lovely opening of a
cadaver that was to come off the same night in
the dissecting-room. But if there ever was a
real masculine Apollo Belvidere piece of illa-
tive grace, is it not the one you have looked at
in this survey? And so far as the organic
world is concerned, shall we not say that the
wielder of its bow and arrow, the Ulysses of
evolution, is worthy of having at our hands
the Penelope of faith?

EVIDENCE OF INORGANIC EVOLUTION

There are doubtless many who have accepted
evolution from the start, and to whom all fur-
ther efforts to prove its truth are as much a
work of supererogation as arguments would be
to convince them that the sun shines or the
earth revolves. But such is very far from
being the case with all, even intelligent people.
I have before me the report of a sermon re-
cently delivered in Boston, the preacher of
which says, "If evolution is true, then the
Bible is not true, and God did not make man
in his own image holy, and hence man never
fell, and Jesus Christ is of no use." There are
multitudes of respectable families who still have
the old idea that evolution gives them a very
much despised ancestry — is a theory liable to
explode their human origin, and with which it
is just as well not to be caught monkeying.

Most of these disbelievers are encased in such
Harveyized steel plates of prejudice, that no
proof, even though it came at them with the
84

INORGANIC EVOLUTION 85

force of a sixtcen-inch solid, shot from a thirty-
foot dynamite gun, would knock into them a
conviction, — are like some Protestants in their
relation to the Roman Catholic Church; so ab-
solutely sure its adherents are of the Evil One,
that if they should get into heaven and find
them there, too, they would feel at once, in
spite of golden streets and angel songs, that
by some awful mistake on the part of the
Almighty they had got into the wrong city,
and with all possible speed would hurry out of
it into the other place.

But there are many others impressed in a
general way with its truth, who would like to
have their faith in it clarified and strengthened,
and would like, especially to have its consist-
ency with their religious belief made plain.
As regards those who from the first have been
its confirmed adherents, I doubt not, as to me,
the whole thing, proof and what is proved, is
a grand poem, a majestic hymn of creation,
something not merely to be gone through with
once and then laid aside, but to be enjoyed
over and over a hundred times, each time re-
vealing new meanings between the lines, and
each line a new sweetness in itself,

My preceding lecture was devoted to its
evidence, as the process by which the different
species of the animal and vegetable kingdoms

86 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

were originated from a common homogeneous
root.

It seemed best to take up these evidences of
organic evolution to start with, because their
field is the one in which they are the most con-
clusive and the most unitedly applied, and
because it affords the best vantage-ground from
which to go on into more difficult realms. It
is a field which is associated forever with the
great name of Darwin, and so brilliant was his
exposition of it, that to many persons, even now,
it is the whole thing, and he its whole discoverer.
But, as needs to be emphasized over and over,
the organic world with all its importance is
only one of its departments, and Darwin with
all his greatness, the highest name in only a
part of its calendar. Evolution is cosmic, in-
cludes all worlds, has as its supreme and
earliest expositor the splendid name of Herbert
Spencer. Proceeding now to this larger field
I shall try to show that its proofs, though more
fragmentary in their application, are of the
same kind and force as those which are so
cogent with respect to Darwinian evolution.

First, as regards the raw material of the in-
organic world, there are many curious facts
about the chemical elements, so called, which
render a common source highly probable.
Their atomic weights mount up from the 1 of

INORGANIC EVOLUTION 87

hydrogen to the 240 of uranium in a series,
each member of which is approximately a mul-
tiple of half that of hydrogen, as if somehow
the unknown substance to which that half be-
longs was their one starting point. They do
not succeed each other in their chemical
qualities, individually, right along from one to
sixty-seven, but are divisible into ten or eleven
groups, as copper, silver and gold, iron, nickel
and cobalt, fluorine, chlorine, bromine and
iodine, in each of which the chemical qualities
succeed each other regularly for awhile, and
then begin with similar ones over again, the
groups rising one above another, and the first
element in each corresponding in its qualities
with all the other firsts, the second with the
seconds, and so on. They are like the octaves
in music, where after each seven notes there
comes the eighth which harmonizes with the first
on a new scale, — are like the classes of the
animal world where the flying fish, the bat and
the bird, though belonging in their homologous
structure to entirely different groups, resem-
ble each other in their special wing-like ap-
pendages ; copper, for instance, being related
to silver and gold as one fish is to another, but
to iron and fluorine as the flying fish is to the
bat and the bird; and very significantly are
in the same way like the vibrations of ether,

88 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

which divide its common substance up into the
known groups of actinic, light, and heat rays,
while the Roentgen ray is most probably one
simply of another group, — all indicating that
even the raw material of this old world of ours,
apparently so full of discord, is set to music;
sure, therefore, at last in its completed struc-
ture to beat itself into harmony. And that
such a rythmic grouping, so far as its chemical
elements are concerned, is not a mere fancy, is
shown by the fact that Mendelejeff, who first
pointed it out, was able to predict from the
vacant places in its tables for which there were
then no known elements, that new ones to fill
them would eventually be found and what their
characteristics would be ; a prediction which has
already been fulfilled with regard to two of
them by the discovery of gallium and germa-
nium each with the very qualities the vacant
places required, a discovery in chemistry which
parallels that of Neptune in astronomy and
those that Cuvier foretold in zoology. A large
part of the chemist's difficulty in reducing these
elements all to a common base, seems to arise
from a lack on earth of sufficient heat, just as
in the Arctic regions would be the case with
steam, water and ice. But in the brighter stars
there is no such difficulty, their temperature
being vastly above anything that a theologian

INORGANIC EVOLUTION 89

ever conceived of as necessary to reduce even
sin to holiness ; and very singularly the spec-
trum of the most brilliant orbs shows only one
element, hydrogen, while that of the red and
parti-colored ones, which are the least hot,
shows the other elements in continually in-
creasing numbers, thus suggesting that the
same cooling process which is evolving the
original cosmic fire-mist into worlds, is evolving
out of it the varied chemical elements which
later on are to play such an important part in
rendering at least some of these worlds fit places
for habitation, and in providing for their in-
habitants the fit garb of life. So beautiful and
far-reaching from the start are nature's laws,
so much more wonderful than any magical
creation out of nothing, evolution's way of
providing nature with even its raw material.
And as an indication of what the human mind
is capable of, and of the unseen universe in
which science not less than religion is at work,
it is to be remembered that these marvelous de-
ductions are made by dealing with particles of
matter some of which are less than one five-
hundred millionth of an inch in diameter, that
a cubical box a thousandth of an inch in thick-
ness would contain more than seventy thousand
millions of them ; that magnified in the propor-
tion of a pea to this whole planet they would

90 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

be only the size of a grape ; that they are two
hundred thousand times smaller than anything
the most powerful microscope ever made has
rendered visible ; that even if a microscope were
invented capable of magnifying them to a vis-
ible size, they are moving back and forth so
rapidly, some of the gaseous ones at the rate
of a mile a second, which thus magnified would
be two hundred thousand miles a second,
that no human eye could follow them;
that even though it could, their nature is
so contradictory of everything known about
matter in the mass, that when they com-
bine chemically, one so exactly occupies the
space of the other as entirely to disappear, as
much so as if when a policeman overtook a
thief, he should be so completely absorbed by
him, — clothes, club, badge and body, there
would be only one person left, and he neither
policeman nor thief, but possibly the citizen
robbed, or the judge on the bench. What need
of children's brownies, or of Alice's Wonder-
land, when evolution as a part of its sober
scientific equipment gives us figures and facts
such as these?

Passing from the little to the large, we have
as regards the evolutionary origin of the earth,
the same kind of proof that paleontology
affords with regard to that of species. Its

INORGANIC EVOLUTION 91

strata not only contain the fossils of animals
and plants graded one above another into those
which now exist, but the rocks themselves are
fossils, fossil worlds graded one above another
till their summit is the one which is now a-top.
Each of them, so dead, so dark, so buried in
eternal silence to-day, was once a realm at the
surface, played over by the waters, danced on
by the winds, brightened by the sunshine and
alive with ten thousand joyous things; each a
fulfilment of Emerson's words,

"When the old world is sterile
And the ages are effete,
He will from wrecks and sediment
A finer world complete."

And as we go back through the wrecks and
sediment we find their appointments, the same
as their inhabitants, growing more and more
primitive till they end in one which shows
beyond question

"The solid earth whereon we stand
In tracts of fluent heat began."

The first geologists explained its changes as
all the result of tremendous convulsions which
destroyed one after another its old formations,
and opened the way for a supernatural power
to come in, and make in each new one all things

92 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

new. Convulsions there were, — earthquake
shocks that rent its crust into faults, like that
along the Appalachian Mountains, five miles
up and down and hundreds of miles in length;
volcanic outbursts, like that on the west of the
Rocky Mountains which covered what is now
whole states with ashes hundreds of feet deep;
and elemental battlefields in which the oppo-
nents like Milton's angels plucked up crested
hills and used them as the missiles of their awful
fight. But since the studies of Lyell it has been
recognized that the same slow agencies that
are at work on the earth now, have also always
been at work, and that the two together are
fully adequate to account naturally for all
geologic changes. Coarse and blundering as the
shapers of a world do indeed seem, — the fingers
of the earthquake, the volcano, and the glacier
and hardly less so those of the frost, the rain,
and the air, — no sculptor's chisel or house-
wife's hands ever left traces of greater skill
behind them than they have in carving and
ordering the earth. Man has stored up books
in libraries, but geologists tell us of long ages
before books, during which these blind natural
forces stored up the oil by whose light the far-
off coming eyes were to read their words. The
earth's surface, when it cooled down from its
molten state, was richly provided with iron,

INORGANIC EVOLUTION 93

but it was in the form of a red oxide so minutely
scattered and mixed up with the soil, just as
we see it now wherever red earth is, that for
man alone to get it out would have made it
rarer and costlier than even silver and gold.
Its red oxide is insoluble in water, but among
the earth's earlier products was a coarse vege-
tation, which dying and mingling with it in the
soil furnished the carbon whose greater affinity
for oxygen took away a part of it from the iron,
and thus changed it to a black oxide in which
condition it is soluble in acidulated water, the
oxygenized carbon providing at the same time
the needed acid. In this form it was taken up
by the rains and floods and carried into ponds
and bogs where, away from the carbon, it took
back from the air its lost oxygen and became red
again, the same thing exactly which now occurs
in the purifying of our blood. As a red in-
soluble oxide it sank to the bottom, becoming
thus, instead of scattered particles, a great heap
ready, ages after, for man's reduction of it into
the metal which has played such a part in
human progress, so that the very pen with
which the theologian writes his argument
against evolution is itself the proof of its
reality. The carboniferous forests grew the
vegetation whose decay is the base of our
enormous coal beds, but their prostrate forms,

94 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

left exposed to the sun and air, would soon
have wasted back into their native elements
again, had not a great convulsion of the earth
sunk them beneath the sea, and there sealed
them up air-tight with mud and sand, just as a
woman does her summer fruit with wax and
glass. Then another convulsion lifted them up
for another growth, to be followed in due time
with another sinking. Nine times in some places
was this process repeated; and now, on nine
different shelves in earth's cellar the mighty
cans, filled with their precious treasures, stand
waiting for human use, all of which beautiful
economy is denied and lost sight of by those
who in the interest of religion, as they call it,
shut their eyes to the evolution they point to,
and hold that the whole thing was done at once
by a single magic word. What gives the earth
its fertility? Not the least of its sources is the
loosening and mixing up of soils, begun long
before the days of agricultural schools, by the
waters and frosts which seemed to be only
tearing it to pieces, and about the time of man's
appearing on the scene, completed by those huge
glacial plows whose glittering shares a thou-
sand feet thick have scratched the proofs of
their existence all over our northern bed rocks.
Why do nearly all the great mountain chains
and continents of the earth run north and

INORGANIC EVOLUTION 95

south, thus allowing its torrid and its arctic
waters and airs to modify each other and make
parts of it habitable that otherwise would be
sealed up with perpetual snow? They are
gigantic proofs of the far-off time in the earth's
evolution when revolving on its axis faster than
it does now, and consequently bulging out more
at its equator, it was compelled, as it slowed
down, and bulged out less, to shrivel up with
its ridges lengthwise rather than with them
east and west.

So with scores of other things. Geology is
the typewriter girl of evolution. The earth's
progressive unfolding does not have to be
reasoned out: it is written out, written on its
own massive tablets of continent-wide stone.
The footprints of the advancing eons are just
as plainly impressed on its pages as are those
of its reptilian birds. If, as Tennyson says,
its life

"Was battered by the shocks of doom
To shape and use/'

it was by a doom that was in itself. The
modification of old structures into new ones
so conspicuous in species, is equally clear in
strata. There are rudimental boulders in
modern soils which teach the same lesson as
rudimental bones in modern animals; aortic

96 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

arches of ancient rivers, as with the Connecti-
cut between Hartford and New Haven, which
have been as visibly dried up in the land's pass-
ing from its jural to its triassic formations
as those of the lizard have in its passing from'
its fish to its reptile forms ; primitive rocks yet
at the surface, as, for instance, the granites,
which, like the mosses and shells of protozoic
time, have survived unchanged all the con-
vulsions of the ages. And, as if to make the
whole thing sure beyond any possible doubt,
just as we have in every pond amoebas and
rhizopods to show us what the animal world
started from, so here and there over the earth
we have protoplasmic lava streams bursting up
from the burning core below, to give us speci-
mens of the very stuff out of which the material
earth originally came.

Turning now from stones to stars, their
immense distances, their apparent diversity
from all that we have on earth, and the absolute
impossibility of our ever watching from infancy
to age their eon-long growth, would seem to
render the getting from them of any evidence
as to how they came, an almost hopeless task.
They are the very framework of the universe
itself, reach in space out into infinity, in age
down into eternity, — often reveal their existence
only to the telescope's twenty-inch pupil and

INORGANIC EVOLUTION 97

the photograph's sensitized retina. Yet even
to them evolution has put its question, O ye
shining stars, what light of knowledge can you
give to man about your birth and growth? O
bands of Orion and sweet influences of
Pleiades, burning suns and clustered worlds,
what truths will you reveal to finite minds as to
your laws and forces and your relations to one
another and to our own little earth? And the
question has been answered by their tongues of
light, answered, if not in all its fullness, yet
with not a little of that same kind of evidence
that we have received from the things of earth.
As regards our solar system, what are the
globular shapes of its members, their being all
made of matter, all obeying the laws of gravity,
all revolving on their axes, and nearly all
moving in the same elliptic plane, but the like-
nesses and homologies which indicate, as they
do among animals and plants, that they have
had a common parentage, their birth one after
another from the same cooling and contracting
nebular mist? What, rightly viewed, are, also,
their differences in size, satellites, times of revo-
lution, stages of progress, baby Jupiter and
old-age moon, reverse rotations of Uranus and
Neptune, erratic comets, and multiplied aster-
oids, facts so often pointed to as proofs of
their unlike origin, but the manifestations of

98 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

that variability which is so vital a character-
istic of all evolution, and so conspicuous in the
animal kingdom, — elephants and microbes,
quadrupeds which fly and fishes leaving their
watery plane to travel on land. If Nature had
deliberately planned to give man an indisputable
rudiment of the circular form that, according
to evolution, all the planets and satellites have
passed through, — had in traversing the wilder-
ness of sky purposely left behind a fragment
of her dress, or — shall we say — an ornament
of her fingers, so as to enable man the surer to
follow her trail, what could she have better
chosen for it than those wonderful rings which
still sparkle on the planet Saturn nine hundred
millions of miles out in the depths of space?
And then as regards that integration of dif-
ferences which is the highest stage of evolution,
that divine unity in which each member of the
system does his work without jar or friction,
where can we find a better example of it than
in this shining family of the skies? There is
no Venezuela question between Venus and Mer-
cury ; no part of the earth, not even England,
that wishes to grab anything on Neptune or
Uranus. Mars is named after the god of war,
but not even any newspaper has ever heard of
his being ready for a fight. Jupiter has belts ;
but the rest of the planets do not have to make

INORGANIC EVOLUTION 99

laws against his arranging on their soil for a
pugilistic encounter ; Saturn rings, but there is
not the slightest reason for supposing they
have anything to do with political corruption;
and the huge, hot-tempered Sun himself, in-
stead of acting the part of a Russian bear to
the other members of the planetary alliance, is
more like a big bird gathering them all, even
the little asteroids, under his warm wings and
without any need of fighting off his brother
suns, leading them all in safety about his vast
stellar yard.

Mounting up with the telescope and the
spectroscope into the great sidereal universe,
we find that with all its distances and all its
differences, it has its points of contact with our
own little earth, has its grades which make it
easy for evolution, without even a flying leap, to
rise from its lowest to its highest point, instead
of being that cold, glittering, motionless realm
which it often impresses us as being on a
winter's night, No buzzing factory, when bus-
iness is good, was ever more alive with workers
than are its majestic rooms with world-weavers
and sun-forgers, no woods and meadows in
springtime more varied with insects, and birds,
and flowers than are its radiant fields with bud-
ding planets, bright-winged stars, and many
colored suns. Digging into the depths of our

100 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

own earth, we find in its heated core the evidence
of a time in its far-off youth when even out-
wardly it was one of their glowing brotherhood.
They are all composed of the same material, only
in different stages, that we are, all have at their
cores the same hot blood. Gravity is their one
law, ether their common light, motion their
united life. That same fierce struggle for ex-
istence and survival only of the fittest, which are
such awful agencies of evolution in our terres-
trial woods and fields, are in operation upon
all the sidereal heights, world eating world to
keep alive, and star starving star to get its
needed food. They, too, have their youth,
maturity, old age, and time to die. Every
summer's night, turning to the southern sky,
you can see one of them, Antares in the neck of
the Scorpion, going with varied colors through
its dying agonies. Ceasing to be sun species,
they give birth to planet species. And just as
here on earth to-day you can find every grade
of animal and plant that the animal and plant
kingdoms in their age-long growth have ever
known from amoeba up to man and from desmid
on to daisy, so in the realms of sky, though we
cannot go back into eternity and trace their
course, we can find as contemporaries of our-
selves every grade of stellar and planet life,
from the protoplasmic nebula of Orion just

INORGANIC EVOLUTION 101

wriggling into shape, up to sparkling Sirius
walking in beauty the winter sk}% and from the
firefly meteors of earth opening their wings a
moment but to die, on to the unsetting Ursa
Major bidding the north forever know its
place, — every phase that the stellar and planet
kingdoms have ever been through, all the steps
of one mighty stair-way, all the links of one
splendid truth.

This discussion may seem, in some of its as-
pects, to be only a proof of material evolution
of the body, and not the soul of the universe,
but is not the seeing of how such a body has
been prepared, one of the best ways of rising
up to an appreciation of its indwelling soul?
"I am thinking after him the thoughts of God,"
said the astronomer Kepler reverently, as he
first came to some of these great stellar truths.
And that is what we really have been doing,
thinking after him the thoughts of God. And
what delving in dusty manuscripts, what
wandering in the mazes of theological specu-
lation, what pondering even over the pages of
Christian Scripture, could give us thoughts of
his which are more truly sublime than this
tracing of what he has done from atom to star;
what put us in a more reverent mood towards
him than this standing for a space in his great
temple of the universe? A pious French abbe

102 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

complained to a scientific friend, one day, about
the indifference of his flock to sacred things,
how in spite of his most careful expositions of
Scripture setting forth the wisdom and good-
ness of Almighty God they would yawn and go
to sleep. His friend advised him to drop awhile
the written book and preach to them the glories
of God out of the great book of nature, — and
meeting him the next week, he inquired the
result. "Oh, wretch that I am !" exclaimed the
priest, "I did as you advised, told them about
the size and splendor of the sun and wonder of
the stars, and how great he must be who made
them all ; and alas, alas ! they did not indeed go
to sleep, but they went to the other extreme:
they profaned the house of God by breaking
into applause." That special way of approving
what God does is doubtless too Frenchy for us
sober Americans to be in danger of its use.
But if the light of the stars as they now are
can keep men's bodily eyes awake, how much
more ought the light of the process by which
their shining came, keep their souls from
stupor; and if the wonder of the universe as
it reaches through space can throw them into
ecstasies of worship, what, in view of the eons
of time added to space through which its
wonder was unfolded, ought to be their
emotions?

VI

THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE

The method of proving the truth of evolu-
tion which I have tried to follow in this course
of lectures, has been not to begin with the origin
of things in a far-off nebula and take them in
their chronological order, but to start in with
the easy and undeniable ones right around us
that we can actually see are the outcome, by
natural laws and forces, of their preceding
states, and thence pass on gradually to those
which are more remote and difficult. "You will
admit that two and two make four, won't you?"
said the irrespressible village logician to his
opponent in the grocery store whom he was try-
ing politically to convert. "No, I won't," re-
plied the man who had experienced at other
times the logician's argufying powers, "for if
I do, you will lead me on and on with more twos
and twos till I have either got to accept your
doctrines or deny at last that they make four,
and I may as well make a fool of myself by deny-
ing it at the beginning as at the end." So
103

104 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

with the opponents of evolution. Their only
safe way is to start in with denying that the
two and two of natural laws and forces will
make four. With the facts right before their
eyes, they are hardly able to be fools as soon
as that, and so they wait till they have reached
some remoter and obscurer fours, those,
perhaps, where a new species of things comes
in, before they set up the doctrine that they
must be the product of something else than
two and two. At the very pleasant tea-table
where I was sitting one evening when away from
home on an exchange, the minister's wife and
sister, both of them the graduates of a high-
toned academy, and the latter a teacher in one
of our glorious public schools, got into a dis-
cussion as to where the moon rose. The min-
ister's wife was sure it rose in the west because
she had seen it there over her right shoulder,
while the teacher had a glimmering idea that its
rising was in the east because somebody's
poetry had made it rhyme with yeast. So
along with the tea and the toast they mildly
argued the matter for some time, and then each
politely yielding something to the other, as
Christian ladies will, they harmoniously settled
down into the agreement that when it is an old
moon it rises in the east, but when a new one,
in the west, a good illustration of the kind of

THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE 105

truth to which most compromises lead. And so
as regards evolution, there are not a few
religious teachers and minister's wives' hus-
bands who hold that when things are old and
familiar, existing animals and plants and the
"fours" of our daily lives, they originate in the
natural east and from the twos and twos of an
earthly parentage, but that when they are new
and strange, as the beginnings of species and
worlds and life and soul, they can rise only in
the supernatural west and by a miraculous
creation. We have seen the evidences, however,
that the new moons of species and planets and
stars rise exactly where the old ones do, and
that so far as material things are conceived,
additions to them at the beginning are by the
same fundamental rules of arithmetic that they
are afterwards. And now I proceed to the
reasons for believing that the same is true of
those things which transcend matter and which,
though close at hand, are more difficult to deal
with than Ursa and the Milky Way.

The first of these is life. What is it and
whence does it come? We all have it in our-
selves ; without it could not ask the question,
and it is all around us in a myriad other things ;
has its special marks that we all know ; does
continually what nothing else can ; builds on
earth a vast, twofold kingdom, and is the base

106 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

of that intelligence without which all the rest
of the universe, splendid as it is, would be only
an empty house.

Yet how difficult is its definition even to our
thought. Religion calls it on the one hand a
breath of the Almighty, and on the other a
vapor which appeareth for a little while and
then vanisheth away; poetry, "a bubble," "a
cheat," "a walking shadow," "a confused noise
between two silences." One of the ponderous
dictionaries tells us, learnedly, that it is "a
state of being alive" ; Mr. Mantalini that it is
"a demd horrid grind." English pragmatism
declares that it is "the sum of the tendencies
which resist death," French epigrammatism go-
ing; to the other extreme, that "it is itself
death." Herbert Spencer's famous statement
of it as a "definite combination of heterogene-
ous changes both simultaneous and successive
in correspondence with external co-existences
and sequences," while setting forth admirably
its phenomena, fails to set forth the thing it-
self; is like speaking of a tree as a definite
combination of heterogeneous growings, but
without saying what it is that grows ; and the
simpler definition of it given by Mr. Fiske, as
"the internal and external activity of an or-
ganism in relation to its environment" shuts
out on the one side such things as seeds and

THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE 107

germs which are alive without being active,
and includes on the other, such things as
steam-engines driving factories, which are ac-
tive without being alive. And then as to its
origin, no eye has ever seen it rising in nature
from the world's preceding inorganic state; no
experiment in the laboratorv succeeded in o<et-
ting it from what beyond question was other-
wise than alive. Sir Win. Thompson's idea
that it might have come to earth on a meteor-
ite exploded from another planet, only puts
the question a little further off, — is about as
senseless a solution of it as anything that a
man of scientific standing ever put forth.
And taking these facts all together, and espe-
cially the wide remove of its higher qualities
from those of matter, it is no wonder that
supernaturalists have made it one of their great
rallying points as an instance of something
which must come from a Being who is outside
of natural law and force.

But the two realms with all their separations
have here also, as everywhere else in nature,
a multitude also of connecting links. There is
a Hindoo myth that the gods and Asuras, a
race of genii, sat for ages on the shores of
the ocean, part on one side and part on the
other, churning its waves to bring forth out
of them the Amreeta, the waters of life. Eon

108 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

after eon as they churned, the moon and many
other strange things appeared, but not the
Amreeta. Nevertheless they kept on with their
churning, and finally, one day, the stubborn
ocean yielded, and the precious, long-desired
waters appeared. The genii are the mighty
forces of nature; the ocean, the vast sea of
nebulous mist. Out of their churning we have
seen sun and moon and stars and many other
strange things already appear that are her-
alds and hints of the stranger one which is on
its way. Who has ever watched the subtle
operations of chemistry, each element selecting
its own special material with which to be united,
or the wonderful shaping of a crystal, each
particle guided naturally to its own place, re-
producing from an inner type the parts of it
which are broken off, and using sometimes a
germ-like particle from another crystal of the
same kind with which to get a better start,
and not felt he was in the presence of a mys-
tery second only to that of life? Protoplasm,
the living raw material out of which all organic
forms are made, is composed chemically of the
same elements, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and
carbon, that are found in a multitude of inor-
ganic things, has had not a few of its higher
compounds once supposed to be makable only
in the laboratories of life, reproduced equally

THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE 109

well in those of science. Organic growth goes
through the same three great stages of homo-
geneity, differentiation and integration that
are the characteristics of inorganic evolution.
And though no one has ever seen ordinary mat-
ter converted into living matter without the
help of life, yet everyone with such help sees
it continually done all around him, plants
evolving it out of the soil into vegetable mat-
ter, and animals out of plants into animal mat-
ter. In fact, the very thing which there is
so much mystery about in nature is being re-
peated every day at our tables ; particles of
matter which are absolutely dead, killed, baked,
boiled, roasted, fried and chewed dead, being
eaten one hour, and three hours afterwards
made alive again and floating in our blood, and
of the same protoplasmic substance as that
which is afloat in our ponds and is the begin-
ning of all life, a process how analogous to the
embryonic repetition of racial growth which
takes place later on in all animals, and is so
conclusive an argument for the natural origin
of species.

Then, as regards the life principle itself
which is in the protoplasm and in all living
things, and is their really distinctive quality, a
large part of the difficulty about its inorganic
evolution disappears, if it is conceived of as a

110 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

differentiation and function, not of matter
alone, but of that force which is in matter and
in all the inorganic world. It has been the
custom of some scientists to ridicule the idea
of vital force as an exploded superstition ; but
it is hard to see why. Its recognition simply
coordinates it with mechanical force, chemical
force, electric force, crystallizing force and the
like, as variations, such as nature everywhere
else is filled with, of one underlying energy,
that energy, it may be, the outflow of
the world's eternal, all-pervading spirit; and
as crystallizing force, chemical force and
the like are not the product of crystals
and chemical compounds, but are their pro-
ducers, so vital force is not the result of
vital organizations but is itself the organizer,
or, supplementing Spencer's definition, is the
agency which carries on "its definite combina-
tion of heterogeneous changes." Taken thus,
life with its special qualities is simply the
mounting up of inorganic force one octave
more in that great diatonic scale that we have
found in other things, and on which the uni-
verse everywhere is apparently arranged. And
just as matter in cooling seems to have come
to a stage never repeated, in which it was ex-
actly fitted for having matter pass into its dif-
ferent elemental groups, so, later on, it is rea-

THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE 111

sonable to think it came to a condition in which
the force that had always been associated with
matter was differentiated, just as naturally,
from its other groups into that of vital force.
The evidence that its material embodiments,
its animal and vegetable kingdoms and its dif-
ferent species, have all originated from its first
protoplasmic form, has already been pre-
sented; but coining in here as more especially
a phase of life, are the evidences of the evolu-
tionary process by which it is continued in its
individual possessors, and transmitted from one
generation of them to another, and of how it
is related to death. In the individual it is by
the constant using up the old cells in which
it is stored, and the putting in their place of
the new ones derived from food. The old
Frenchman was at least half right when he
defined life as death. The two are not con-
tending foes, as they are sometimes repre-
sented as being, but a firm of great cooperat-
ing partners, life being possible only by con-
tinuous death, and death only by continuous
life. Every time we move, every time we think,
every time we feel, every time we in any way
live, it is only by having some part of us die.
In the vegetable world the dead parts are util-
ized, some to give its trunks and stalks stabil-
ity, and some to fertilize the soil beneath them

112 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

for other growths ; and in the animal world a
part to keep the body warm, and a part to go
the round of the elements into life again. It
is a process which explains why we eat food.
It is not merely for the fun of it as some of
its eaters seem to think. It is for the same
reason that the engineer puts coal into the fur-
nace of a steam-engine, to generate the force
by which the functions of life, acting, think-
ing, feeling, are to be carried on, another rea-
son for believing in vital force ; and then, in
turn, the hunger for food and the absolute ne-
cessity of getting it, become the great driving-
wheel that keeps the factory of the big world
alive and in operation ; so naturally in evolution
does one thins* arise out of another.

But it is not the cells of the body alone
which are used up in living. Little by little
the whole body itself grows old and effete, is
worn out and dies. That is exactly what death
is, life's material used up in living; begins at
the cradle, ends only at the grave ; can be pre-
vented only in one way, by our not living,
merely existing, as sometimes a frog does,
sealed up in a rock or tree. While in the
army I was sent on one occasion with some dis-
patches from Roanoke Island across Albe-
marle Sound to Elizabeth City. Our boat was
a miserable little steamer captured from the

THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE 113

foe; and all night, not daring to land any-
where, we struggled against the fierce March
wind, again and again nearly going to the bot-
tom. Towards morning our wood and coal
gave out, and then to keep the boat in motion
we had to begin tearing to pieces its cabin and
decks and putting them under the boiler, our
last available stick being in embers as slowly
and gaspingly we crept up to the wharf.
That is how it is with this body of ours in
which the soul is sent with dispatches from
time to eternity. Battling with the gales of
earth, it has to use itself up in getting there
and, did it exist as one generation alone, the
end would again be universal death. But in
anticipation of its fate, while it is yet in its
vigor, the same thing takes place with the body
as a whole, that all along has been taking place
with its single minute cells. It imparts its life
to another body endowed with a fresh set of
cells. Reproduction, therefore, is simply a
differentiation of growth; and what the cell
is to the individual, the individual is to the
race, is simply a larger cell helping by its be-
ing used up and dying to keep humanity alive ;
so beautifully again does one thing in evolu-
tion unfold naturally into another, so wonder-
derfully what under the old theology was the
penalty of disobedience and the curse of God,

114 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

becomes under this new revelation the result
of obedience and a gift to man of an ever
greater blessing.

There are five different ways in which phys-
ical life is continued from one generation to
another. The first and earliest is that of fis-
sion, the one in which a single-celled animal
simply divides itself into two parts, the very
thing which takes place in all growth; the last
and highest, that in which the two sexes blend
their lives in a child which is distinct from them
both. Looked at superficially, it seems as if
the two ways were the exact opposites of each
other, the first a division and the last a union
of cells, and as if there could be no natural
evolution of the one into the other. But
Haeckel has shown most conclusively that the
other three ways, those of budding, germ buds,
and germ cells, are the connecting links be-
tween the lowest and the highest, and that even
in the highest there is always a repetition of
the lowest; that is, a dividing of substance
from each of the parents first; and so repro-
duction becomes in its highest phase simply a
continuation of growth, a growth of the race
instead of the individual, a growth in which
all the oldness and wornness of the parental
bodily cells are left behind, and only the fresh-
ness and vigor of its new specialized ones, filled

THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE 115

with the deeper inheritable qualities of the
parents, are passed on. So easily does Nature
grade the way from generation to generation,
so wonderfully out of life's old age get for-
ever and forever life's immortal youth, so
honestly recompense her children for the pain
and loss of growing old and being worn out
themselves in her service, by giving them what
is more precious than their own lives and what
they otherwise would never have known, the
joy of having, rearing, and loving those
through whom the world's life is to be passed
on.

Following life up from its roots has thus
brought us, almost unconsciously, into the very
midst of another great phase of evolution,
that of love. But this in its origin and de-
velopment is of itself so wonderful and beauti-
ful as to deserve a separate treatment, and
reserving its consideration for another lecture,
let me round off our thoughts about the evolu-
tion of earthly life, by calling attention to its
bearing on the great question of an immortal
life. If physical life is, on the one hand, the
mere result of physical organization, like the
movement of a watch of its making, as ma-
terialism claims ; or, on the other hand, is a
gift of God supernaturally breathed into the
physical organization as theology has taught,

116 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

then the death of the body, as with the de-
struction of a watch, may well be regarded as
the end of its movement, and the penalty of
its sin. But if life is the unfolding of a force
which everywhere else in nature is immaterial,
and which, as we have seen, can be transferred
from one material body to another, and can
even make the death of the material body it is
in the very means of such continuance, why is
it not fair to believe that it can also be con-
tinued from a material to a spiritual body, and
make death there also the means of its continu-
ance? It is not life anywhere which really dies,
but only what life was in. It is a view, to be
sure, which makes the final change different in
some respects from all the others, but this
only renders it so much the more natural.
The trunk of the tree continues its life in the
limbs, and the limbs in the branches, and the
branches in the twigs, and all these are alike
in form, but when it comes to the twigs, they
transfer it into what? Why, into flowers and
fruit, different how widely and how beautifully
from all its other forms. So with nature as
a whole ; it puts its life first into animals and
species and races and individuals, all material,
but when it comes to the end of individuals,
and wants to continue the process, what should
we expect the next step to be, but spiritual

THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE 117

bodies, something above matter, the flowering
and fruitage of its other forms? And thus we
see how naturally and inevitably under the
touch of evolution the life which is rooted in
sod ripens in soul.

VII
THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE

My preceding lecture in this course was on
the evolution of life, — its definition as that in-
terior power of an organism which enables it
continually to readjust its inner changes to
its outward environment ; its probable origin
as a differentiation of natural force; its rela-
tions with mechanical force, chemical force,
electric force, crystallizing force, and the like;
the wonderful methods by which it is continued
in growth and reproduction from cell to cell
and from generation to generation, — itself
never dying, but only what it is in; — and the
natural possibility of its being continued at
last from a material to a spiritual body, and
so of immortality's being provided for in the
very nature of life and death.

Side by side with the wonder of life itself is
the evolution out of it, of that tie which binds its
different forms together and which in human
beings has reached such heights of beauty and
power, — the tie of love. Darwin has shown,
118

THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE 119

carefully and scientifically, what an immense
factor it has been even in the animal and vege-
table worlds, for the development of their cour-
age, strength and shapeliness ; and in the
human world, as revealed to the most casual
eye, how wide over camp and court, hovel and
throne has been its sway, how mighty its in-
fluence. It is no small part of the power which
drives the shuttle in that roaring loom of time
out of which comes the web of our common
daily prosaic lives. Like a vein of gold it
runs through all heroism and gallantry,
all poetry and romance. It has been one of the
great factors of history, — kissed away king-
doms, folded nations in its arms, whispered
battles with its breath. Religion has borrowed
its language to express the grandest of her
own truths, — told us that God is love, and the
sum of all duty, loving. It mingles its luster
with the great hope of immortality, — makes
half of our conception of heaven and more
than one-half of its attractions. And the
marriage relation in which it finds its con-
summation, having as its central idea that each
person in going out into the world should not
be left to fight its battles and bear its burdens
alone, but have a helper bound to him by the
sweetest of all ties, another self yet different
from self, the two nursing each other in sick-

120 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

ness, defending each other in assault, and
making for each other a common property and
a common home ; that out of their union should
come a blended continuation of themselves in
those dearer than self, and that with passion's
flame sobered into friendship's fire, they should
walk in its warmth through the chills of age,
helpers still to the final home, however short of
its ideal it may come practically, — could there
be, at least in its conception, a more exquisite
device for promoting the world's welfare, and a
surer evidence that at the heart of things is
somehow Infinite Goodness?

What, now, under evolution, is the source of
the agent which has played such a tremendous
part in the world's progress, and which is still
so precious an element in the world's attain-
ments? Poets have sung it as

"The sacred fyre ykindled from above
Emongst the eternall spheres and lamping sky
And thence poured into men."

And truly if there is anything on earth which
in its finer forms would seem to be the direct
breath of Deity, anything which at first view
it would seem impossible to account for as
rising out of protoplasm and dust, it is its
"sacred fyre." Evolution, however, finds the
same law prevailing here as everywhere else in

THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE 121

nature ; first, the lowly germ embedded in a pre-
ceding state of things, then the coarse material
stalk growing gradually out of it, and then on
this stalk the fragrant flower and rich fruit.
And though to pass from its sentimental splen-
dors to its scientific source may seem like going
up like a rocket and coming down like a stick,
nevertheless, I think I can show that the real
process is going up as a stick, and then burst-
ing into rocket splendors for which there shall
never be any coming down at all.

Going back to its starting point in living
creatures, all love has necessarily to begin with
self and to take the form of self-love. The
only thing a creature can be conscious of at
first is its own existence, and, if it is going to
live, the only thing that it can care for at the
start is the supply of its own wants. To care
for a thing, however, is to love it. That is
what the word "care" means in Latin, love ; and
we have the same connection in English through
the word dear, a word which on the one side
means costly in the way of money and effort ;
and on the other, beloved, a dear dress and a
dear friend. It is a connection which holds
true of all love. Care is its food and nurse.
The mother loves her child, the husband his
wife, the citizen his country, the Christian his
church, the soul its God, just in proportion as

123 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

they take care of them and do for them ; and
the cares of life, — those things of which men so
often complain, — without them it would be im-
possible to have what we all so much rejoice
in, its loves. Theologians in the past have
identified self-love with sin, have told us that
the first thing to be done before we could have
any higher love was to crush it out. But this
was never the teaching of Jesus. His com-
mand was: "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as
thyself," recognizing not only that our neighbor
is a part of ourselves, but that love to ourselves
is the starting point of love to him and is of
the same religious quality ; and science agrees
with him, — shows that love to self is the nec-
essary condition of all life and that without it
there could not be anyone either to love or to be
loved.

Passing on to its next form, love between
the sexes, a large part of its problem is the
origin of these two great divisions in the sphere
of life, itself one of the most wonderful facts
in nature. Of five hundred theories which have
been propounded for its explanation, while no
one as yet has been freely established, and
while food, environment, parental age, time of
union and the like, are doubtless all factors,
and in the lower animals sometimes apparently
overruling factors, the one which lies at tne

THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE 123

basis of the others and best explains the equal
numbers of the sexes and the subtler and finer
differences between them, is the view that the
little protoplasmic cell in which life begins,
has its two opposite poles, each, like all po-
larity, with its different characteristics which,
when the cell propagates itself by dividing, as
we found to be the case in all growth, all re-
production, all continuance of life, become nat-
urally the starting points of two sides, two
kinds of living things. As with polarity
everywhere else, it is those with the opposite
sides which attract each other; and as their
possessors increase in size and complexity, the
differences in their organizations, as the re-
sult of them, become more and more pro-
nounced, developing sometimes in the same in-
dividual, as with many plants, and at last, as
with the higher animals, always in two, and
repeated embryonically in each individual's
growth, — these that culminate physically in
the two great halves of the human family so
like yet different, while the lowly influence which
drew them together at first, so akin with what
every bit of iron displays, mounts up on the
animal side through a myriad lower creatures
into the love which is so often their guiding
needle on the stormy sea of life, and in the
vegetable kingdom, through a myriad plants

124 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

into the orange flowers that are the symbol of
their wedded lives. How far the division of
that far-off protoplasmic cell in which, accord-
ing to this view, love began, may account also,
atavistically, for the miffs and quarrels and di-
vorces into which, like the zebra stripes on a
horse, it ever and anon, even now, breaks forth,
evolution can only hint, but it gives a scien-
tific basis for the terms magnetism, attraction,
drawn to, and the like, which are used so com-
monly as the synonyms of love ; and it is a good
illustration of that oneness, differentiation and
oneness again, which are the three great stages
of all evolution. Mr. Drummond and other
writers have spoken of sex as an anomaly in
creation, "a phenomenon which stands abso-
lutely alone in the field of nature," — as what
"has nothing at all like it," and is without a
parallel in the world. But this is a groundless
assertion. Wherever force is, there is po-
larity. Every magnet, every blade of grass
attracted with its stem up and its root down,
every electric cloud swinging through the
skies, our whole earth with its north and south
poles, every planet swinging through space,
every beam of. light, nay, possibly the universe
itself with gravity at one extreme drawing to-
gether, and the opposite of gravity at the
other, driving apart, are its analogues. Love

THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE 125

is simply vital force polarized, — is related to
chemical force and crystallizing force as the
wings of the bird are to those of the fish and
the bat, or among the elements, as copper is to
iron and fluorine ; is the first note in the great
octave of life. See, too, how directly and in-
evitably it grows out of life, the very division
by which alone its primal cell can get food and
so live, making it a necessity, — how rooted,
also, it is through force in the very constitu-
tion of the universe itself. We cannot live,
nay, we cannot even be, without some form of
love. Then the equality of the sexes, not in
numbers alone, but in rights and powers, —
that, likewise, lies at the very foundations of
their existence. Who shall say there is any
difference between the polarities in which they
both begin? When life's primal protoplas-
mic cell divided, it divided, as it does now, in
the middle, divided equally the common goods.
Woman has never given up that original birth-
right, never could and never can give it up.
When I hear lawyers and politicians talking
about their being no natural rights, and that
what women or any other human beings are
to have, are a gift of legislation and a matter
of expediency, I want to send such children
for awhile to the primary school of evolution.
There are statute books older than those of

126 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

Judea and Rome, commentaries wiser than
Blackstone and Kent, epistles more authori-
tative than those of Paul, legislative halls
which antedate those of empires and repub-
lics. They began with life, are based on the
constitution of the universe; and it is from
them that women, and all of us, get our rights.

Notice, also, how closely the scientific ac-
count of the way in which sexes originated
coordinates itself with the Bible account. The
story of the rib has been often ridiculed as
the acme of nonsense, but the old Scripture
writer was wrong only in the names and de-
tails. His Adam's scientific name is Amoeba.
The rib out of which Eve was made was not
bone but protoplasm, and it was Amoeba's
whole side, not a part of it, out of which she
was taken. But the reason for it given by
evolution is precisely the same as that of
Scripture, that it was not good for Adam, even
in his amoebic state, to be alone, and the ulti-
mate purpose was the same as that given by
Christianity, that these twain should be again
one flesh.

But while thus recognizing the rapture and
romance of love between the sexes, and the holi-
ness into which it finally climbs, it is to be rec-
ognized, also, that this is not its highest form ;
their paradise, not its truest heaven ; their

THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE 1£7

intercourse not all which is needed to make
man a family and earth a home. The love of
the parent for the child, and preeminently the
love of the mother for her babe, that is where
it takes its richest hues, that where it rises to be
the type of what Deity feels, that where it builds
the walls and kindles the fires and puts on the
roof of a family and a home. Whence does
this form of it come? How direct and clear
the evidence that this, also, is evolved naturally
out of life and, what is more, out of animal
life. When the two sexes unite in transmitting
life to their offspring, it is a part of each
other and of themselves that they transmit,
and inevitably, therefore, the love they have
for each other and for themselves goes with it,
constituting parental love, and as the off-
spring was first in the form of an egg and then
of a babe, they were moved by their love and
love's desire to protect its weakness to provide
it with some kind of nest. That nest, that
shelter, — I never see one now that I do not
reverence it, — rough and rude as it was, was the
beginning of a long line of abodes whose far-
ther end is the stately mansions of civilization,
nay, rather, is that great house of many man-
sions into which, as offspring of the Eternal
Parent, our souls are a1 List to be gathered.
"What makes you call that house your home?"

128 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

asked a gentleman, quizzing a little boy who
was just returning from school; "it looks just
like the houses where all the other folks live."
"Because," replied the bo}^ puzzled for a mo-
ment, and then pointing to the window where
he caught sight of his mother looking out for
him, — "because she lives there !" And there
have been myriads of children clad in feathers
and fur and unable to express it in articulate
words, that have known what theirs was by the
same sign.

Then the care and devotion of animal par-
ents to their young; who can fail to recognize
in them the beginning, nay, often the full rich
growth, of those very qualities which make the
wonder of human parental love? When the
female monkey brushes away the flies from her
sleeping babe, and later applies a stick to the
appropriate part of his person to guide him
into good behavior, or when the paternal ba-
boon plants himself at the foot of the tree all
night, to keep leopards and tigers away from
the mother baboon sleeping with her infant
child in the branches up above, who shall say
that the hair on their bodies makes even a hair's
difference between the nature of their affec-
tions and that of the human beings who, for
their offspring, do the same things? I read,
awhile ago, of a gentleman whose land was over-

THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE 129

run with prairie-dogs, and who attempted to
drown them out. As he stood watching the
proceeding a little prairie-dog mother came
rushing back to a hole near him where her
young had been left, and diving into it all
flooded with water, brought up one of the
young ones and laid it at his feet. Returning
fearlessly she brought up another, and then a
third. A fourth time she went down, but this
was too much ; she never came up, sacrificing
her own life for that of her offspring. The
same day, or soon after, I read of a human
mother whose house caught on fire, and who
rushed in three times to save as many of her
little ones, and who going the fourth time per-
ished in the smoke and flame, sacrificing: her life
for those of her offspring. Did the fact that
one did it on four feet, and the other on two
make any difference in the love which moved
the feet to go? A little King Charles spaniel
carried into one of those hells of cruelty which
Christianity yet allows vivisection to make on
earth, — worse, I sometimes think, than devils
ever thought of down below, — gave birth, right
in the midst of her being cut up alive, to two
puppies; and, forgetful of self, with her
breasts severed, her hind legs and back para-
lyzed, and the unspeakable pain of peritonitis
racking every nerve, began at once her care of

130 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

them, her last act being to lick with her tongue
what with her mangled breasts she could not
feed. Which now, if love is indeed a specially
human attribute, must we call the real brute,
the dog which so died, or the eminent scientist
who so inflicted the death? And what are
these and the myriad other like stories that
the records of the world's lower life are full of,
some having their prototypes even in the vege-
table world, but proofs that the family tree
is all one and that what the human baby finds
in its home at the top was branched to, along
its growth by baby beast and baby bird !

Sexual and parental love are doubtless the
earliest and the deepest-rooted of all love's
forms, but they are necessarily limited and
narrow in their range, and are very far from
showing the whole of its capacities. There is
a form of it which goes out wider and farther
than any of these, and which takes in at last
the whole of the human race, nay, farther still,
and takes in all living things ; a form of it
which is to the love of sex and offspring what
gravity is to the attractions of chemistry and
cohesion. It is a love which is often thought
to be exclusively human, and the product, even
in man, of a supernatural religion. The
cruelty and antagonism of animals and na-
tions and races to each other, and their mutual

THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE 131

slaughter and struggle for existence as the
only way of their living at all, are pointed out
as evidence that this love could never have
originated out of life, and that hate is their
natural condition. And the immense gulf be-
tween egoism and altruism, care for self and
care for others, the one pulling in one direc-
tion and the other the opposite way, is empha-
sized as too wide for any natural evolution
ever to have leaped.

There is no denying these antagonisms as
they now are and for ages have been ; but go-
ing back to where life started, and is ever and
ever restarting, we find that the sides of the
gulf are so near that even a microscopic cell
spans their space. When that first cell di-
vided, it was not out of any hate or rivalry,
but because each division in doing so, could get
more food, and each was a part of one common
self. Later, when parenthood came in and the
first child was produced, what was it? An-
other self, and yet at the same time an exten-
sion of the parental self. What the parent
did for it, therefore, it did for its own larger
self. That is where altruism came into the
world. It was a part and parcel of egoism,
was a direct outcome of life. And then, when
other offspring were produced, what was their
relation to each other? Why, that of natural

132 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

brothers. With their multiplied descendants
came the swarm, the flock, the herd, the tribe,
their members all naturally related to each
other. Early association, common tastes, mu-
tual assistance in getting food, and, what is
not to be forgotten, even the assaults and an-
tagonisms of other tribes, as their separations
became wider and there was need among them-
selves of closer union; all helped to strengthen
in knots, here and there, the tie of a common
brotherhood. Among animals it was largely
a social instinct, not rising into what is prop-
erly love; but even in their ranks instances
are not wanting of those altruistic qualities in
it, which are foregleams of nature's coming
full humanitarian day. What farmer has not
seen instances, out in his barnyard, of a genuine
Damon and Pythias friendship, among animals,
sometimes those of different species, that was
simply an enjoyment of each other's company
untainted with one particle of self-interest?
A rat is not an animal that we very much re-
spect; but when two clear-sighted ones were
observed, as was the case awhile ago, leading
an old gray blind one carefully down to the
water for a drink, what is it but the seed
planted in our common life-soil far below hu-
manity, which blossoms at last up above in
our civilized blind asylums? There are many

THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE 133

Christian people who think the doctrine of
their relationship with monkeys and baboons
degrading; but when a mother monkey adopts
and cares for a whole group of little orphan
monkeys, and a troop of baboons is attacked
by dogs and all escape to the hills but a young
one which mounts a rock and cries for help,
and a stout old baboon heroically comes back,
facing the whole pack of hounds, and bears
him away in safety, where is there a true
mother's or hero's heart that does not in-
stinctively pay its tribute of honor to such
deeds as having in them the very accent of
altruistic affection? Sometimes the contrast
between a brute's conduct to others and that
of a human being is very much to the credit
of the brute ; as in that case out on a Kentucky
frontier where two babes, lost out in the woods
over night, were found by the searchers the
next morning, being nursed along with her own
cubs, by a she-bear, which foster-mother they
at once shot. Self-sacrifice for others, giving
up voluntarily one's own life to save theirs, is
justly regarded as the crowning evidence of
humanitarian love, but, as a little girl, in a
Michigan town, was passing on her way to
school through a stretch of forest, she was
met by a huge cougar, six or seven feet long,
which would undoubtedly have eaten her up,

134< THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

had not a small dog, hardly a foot in length,
flown to her rescue, being torn to pieces him-
self, but giving her a chance to escape ; an act
the more striking because he was not the
child's dog, but one which had followed her
from the post-office, and so must have done it
out of pure regard for her as a human being.
And what are all such things — mere specimens
of what animal history is full of — but proofs
that love in its essence is all one, and that one
the direct outcome of life ; that what the poet
sings in songs and the lover lisps in vows, and
the mother feels in babes, and the martyr
shows in racks and stakes, are but variations
of what the plant blooms with in flowers and
fruit, and the animal rises to in nests and
lairs ; proofs, too, that Jesus was scientifically
correct when he said: "Thou shalt love thy
neighbor as thyself," recognizing self as the
natural and normal starting point of love, or
as Pope puts it

"Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake,
As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake.
The center moved, a circle straight succeeds;
Another still and still another spreads.
Friend, parent, neighbor first it will embrace,
His country next, and next the human race,"

THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE 135

Love is the staple of all novels and is sup-
posed especially to have an affinity for fiction
as its garb, but was there a novel ever written
so romantic in its rise, so dramatic in its inci-
dents and so wonderful and unexpected in its
denouement, as this story of love itself set
forth in sober scientific fact? It is the very
child of life; and to get them both not super-
naturally from Deity and the spirit world, but
naturally from animal and earth, instead of
degrading them, as some have thought, —
what is it but adding to their might and mar-
vel? To drop them out of heaven were easy
and commonplace; — to raise them out of
earth, there is wonder, there an act which is
worthy of a God. It is an origin which does
not drag them down, but lifts their source up,
makes dust divine, matter mystery, nature
miracle; is a putting a power on this near earth
that we once thought was in far-off skies.
And with life and love thus bound together at
their very birth here in time, who shall say
there is any eternity in which they arc likely
ever to be parted; and with the wonderful prog-
ress they have made together in the past, what
Hebrew prophet ever uttered promise more in-
spiring as to the heights they may united rise
to, in the eons yet to come?

VIII
THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY

The subject of my last lecture was the evo-
lution of love in its various phases out of life,
— self-love, sex-love, family-love and race-love;
and now, as coming naturally next in order,
I take up the evolution of society, a manifes-
tation of life in which the connecting link be-
tween its parts, while akin to love, is more
directly self-interest, cooperation and compan-
ionship.

It is a subject whose importance can hardly
be stated in terms which are too strong.
Everybody, to be sure, has moods in which he
wants to be alone, — ought, now and then, to find
in his own thoughts good company, — reaches,
perhaps, the climax of his being when he can
stand up, and, in all the grand meaning of that
little word, can say 7. There is usually a time,
also, in his experience, when the presence of one
other person is enough for his happiness, a
time when he would very much rather have no
one but her around, not even her old father,
136

THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY 137

or dear mother, or mischievous young brother,
and when he thinks that with her a desert isle
would be a sevenfold heaven. And again, there
is the possibility of finding for awhile a de-
lightful companionship with nature and nat-
ural objects, —

"A pleasure in the pathless woods,

A rapture on the lonely shore,
Society where none intrudes,

By the deep sea and music in its roar."

But in his deepest nature and his most endur-
ing wants, man is preeminently a social being.

Other relations are to him the luxuries, the

moonshine, cake and poetry of life ; but society
he has to have as the necessities, — the sunlight,
the daily bread and the sober prose, of ex-
istence. It is only in connection with his fel-
low creatures that he can rise up into his
highest individuality, only by first dwelling in
society that he can really enjoy nature. A
babe growing to maturity in the woods, grows
only to be a mature brute, — never learns even
to speak; while a man left, like Enoch Arden,
wholly to himself, sinks, even amid the grandest

natural surroundings, into abject misery,

exclaims, as Cowper makes Alexander Selkirk,
"O Solitude, where are the charms
That sages have seen in thy face!

138 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

Better dwell in the midst of alarms
Than reign in this horrible place."

And in the world at large, it is society alone
which has made civilization and progress pos-
sible, its millions of common men doing with
their differentiation and cooperation what one
man, with all their brains and hands heaped to-
gether, never could; and its multiplied institu-
tions being the mighty bowl in which the
inventions and discoveries of one generation,
dipped up from the spring of thought, are
handed down, amid the continual deaths of their
original holders, in ever-increasing amounts to
the generations that are their followers.

It is a subject preeminently which every
young person coming now on the stage of ac-
tion ought to know something about. The
great saving hope of mankind hitherto has been
theology, the science of man's relations to God
and the spirit world. The great saving hope
of mankind in our day is sociology, the science
of man's relations to his brother-man and to
the social world. Nine-tenths of the problems
that we all have to meet as we go out into life
are social problems. The air is filled with won-
derful socialistic schemes for the improvement
of man's condition here on earth. All busi-
ness, all politics, all reform are social matters.

THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY 139

And to act intelligently with reference to any
of these interests, everybody needs to know
something of the origin, nature and history of
the great institution out of which they grow.

What is society? It is made up of indi-
viduals, and in the confusion with reference to
the subject which once prevailed, it was
thought these were all. But a collection of
individuals merely, as in a railroad car, around
a street fight, or at a ballroom, even though
the individuals be those of a university fra-
ternity or a New York's Four Hundred, do not
of themselves constitute society any more than
a thousand bricks constitute a house. They
must have some permanent relations to each
other, must be organized, and each contribute
something to the common good, in order to have
anything of the real distinctive social quality.

Then, secondly, it is not an artificial but a
natural organism, is not something which men
have intentionally put together as they do a
factory or a watch, but is something which has
grown up of itself by the action of man's own
interior unconscious life force, as the solar
system, the earth and the whole animal and
vegetable kingdoms have. It is a distinction of
the most vital importance, and it is one that
Mr. Spencer and the evolution philosophy are
to have the credit, if not of first teaching, yet

140 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

at any rate of calling attention to, and making
one of the most precious parts of their great
system. It was the old idea that society was
intentionally and artificially put together, an
idea which lies at the basis of Plato's "Repub-
lic," and Hobbe's "Leviathan" and Rousseau's
famous "Social Contract." It supposes that men
were originally only individuals, most of them
barbarian individuals, and that once on a time
they came together and said, "Go to now, let
us unite and be a society," and that from that
time henceforth a society there was. A great
deal of the same nonsense prevails now. Men
confound states with society; think that be-
cause they can change politics, they can change
principles ; because they make the laws of na-
tions they can make those of nature, forget-
ting how small a part of society the state is.
And nearly all the socialistic schemes the world
is so full of to-day, Mr. Bellamy's, for in-
stance, are based on the idea that society is
like an old house needing only its worn-out
structure torn down, and plenty of lumber and
carpenter's tools and a modern architect carted
to its site, to have a new one in a year or two
rise up in its place.

There is no denying that man has the power
to cooperate with nature in promoting social
growth, but it is only to modify, not remake,

THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY 141

only as he has power to cultivate and improve
the apple-trees and pear-trees of his garden,
not cut them down and build new ones with
other wood and flowers and fruit; only as he
has power to dress and feed and develop his
own body obeying its laws, not to take it apart
and make it over again, conforming it to a
pattern he himself has devised. What we need
to recognize is that the social tree is a living
organism, that it did not have to wait for
philosophers and politicians and legislative
halls and dress coats and Easter bonnets to
come along before it could appear on earth,
but that it began with life itself, and is what
can no more be cut down and made over afresh
than could the solar system, or the human
body, or the whole animal and vegetable king-
doms.

Going back to its origin, when nature's first
protoplasmic cells in growing, divided and be-
came two cells, — as we found to be the process in
all growth, — while some of them wholly divided
and became separate creatures, others clung to-
gether as parts of one creature, and gradually
differentiated themselves into its various organs
and performed its various kinds of work. All
organic bodies are really societies of cells, co-
operating with each other for the common good.
Their food is simply great companies of other

142 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

cells going along in the blood to take the place
of the older ones which have been used up.
They are free at first, but as soon as they have
joined their different organizations, bones,
brain, muscles, heart and so on, have as little
will of their own as the members have of a labor
organization. The social system of the in-
dividual physical body is that of an absolute
monarchy in which the individual cell life is
wholly dominated by the larger common life,
each cell going to brain or foot, heart or en-
trails exactly as it is sent. Ordinarily it is a
contented kingdom, each subject by his obedi-
ence and cooperation getting more comfort
than he could alone, and the whole having the
same efficiency, as compared with what its cells
acting separately would have, that a disciplined
army has in comparison with a mob. But now
and then difficulty occurs. Too much work or
too little pay or the wrong food is given some
of the cells. The dominating life gets idiotic
or overbearing, and perhaps a lot of outside
bacteria come in as walking delegates and stir
up trouble ; and then sickness follows. That is
what sickness is, the cells of the individual social
body getting up a rebellion, going off on a
strike. Setting up for themselves an inde-
pendent life. Usually it is an entirely justi-
fiable proceeding ; and the true remedy is not to

THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY 143

introduce scab labor in the shape of medicines,
or call out the military in the shape of the
surgeon's knife, but simply to do the cells
justice by giving them better food, shorter
hours of labor and an improved boss-life, a
wisdom that might well be imitated in dealing
with the workmen of the world's larger social
body.

But nature's aim was to make these little
condensed monarchial societies only as a pre-
liminary to something else. As they became
more developed and began to produce their off-
spring by the union of sexes, another and
higher set of social relations was evolved. The
offspring, instead of being joined with each
other physically, as the cells are, remained
separate individuals, and were joined together
by an invisible social tie, first as families, and
then as they multiplied and spread out, into
swarms, herds, flocks, tribes, nations and races.

The family was thus the beginning of what
is properly society, growing, as you see,
naturally and inevitably out of increasing life ;
and the social body differed from the physical
body at the start, only in the fact that while the
one in growing kept its growing parts phys-
ically united, the other in growing kept them
physically separate and united only with a
spiritual tie. It is a parellelism, as Mr. Spencer

144 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

says, which is not to be pressed too far, but
one that in some respects is wonderfully exact.
Individuals are simply the cells of the great
social body. What are differentiated in the one
as bones, brain, muscles, arteries, nerves, viscera
and senses, are differentiated in the other as
chiefs, classes, occupations, workshops, roads,
telegraphs, post-offices, sewers, schoolrooms and
churches. As physical growth is accomplished
by the division of its cells and clusters of cells,
so social growth is accomplished by the enlarge-
ment and then division of its individuals and
clusters of individuals. Even the physical
methods of reproduction by budding, germ-
budding and mating, have their social analogues
in the planting of colonies, the addition to the
state of outlying territories, and the inter-
mingling of different tribes by emigration and
conquest. Social life itself is, like physical life,
the continual readjustment by its own forces of
internal to external relations ; is kept up in the
social body by the constant using up and dying
off of its individual members, as it is in the
physical body by the constant using up and
dying off of its cell-members. And as regards
rebellions and strikes and mobs and anarchies
and crimes, what are they but the fevers and
sores and consumptions and inflammations and
diarrhoeas of society, caused by the oppres-

THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY 145

sions, bad foods, poor wages, injustices and ig-
norances of the social body as a whole, needing
therefore, like a sick man, not so much
violent medicines and sharp bayonet thrusts,
as a more thorough social pathology and a
better application of social sanitary laws.
But, while recognizing the parallelism in these
respects, there is this very important difference
between the two, that while the dominating life
of the animal body is in it as a whole, the dom-
inating life of the social body is in its parts.
Society has no one brain, or stomach or heart,
but does its work by the consensus of its many
brains, stomachs and hearts. Most important
of all, while it is the tendency of the animal
organism to lessen the individuality and free-
dom of the cells and make the perfection of the
body its supreme aim, the tendency of the social
organism is to increase the individuality and
freedom of its members and to make the per-
fection of its distinct personal parts the su-
preme thing, yet with man as their center both
uniting most wonderfully, even along these con-
tradictory ways, in promoting his individuality.
Viewing society as thus a natural organism
differentiated from the physical body and
starting as a family, its first function in evolv-
ing must evidently have been to provide itself
with food, clothing and shelter, articles which

146 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

in its primitive state, both among animals and
man, it doubtless gathered direct from nature,
and, except with its young, each one wholly for
himself alone. But with the increase of itself
and other families, there necessarily arose after
awhile a competition between them as to which
should have the most of what was too little for
all, a competition which, sooner or later, led to
fights, which fights in their turn, while sepa-
rating species from species and tribe from tribe,
tended to unite more closely, as their only means
of success, those that were of the same species
and the same tribe. At first all members of the
species and tribe would take part in the fight;
but among human beings this could not last.
The fighters had to have food and weapons to
carry on a long war; those which had them
most abundantly, as in our Civil War, being
most likely to triumph ; so a differentiation took
place, some remaining at home to gather food
and shape weapons, while others went forth to
use them in the field. Thus we have the origin
of those two great systems, the military and the
industrial, which ever since have been such
prominent features in all human society, and
out of which, as with the exoderm and endoderm
of the animal body, all its other organs are
found to grow.

At first the tribe was nomadic, exhausting the

THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY 147

food in one locality, and then moving to an-
other, but as industries, wealth and strength
increased, it found it desirable and possible to
settle down in the better places as permanent
abodes where larger houses could be built and
stronger defenses put up, so towns and villages
arose.

For a long period all property, consisting as
it did of weapons and utensils, flocks and herds,
which all in common had helped in producing,
was by all in common owned and used. But
with a fixed abode and more numbers, more in-
dustries sprang up, and more property was ac-
quired ; one man got a facility for doing one
thing and another another ; one was industrious
and another lazy ; and in the end each naturally
wanted what was best fitted to his person and
his family and into which he had put the most
work ; so private ownership came in, and with it
that difference between the rich and the poor
which has become such a conspicuous and, to
many, such a terrible feature in society as it is
to-day.

With the facility that the skilful and in-
dustrious acquired for doing some things better
than others, they inevitably accumulated more
of some than they needed, and less of others, so
they exchanged products and trade was started.
At first the trade was only among neighbors,

148 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

but towns, countries, nations were so situated
as to produce some things the others lacked ; so
commerce followed, involving ships, wagons,
roads, canals, post-offices, telegraphs, — all that
vast network of intercommunication that is the
veins, arteries and nerves of the social body in
our time; involving, also, on the one side
cheating, lying, taxes, tariffs, money, gold-
bugs, silverites, and cut-throat competition,
and on the other side, still more largely, honesty,
acquaintance with other countries, human-
itarianism, toleration, free trade, the desire for
peace, and leisure for the culture of letters,
art and science. At the beginning of society
the father as the strongest and wisest, was
naturally its leader both in peace and war ; but,
when he died, his ablest and bravest son
would become its chief in war, and when the war
was over and he returned a conqueror, its chief
also in peace, bringing with him a warrior's
method of personal command ; thus government
arose, and a government which at the start was
inevitably despotic. That is what war always
means, despotism. You cannot fight battles
with town-meetings, or capture forts with
ballots ; and whenever a nation has an army,
down must go the people and up again the
potentate. But in the course of time many
strong men arose, some in other arts than those

THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY 149

of war, who as counsellors and administrators
shared in the government. The people, also, of
the little towns and villages got together in
town meetings, and the tradesmen of cities in
guilds and clubs, and talked over their local
interests and made rules for their own especial
assemblies. This was a most important step,
for town meetings and voluntary unions, so
powerless on battlefields, are the very seeds of
power in times of peace. So little by little,
amid awful scenes of revolution and confusion,
monarchies were undermined, and in place of one
man's will, government was carried on by the
many's law.

While a part of the people increased in
virtue, peacefulness and civilization, others
lagged behind, kept something of their old
vices, violence and savagery. That is what
makes evil, the rise, not the fall of humanity ;
and as a result laws had to be made to punish
wrong-doing ; and to enforce the laws, society
had to inaugurate its police, constables, courts,
juries, jails and hangmen.

There are a myriad little matters of social
intercourse, however, that law cannot attend to,
and these from the very start were regulated
by custom, fashion, convenience, good sense
and public opinion, and they gave rise even-
tually to courtesy, manners, politeness, eti-

150 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

quette, all those graces which lubricate life and
constitute what is called good society.

Women at first were the mates of the whole
tribe alike, and marriage probably came in
through capture and purchase, each man feel-
ing he had an exclusive right to what he had
dragged at the risk of his life from another
tribe, or paid her parents for in pelt and prov-
ender. The marriage ring that ladies wear so
proudly now, is a remnant of the marriage
shackles they wore ages ago, and what to-day
are figuratively called marriage bonds were
once very literal bindings. Women with their
children to bear and bring up, naturally made
home their sphere, developing in its quiet those
gentler graces and attractions which have been
such a power in softening and elevating society ;
chose their husbands when choice came, because
of their strength in giving them protection,
while the husbands chose their wives as they
could, because of their beauty, which explains
why men are so strong and ugly, and women so
weak and lovely. But with the da}s of danger
passing away, and women able to go freely out
into the world and share in its work, their nat-
ural equality will come back, and with their
fewer vices than men, the pendulum may swing
the other way, and they for awhile be the
superior sex in giving society its coming shape.

THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY 151

The evolutions of mind, morals and religion
are so unique and important as to deserve
special lectures; but let me say briefly that
they are very largely social growths. Man's
great struggle for existence was the nurse not
only of bodily strength, but still more of intel-
lectual keenness and power. So with morals.
Men, in order to live together, must have fore-
bearance, fair dealing, self-restraint, and some
degree of veracity, self-sacrifice and regard for
each other's rights. Morality is simply the
law of social health, as hygiene is of bodily
health, ever enlarging as society grows more
complex, and in the one as in the other, killing
off those who disobey its laws, and preserving,
as the fittest to survive, those by whom they are
kept. And as regards religion, while it began
in the individual soul, it has been in its develop-
ment preeminently a social quality, instituted
at a very early date ; its special rites and cere-
monies dominated the world for ages through
fear, blossomed with the brightening centuries
here and there into love, and while doing some-
thing to shape society, has been in its doctrines,
its liberties, its organizations, and its rituals,
an outcome how largely of society's own ever-
increasing growth.

That the hasty survey thus given of the
world's social evolution is not a mere fancy, we

152 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

have many of the same proofs that we do with
regard to the evolution of its other parts.
Take, for instance, the passage from the society
of united cells in the animal body to the society
of disunited animals in a flock or herd. There
are creatures which ordinarily swim with their
parts distinct, like a shoal of minnows, but
which, when alarmed and needing to defend
themselves, instantly put their parts together
and become one large animal, and others which
begin their existence as a single organism, and
then pass gradually into a full community.
What are swarms of bees but little buzzing
groups of cells, that without ever being joined
together are really, in their motions and con-
trolling spirit, only a single composite animal?
What are ant hills and flocks of birds and
shoals of fishes but cruder manifestations of the
social tie which higher up draws human beings
into cities and tribes, a unity of life that Words-
worth alludes to in his words:

"The cattle are grazing, their heads never raising,
There are forty feeding as one."

And even among plants how inevitably do those
which are of the same kind group themselves,
pines with pines, oaks with oaks ; with what
soldierly comradeship the serried ranks of the
forest lock arms and breast the winter storm;

THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY 153

how socially the groves, those first temples of
God, arch their limbs into roofs, and lift their
tops into pinnacles, and with their leaves as
hymn-books and the breezes as breaths, join in
their choral song; how loving the violets and
innocents, unable alone to attract their insect
fertilizers unite their forces in great patches
of color which can not fail of being seen. And
even the wicked weeds when they go forth to do
their mischief, how well does every farmer know,
it is not as single robbers but as great maraud-
ing bands that they make their assaults, — all
evidences of how thoroughly the socialistic idea
is rooted in nature and with what easy steps it
rises from cell to soul.

Coming to man, however, it has long been the
teaching of theology that his movement has
been the other way, that he was placed on earth
at first as a civilized being, and that falling
first out of Eden into sin, he kept on falling till
he landed in utter barbarism and savagery ; and
indeed apart from theology there is no denying
that he has had great and terrible lapses, — not
only individuals, but cities, tribes, nations,
whole civilizations, Assyria, Egypt, Persia,
Greece, Spain. But regarded scientifically,
these have been only the rhythmic movements
that we find in all progress ; are like the aging
and death of generations and species ; no more

154 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

an indication of what is taking place with the
growing part of humanity than the swash of
the waves is of how the tide is setting along the
ocean's shore. The different grades of society
are spread over the earth now, rising regularly
from the lowest to the highest, just as the dif-
ferent species of animals and plants are, so that
to-day you can see the stone age in Africa and
our savage sires socially in the living men of the
southern seas. All history sets its shoulders
square against the idea that man began as a
civilized being and sank through sin into sav-
agery, and plants itself on the side of his
gradual rise, every existing civilization, as you
trace it back, growing cruder and cruder till it
is lost, not in the sunlight of Eden, but in the
night of barbarism and superstition. Beyond
the age of iron, where written history finds man
and begins his record, the implements that are
found in caves and gravels and mounds and
shell heaps and at the bottom of Swiss lakes
tell in their written words of a bronze age, and
back of that of a smooth-stone age, and back
of that of a rough-stone age, where his only
tools are such as an intelligent baboon is found
now to use. Nor is it in the earth or in old
records alone that we find the evidence of his
rude primitive state. Just as man's living body
has all through it the rudimental and atavistic

THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY 155

organs of the animal bodies from which he
came, so our living society has all through it
the rudimental and atavistic forms, qualities
and actions, that prove equally the savage and
even the animal society out of which it has been
evolved. When an Ashantee woman wants to be
very dressy, she breaks off the twig from a tree
and ties it to her back hair, — this and nothing
more, — and who shall say that so far as the up-
per part of her person goes, the fashionably-
dressed ballroom belle of civilized America does

not touch shoulders with her very closely as if

I may be allowed the word without seeming to
make a pun— a missing link. Start a panic
m an army, or in a crowded assembly or any-
where that a large company of people are
gathered, and see how quickly they will lose
their separate individuality of will, thought,
and action, and become as much one animal
moved by one impulse as ever a swarm of bees
or shoal of fishes was. The story is told of a
cat who was magically transformed into a
fine lady and acted her part so successfully in
the most fashionable social circles as to resist
all efforts to make her betray her origin, till one
day her artful rival dropped a rat on the parlor
floor when, instantly springing to the carpet
on all fours, she went for it mouth and claw.
Who has not seen whole churches apparently

156 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

transformed into angels, and resisting all other
allurements into lower traits who have done
precisely the same thing when an heretical rat
has been let loose in their presence? Every-
body who is familiar with a farmyard has
noticed how inevitably a brood of chickens,
when a strange one has strayed among them,
will turn on it and peck it to death or drive it
off ; and what is it but the very thing that all
fashionable circles do when a woman with a
strange bonnet comes into their brood; and all
conservative men-circles when a crank with a
new idea comes into their coop? Put a parcel
of boys together free of restraint, even college
boys, and see how soon they will be up, or,
rather, down, to the embryonic monkey tricks
of the social stage through which their ancestry
came. Dig down under the present crust of
society anywhere, and you will find specimens
of its primitive state just as surely as you will
in the rocks of its primitive animals, — tigers in
Tammany Hall, bulls and bears in Wall Street,
the lion's tail in English statesmanship, and the
eagle's talons in American oratory. City
streets which have at one end churches and
schools and homes and the nineteenth century,
have at the other superstitions and ignorances
and hovels and the dark ages. And indeed what
is the church itself but a vast system of social

THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY 157

paleontology, the fossil remains of the world's
past beliefs, rites and ceremonies tufted at the
top with a thin growth of fresh and living
social activities.

Such has been the evolution of society, such
the earmarks it yet carries of the animal and
the savage herds from which it has come. You
see the new meaning it gives to history, to an-
tiquities and to all existing habits and customs,
makes them no longer columns of beads on a
string, but rows of letters setting forth wonder-
ful truths. It is a process which is still going on,
and going on more rapidly now than ever before.
What changes have we seen in it during our
own time, slavery wiped out, liberty enlarged,
and inventions made and truths discovered that
under our very eyes are giving it a new shape.
It is something of which we too, individually,
are a part, living cells in its mighty body, help-
ing to make it not only what it is, but what it
is to be. And seeing how it has been evolved in
the past, are we not the better prepared to do
our part in helping it on to that day when what
is rooted so deep in time and been nourished with
such myriad lives, shall bear on its branches
what vastly beyond its own perfection is to be
its final outcome, the blossoms and fruit of even
finer and distinctive individual men and women?

IX

THE WORLD'S COMING BETTER SOCIAL
STATE

AS INDICATED BY EVOLUTION

When the schemes and all the systems, kingdoms

and republics fall,
Something kindlier, higher, holier, all for each and

each for all.

Men in all ages have been discontented with
their own times and have delighted in picturing
to themselves a better social state. With some,
its location has been in the far-off past, a Gar-
den of Eden, and a golden age ; with others^ in
the far-off future, a heavenly home and an im-
mortal existence; with yet others in an ideal
world independent of any special time or place,
a Plato's Republic and a More's Utopia, and
with not a few right here on earth in a day soon
to dawn, a Christian millennium and a cooper-
ative commonwealth. And while now and then
it has been only an object of pleasant thought,
no more to be sought for practically than
158

BETTER SOCIAL STATE 159

Spencer's Faerie Land or the gorgeous realms
of a sunset sky, it has with multitudes of our
race, indeed with all reformers, been their
dearest hope, struggled for amid all the agonies
of battlefield and martyr fire.

Preeminently is our own age characterized
by such dreams and discontent. The splendor
of its attainments in wealth, art, science, letters,
liberty, rights, almost everything which relates
to human welfare, is almost lost sight of in
the multitude yet remaining of its poverties,
miseries and wrongs. Literally is it having the
old Scripture fulfilled that your sons and daugh-
ters shall prophecy, your young men see visions
and your old men dream dreams ; and alive with
its spirit there is hardly a newspaper falling
short in its morning supply of scandal and
crime, which does not eke out its vacant space
with an improved social system, hardly a crank
failing to earn a living for himself with the
hammer and hoe, who does not work out for the
world with his fancy a new scheme of universal
financial prosperity.

Nor is it a tendency which even in its wildest
manifestations is to be wholly despised. The
age which never dreams will never do. All the
world's great days of sober fact have had
their morning sunrise in some splendid
fancy.

160 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

"Dreams in their development have breath,
Are rudiments of the great state to be."

The very word Christian, now so fondly clung
to by those who would maintain the existing
social order, meant originally the adherent of
a person regarded as especially anointed of
God to lead men to a better state of things
right here on earth, — is now, in the occasional
lapses of its ministers into sympathy with new
social movements, only being true to the dreams
of its own divinest youth. And the socialistic
hope, condemned often as outside of all religion,
is really only a fresh outbreak in our day of the
world's old Messianic hope, its visions but
new chapters in humanity's larger, unclosed
Apocalypse, and its demands but the modern
wording of our old endeared Lord's Prayer,
"Thy kingdom come."

But while such dreamings all have their use,
all help to keep men from settling down into the
despairing belief that society as it now is, with
its myriad evils, is necessarily a fixture. The
great drawback to most of them as social states
actually to be worked for, is that they are only
dreams, only pictures drawn by the unguided
fancy of what for the moment seems desirable,
and not forecasts based on a study of society's
own inherent laws and whose realization we can

BETTER SOCIAL STATE 161

help nature practically to bring about. There
is one truth in the matter which our modern
acquaintance with the principles of evolution
ought to make us absolutely sure of: it is that
there will be and can be no coming better social
state which is not the direct outgrowth of the
one which is now and here, preeminently no
better one which can arise from the present
one's mere destruction. The present one is the
survival of the fittest from among all the myriad
experiments which up to date it has been
possible for nature to try, — would result if
wiped out and tried again, only in its mere
repetition, — has within it as the costly product
of all the ages of its growth the germs of the
best that man can ever have. And to know
what the world's coming one is to be, it is evi-
dently to this present one, to the forces and
laws already within it out of which the coming
one is to be evolved, that the student must go.
Evolution, to be sure, even with such a basis to
work from, cannot give us all the details of its
coming state, the exact size to which its sleeves
will swell and hats arise, — cannot do with the
star of empire what the astronomer can with a
star of the skies, predict from a part of its orbit
the whole of its course, for, aside from the
mighty factor of man's free will acting on
society as it never does on star, nature itself

162 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

breaks forth ever and anon into great flying
leaps of action which are liable, as Tennyson
says, to make the future, —

"Something other than the wildest modern guess of
you or me."

But it can give us, if not astronomical pre-
dictions, yet weather bureau indications of what
in the world's great to-morrow its social state
is likely to be, and it is some of its larger
features thus pointed out that I shall try to
set forth.

It indicates first that it will be a better state
than it is now. Evolution does indeed have its
degeneracies and dyings out, its "scarped cliff
and quarried stone, from which a thousand
types are gone," and the time will surely come
when in this world, at least, it will have reached
its climax and begin to descend ; the time when,
as Huxley says, "its fittest forms to survive
will be again the mollusc and the moss." But
that climax is yet a long, long ways off. Of
the eight great periods which a planet's life
normally passes through, mist, liquid, rock,
lower life, human life, dying, being dead and
dissolution, each of them lasting millions of
years, the earth as yet is only in the early
part of the fifth, only when man is at the very
beginning of his maturity, — has, therefore,

BETTER SOCIAL STATE 163

barring the accident of a comet across its path
or the assaults of some unusually harmful
meteoric bacteria, at least five millions of years
before reaching its turning point of old age, —
is what, if there were insurance companies which
issued policies on stars, as sometime, judging
by the way they are now extending their bus-
iness there may be, would be considered a very
good risk. And all this time evolution will
mean as a whole the world's growing better,
mean even with its degenerations a degenerating
forward, and with its dyings out a dying into
higher forms of life.

Moreover, it is to be noticed that the special
part of the world which is now evolving is its
social part. Nature is not doing much in our
day at making mountains or continents or seas,
or new species of animals or plants or men, —
not doing much directly at improving the in-
dividual body or bones or even brain. But she
is at work now as never before, on the world's
social structure, is building up the individual
human brick, molded for so many ages out of
her original protoplasmic clay into an edifice
which does indeed promise to be sky-high, —
this fact that Mr. Kidd, among all the thousand
and one fallacies of his wonderful book, has
strikingly made plain. It is what renders
sociology such a fascinating study ; social re-

164 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

form such fascinating work. We think some-
times we would like to look back into the eons
of the past and see our material earth, its seas
and shores and living things actually evolving
under nature's plastic touch; but we can, if
we will, do better than that, — see our social
earth, its grander shores and finer life, visibly
taking shape before our eyes ; be, if we will,
partners with nature in the work. And with
this certainty of its ultimate betterness to
fall back upon, what though we also see races,
nations, institutions, religions, some of them of
immeasurable cost and worth, perishing all
around us, we need not fear, as some do, that
society itself is going to perish, need not fear
but that from every fall, the same as with
physical nature, it will rise up a fairer spring.

"Grown wiser by the lesson given,
I fear no longer, for I know
That where the share is deepest driven
The best fruits grow."

What will be the nature of society's better
coming state? Nearly all dreamers have an-
swered, material, moral, civil perfection, a
state in which all the forces of nature will be
in harmonious action, all the problems of society
satisfactorily solved, all the ten thousand forms
of the world's evil utterly eliminated, and all

BETTER SOCIAL STATE 165

the races of men freed from anxiety and care,
working only as they wish, and healthy, happy
and good, or, as Tennyson says,

''All diseases quenched by science, no man halt or
deaf or blind,

Stronger ever born of weaker, lustier body, larger
mind, —

Every tiger madness muzzled, every serpent pas-
sion killed,

Every grim ravine a garden, every blazing desert
tilled."

But fascinating as in some respects such a
vision is, evolution is very far from pointing
to it as one ever likely to be realized. Man's
present use of the earth, instead of tending to
make it a natural garden, is tending more and
more to make it a natural waste, — slashing
down its forests, burning up its coal, exhausting
its soil, poisoning its airs and letting loose its
cyclones and floods. Its big wild beasts may
be becoming fewer, but how about its little
bacteria? Its new West producing larger
crops, but what of its old East? Its machinery
doing more and more work, but where is its
lessening of our human anxieties and cares?
Each new discovery brings with it a new
danger, — railroad speed, railroad smash-ups,
electric dynamos, electric deaths. Each settle-

166 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

merit of an old problem reveals a dozen bigger
ones to take its place, shows ahead of us from
each mountain climbed.

"Hills peep o'er hills and alps on alps arise."

While the average length of human life is in-
creasing by preservation of the young, who
shall say that Lombroso is mistaken in thinking
that its real stock vigor, as shown by its fewer
old people, is going the other way? And as
regards its moral health, though its temptations
and tempters in our modern life may be less
outward and crude than of old, what evidence
is there that their assaults on it inwardly are
any less terrible, or the struggles needed for
their resistance an}^ less fierce than when, at the
start, its primal Adam and Eve yielded to those
of an apple and a snake? No: evolution does
not promise to take us forward to an Eden in
the future any more than backward to one in
the past, — does not promise even to give us a
sunshine without a shadow or a crown without
a cross.

But it does promise with its unfolding around
us of more difficulties, more evils, more prob-
lems to be met, to unfold within us more
strength and skill for their meeting and more
success in winning out of them food, health,
happiness, manhood. It is this which has been

BETTER SOCIAL STATE 167

its trend all through the past, — not fewer foes
and battles, but more victories and spoils; not
smaller apples and snakes as the tempters, but
stronger Adams and Eves as the resisters ; not
the earth unmade a wilderness, but the earth
out of its very wildernesses made to bloom as
Eden never did; not its strata of coal undi-
minished down below, but its layers of the
lightning tapped and mined up above ; not man
less liable to disease, but man endowed by his
very wrestlings against disease with a health
such as nature never gave; not society without
a hell, but society using its hells to make out of
them and make for itself, an ever finer heaven.
And everything points to this as its direction
still more grandly in the future. Just as a
French gardener can already take a bit of pave-
ment, and by the use of his chemical fertilizers
make out of it in three years a bit of Paradise,
so when this old earth of ours shall have become
so dry and desert-like that, left to itself, it
would not feed a mouse, science and art are to
clasp it as a woman does a sponge, and squeeze
out of it harvests such as watered Egypt never
waved with ; compel Sahara with its own heat to
make ice and snow; have around either pole,
by reason of its delicious mingling of frigid
cold and torrid warmth, hotels and picnics and
the summer girl; shut the western cyclone, in-

168 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

stead of the western farmer, down in a "dug-
out" as a source of electric energy for driving
his plow and reaping his wheat ; and make man
as little afraid of bacteria as he now is of bears,
tame them, perhaps as he has the dog and the
cow to be his guardians and help his health. And
while vaster and vaster problems will con-
tinually follow his solution of the old ones, the
vaster and vaster strength that he will get from
their solving, will make him look back on those
which to-day are so puzzling, — the silver ques-
tion, the tariff question, the adjustment of
labor and capital, the management of big cities
and big hats, and the like, — very much as the
man of sixty now does on his childish wrestlings
with a, b, ab, and two and two make four.
Meliorism, not optimism, an ever bettering, not
an ever best, that is the principle, that the
promise of evolution, as regards the world's
coming social state.

And after all, is not that what we really
want, that the thing which really is best ? Who
dreads difficulty, toil, sacrifice, agony, when to
meet them he has health, muscle, courage, brain,
■ — who, rather, does not welcome them as man-
hood's truest joy? A perfect world to dwell in
would mean to its dwellers inevitably the
wasting away through ease, of their long, toil-
won powers. It is only imperfection which can

BETTER SOCIAL STATE 169

keep alive perfection ; only a heaven before us
forever unreached, the struggle for which can
make a heaven within forever reached ; and
amid all the frightful pictures theology has
painted of a realm where

"Infinite day excludes the night,
And pleasures banish pain."

"And everlasting spring abides
And never withering flowers/'

it is an immense satisfaction to feel that evolu-
tion will never cease, at least in this world, to
provide us amply with manhood's meat of
sorrow, hardship and care, — great problems to
be solved for humanity, and great sacrifices to
be made for those we love, — never cease, there-
fore, to give us a betterness in which souls can
grow.

How far will society's coming betterness be
a realization of what socialism has in view, a
betterness in which all its property will be owned
by the state and all its industries, — farms,
factories, trade, travel and the like, admin-
istered by the state's officials? We all know
how largely such a consummation is the ideal of
our time, and what thousands not of cranks
merely, but of society's best men and women
are working for it as the one remedy including
all others, for the waste, inequality, rivalry and

170 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

wrong with which the world now is so fearfully
cursed. Far be it from me to utter one word
of disrespect for their zeal, or of denial as to
the really strong arguments urged for their
plan. But whatever else may be said in its
favor, looked at in the light of evolution and
through the long vista of history, it is an ideal
whose realization for the future is utterly hope-
less, one as regards which the movement is all
the other way. There are three great stages
in all evolution, whether it be of worlds, plants,
animals, or society, homogeneity, or sameness ;
that in which everything is in common, as a
nebula, a seed, an animalcule ; then differentia-
tion or diversifying, that in which the common
mass is divided, subdivided and divided again
into a multitude of distinct parts, as with
planets, the limbs of a tree and the organs of
the human body ; and finally integration or or-
ganization, that in which the parts while still
remaining" as distinct as ever in their own forms
and functions, are joined by their common life
principle in a large and complex whole which
is capable of functions infinitely beyond what
either the original mass or the divided parts
could accomplish, as the solar system, the fruit-
growing tree and the marvelous human body.
Now society, like everything else, began in
homogeneity, or sameness, began with having

BETTER SOCIAL STATE 171

lan'ds, dwellings, wives, children, rights, reli-
gion, everything, owned and held in common
by the family and the tribe, and administered
for it by the father and the chief. And it was
then, beyond question, its most desirable state,
survived for ages variously modified as the
fittest in which to withstand foes and secure
food, lifted man from savagery to Greek
and Roman civilization, — is what Puritanism
sought to reestablish here in America, and has
its illustrations to-day religiously, alike its ex-
cellencies and its defects, in the great Roman
Catholic Church.

But it is now most emphatically a back num-
ber in the issues of time, has left far behind it
the environment which of old made it a success ;
and to go back to it would be like the limbed
tree's going back to its common trunk, or the
starred universe to its undivided fire-mist.
Evolution is not traveling at all that way.
The rise of humanity has been the rise of the
individual; freedom, that ideal for which such
battles have been fought, such rivers of blood
poured out, such heroisms of earth's noblest
and best displayed, has been freedom first of
the state, and then freedom just as certainly
from the state; commercial progress, the
growth of property into private hands away
more and more from legislative interference,

172 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

and Mosaism, Christianity, Protestantism,
Liberalism, religion's great steps, each a step
forward in the soul's throwing off some com-
munity's shackles to stand forth and give an
account of itself before God. And with this
mighty law of evolution within it, where now is
the probability that society's movement is to
be reversed, and its differentiations rolled back,
even partially, into the homogeneity out of
which they have been so long and so painfully
evolved? Where the likelihood that humanity
after struggling five thousand years to get its
neck out of the yoke of a sovereign person, is
going to put it right away into the yoke of a
sovereign state?

What though the property thus massed
away from the individual is still to be owned
by the community of which the individual is a
part? That will not make his real control of
it any more than when formerly it was owned
by a chief or a king. An old New Hampshire
farmer tried to celebrate his Fourth of July
one year by going on board a magnificent war-
ship at anchor off of Charlestown Navy Yard,
and making himself very much at home, in-
specting its guns, engines, cabins, compasses
and the like. An officer, on beholding the in-
truder, peremptorily ordered him ashore. "I
won't go," said the old man, "I am an American

BETTER SOCIAL STATE 173

citizen, I'd have you know ; and helped pay for
this 'ere boat, and it is as much mine as it is
yourn." "All right," answered the officer,
picking up a sliver from the deck and handing
it to him, "here is your part of it ; take it and
begone." Well, that sliver represents just
about the control the American citizen would
have of his property after he had lumped it
all into a great ship of state.

What though the officers who control its
affairs are to be chosen by the officers them-
selves? That is not going to make their indi-
vidual liberty under them any greater than it
was when their rulers were imposed upon them
by blood and birth. Jam, the New York
soldier, who was so outrageously strung up by
the thumbs a few years ago, helped to choose
his officers, yet when he attempted to express
his opinion as a freeman, wherein was he better
off than the subject of a czar? The people
of the United States choose their lawmakers as
things are now; yet who, looking at the kind
of wisdom they display at Washington from
winter to winter, can wish to put any more of
his interests into such hands? Changing the
name of a government, calling it a fraternity
instead of paternalism, is not going to change
its nature. Wherever the political carcass is,
there will the political eagles be gathered to-

174 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

gether; and a family in which an elder brother
is given the rule is not likely to be any more
acceptably abused than one in which the ac-
customed father holds the rod.

No, while the parts of the people who have
special axes to grind, may be as ready as ever
to bring them to the public grindstone, it can
hardly be said that those who have to do its
turning, — and some of us farmers' boys, who
used to have to turn the stone about mowing
time know what that is, — are likely to be very
much pleased with such an enormous addition
to their work. It is honest men, not rascals,
who to-day are getting a distrust of politician-
made justice, — honest men who, seeing how law
has left its seat in the bosom of God, where
old Hooker beheld it, to take one on the bench
of a lobby, is woven by a congress only to be
riven by a court, has narrow meshes for the
poor workman's cart and obsequious gates for
the big corporation's coach, — they who are rely-
ing more and more on themselves, independent
of law, for conducting their business. And
anarchism, — not the anarchism of dynamite and
disorder, but the anarchism of Jesus and Paul,
each man's doing right without rulers from a
principle within because it is right, — though
such a terrible word now, as libertv was once,

BETTER SOCIAL STATE 175

is destined, like liberty, to be a mighty word and
an honored one in the years to come.

But, while State socialism, that is, the own-
ing and managing of things by the State and
its officers, is thus hopeless under evolution,
there is another kind of socialism, that of
voluntary individual association, the integra-
tion of society's differentiated parts not by
outward authority, but through their own in-
herent law, into grand organic wholes, which,
as being in the very line of all evolution, — its
third great stage following naturally after
that of differentiation, — is sure more and
more to come about. State socialism says
union is a good thing, and therefore all men
shall unite; nature socialism says union is a
good thing and therefore all men will unite —
two little words, but having between them all
the difference there is between despotism and
liberty. Society is going to take nature's
way> — has already begun it, — indeed has been
walking in it from the very start side by side
with its making men individually free. The
age in which we live is preeminently one of vol-
untary individual associations, people joining
hands to do things themselves, instead of kneel-
ing at the feet of a prince, or, worse still, of a
politician to get them done. Who will say it

176 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

is not the manlier way? And its use is to go
on with increasing ratio, the State always,
perhaps, doing some things, those which experi-
ence shows it can do best, but becoming at last
only one of ten thousand voluntary associ-
ations. And under the action of these two
great forces, differentiation and integration,
the one giving man the priceless boon of indi-
vidual liberty, the other the equally priceless
efficiency of cooperative labor, the world's
great social solar system of its coming age is
to swing forth along its starry way.

But, excluding thus the idea of property's
being owned and managed by the State, the
question yet further arises, what are to be its
distributions in private hands, and what es-
pecially between those of labor and capital?
It is a question of tremendous significance.
The differentiations of wealth in our day have
passed all former bounds, — are heaped upon
one side in multiplied millions, hollowed out on
the other in multiplied miseries. The strug-
gles for it between labor and capital are
rivaling in cost and ferocity the world's old
military wars. "What!" exclaimed an African
chief to the traveler Burton, "do you think 1
am going to starve when my sister has children
she can sell?" There are business chiefs, not
in Africa, who with equal indignation are ex-

BETTER SOCIAL STATE 177

claiming, "Do you think I am going to submit
to a starvation ten per cent, of profit, when
my sister Labor has children by the sale of
whose toil into what is practical slavery, I can
make twenty !" And with this process of dif-
ferentiation still going on, fortunes becoming
larger and larger as the result of natural law,
and corporations more and more arrogant as
the result of human law, it is no wonder that
to many persons the outlook ahead seems des-
perate and dark. What has evolution to say
of the matter?

It says first of all, do not scare, — that huge
fortunes are not unmixed evils ; that a million
dollars honestly gained means in its very gain-
ing a million dollars' worth of service to the
world, and after its gaining a million-dollar
mountain from which copious streams of
spending are bound inevitably to flow down
into the plains ; and that so far as they are
evils, dishonestly gained, they will of them-
selves fail to survive. Evolution has had big
things to deal with before ; has seen the animal
monsters of the geologic ages superseded so
entirely by lesser ones, that man's real danger
to-day is from those which are too minute for
eyes to see ; seen the emperors and kings, prin-
cipalities and powers of the political world go
down again and again before the plain common

178 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

people ; and it has at least two of its great
forces already at work which are sure, in due
time, to bring about a similar result in the
financial world, with its property monsters and
capital kings. One of them is the transfer of
its struggle for existence, or, in other words, its
fierce competitions, from the ranks of labor to
those of capital by the popular education of
more persons into the capacity for using
capital. It is the excess of laborers now
notoriously which keeps down their wages, the
scarcity of capitalists which makes their enor-
mous gains possible. Equalize their numbers
by equalizing their ability, make brains as
common as brawn and you equalize their
rewards. The school-book, this is the best
lever, if labor would but see it, for lifting Up
wages, — the slate-pencil, this is the best blud-
geon, if labor would but use it, for knocking
down scabs ; and instead of lamenting and re-
sisting the increase of capitalists, as it now
does, it ought to rejoice in every one which
goes up among them from its own ranks as a
helper transferred to the very citadel of its
foes. Evolution's other force helping along
the same result is the union of labor with
itself, the matching of millions of money with
millions of men, the solid shot of capital with
the Gatling gun of toil. It is a weapon which

BETTER SOCIAL STATE 179

has proved effective everywhere else in the
struggle for existence of the weak against the
strong, for it was not good old Dr. Gatling
down at Hartford, but Nature herself who was
its original inventor, — used it ages before man
on her awful geological battlefields where, when
her monsters got too large, she not only pitted
them against each other individually, but
assailed them with whole flocks and herds
acting together, six hundred a minute of her
smaller creatures ; and it is one which labor can
rely upon with equal certainty of success in its
battle against the dinosaurs and megatheriums
of capital.

But this is not all. Evolution here, as
everywhere else, means beyond war peace,
beyond division a finer union. A husband and
wife who had invited to dinner a gentleman
friend recently divorced, had with them at the
table their little son, a regular enfant terrible
full of embarrassing questions sure to pop out in
the most embarrassing places. He had doubt-
less overheard a little of his parents' talk about
the divorce, and with the first lull in the con-
versation, fixing his eyes on the "marriage-is-
a-failure" victim, demanded of him, "Where is
your wife?" Trusting to quiet him with one
straightforward statement the gentleman
answered "Divorced." Instantly the question

180 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

followed, "What did you get divorced for?"
With a flushed face the unhappy wretch seeing
that he was in for it, explained that all married
people were not as congenial as his happy
father and mother were, and that temper had
made the difficulty. "Well," he continued,
before his horrified parents, who hitherto had
enjoyed the fun, especially the compliment to
themselves, could choke him off, "what made
you get divorced for that? Why didn't you
do as pa and ma do, when they get their
tempers up, stick together and fight it out?"
Well, that is exactly what labor and capital
are going to do under evolution. Instead of
getting divorced as the result of their dis-
agreements, they are going to do as pa and ma
did, stick together, not as master and servant,
but as husband and wife, and fight it out. Labor
will always exist and always be labor, — the
golden age have dust on its floors and dirt in
its streets, the millennium its shining robes to
be washed and its white horses to be groomed.
But there is no reason why labor, because it
deals with dirt and coarseness and brutes,
should itself be dirty and coarse and brutal.
A large part of its degradation in the past has
come from the old theological doctrine that
the matter it deals with is in its very nature
degraded and vile. But science has in our

BETTER SOCIAL STATE 181

day, thank Heaven, utterly rid it of that
slander, has shown it to be as beautiful in its
laws, as wonderful in its nature and as
immanent all through with Deity as spirit is.
The worker in it, as it is now revealed, even in
its lowest dust ; the greasy mechanic and the
despised mudsill ; touches grandeur, stands face
to face with mystery, has that to deal with which
challenges his loftiest powers and is capable of
drawing out his noblest qualities. Filth ! What
form of it has matter ever assumed, even in its
lowest sewer, so utterly repulsive as that which
has been revealed again and again as existing
at the very heart of European culture, some-
thing which must be vile indeed when it is too
vile for even a modern newspaper to make
money on. If we are to have dirt at all, give
it to us, I say, in the blackened hands and
stained dress that are on the outside of manly
toil rather than in the blackened tastes and
smudged souls which are inside of fashion's
dainty dress and aestheticism's whitened skin,
the honest dirt of the cabbage's root rather
than the nameless nastiness of the sunflower's
gaudy disk. And with matter thus raised to
honor by science, there is no reason why the
worker in it should not be raised to an equal
level, — be paid as much wages, eat as good food,
wear as good clothes, go into as good society,

183 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

and have at church as broad-aisled a pew as
the worker does in business of mind or
soul.

Capital also, will always exist, can no more
be got rid of by labor than the mill pond can
by the stream. And making labor an equal, it
will find in it, as every husband does in his wife,
a helper who, beyond any servant, will save him
enough more and make him enough happier to
pay tenfold over for all its extra cost.

Then, as society evolves, may we not fairly
look forward to a time when they both will
estimate wealth and reward in something else
than dollars and cents ; to a time when knowl-
edge will be gain, and art and science riches,
and inward growth income ; to a day when news-
papers will speak of millionaire souls and of
deeds registered in heaven as really treasures,
and when at a man's death his character will
be counted as well as his cash in reporting
what he was worth? And will not this be a
solution of the property problem infinitely
better than any mere equalized distribution of
its silver and gold?

I have time left only to speak briefly of the
other great elements which are to enter into
the world's coming social state, piety, morals,
brotherhood, womanhood, nationality and the
like, what they are to be. Evolution affords

BETTER SOCIAL STATE 183

no indication that society's separations on these
points are ever, as some hope, to be closed up,
and all men be of the same tastes, caliber,
political opinion and religious faith, — tends,
rather, to accentuate their existing divisions.
There will always be farmers, mechanics, mer-
chants, lawyers and possibly — though their
chance seems poorest of all — even ministers ;
always radicals and conservatives, believers and
skeptics, saints and sinners, Mikes and
Bridgets, Sir Galahads and Lady Clara Vere
de Veres. But evolution does indicate the com-
ing of a time when out of their separations,
here, the same as everywhere else, its other
principle of integration shall arise, under which
all harsh feeling between them shall pass away,
and an organic union take its place, in which
their very differences shall be each other's help.
Mr. Kidd has shown conclusively that it is only
those people who have the most fraternity,
morality and public spirit with which to hold
themselves together and hold in themselves
each generation's slow increment of progress,
that in the world's fierce struggle for existence
can survive ; these qualities, therefore, which
are sure to become more and more prominent
in the world's coming state. Pride and scorn
and class airs will be lessened. Bridget will
always get a smile in the street from Lady

184 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

Clara, and Mike a bow from Sir Galahad.
Protestants and Catholics shake hands together
instead of fists; Democrats and Republicans
tell truths about each other instead of lies.
"You can't whip me now, father, for I am
sitting down on the spot," exclaimed the small
boy to his irate approaching sire. So even
Robt. Ingersoll shall have his spot to sit down
upon, safe from the pulpit father's theological
lash. Marriage, like everything else, shall
have less law in it and more love — not begin in
courtship and end in courts, as too often it
does now, but have the fixedness of freedom and
the oneness not of the oak and the vine, but of
the two-celled heart. Each sex, completely
developed along its own line, "full summed in
all its powers," man ever manlier and woman
ever more a woman, shall lay aside more and
more its outward ferocities and foibles, he his
"swelled head," and she her "swell" hat; and
society in rising up into the splendors of its
new morning and singing the sweetness of its
new song, will find that it must have them both
acting everywhere together as its two wings
on which to soar ; and, to make all the sweetness
of its song, the gifts of each set to those of the
other

"Like perfect music into noble words."

BETTER SOCIAL STATE 185

While nations, also, so far as feature, cus-
tom, character and capacity go, will always
remain distinct members of the world's great
social structure. Nature has not spent such
countless ages and such outpourings of blood,
treasure and hate in evolving them as separate
peoples only to end in resolving them all back
again into one conglomerate humanity. But
differentiation here, as everywhere else in evolu-
tion, will be followed by an integration of the
parts that will utilize their very diversities in
building out of them a grand organic unity
which each people by keeping alive its special
entity will render the more complete. Nation-
ality, as we know it now, bristling with bay-
onets and centered in self, is but a passing
phase in humanity's growth; patriotism as it
is to-day, fed on battle memories and beautiful
with an outward red, white, and blue, but a
single petal in the flower of a people's love.
All harsh barriers between nations shall in the
world's better day be broken down. Armies
shall be turned into embassies, forts into gate-
ways, tariffs into wastebaskets. Boy brigades
and military drills shall die out even from
our Sunday-schools ; and the difficulties between
great peoples — as difficulties doubtless there
will always be — will be settled not as now by
the barbarian fisticuffs of war, but in the

186 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

parliament of man, the federation of the world.
There was a time in the far-off geologic ages
when the highest organization on this earth was
a worm, a series of animated segments out-
wardly linked together as one animal, but each
with its own circulating motor and nervous
systems and each in all, but its outward form
a distinct existence. Then after long ages a
creature appeared of the amphioxus type,
having a faint thread-like nerve running length-
wise through the segments and uniting them in
a common life system. It was a step forward,
that bit of notochord, which was second in
importance only to the appearance on the
planet of life itself, was the beginning of a
backbone and a brain and of all the marvels
of vertebrate existence ; and it has gone on
from species to species till now, in place of a
segmented worm crawling the earth as its
highest product, we have articulated man walk-
ing the planet as its master, and unfolded mind
walking the universe as friend of its Maker.
Society with its different nations strung to-
gether in segments over the earth, outwardly
one humanity, but each with its separate
economic, military and governing systems, was
all through its great historic ages only at the
worm stage of its development. In 1858 a
slender telegraphic wire was laid across the

BETTER SOCIAL STATE 187

sea connecting two of these segments, England
and America, together. That wire was the
evolution of humanity's notochord, that the
beginning of society's amphioxus stage. It is
to go on with the race, as it has with the indi-
vidual, bringing its parts into ever closer
relations. And what man, with his body, mind
and soul, is now to the segmented worm, that
the vertebrated, vasculated, brain-governed
humanity of the future is to be to even the
mightiest nations of the past.

Friends, the subject I have thus imperfectly
discussed, is not simply a refined philosophical
speculation, but a matter of transcendent
practical value. Human beings were meant to
be not mere idle lookers-on in this part of
nature's work, — not mere passive blocks wait-
ing to be built by other hands into the coming
social state, but live helpers in its doing, or as
the old Bible puts it, laborers together with
God. And to give this help wisely and well
they evidently must know something of what
nature's plans are, see something of what
nature is aiming to bring about. "John," said
a dying woman to her fond husband, "you have
always eaten the crusts at our table yourself,
haven't you?" "Yes," answered John, "I
always have." "John," she continued, "you
have always eaten them because you wanted to

188 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

save me from doing so, haven't you?" "Yes,''
replied John tenderly, ''that is why I have
"John," she gasped out with her final breath,
"I always liked crusts myself," leaving John
the double sorrow of having sacrificed himself
all his life on the altar of eating crusts, and
sacrificed her on the same altar of having no
crusts to eat. How many are the reformers
eating the crusts at Nature's table their whole
lives long, when it is in her own stomach they
are really wanted— how many the cross-bearers,
who, if they only knew her real likings, might
help things along a great deal better by eating
its soft parts themselves! Rightly under-
stood, I do not know of anything in all the
ranges of thought hardly excepting religion
itself, which is so practical, so hopeful, so in-
spiring as the evolutionist's faith, anything
which amid all its struggles for life and over-
shadowing of death, has before it so sure a
future for alike great and small as the evolu-
tionist's work. During our last war with
England, a large frigate sent out to convoy a
fleet of merchantmen from one port to another
on the Atlantic coast was overtaken just at
nio»ht by a terrific storm and had hardly time
to'signal its charge what course to take and
what rendezvous to seek, when the darkness fell

EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 189

and shut them all from each other's sight.
The frigate itself ably manned, after battling
three days with the gale, succeeded just as
night was again descending, in reaching the
appointed port. But where was its convoy?
Not one of them was to be seen, and it can well
be imagined with what an anxious heart the
captain lay down to his needed rest. But how
great was his joy, when rising early the next
morning he beheld a score of them lying at
anchor all around him, their long, tapering
masts lifted up to heaven as if in silent thanks,
and at the harbor's mouth through the mist all
the others borne in on the ocean's mighty flood
tide, the smallest, dullest sailer of the fleet, one
they had feared would never even in the sun-
shine reach any port, bringing up the rear.
The frigate's instructions had not been in vain.
So with evolution set to convoy all the myriad
interests of earth from the port of the past to
the haven of the world's better comino- state.

mi

The storms and convulsions of time's sea and
the awful night of the grave may indeed fall
upon them and drive them wide apart, — make
it look sometimes as if all were to be lost. But
signaled by their convoy what course to take,
and each doing its own best, they, too, shall
weather all their storms, survive all their

190 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

nights, and borne along by nature's mighty
flood tide, flood not for six hours merely, but
for six millions of years, reach at last, even the
slowest, dullest sailer of them all, the port of
the World's Coming Better Social State.

X

HOW EVOLUTION IS RELATED TO
RELIGION

Evolution buried for ages as a fruitless seed
in the dust of scholastic books, and then on its
first springing up in the fields of modern
science, ridiculed and denounced as a "mere
dirt philosophy," has become suddenly, in our
time, the pet word of society, winning to itself
in a single generation the adherence, with
hardly an exception, of all scientific thinkers,
the homage of newspapers and reviews, and the
respect even of pupils and theological schools.
It is a popularity, to be sure, for which it has
had to pay the penalty of being often vulgar-
ized and misapplied, — made a sort of Trilby in
the shops of thought; and as a consequence
some of its more sensitive disciples are shrink-
ing back a little from its use. But there is no
cheapening of its name which can really
cheapen the thing itself. It is the grandest
philosophical generalization the human mind
has ever yet reached, the statement of a law
which runs through everything in nature from
191

192 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

the making of a sod to the making of a soul,
the revelation of a tie which gives unity to all
things in time just as gravity does to all things
in space. And though it is not yet by any
means a completed system, though it has many
missing links to be supplied, and many vast
realms to be explored, its main principles are
settled beyond dispute, and transcending all
our ages' other magnificent achievements, its
discovery bids fair to be the one supreme thing
which is to make the nineteenth century
memorable forever in the annals of thought.

Evolution, however, is not only a grand
philosophical theory, but is even more a great
practical truth, one which affects the aspect of
every object of the universe man has to deal
with, and it has changed the point of view from,
which the whole universe is seen. There are
some beholding the change, who are exclaiming
with horror that "we are all adrift" ; some
who, refusing to recognize it, are going right
on with their work as its objects appeared to
them at the old creation standpoint, and some,
ministers, alas, who, while recognizing their
new position, think the only safe way is to mix
up the two views, look at nature and natural
science from the standpoint of evolution, and
at ethics and religion from that of creation,
and who, accordingly, are depicting the Bible,

EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 193

Jesus, Christianity and man as having at the
same time a natural and a supernatural origin.
It is an impossible combination ; the true course
is to lay aside reverently every mental conclu-
sion which is vitiated by being drawn from the
philosophy of the past, keeping only the ri-
pened skill which has come from its study, and
redraw the picture from this standpoint of the
world's new thought.

Preeminently is such a change needed in
drawing our religious conclusions. God, man,
society, soul, universe, are indeed the same in
themselves as of old, and the light we are to see
them by is that same divine Light that from
the dawn of faith lighteth every man who com-
eth into the world. But their perspective, their
relations to each other and to the eye which
sees them, and the parts of them on which the
light falls, — these are widely different. Their
supernatural sides and ends, often the only ones
visible from the old creation standpoint, have
disappeared; their natural ones, as never be-
fore, come into view. And henceforth, there-
fore, if we are to have intellectually any com-
plete and consistent setting forth of religion,
it must inevitably be the one which comes from
the study and use of this philosophy.

Evolution is of necessity very closely related
to religion; is not only a new point of view

194 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

from which to look at religious objects, but a
new way into the very heart of the thing it-
self.

All religions have had a cosmogony, — the
Hebrew Bible begins with one; — all have had
to be mixed up with some kind of dirt phi-
losophy. For the first thing to attract man's
attention, as it evolves into consciousness, is
this wonderful material world in which he finds
himself placed; the first things to excite his
awe and adoration, the majesty and marvel of
it he is everywhere surrounded with. Whence
did it come? What is the power which keeps
it moving? How can man adjust himself to
its power so as to get its help and avoid its
harm? These are questions he has to ask,
these the ones which bring him face to face with,
religion. The creation answer gives him an
outside maker, the evolution answer a maker
within. And while a person may study a manu-
factured article, a house or a world, and never
come into very close connection with the being
who put it together, he cannot study an evolv-
ing one, a flower, a man or a universe, and
not feel that to know it all through, root and
all and all in all, he must, as with Tennyson's
flower in the crannied wall, know what God is,
know something of its indwelling originating
power.

EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 195

Under the doctrine, also, that everything in
the universe is the outgrowth, by natural laws
and forces, of its own preceding state, religion,
as a thing of the universe, has to be recognized
as such a growth ; a plant which somehow must
have had its seed, a species which somewhere
must have had its origin ; and evolution, there-
fore, to be thoroughgoing, must show what
its seed was, investigate the species out of which
it originated, study its environment and its
inner laws and forces, and, in short, do by it
as it does with all other growing things.

Especially does it have a close connection
with the study not only of religion, but of re-
ligions. It is impossible to know any one of
them by knowing that one alone. They must
be classified and compared and their relation-
ships with each other traced out, that is, the
principles of evolution applied to their investi-
gation. It is the lack of such a guide which
has led theologians to place the Old Testament
as an authority on the same level as the New;
mix together in their conceptions of Deity the
attributes of the Jewish Jehovah and the
Christian "Our Father" ; go back to the literal
words of Jesus and his apostles for their state-
ment of what Christianity is ; coordinate as
brothers and sisters, religions whose real rela-
tionship was that of parent and child, uncle

196 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

and nephew; and even in their definition of re-
ligion seek for some element that was common
alike to its fetich seed and its full-grown
civilized tree. It is only the study of how they
have been evolved which can show their true
connection. Liberality will be placed by it on a
solid scientific foundation, and while intensi-
fying the faith of its disciples in their highest
form, will show that for its age and environ-
ment even their lowest was the survival of the
fittest. Equally close is its connection with
religion on its humanitarian and ethical side.
To be sure of man's brotherhood we must know
something of his fatherhood. To deal rightly
with his divisions of race, and with their
hatreds, wars and persecutions they must be
studied in the light of nature's own principle
of differentiation. The wide contrasts be-
tween the moral principles in savage and in
civilized lands can be understood only by tak-
ing into account their wide contrasts of en-
vironment. And in all man's practical religious
work for the bettering of himself and society,
with evolution still going on in the world, the
only way in which he can hope to succeed is
not to act at cross purposes with it, but to fall
in with its trend; conform to its laws and
principles ; show himself and what he is aiming
for, the fittest to survive; to do which he evi-

EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 197

dentlj must know what its trend and its laws
and forces are.

Finally, if there is to be a future world for
the human race, it must be the outcome in some
way of this present world. And its outcome
how? Why, in precisely the same way that
this present is the outcome of those which are
past, by its evolving through natural laws and
forces from its preceding earthly estate.
And this means that its beginnings, its promise,
its evidence are now and here. The process
of its evolution may well be, as it has been with
the present one many times in the past, by the
origin of a new species of world as different
from our terrestrial one as the oak is from the
acorn, or the grown animal from its proto-
plasmic cell. But the acorn, the cell, the pre-
ceding estate, not the less are to-day in our
streets, in our churches, in our homes, in our-
selves ; have in them the promise and the potency
of all its splendor, all its fineness, all its eter-
nity ; are what a perfected knowledge of evolu-
tion would enable us now to see. And it is
along such lines, not fanciful and far-fetched,
but logical and scientific, that this "dirt phi-
losophy" is related to what is humanity's fair-
est hope and religion's crowning truth.

From dust to Deity, from cell to sainthood,
from monad to morals, the roots of the tree of

198 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

life in the mist of the universe's primal nebula,
— that is its scope. It is not indeed a story of
unbroken progress, or of an altogether dressed
up Sunday-clothes goodness. It has its dark
and bloody chapters, its myriads of "red-with-
ravin" actors, its long pages of degeneracy
and dissolution, and its agencies that no one
would think of setting up in a modern pulpit
as those of the Christian ideal. But taken as
a whole, what poem ever had a more epic gran-
deur, what history a clearer evidence that
through the ages one increasing purpose runs,
what gospel along with its Gethsemane and
Calvary the proclamation of a richer good
news? As a religious revelation it is of the
same order as our printed Bible. It opens
with a book of Genesis, and gives us the long
bondage of its children in the world's Egypt,
the weary wanderings of their feet in the wil-
derness of nature, the fierce battles they had
to fight for civilization's promised land, the
bloody reigns of their judges and kings, and
the horror of their imprecatory Psalms. But
it gives also the rugged grandeur of Sinai's
laws, the long line of nature's prophets, fore-
telling ever a better day, the coming on earth
in due time of the son of man, the acts of a
myriad apostles, and the vision at last of a
New Jerusalem and a tree of everlasting life.

EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 199

And reading it with the same reverence that we
give to the printed page, we shall find, I think,
that the word of evolution coming through the
lips of science, not less than the word of Scrip-
ture coming through saint and sage, is the
word of God.

XI

DOES EVOLUTION NECESSITATE A

FIRST CAUSE?

The existence of the natural world with its
grandeur and beauty, its marvel of life and its
myriad apparent instances of intelligent de-
sign, has been regarded by the religious mind
in all ages as one of its strong arguments
for the existence behind it of a divine origi-
nating Cause. As every house has its builder,
and every watch its maker, so, it has been rea-
soned, this great house of nature, this mighty
succession of events, a little of whose time-
element the watch is meant to measure, must
have had correspondingly its builder and its
maker. And as before the age of machinery,
everything which man did he did immediately
with his own hand, and each time by a direct
act of the will, it was natural to suppose that
the divine Cause proceeded in the same way,
made the universe at first and everything in it
as fast as it appeared by his own direct touch,
and as the outcome in each case of his own

special volition.

200

EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE 201

"God of the earth, the sea, the sky,
Maker of all above, below,
Creation lives and moves in thee
Thy present life thro' all doth flow."

It is an argument which modern science from
its very birth has tended in some ways greatly
to weaken. While enlarging immeasurably
man's conception of the size and wonder of the
universe, — and so of the Being from whom it
came, — its continual discovery of laws and
forces, more and more of them, in nature itself,
that are immediately producing the phenomena
once ascribed direct to Deity; — as, for in-
stance, gravity, its planetary motions; the
unequal heating of the atmosphere, its winds;
and the violation of sanitary laws, its diseases ;
— these things known as secondary causes, have
pushed farther and farther out of sight alike
the need and the place of a First Cause. Some
positions, to be sure, along the way of the
arguments' retreat have been seized and held by
the church as necessitating, in their case at
least, the direct action of Deity ; — among them
the first appearance of life on the earth, the
coming of man, the rising of ethics and reli-
gion, and preeminently the advent of Christ
and Christianity, — but their defense all along
has been evidently the lack of some more com-
prehensive natural principle for their explana-

202 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

tion. And now in our time, evolution, the
crown of all the sciences, has come on to the
field apparently to complete the process, teach-
ing as this very principle that everything in
the universe, even life, man and religion, is the
outgrowth by natural laws and forces of its
own preceding state; that matter itself had
within it from the very start the promise and
potency of all life; and that what has been
thought so long to be design, and the proof,
therefore, of a designer, is really only the
survival of what natural selection and the
struggle for existence have shown to be the
fittest for its environment; a theory which
"solves by some great force the mystery of
things, sees in dead matter both their source
and end;" and leaves no more need of a divine
Cause to come in among them than there is for
a farmer to take the place of nature in giving
his cattle their eyes and ears, or his trees their
flowers and fruit.

Is this the real inevitable logic of evolu-
tion? Must its disciples in accepting it give
up the argument for Deity which is based on
nature, and give up with it all belief in a
divine, intelligent First Cause? It is the awful
fear that such must be its outcome which is
the secret, beyond question. As Mr. Fiske
says, of the violent opposition from the reli-

EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE 203

gious world with which evolution was received
at first; — not so much that it gave man a
monkey for an ancestor as that it took away
apparently his divine Father, not so much
that it made the Scriptures false as that it
seemed to rob the universe of its meaning.
And under such an impression, it is no wonder
it was heard with dismay, for there is no splen-
dor of a truth which can take the place in the
human soul of a truth-giver, no enlargement
of the house it lives in which can make up to
it for the loss of the house's head.

Evolution does indeed have its atheistic, or,
at any rate, its agnostic aspects, and it has
not been lacking in followers who have ac-
cepted them as its real teaching; but there
are others who, instead of acknowledging its
guilt in this direction, have sought to show
that it affords in its own principles a new and
strengthened argument for the existence of a
First Cause.

One of the ways in which they have done
so is by pointing out that it implies of neces-
sity a beginning of things in what has been
evolved, and that it never by any possibility
could have begun itself. The most formidable
objection against the theistic argument hith-
erto has been the alternative theory that the
universe never had any beginning; that it is

204 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

self-existent; and that what is going on in it
now has been going on forever; an infinite
round of summer and winter, birth and death,
growth and decay,
"A mighty whirling wheel of strife and stress"

without starting and without stopping—a
theory, it was urged, which is no more in-
herently difficult than the doctrine of a self-
existent creator whose life had been going on
forever without a First Cause. And it was
an objection that the old natural theology was
never able really to meet.

It is one, however, that evolution at first
sight does seem fairly to overthrow. For
though some evolutionists have claimed that
their science is only the description of a proc-
ess, and has nothing to do with beginnings,
such a narrowing of it has no warrant either
in its history or in its principles. The very
name of Darwin's great work in exposition of
its organic field is the "Origin of Species" ; and
its whole professed object, as Herbert Spencer,
Haeckel, Huxley and others of its great ex-
pounders, set it forth, is to trace out the law
by which everything which now exists, no mat-
ter how highly differentiated and integrated
it may have become, must have had its starting
point in some kind of homogeneity. The fact

EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE 205

is, it is a necessity, which appears to be involved
in the very idea of evolution, the evolution at
any rate of any finite thing. Where there is no
progress, only a series of changes out of which
nothing comes, its changes may indeed have
gone on forever without a beginning and con-
tinue forever without an end; but the moment
you introduce the idea of differentiation, one
of the stages as we saw of evolution, — a stage
in which the present condition of a thing has
been reached by dividing and varying the ma-
terial that composed its preceding condition,
going back to ever simpler and simpler forms, —
that moment you bring in the necessity of a
beginning. You all remember that old prob-
lem in arithmetic which used to be given us in
our school days: If a single cent was put to
interest at the opening of the Christian era,
what would the amount of it be in our day?
and how we used to wish that some old an-
cestor of ours living then, instead of spending
all his cents for candy or marbles, had been
thoughtful enough to put one of them in the
bank for our benefit. But, however large the
sum, we now should have had quintillions on
quintillions of dollars, enough to have filled
not only our globe, but this whole universe ;
and however far back the interest began, even
with that old anthropoid ancester who had

206 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

a tail and lived in a tree ; we all knew it had to
begin with that first cent. So with the evolu-
tion of all our visible universe itself. Its ac-
cumulations are only a question of more
intricate interests, only a case in which we have
had the very thing done for us that we wished
as children; and, enormous as the amount now
is, it is equally true that it all had to begin
with the putting to interest of that first far-
off cent.

But if there must have been thus a begin-
ning to the universe, an accumulation, step by
step, of its enormous amount, who, this argu-
ment asks, could have been its beginner, who
the investor in nature's bank of its first won-
derful cent? It could not have been its own
beginner. None of us as schoolboys in our
wildest wishes ever thought of a cent that on
its way to buy candy or marbles at the open-
ing of the Christian era, or at the creation of
the world, had stopped at a savings bank and
for our benefit put itself to interest. Matter
and force, the supposed constituents of the uni-
verse's primal homogeneity, or even that still
simpler world-stuff out of which even matter
and force may have been differentiated, — these,
with all the other potencies that materialists
have ascribed to them, have never had
that, to begin with, of self-determining

EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE 207

will-power, never the ability to say to each
other at some point in eternity, Go to, now,
let us evolve a universe, — never the kindly fore-
thought which would prompt them to invest a
cent out of their pockets for a little humanity
boy, who was to come into existence myriads
of ages after their day.

Yet, without such powers, think for a mo-
ment how impossible was the world's self-origi-
nation. All the laws and properties which were
in its matter and force then at the world's
beginning, must have been in them always,
otherwise, as you see, their state would not
have been a beginning; but if in them always,
then inasmuch as they could not start them-
selves, they must have been always in opera-
tion; and, if always in operation, then the
universe, or at any rate, all that is finite in it,
must from all eternity have been along, at least
as far as it is now.

Mr. Spencer in his "First Principles" at-
tempts to get rid of this difficulty about the in-
itiatory impulse, by supposing the original neb-
ulous matter of the universe was only partially
diffused, and that its forces were in a sort of
balanced condition which the slightest disturb-
ance would destroy and set in operation. But
the chapter in which he does so, entitled "The
Instability of the Homogeneous" is the most

208 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

unsatisfactory of all his works. If the nebul-
ous matter was not universally diffused, it
could not have been in a state of homogeneity,
— would have had an outside and an inside, and
the outside particles, being more acted upon
by gravity than those within, it would from
all eternity have been evolving, and, being
finite, would from all eternity have been
evolved.

On the other hand, if the original material
was equally diffused through all space, as Kant
and Laplace and others have assumed, and at
rest, as the friction of its particles would have
necessitated, it never by any known natural
force, — gravity, cohesive attraction, chemical
affinity, or the like, — could have changed its
condition. Never by gravity, because being in-
finitely diffused, each atom would have been
equally drawn in every direction ; and never by
cohesive attraction or chemical affinity because
in order to have them act, its atoms must have
parted with some of their heat; — impossible
again, inasmuch as filling all space, each one
would have to receive from the others exactly
as much as it gave to them. Thus whatever
condition is assumed as the original one, it is
inconceivable how the universe with matter and
force alone could have had any absolute begin-
ning; the difficulty being as in the case of a

EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE 209

balky horse, either its starting too soon or else
its refusing to start at all.

It is an inconceivability which Haeckel, the
most scientific and thoroughgoing of all evolu-
tionists, sees and acknowledges, the only one in
all his vast system which he does see and ac-
knowledge. "A great and unsolved difficulty ,"
he says ("History of Creation"), "lies in the
fact that the cosmological gas-theory furnishes
no starting point at all in explanation of the
first impulse which caused the rotatory motion
in the gas-filled universe." And it is one also
which Mr. Spencer, if not in his chapter on
"The Instability of the Homogeneous," yet
elsewhere sees and acknowledges.

He says, "The ultimate mystery continues as
great as ever; the problem of existence is not
solved by evolution ; it is simply removed farther
back ; and those who hold it legitimate to argue
from phenomena to noumena may rightly con-
tend that the nebular hypothesis implies a First
Cause as much transcending the mechanical
God of Paley as his does the fetich of a sav-
age."

The difficulty, it is claimed, is one that the
doctrine of an intelligent Will Power at the head
of the universe does solve, and is one, there-
fore, which logically compels his recognition.
It is like the weaving of a piece of cloth by a

210 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

human being as compared with its being done
by an automatic loom. Both the man and the
machine have physically the same mechanical
devices and use directly a power which is sub-
ject to the same natural laws. But while the
machine, the moment it is wound up, has to
start the weaving, if it is going to start it at
all, and has to go on with it without stopping
till the work is all done, thus completing it in
a definite time, the man with his power of
choice can wait as long as he pleases before
setting his loom in motion and can delay as
long as he pleases before his cloth is done.
So while the universe, if self-evolving, would
from all eternity have to be evolved, the uni-
verse with volitional First Cause would be a
loom whose power-belt could be turned on at
any point of time, setting its warp of atoms
and molecules, suns and stars leaping up and
down, and between them, flying back and forth,
its shuttles of heat and cold, life and death,
threaded with the mystic woof which hour by
hour weaves the world. And the fact that its
long web is yet in the process of weaving and
has not from all eternity been finished and laid
away, is evidence, it is claimed, that it has at
its head a great living weaver who chose at some
special point of time to apply its power and set
it in operation.

EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE 211

Is the argument sound? At first view it
seems to be so, — seems all that even Mr. Spen-
cer admits as to its cogency ; and I am free
to confess that personally for awhile I rested
in its conclusion and rejoiced in evolution, be-
yond all even of its philosophical beauty, be-
cause it was apparently so logically theistic;
made nature reveal, afar off, to be sure, yet
with intellectual certainty, the existence of its
God.

But more careful thought shows alike its
inconclusiveness to the mind and its unsatis-
factoriness to the heart.

First of all, as regards a divine First Cause,
himself, to ascribe to him will-power does not
really remove the difficulty of conceiving how
he could have willed to begin the universe at
any special point of time. Where there is
will-power there must be motive to act on it
before it can choose, just as certainly as where
there is a water-wheel there must be water to
make it go ; this so far as we can see, as truly
in an infinite as in a finite will ; and the ques-
tion inevitably arises as to how in an all-per-
fect and unchangeable Being there could be a
new motive arise. A motive must have an
origin as surely as a motion; and to say that
a First Cause was moved at its beginning to
start the universe, only sets us out in search

212 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

of what was the first cause of that First Cause,
and transfers the endless series from the realm
of matter to the realm of spirit.

Worse still, it makes matter and force origi-
nally separate from the First Cause of the
universe and able to exist without him till he
was needed to set it in motion ; and then, after
he had done so, separate from him again, and
in no need of his presence; makes the world
atheistic, therefore, except at the one single
moment of its birth. It differs from that half-
way evolution which holds God interfered with
the processes of natural law and force at cer-
tain special periods, as at the introduction of
life, of man, and of religion, only by going a lit-
tle further back, going to the beginning of the
universe instead of going to the beginning of
some special part of it ; and logically and con-
sistently, if we make him thus a miracle — God
at one period, we might just as well allow him
to be such at all periods.

Then, as regards the beginning of the uni-
verse itself, it really explains nothing; — drives
the sceptic as to Deity only into an apparent
corner. All the difficulties as to how gravity,
cohesive attraction, chemical affinity, and the
like, could be kept from acting on a finitely
diffused homogeneity, or be made to act on an
infinitely diffused one, are exactly as great

EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE 213

under the supposition of a will-power to set
things in motion at first, as under that of their
self-beginning. Of course it is easy to say
that an Infinite Being with a single .word could
speak them all out of the way. But this would
be resorting to magic to get rid of them in-
stead of natural law; and, if we are going to
have a fiat universe at all, we might as well
hold with the old theology that Deity spoke it
all into being ready-made out of nothing six
thousand years ago, as to be to all the trouble
of tracing it back over the long, slow path of
natural evolution millions of years, and then,
even there, have to evoke a divine fiat.

Still further, admitting all that the argu-
ment claims as to this present universe's having
had a beginning, it does not follow as the only
alternative that will-power must have been its
beginner. It may be said, and it has been said,
that the present universe, — beginning, evolu-
tion, and all, — may be only one of an infinite,
self-existing series which has been, and is. to be,
evolved ; that the homogeneous elements out
of which it started may have been simply the
remnants over from the decay of its myriad
predecessors, and that the power which enabled
it to start may have been merely the rhythmic
action of the old indwelling power which made
the others decay and which, by the law of the

214 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

conservation of energy, must have been gath-
ered up somewhere; just as a pendulum, when
it has swung its full extent one way, comes for
a moment to a dead stand, in which its po-
tential and kinetic forces exactly balance each
other, after which, without the need of any
new touch, but simply by its own inherent
weight, it begins to move the other way. Or,
instead of the entire universe coming to such
a stand at the same time, it may be that like
summer and winter on the earth, its evolution
and dissolution may alternate from one part
of it to the other, the released forces which in
one hemisphere have produced its decay, im-
mediately passing into the other to produce
its growth.

It is a theory incapable of direct proof, but
which does have, it must be acknowledged, a
multitude of actual, known phenomena in this
present world that analogically are in its fa-
vor. Evolution here on earth is everywhere
rising by its own inherent laws and forces out
of dissolution. Plants, animals, men, nations,
civilizations, even religions, are born, grow to
maturity, linger a little while, and then decay,
only to have others out of their dust do the
same. All the indications of science are that the
earth itself is at last to fulfill the law it has
imposed on such myriads of its children, "Dust

EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE 215

thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."
And looking up, the skies, with all their splen-
dor, have in them already the shadow here and
there of their celestial doom, — stars like Anta-
res, dolphins of the upper deep, whose flashing
colors are those of expiring suns ; globes like
the moon that are the dead leaves yet undis-
solved of their vast stellar woods ; and nebulas
like those of Pegasus and the Hunting Dogs;
whose aspect is best explained as that of vast
systems of worlds, equal in size to our Milky
Way, which are just ending, rather than just
beginning, their lives ; all suggesting that what
is the round of birth, growth, decay and birth
again here on earth, is the law of the universe
as a whole. It is a use of its material vastly
more in accordance with the economy of nature
than to think of it as remaining forever, after
its life, a huge corpse filling space ; — is the only
known way in which the great law of the con-
servation of energy can be carried out ; — the
only imaginable way of answering \yhat be-
comes of those vast tides of ether waves which
in the shape of heat, light and actinic force,
are sweeping off from every sun and star.
And with it recognized as a possibility, it will
be seen at once that all the cogency of the
argument for a First Cause, that is based on
the need of it at the beginning of evolution, is

216 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

taken away. What made the homogeneity out
of which the universe came, broke it up. Death
itself had in it the seeds of life ; and as the last
expiring moment of December gives birth to
the first new moment of January, so, it ex-
plains, the last expiring breath of the uni-
verse's old order of things may have been the
power which started the present one on its
course.

Then, after all, it is the failure of an argu-
ment, promising as it seemed at first, over
which, rightly considered, there is really no
reason to mourn. Were it successful, it would
have given the inquirer only an attribute of
Deity and not Deity himself, only a chronolog-
ical First Cause and not an always and all-per-
vading presence. And its want of success only
shows that the Eternal is not to be captured
like an elephant, by driving him with the weap-
ons of logic into a penned-up corner of the
universe ; not to be found in the earthquake,
the thunder and the whirlwind of a beginning,
any more than in the displays of them after-
wards ; and it gives new significance to the
Scripture words, "Spiritual things are to be
spiritually discerned."

But leaving this part of the inquiry as
fruitless, there is another and grander way

EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE 217

in which evolution does really necessitate the
recognition of a First Cause; one, also, which
is in harmony with the Scripture dictum as
to his spiritual discernment; and that is by
its leading to him not merely as the source
once of some far-off beginning, but as that
out of which and in which now and always all
things rise and are. It makes him the First
Cause of the universe in the same way that the
fountain is the first cause, every moment, of
the stream which winds through the valley, and
that the sun is the first cause age after age of
the light which goes pulsing off into space.
Nay, even these connections do not express all
the closeness of his evolutionary relation to the
sum of things, for the stream after it leaves
the fountain, and the light after it leaves the
sun are separated in space from their source,
but the universal First Cause is not conceived
of by evolution as separate even in space from
anything to which he gives birth, any more
than gravity is separate from a moving planet,
or life from a living body ; but as continually
operative in every atom as that from which it
comes, —

"A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things,"

£18 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

a spirit, a Being who wills and loves and works
forever the eternal right. Under its reign the
old miracles, such as the turning of water into
wine, disappear, but the whole world shines forth
with the ever new miracle of turning chaos into
cosmos; the old Bibles lose their prominence,
but all truth becomes his revelation; super-
naturalism sets, but atom and star rise up his
prophets, flower in the crannied wall and nebula
in Orion's belt his apostles. He is made by 'it,
as never before, his own teacher. The truths
of transcendentalism join hands with those of
sense. He is not merely an occasional visitor
to earth, but from its birth out of the fire mist
till now its perpetual presence; its matter and
force not agents he operates upon from the
outside, but parts of himself ; the universe every-
where no longer an unconscious machine, run
with his hand on its crank, but a live tissue
thridded directly with his muscles and nerves
and growing, as all live things have to, with a
vitalizing* force in contact with its every atom.
All the poet's raptures over nature ; all which
even a Wordsworth has sung about

"A sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused"

than its outward charms ; all the emotions of
the religious worshiper in the presence of

EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE 219

mountain, sea, and midnight sky, are justified
by it as scientific realities ; and not only those
who have the spiritual and poetic vision, but
those even who have only the eyes of sense, all
who can see anything, can see God. Yet
giving thus everything that pantheism ever did,
it separates itself, with its recognition of will-
power, by a broad impassable line from pan-
theism as such ; is in its essence theism still. It
does not solve all the problems about Deity ;
those about his own mode of being; or how
existing from all eternity in connection with
matter and force he could have always been
what he is without exerting his will upon them ;
or the relation of evolution to his unchange-
ableness ; or any of those mighty ones Mr.
Spencer presents as constituting his unknow-
ableness ; — makes him in some respects a greater
mystery than ever before. Yet even here it
has its side of hope, has it in its very name.
And with man, society, the universe, all that he
is identified with, still unfolding, instead of
fearing that faith in him under evolution will
die away, is there not good reason for believing
that the conception of him will expand with
their expanding; and that, while forever more
and more the Unknowable, he will be forever
more and more the Known?

The existence of such a First Cause is in-

220 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

volved in the very nature of evolution. The
two primal constituents, which its expounders
have to assume the presence of everywhere it is
going on, are energy and matter, or, if these
are reduced to one, that one has to be energy.
Matter alone cannot be conceived of as either
moving itself at first or keeping itself in mo-
tion afterwards. All the forms of it anything
is known about, from atom up to world, are
pervaded with an immaterial something which
makes and maintains them what they are.
Nothing can be thought of as behind or be-
fore or within such energy to produce it, or
as being in any way its cause. Matter may
store it up as in dynamite or in a combustible
body, but their manifestations of it are only
the setting of it free. Even when a living
being puts it forth, lifts his arm, or exercises
a volition, he does not create it, is not a cause,
as Mr. Martineau in his discussion of the sub-
ject seems to think, but is only an agent, using
what has been gathered by him out of his food.
Scientifically there are and can be no such
things as "secondary causes," nothing but this
one original, all-pervading First Cause. And
not in some far-off beginning of things, reached
only by an intricate process of logic, but where-
ever now we see anything being done, wher-
ever any stage of evolution, there we are in

EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE 281

the direct presence of the universe's First
Cause.

"They reckon ill who leave me out,
When me they fly, I am the wings,
I am the doubter and the doubt,

And I the hymn the Brahmin sings."

It is this that Herbert Spencer means by his
phrase, "that Infinite and Eternal Energy out
of which all things proceed," only the words
ought to be "out of which and in and through
which all things proceed." It is what those old
heathen poets whom Paul quotes, expressed
with wonderful accuracy, — Pagan gems which
shine even in their Christian setting, when they
said, "In him we live and move and have our
being" ; — is what Paul himself rose to in his
words, "For of him and through him and to
him are all things" ; and it is what poetry in all
ages, — often supposed to be the antagonist of
science, but really the rosy morning of its sun-
lit day, — has been the herald of, singing as it
did in Faber, —

"God is never so far as even to be near:
He is within; our spirit is the home he holds dear:
To think of him as at our side is almost as untrue,
As to remove his throne beyond those skies of

starry blue;
We walk the earth ourselves his sanctuary."

n% THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

Such a First Cause, so far as evolution neces-
sitates its recognition, may seem to be only un-
conscious force, only a Deity as unsatisfactory
to the heart and to the spiritual nature as
matter itself is. But force is only one of its
forms, only that which shows itself in physical
motion its lowest form. It is something which
itself evolves, — that is recognized in the very
definition of evolution, a process in which the
retained motion undergoes, along with matter,
a parallel transformation from homogeneity
to heterogeneity. It shows itself step by step
in intelligent motion, puts things together with
a purpose, elaborates the crystal, rises up into
life; that is what life is, evolved force, not
merely the adjustment of inward to outward
conditions, but the cause which adjusts them;
and then rises up into consciousness, mind,
heart, soul, duty, religion, — all flowing from it
and retaining it as their substance, just as much
as stars, earth, body, species and all the
wonders of physical evolution do their prim-
itive matter. And to get our conception of all
that it really is as First Cause, it is to these
higher manifestations rather than to its lower
ones that surely in all scientific fairness we
ought to look, just as to know the real nature
of a tree we do not look at its roots alone, but
at its fruit, and not at its green and imper-

EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE 223

feet fruit but at that which is ripe and per-
fect.

There is one other difficulty which needs to
be considered. Giving up the idea of any ab-
solute beginning to things as necessitating the
recognition of a First Cause, and accepting the
present universe as only one of an infinite
series whose First Cause is logical rather than
chronological, it may be asked what then be-
comes of evolution otherwise than as operating
within each term of the series? How is it
possible as a progressive change from one of
them to the other without its leading back to a
primitive one, beyond which there can be no
evolution, just as certainly as following back
the changes of the present one alone was found
to do? And, on the other hand, if there is no
progress from one to the other, if it is only an
infinite series of evolutions which in the end
evolve nothing but each other, a First Cause
which causes nothing in its last term more than
was in its first, what is a belief in it but a
giving up of any real, any eternal evolution,
and how is it any more satisfactory to the
mind than the old doctrine of an infinite series
of changes which evolved nothing at all?

The difficulty arises from taking into the
conception of the series only one kind of
infinity, that of time, and not those of space

224 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

and degree. To believe in an evolution that
is without any absolute beginning, one that is
able to be progress from universe to universe
without either a first term or a last one, we
must believe in a universe that is infinite in
extent and infinite in its degrees of perfection,
a universe, some part of which at least, has been
forever in the past changing into something
finer and better, and all parts of which, in the
future, are to go on forever doing the same.

And who shall say this is not a possible con-
ception? Who shall say this material universe
is the only one which in the eternal years has
ever been or will ever be? Who shall say that
the endless variety from nebula up to Milky
Way, and from amoeba up to man, which we
know to exist in this universe which stretches
through space, may not, also, be the law of
that series of universes which stretches through
time, giving evolution a field in which forever
to evolve ; and out of the very heart of the
necessity which it puts us under of believing
in religion's foundation, an infinite First Cause,
unfolding also the necessity of our joining with
it religion's crowning truth an infinite and im-
mortal effect, making possible, also, an obedi-
ence forever of religion's injunction "Be ye
perfect even as your Father in heaven is
perfect."

EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE 225

Aiming along this new path opened in our
day to learn whether nature would repeat the
answer that, questioned in other ways, she gave
of old, I have tried in its setting forth to avoid,
as much as possible, all merely technical terms
and all those subtle problems about the absolute
and unknowable which belong to the realm of
metaphysics, a realm in which I confess myself
an utter ignoramus, and to use only common
language and those principles which belong
fairly to the realm of physics and of natural
evolution. I know very well how narrow is the
path and how liable the student is to mistakes
when even in the realm of physics he comes to
that border-land where the finite, either of space
or time, reaches out into the infinite; know
that what is law and truth and solid ground in
the one may be disorder and falsehood and utter
nothingness in the other; know that even in
mathematics the exact truths with regard to
finite lines and angles become the inexactness
of those which are stretched out to infinity.
But this is as true of the arguments against a
First Cause as of those in its defense; and
though it be regarded as only a speculation, it
is a speculation which has the whole known
universe as its basis ; one that surpasses in
grandeur all other thoughts, and that is reaf-
firmed by what comes direct through the

226 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

spirit's vision. Evolution and dissolution are
but the systole and diastole of nature's great
heart ; life and death but the summer and winter
of time's vaster year ; all the myriad worlds the
keenest telescope takes in, but one pole of the
world's mightier globe; and all the long geo-
logic ages and all the uncounted eons since the
nebulous dust out of which our present universe
came, but a part-way swing of that matter
pendulum which ticks off eternity's seconds.
And it is of such a universe, such a system of
nature, that it gives us the cause, not the cause
which merely as an outside hand wound it up
in some far-off beginning, or repeated its wind-
ings on some special subsequent occasions, and
then left it to run of itself, but one which is
its mainspring and in all its movements then,
now and evermore. To evolve is the necessity
of his very being, as it is of the sun to shine
and of the plant to grow. There never was
and never will be a time in which he is to be
thought of as an idle, or a sleeping, or a self-
sufficient God; never was and never will be a
time in which anything evolved will be separate
from his pervading might. Not that he is the
all himself; the doctrine is no pantheism; but,
to use the exact Bible phrase, that he is the "all
in all"; is the central sun that is forever
shining and yet whose beams are never the same

EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE 227

as himself. Worlds, universes, alike material
and spiritual; there is no difference between
them except of species and degree ; they are the
ether waves which go pulsing out evermore
from his central warmth ; evolution, that in the
last analysis is the shining into finite forms of
the Infinite Light. So believing, naturalism,
more truly than any supernaturalism, can
sing,—

"Thou art, O God, the life and light
Of all this wondrous world we see;
Its glow by day, its smile by night,

Are but reflections caught from Thee;
Where'er we turn thy glories shine
And all things fair are Thee and Thine."

And knowing its diviner meaning religion can
say of nature as earnestly as ever science has, —

"So welcome wre from every source
The tokens of his primal force, —
Older than heaven itself, yet new
As the young heart it reaches to;
Beneath whose steady impulse rolls
The tidal wave of human souls,
Guide, comforter and Inward Word,
The eternal spirit of the Lord."

XII
WHAT BECOMES OF THE FATHER-
HOOD OF GOD UNDER EVOLUTION?

Of all the various names which have been
applied to the Deity, setting forth one and an-
other of his attributes, the most distinctive and
precious is that of Father, our heavenly
Father. It is the high water mark of the old
type of religion, the religion of sentiment and
emotion as distinguished from the religion of
science and law, is the measure of the immense
progress which had been made from the time
when even among the most advanced races on
earth his highest s}unbol was a stick or a stone ;
and around it have been gathered age after
age, all the great hopes, beliefs, affections and
venerations of our larger Christian faith.

But how far can this conception of him be
retained under the new scientific light of our
time, — how far, especially, can it be made con-
sistent with the great evolutionary doctrines of
man's descent from the brute creation and of
the Deity as "that Infinite and Eternal
22$

THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD 229

Energy" out of which by natural force and
law, all things, alike the evil and the good, are
thought inevitably to proceed? A lady of my
acquaintance was present at an Orthodox
church awhile ago where the minister was
preaching on the absurdities of this new science
with regard to the origin of man. "An evo-
lutionist," said he, "looks up into the face of a
baboon or a monkey and proclaims 'Thou art
my father;' but we Christians look up into the
face of the all-loving and all-perfect God, and
say 'Our Father which art in heaven !' "

Deeper down, however, than this merely
superficial difficulty, is that awful shadow of
ferocity, cruelty, blight and wrong which over-
lies so large a part of the divine realm here on
earth, — the organic world's fierce struggle for
existence, its overpowering of the weak and
sick by the well and strong, and its necessity
of their eating each other up as the only way
of their getting food; the awful convulsions
and severities of the inorganic world, the earth-
quake, the tornado, the drouth, the flood, the
frost, destroying myriads of living things with-
out even their use as food; and the vice and
crime and tyranny and inequality and poverty
and suffering which prevail worst of all among
his human beings. Under the old doctrines of
the Deity as a Being outside of nature, and of

230 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

Adam's Fall as having dragged the world down,
it was possible to explain such things as the
result of man's disobedience, and as occurring
without the immediate action of divine will,
thus relieving him to some extent, at least, of
their responsibility. But under the modern
scientific conception of God as immanent in
nature and as the energy out of which all
things immediately proceed, there is no possi-
bility of such an exculpatory explanation.
Science cannot have him in the sunshine and
leave him out of the storm, near in the flower
and far in the frost. The animal world's
struggle for existence and eating each other up
as food are shown by it to have been instituted
eons before there was any man to sin. And
with God the energy out of which all things
proceed, it must be his own arm directly which
starts the earthquakes, and his own breath im-
mediately which blows the whirlwind. "That,"
said an eminent scientist to me once with whom
I was talking on the subject, taking down a
hawk's claws from his cabinet, — "that is what
I find in the God of nature, and when I
want this" — opening his Bible and pointing
to the words, "Like as a father pitieth his
children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear
him," — "when I want this kind of clause, I have
to go for it to the pages of Scripture." It is

THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD 231

a difficulty which is not a mere theoretical one
of the scholar's study, but one which forces
itself on everybody's attention, one which
clutches at our nerves and heart-strings as well
as at our minds and philosophies. There are
multitudes who accept gladly the scientific
doctrine of the Deity as the great indwelling
spirit of the universe, and who can see that it
adds infinitely to his grandeur as an object of
reverence, but also feel that in doing so they,
to be consistent, must give up the genial home
warmth and sweet paternal relation which have
been so long associated with his endeared gospel
name ; and perhaps there is no truth which the
words of this earth can express that to think-
ing, feeling men and women would be so com-
prehensive, so precious, so welcome, as the one
which would enable them, in the midst of the
natural world and in the full blaze of evolution,
to look up and say with the old faith and the
old love, "Our Father which art in heaven."

I am free to say that I do not think it
possible to make the two conceptions of him
parallel in all respects, any more than it is the
two of anything, one of which comes through
the mind and the other through the heart; do
not think it is desirable to do so, for in that
case neither of them would add anything to
what the other gave. But I do think the scien-

838 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

tific view of him includes in its drier light some,
at least, of the paternal attributes which are so
precious in the religious view. And it is on
this most important question, how far the God
of nature and of evolution can be spoken of as
Our Father, that I shall dwell in this lecture.

Look first at the matter subjectively. How
did religion get the name and conception of the
Deity as Father, our heavenly Father? It is
commonly thought that it was supernaturally
revealed through the lips of Jesus, and that it
was the distinctive gift of Christianity to the
world. But as a matter of fact it is older than
Christianity, older than any of the world's
existing faiths. It originated among our old
Aryan ancestors thousands of years before
the Christian era, in what to them was pre-
eminently a natural religion. Among their
many deities was one they called Dyaus Pitar,
literally the Sky Father; and when the original
Aryan religion died out, the name was a part
of the precious goods it distributed among the
nations that were its descendants, becoming
with the Greeks Zeus Pater, with the Romans
Jupiter, meaning the same thing, with the Scan-
dinavians Alfadir, — All-Father — and with the
early Christians, "Our Father which art in
heaven." The name, therefore, is strictly a
natural evolution, not something which Chris-

THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD 233

tianity gave to nature, but which nature gave to
Christianity; and though under Christian nur-
ture its contents of tenderness, care and spirit-
uality have been immeasurably enlarged, it is
only fair to argue that to the primitive Aryan
mind it must have expressed, as the root out of
which its after growth came, a real aspect of
nature, otherwise it is a name which would never
have been suggested.

The Dyaus Pitar, to be sure, has not been
the world's only nature god. The Aryans
themselves had other deities with other names
expressing other and sometimes the darker and
more terrible aspects of earth, air and sky, as
Rudra the god of storms, Agni, the god of fire.

Polytheistic also have been all the religions
which came from Aryan stock, many of them
wTith divinities whose attributes were the very
opposite of what is fatherly, as Ahriman, Siva,
Mars and Thor; and even in our Christian
faith the conception of a Father God has not
always been so all-embracing but that it has
had to be supplemented with such names as
Jehovah, Lord, King, Almighty, Triune and
the like, taking in what were thought to be
other of his attributes, and with such a being
as Satan to include his relation to the kingdom
of evil. But this only strengthens the argu-
ment for the reality in nature of what under-

234 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

lies the word Father, for it shows the name has
been put to what in evolution is the supreme
test of a thing, the struggle for existence.
And it has survived, has killed out or absorbed
all the others because it has proved itself to be
the fittest, has expressed better than any of the
others what under the world's increasing in-
telligence has been found to be not only the
needs of the human heart, but man's larger
mental conception of what exists really at
nature's heart. Even amid the crudest beliefs
with regard to immediate evil divinities, faith
in a supreme one who has the paternal char-
acteristics has often curiously cropped out.
The story is told of a farmer in England some-
what unfortunate in his crops and in his family
affairs, whose minister sought to comfort him
by saying they were not accidents but the dis-
pensations of an All-Wise Providence, to which
he ought cheerfully to submit. "Oh, yes," was
the answer, "I well know it was Providence that
spoiled my crops and killed my children;
it is Providence does this, and Providence does
that, — nothing but Providence picking on me
all the time ; I hate Providence ; but I am thank-
ful there is One above who will at last set things
right." And in all the Ayran mythologies
along with their recognition of agencies in
nature that for the time being were setting

THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD 235

things wrong, there has always been, dim or
clear, this trust in one above them who in the
end would set things right, — above Ahriman
Ormazd, above the tricksy pantheons of Olym-
pus and Asgard a paternal Being whom alike
gods and men were bound to obey, and above
Sinai and Satan a heavenly Father who at last
would put all enemies under his feet and be the
world's all in all.

But we are reminded that man's conception
of what Deity is did not begin its evolution
with the old Aryan faith, or with divinities any-
where which had even the faintest lineaments
of a loving, paternal face. Spencer, Frazer,
Tylor, Robertson Smith and others have traced
back religion through the worship of idols,
animals, the heavenly bodies, sticks and stones,
to that of the ghosts of dead ancestors ; and now
Mr. Grant Allen comes along and after review-
ing and re-proving all these steps, goes back
beyond them, back even of the ancestral ghost,
and shows that the first step was the worship
of the mere dead body itself, apart from even
the crudest idea of spirit, — argues that even
the Christian conception of a heavenly Father
and the Hebrew one of Jehovah originated
in the homage paid to a dead savage chief-
tain.

It is a view on the face of it which is the most

236 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

startlingly atheistic of anything scepticism has
yet set forth. The conception of Deity is
naturally thought of as meaning the same thing
as Deity himself, and the evolution of the con-
ception from the sight of a dead body or from
the shadow of a live one is thought of as cover-
ing the evolution from such a source of every-
thing which is divine; is tracing the broad
highway of Christianity in which God moves as
a Father, out beyond civilization and be3^ond
heathendom into a wilderness where it not only
narrows to a squirrel path and runs up a tree,
but to where it comes down even from the tree
and disappears as a hole in the ground. "Who
is your God?" asked a traveler in Arabia of a
Mesaleckh nomad. "It was Fadee," answered
the man, naming a powerful provincial chieftain
recently deceased, "but since his death I do not
really know who, at the present moment, my
God is." That is the first impression made by
these recent investigations, that having traced
him to the dead body of a savage chieftain
buried in the ground, evolution does not really
know who at the present moment its God is.
Most of the criticisms on "the ghost theory,"
as it is called, have been based on such a confus-
ing together of the reality and the idea. Even
our friend, Rev. Mr. St. John, in his notice of
Grant Allen's book contributed to The New

THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD 237

World ridicules his work as "a sketch of the
evolution of God" and its author, because of it,
as having "clearly abdicated his throne of in-
tellectual leadership."

Mr. Allen is, perhaps, careless in some of his
expressions. But the very title of his book,
"The Evolution of the Idea of God," and his
explicit statements that his purpose is not "any
kind of inquiry into the objective validity of
any one among the religious beliefs," that "the
question whether there may be a God or gods
does not here concern us," and that he does not
attempt to "cast doubt upon the truth of the
evolved concepts," ought surely to have pre-
vented any such mistake. It would be just as
fair to say of a writer who, in giving a history
of astronomy, had traced it back through its
Tycho Braeic and Ptolemaic theories to the con-
ception of the sky as a fixed hollow sphere a
few miles above us, that he is ignoring the
real heavens; or of one who in describing the
development of electrical science should begin
with the attention drawn to it by the dancing
of pith balls and the twitching of a frog's leg,
that he made these the source of electricity
itself, as to charge that a scientist who finds
the starting point of a man's idea of God in a
dead ancestor, is thereby ignoring the infinite
reality and making the heavenly Father him-

238 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

self grow up from the lifeless body of an earthly
parent.

The fact is, Mr. Allen's book, though open in
some places as he himself says to further
question, is a reverent and exceedingly inter-
esting summing up of the discoveries made in
recent years of how religion reached its present
advanced stage. It is as full of curious facts
about theological ideas as Darwin's "Origin of
Species" is about animals and plants. Many
things in our present ecclesiastical customs
otherwise unaccountable and hurtful, are ex-
plained by it as beautifully and satisfactorily
as the fossils of the earth's strata and the
rudimentary organs of the human body are
by geological and organic evolution ; and
rightly viewed the process it describes is no
more degrading to religion than the tracing of
man up from his monster animal ancestors is
to our present human nature.

Then apart from any special theory, the evo-
lution of a natural religion from such un-
promising beginnings is the very thing we
ought to expect, so in harmony is it with the
evolution of all other natural things; and in-
stead of doing away with the need of recogniz-
ing a divine reality behind it, is what implies
in the strongest possible way his actual exist-
ence. For according to the fundamental prin-

THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD 239

ciples of evolution there must have been some
cause for this long and wonderful growth of
its inner God-idea, some, quickening at first by
a suitable environment of its humble germ, and
some corresponding nutriment afterwards for
its development, just as in the evolution of
astronomy there has been the actual sky, and
of electrical science electricity itself. What in
religion could this cause, this environment, this
nutriment have been? What but a divine
spiritual reality? The relation of Mr. Spen-
cer's dreams and shadows and Mr. Allen's dead
bodies and sticks and stones to the actual all-
embracing Deity has possibly been something
like that of foreign bodies, sometimes mere
specks of dirt or wisps of straw, to the solution
out of which crystals are formed. The foreign
substances do not of themselves make the
crystals and are no real part of them when
made, — rather often mar their appearance.
They simply afford the requisite starting points
and stimulants for the formation of them out
of and by the solution itself,— to the chemist's
eye would imply its existence by the use made
of them, even though it could not otherwise be
seen. And though the crystals at first may be
imperfectly shaped, owing to the crowding of
them together and the smallness of the vessel
in which the solution is held, yet, as the vessel

240 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

is enlarged and scope afforded for their full
development, they take more and more their
own special shape independent alike of vessel
and of nuclei and at last show forth, next to
animals and plants, the most beautiful and
wonderful objects of nature. So with the
crude material bodies in the worship of which
religion begins. They are no part of the thing
itself, no indication of what its real divinity
is. They are only the specks and straws for
the mind's surrounding spiritual medium to
start from in forming its conceptions of the
Divine. It is the surrounding spirit which
makes the conceptions, — narrow and crude at
first and partaking, as might be expected of
the impurities and limitations of the minds in
which they are formed and of the objects from
which they began, but gradually getting away
from these, and crystallizing at last, in accord-
ance with the tendency of spirit's own intrinsic
nature, into that idea of God as a heavenly
Father which is so precious a part of our
Christian faith, the whole just as truly a cul-
mination in the process of natural evolution as
anything there is in the outward world, and not
by any means less wonderful or less reliable
because of its unpromising start and of the
strange forms it has taken along its way.

Turning now from this subjective conception

THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD 241

of God as a Father reached by evolution, to
what evolution has to say about his being such
to human beings objectively and in his actual
relations to them as the presiding spirit of the
universe, the first point for comparison is that
of progenitorship, being the source from which
they have naturally come. The relation of an
earthly father to his children begins in his
being their originator ; and this means not that
he has created them artificially, or that he has
spoken them into existence supernaturally, or
that he has adopted them by a legal process
from some other family; but that he and the
mother have brought them forth naturally from
their own bodies and endowed them, in the very
act of doing so, with a part of their own life.
What is this, however, but the very thing evo-
lution teaches was the origin of man? He is
not an artificial product, not something which
was created all at once by a fiat of the divine
will, not a creature who was brought here from
another world, but a being who by a strictly
normal process was evolved out of nature, that
nature, including alike matter and its infinite
and eternal energy, which to science is only
another name for God. What though man
went through a myriad animal forms on the
way? That is what we know now every child
does embryonically in coming from his human

£42 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

parents, — starts on the lowest animal plane as
a mere cell, and unfolds partly before birth and
partly afterwards, step by step through every
stage that Darwin has shown that our race has
passed through in passing from moneron up to
man, some of them so like those of the lower
animals that it is only an expert anatomist can
tell the one from the other. Yet who thinks
that on that account human beings are any the
less his parents ? It is what we start from, not
what we go through along the way, which
determines origin. The most bigoted anti-
evolutionist knows beyond dispute that his
human ancestors a few generations back were
savages. Yet what would he think of a min-
ister who should get up in the pulpit and say,
"The anti-evolutionist looks up into the face of
a savage or a barbarian and says, 'Thou art my
progenitor,' but we Christians look up to the
Infinite and Eternal God and exclaim 'O thou,
our Father which art in heaven.' " Yet how
could this be a particle more absurd than the
implied argument of the minister that because
the evolutionist recognizes anthropoids a little
further back as in his line of ancestors, he is
therefore cut off from believing" that he has a
heavenly parent? The fact is, trace back man
as far as we will through the ages of the past,
his paleontological footmarks all start from

THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD 243

Deity. The life with which he began, though
undoubtedly an evolution, like everything else
in the universe, from a preceding natural state,
must have been not the less an outcome of that
divine life which was never outside even of in-
organic matter; and when what hitherto had
showed itself only as force, shaped on earth its
first protoplasmic cell, — that out of which all
others have come, that which, according to
Weissmann, still survives immortal amid all the
deaths of its myriad descendants, in that cell,
rather than ages after, when it was born a fully
developed human babe, was revealed, so far
as origin is concerned, the Fatherhood of
God.

Again human fatherhood implies some re-
semblance between the child and the parent,
some qualities which are common to them both,
— a likeness between them which is accepted
everywhere as at least one evidence of their
relationship ; and though at first the resem-
blance may be very incomplete, though there
is a wide difference between the statesman
managing the affairs of a mighty nation, and
his little child at home "pleased with a rattle,
tickled with a straw," yet beneath this differ-
ence, as we know, they have the same human
nature, are made of the same substances, body
and soul, and have the same spiritual capacities

244 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

for appreciating the beautiful, the true and the
good.

Evolution disclaims utterly the idea that
God is like man in bodily form, — in limbs and
features, shape and structure. But when inner
qualities are considered, those which are intel-
lectual, moral, emotional and spiritual, is the
difference otherwise than in degree? How do
we get our knowledge, so far as science is con-
cerned, of what God is? Plainly it is by the
study of the universe around us, — this that is
his manifestation and embodiment, this that has
proceeded out of his infinite and eternal
energy. But what is the universe thus open
for our study? Not its matter and force, suns
and stars, cliffs and clods alone ; but with them
its spiritual parts, its men and women, minds
and hearts, virtues and intelligences. And
taking these into the account, regarding them
all as his manifestations, imperfect, to be sure,
yet having some basis in reality, then evidently
there must be a likeness between the Being who
is thus manifested and the human beings who
are at least a part of the objects through
whom and to whom the manifestation comes.
Indeed, what is the science itself that reads the
universe but an evidence of such likeness? The
only way in which we can understandingly read
anything, any book, any picture, any ex-

TPIE FATHERHOOD OF GOD 245

pression on a fellow creature's face, is by virtue
of something which is common to ourselves and
to the one who wrote the book, made the
picture, wore the expression. So with the uni-
verse. Science finds it put together with won-
derful intelligence and wisdom, full of beautiful
pictures, and richly stamped with expressions,
in its human objects, of love, benevolence, sym-
pathy and moral order. What do these mean
but that there must be something in the power
that placed these qualities there which is akin
to what is in the beings who find them there,
something in the Father who writes meanings
in the world's great letter which resembles
what is in the child who is able to read the mean-
ings of the world's great letter? And if along
with the diviner things we find in the universe,
there are mingled some which are brutish, some
which seem to have no resemblance to our
highest conception even of human fatherhood,
may it not be, as explained by evolution,
because the universe as yet, with all its age and
all its grandeur is only at its embryo stage,
only on its way through its brutish forms to
that maturity in which, like the grown man, it
shall be in all respects the image of its great
original ?

But above progenitorship and resemblance,
human fatherhood means love for its offspring,

246 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

a love which shows itself in kindly intercourse
with them as social beings, in provision for their
wants, and in their protection from dangers
and foes, a love which does not depend for its
exercise on their greatness or worth or service,
but on their being his children, and which finds
its reward in the happiness, not of itself, but
of them. Does the father build a house, it is
not more for himself and his wife than for his
children. Does he go forth to toil hard all
day in the shop, the counting-room and the
field? It is that he may earn bread not for
his own mouth merely, but for his little ones
at home. Is a fortune won? Ah, he says,
now I shall have something to leave my boy and
girl. Does danger threaten, sickness assail,
do foes attack? It is their cause he makes his
own, and help to them in some way that he seeks
to give. And does he want companionship and
social delights? There is no wisdom of phi-
losophers, or beauty of poets or graciousness
of kings that he finds so sweet as the cooing
of his little baby tossed in his arms, who can-
not speak a word. What is there in the God
of evolution and science which corresponds
with these qualities of paternity?

Well, no audible speech, no coming home at
night and taking his creatures bodily on his
knees, no rushing out visibly to rescue them

THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD 247

from the earthquake and tornado, robber and
tyrant. But there are other ways in which a
love not unlike that of an earthly parent for
his children is really shown. What is this
whole earth but a mighty house he has built in
which for them to dwell? What are the coal,
and oil and metals and sunshine and air stored
up in it from cellar to ceiling, but his provision
for their wants? What are its myriad laws
and forces, winds and tides, heats and colds,
electricities and magnetisms but the hands with
which he is toiling day and night to promote
their welfare? What poetry and art and
science and civilization and religion but the
fortunes ever larger and larger which he is be-
stowing on each new set of his boys and girls?

To be sure, he makes them work with him to
obtain many of these blessings, and allows them
to fall into dangers, hardships and trials, and
to be overwhelmed with storms, earthquakes,
diseases, injustices and tyrannies without any
visible interferences to give them help. But
in the larger view such things are only the
rougher outside of what within are equally
blessings, are needed even more than the easy,
pleasant things, are to train up their recipients
in the highest degree as his children. Suppose
that he omitted them from his gifts, — did as
some people would have him do, allow his

248 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

creatures to experience only the smooth, soft,
beautiful things of life, what would be the
result? You occasionally see some parents,
mothers especially, who have tried on their chil-
dren that very thing, — have done for them with
their own hands all the work of life, crammed
them with food, provided for them every kind
of! amusement, tolerated without punishment
their wrong doings, and sheltered them from all
hardship and harm. And what has been its
influence on their characters and their real
happiness? Why, there is no malignity of
devils which could have done them such injury,
no incarnations of hate which could have been
more successful in making them sometimes milk-
sops, sometimes knaves and villains, and always
the embodiments of downright selfishness and
conceit.

Fortunately the God of nature is no such
parent, is not a mother, as some would call him,
but a father, one who has the wise and far-
reaching love that when they are needed
supplies his creatures with hardships, puts them
to public school out in the universe, provides
them with the raAv materials of happiness, but
lets them have the added pleasure of manu-
facturing the materials into actual things,
allows them now and then a round of fisticuffs
with the earthquake, tornado, pestilence and

THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD 249

famine, and teaches them the value of liberty,
virtue and right by having them of themselves
knock down tyranny, vice and wrong. It is by
man's wrestling' with things which are often re-
garded as the evidences of a lack in the world
of any paternal care, that he gets not only new
strength for himself, but at their core one of
a Father's strongest protecting arms, and out
of the nettle danger, plucks not only the flower
of safety but a flower which has in it the very
breath also of Infinite Love.

"By adversity are wrought
The greatest works of admiration,
And all the fair examples of renown
Out of distress and misery are grown.
The gods in bounty work up storms about us
That give mankind occasion to exert
Their hidden strength, and bring in practice
Virtues which shun the day and lie concealed
In the smooth seasons and the calm of life."

Yet while recognizing the element of father-
hood even in the most terrible things of nature
to be obtained there by those who overcome
them, it would be wrong to suppose his pater-
nity is only in what is terrible and is only to In-
obtained by his strong and victorious children.
One of the most touching incidents in Homer's
Iliad is where Hector, the Trojan leader, just

250 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

before going out to battle with the Greeks,
comes home to take leave of his child, the
young Astyanax, and, finding the little one
frightened at his nodding plume, takes off his
helmet and lays it aside to let him see only the
father's loving face. Nature is full of scenes
where the eternal captain does the same, —
leads his adult sons to battle with the warrior's
nodding plume, but when he comes to embrace
his little children, takes off his more terrible
accouterments, and appears to them as the
warm sunshine and the pleasant breeze, —
reveals to their weakness in all its beauty that
Father's smiling face which to others he hides
behind a frowning Providence.

There is one thing more implied in all true
fatherhood, which it will not do to leave out of
sight, love and care for its offspring, alike the
older and the younger, not only in the mass,
but also as individuals, not only as so much
childhood, but as so many children. When a
king loves his subjects, or a general his army,
or a philanthropist his race, it necessarily has
to be as a complex whole, with only the merest
fraction of them known to him by name, and
with thousands and millions he has never per-
sonally met, or taken any individual interest in.
But the peculiarity of a father's relation to his
children is that he knows them one by one, has

THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD 251

a name for each, and makes each the object of
a distinct and individual affection.

At first it looks as if nature was the very
opposite of this, concerned herself with things
as a whole, but not with their individual
parts, —

"So careful of the type she seems
So careless of the single life."

But as under the guidance of science we ex-
amine her tendencies more minutely and higher
up, we find that it is preeminently the indi-
vidual she has in view and it is towards him that
all her progress is being made. The universe,
to start with, is a homogeneous mass, and the
first step of all evolution, and one it keeps
repeating wherever there is homogeneity after-
wards, is its differentiation into a multitude of
distinct parts, — into elements, worlds, species,
races, nations, classes and finally individual men
and women, and the giving to each of them its
own distinct life, form and functions, and its
own special food, protection and care. Na-
ture's providence is all "special," and special
beyond anything human fatherhood is ever
capable of. Gravity never forgets an atom of
dust any more than a Jupiter or a sun. The
same skill is used in painting the spots on a
butterfly's wings as in filling the sky with stars

252 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

and the evening twilight with crimson and
gold. The humming-bird and the dove have
been provided with the means of coming down
the ages through the world's great struggle
for existence as safely as the elephant and the
lion. Limbs and senses and brain and soul are
given as carefully to the child which is born
in a hovel as to the one which is born on a
throne. When evolution passes on to its last
stage, that of integration into human society,
it is only to make its wholeness the means of
yet further perfecting its parts. And though
in time individuals die while the race lives on,
yet as the final outcome, everything in evolu-
tion points to the race as what, with a perish-
ing globe, is to perish, and to the individual
souls that age after age are springing from it
and apparently dying, as the products which,
if anything, are in other worlds to live forever,
the supreme objects, therefore, of the world's
paternal care.

It is on these grounds and in these respects,
the respects of origin, likeness, love and indi-
vidual care, that I think we may safely regard
the God of nature and of evolution as a
Father. The word may not express all that
he is known to be in the light of science, or all
of the unknowable that he is made to be in the
darkness of metaphysics, — every father, even

THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD 253

here on earth, having a vast number of other
relations and attributes besides the parental
ones, which go to make up what he is as mer-
chant, mechanic, citizen, friend, neighbor; but
it does set forth one part of what he is, one
that, whatever else about him remains to us un-
known and unknowable, we want preeminently
to be certain about. As a party of botanists
were exploring the hills of Scotland in the in-
terests of their science, they discovered one
morning a rare flower halfway down a steep
precipice, which they were very anxious to se-
cure. But the single rope they had with them
not being strong enough to bear the weight of
a full-grown man, it was proposed to tie it
around a little boy among them, the son of one
of their number, and let him down to where it
was. The boy looked over the brow of the cliff
at the fair flower nodding in the morninir
breeze, and at the awful abyss and jagged
rocks far below it, and for a moment hesitated ;
then turning to the smiling parental face that
bent over him, he bravely answered, "Yes, I
will go, if my father will hold the rope."
Why? Not because there were not arms there
as strong as the father's arm; not because
there were not eyes there as keen as the father's
eye, not because there were not heads there as
cool and well-balanced as the father's head,

254 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

but because the boy felt instinctively that there
was something in the father's heart, a love tie,
a love sight, a love skill mightier than muscle
or eye or brain, which would never, never let
him fall. So with the boy, man swung off by
the God of nature with evolution as the rope
over the abysses of earth and space and time to
pluck the flowers of knowledge, love, grace and
virtue, he can do it without fear because back
of all law and force, it is a Father's hand which
holds the rope.

XIII

A SPIRIT WORLD AS THE NECESSARY

OUTCOME OF THIS WORLD'S

EVOLUTION

Having traced the bearings of evolution on
some of the great problems of religion that are
connected more especially with this present
world and this present life, we come naturally
to its relation with those which open out be-
yond earth and time into a spirit world and a
future life, or, to express it scholastically, to
the eschatology of evolution.

It is a subject whose significance is in some
respects less and in some greater in our day
than it ever was before. Less, because man
and society have now reached a stage in their
evolution at which life here to many persons
is so rich, rounded and complete that they have
little temptation to look beyond it for another
which shall fill out its deficicnces. Greater,
because the very wealth and wonder of what
has been evolved and is yet further to be
evolved, make its final loss seem all the more
255

256 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

terrible, and our interest in its final outcome
all the more absorbing. Immortality and the
spirit world, connected with the idea of an
endless evolution alike to the universe and to
ourselves, mean more, infinitely more, than was
possible when their utmost reach was an ex-
istence and a heaven —

"Beyond the blooming and the fading,
Beyond the shining and the shading,
Beyond the hoping and the dreading/'

mean so much more, that their very greatness
is what most stirs our doubt as to their pos-
sibility. Then there are those affections,
those yearnings to meet and know and love
again those we have met and known and loved
on earth, which are surely not less ardent, not
less characterized with eternity-hunger now
than in the past. And so, taking all together,
I believe that man is asking to-day, if not with
more faith and hope, yet with more eagerness
and desire than ever before, the old, old ques-
tion, If a man die shall he live again?

Four different sources have been recognized
in the past as the ones from which possibly to
get its answer, — one, a supernatural revela-
tion of it by Deity, witnessed to by miracles
and especially by the supreme miracle of
Christ's resurrection from the dead; another

A SPIRIT WORLD 257

the revelation of it by spirits once on earth,
who have returned from beyond its bourne to
tell their friends, yet here, of the world and
life which are there; a third, the soul's direct
perception of it through its own faculties, as
witnessed by the belief in it among all people ;
and a fourth, the intimations and proofs of it
found in the arrangements and outlooks of this
present world.

But as regards the first of these answers
while there are multitudes of people who rest
in it joyfully as the all-sufficient ground of
their faith, there are other multitudes who
under the stress of modern criticism have had
their trust in its reliability greatly weakened.
As regards the second source, while to those
who have in themselves the spiritualistic fac-
ulty, its testimony is very precious and con-
vincing, its value to the world at large has
been utterly destroyed by the unspirituality of
its communications and the immensities of
fraud with which it has been connected ; and as
regards the other two sources, those of nature
and of human nature, their answers hitherto
have been so vague and logically far-fetched
that only a determined believer beforehand could
ever be convinced of their truth. So it is not
strange that with the advent on a stage of this
new source of knowledge, evolution, one that

258 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

reaches back as nothing else has ever done
into the immeasurable past and has given us
so clearly the story of man's origin, there
should have been an eagerness to find out
whether it can reach forward with equal cer-
tainty into the immeasurable future, and solve
in a like manner the problem of man's destiny.
Its first answer, it must be confessed, is any-
thing but encouraging. Directing its in-
quiries to the origin in the human mind of that
belief in a spirit world and a spirit life which
is now so prevalent among all people, instead
of finding it came from a direct perception of
its reality, it has been traced back by Spencer,
Frazer, Tylor, Lubbock and others to the
crudest and most superstitious material
sources, — dreams, shadows flitting over the
ground, breaths of air which could not be seen,
strange noises, and motions of objects without
any apparent mover, trivial things that we
now know well enough must have had a phys-
ical origin; and it has been shown by in-
numerable examples how these early material-
istic impressions have been developed step by
step under the aid of mythology, and of the
poetic imagination, "giving to airy nothings a
local habitation and a name," into our present
refined conceptions of a heavenly world. It is
a most depressing study. Very naturally the

A SPIRIT WORLD 259

reader of its results is led to feel that what
started so evidently as a materialistic miscon-
ception at one end of the line, cannot have
grown into a reliable spiritual reality at its
other end, and that a world whose foundations
rest on a dream must be in its loftiest super-
structure no better than a dream also. We
have exactly the same starting point of super-
stition rising to-day in the mind even of civ-
ilized man. Let anyone be alone at midnight
in a strange house, or walk alone through a
graveyard at that dark and fearful hour
"when injured ghosts complain" and notice
how startling, in spite of all his sceptical phi-
losophy, is every unusual sight and sound.
Read Mrs. Crowe's "Night Side of Nature" in
the night and prevent the hair, if you have got
any, from rising on the outside of your head,
whatever the flatness of your incredulity may
be on its inside.

Butler's Hudebras did not go astray in his
satire when he sang

"Night is the Sabbath of mankind."

And Coleridge's Ancient Mariner had only a
common experience in being

"Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,

260 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

And having cnce turned round, walks on

And turns no more his head,
Because he knows a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread."

With the appearance of the sunlight and the
society of our fellowmen, such sights and sounds
all sink back into their true place as mere phys-
ical phenomena, — are what no enlightened reli-
gion ever thinks of referring to now as any
foundation of its belief in a spirit world. And
why, it is asked, should the faith which has been
evolved out of precisely similar ones existing
among savages thousands of years ago, be re-
garded by us as of any higher authority?

To give a single illustration, — the night
before my father died he told me the story of a
man he knew of when a boy, a rough, dare-
devil sort of fellow, despising all belief in
God and spirits, who had occasion very late one
dark night to pass by the old graveyard in
Ipswich, at that time a very lonesome and neg-
lected spot. When directly opposite to it,
he heard a low, pathetic moan come from over
in its enclosure. Most people about that time
would have hastened their pace if not into a
run yet into a double-quick march. But he
said to himself, "Well, now is a good chance
for me to find out all by myself whether there
are really any such things as ghosts or not,"

A SPIRIT WORLD 261

so he clambered over the wall, and followed the
sound, breaking forth at intervals, till he came
to the door of a tomb. Most of us would
probably have ended our investigations as to
the reality of a spirit world right there, and
have hurried back to our own flesh and blood
world. But this sceptical old man resolved to
see the thing through, so tried to open the
tomb door and get in. But it was locked and
rusty, evidently had not been opened for
years. Nevertheless, with his rattling, more
distinct than ever came forth the pathetic
moan, not exactly human, but enough so to
suggest that it might come out of what was
once a human throat now somewhat dry with
death's dust. With that he climbed up on top
of the tomb, and there found that a part of
it had caved in, leaving a hole large
enough for his body to get through, and out
of which, beyond all question, came the moan,
reminding him of the hymn, "Hark from the
tombs a doleful sound." Afraid if he jumped
in directly, he would never be able to climb out,
he hunted around in the dark till he found a
stick large enough to lay across the hole, then
tied his handkerchief to it and let himself down
into a place a little darker and more forbid-
ding than even Grant Allen has ever pursued
his investigations in, and feeling carefully

262 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

around among the coffins towards the corner
from which at intervals the moan still came,
what do you suppose he found? A little lamb
that while feeding* above, had fallen down
through the opening and broken its leg. I am
glad to say he did not leave the poor creature
there, but clasping his legs about it pulled him-
self out and went whistling home more a scep-
tic than ever, and showing his Christian friends
the next morning the specimen ghost he had
resurrected from a tomb.

How many are the ghost stories and the
uncanny things the world in all ages has been
full of, that, traced to their source, would be
found to have a similar lamb-like origin? And
how natural it is to infer that the belief which
has been evolved from them is equally baseless:
but this is only a superficial inference. Para-
doxical as it is, the physical origin of such
sights and sounds is a vastly better evidence of
a real spiritual world behind them than their
unexplained source would be. For, unless there
had been in man beforehand some dim conscious-
ness of such a world, no mere physical ob-
ject, however strange, would ever have sug-
gested to him the idea of spirit. Such objects
are like the strange woods washed up on Euro-
pean shores in their relation to the discovery of
this new geographical world. They did not

A SPIRIT WORLD 263

make of themselves the belief in its existence.
That belief as a possibility was already in the
mind of a Columbus, introduced there by finer
faculties than those of sight ; and it was that
belief which gave the waifs to him their won-
derful new world significance. So with that
other world across' wider seas whose indications
on these shores of time were, to begin with, so
fearfully crude ; it was faith already in man's
soul which clothed them with a spirit meaning.
Like everything in evolution, it had to begin
with something that was crude and unlike its
full self, — a nebulous mist, a molten globe, a
protoplasmic cell. That non-physical world
we all have within us did the same, all its terms
having a physical origin, and all bearing still
some traces of their lowly birth, — as the under-
standing, that which stands under ; right, a
straight line, wrong, a crooked one ; morality,
outward custom, and the like. And yet who
now on that account believes that what they
stand for intellectually and morally is any the
less distinct reality?

And what is true with regard to those an-
cient things in which faith in a spirit world
began, is true with regard to what are called
our superstitions now. They are not really
superstitions, that is, things standing over
our faith, but substances, things standing

264 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

under it, as the writer of Hebrews uses the
word, that is, the foundation of the higher
things hoped for. Instead of being despised,
they are to be honored, — are worth more than
all the books of theology ever written as proofs
of a spirit world. The subconscious man is
always the true, natural man, is always reli-
gious even when the one above him, the con-
scious man, is an atheist, is often more truly
religious than when the one above him is pro-
fessedly a Christian. We all of us have in this
under personality, not only a marvel of psychol-
ogy, but treasures of knowledge-material with
regard to the past, more wonderful than the
fossils geology digs out of the rocks, more
ancient than any written history, more pre-
cious religiously than any apostolic manu-
scripts found by pious seekers, buried in
Syrian cells. The beauty of them is they are
born anew with every child, are what time never
can crumble into dust. Some day evolution
will learn to read them as one of its richest
chapters. And among them it will find, not
least precious, the indications from the very
start, crude though it be, of a genuine spir-
itual faculty in our human nature:

"Like plants in mines which never saw the sun
But dream of him and guess where he may be,
And do their best to climb and get to him."

A SPIRIT WORLD 265

But this faculty, how did it originate, how
is its existence a proof in any way of an actual
objective spirit world? These are questions
evolution must answer before we can be sure of
a realm beyond matter in which a future life is
possible. They are ones it does answer, and
its answer is, precisely in the same way that
man got his other faculties and is sure of an
objective material world. How did the primi-
tive animal from which man is descended get
its bodily eye? By the action on its general
nervous sensibility of that world of light it was
surrounded with. How its ear? By the action
and in the same way of the atmospheric world
of sound. How his intellectual powers? By
the action of that truth, which is in all things,
on the bit of brain the action of his outer
senses had gradually stored up. It is all ob-
scure as yet, but about the tendency of the
environment to produce changes in the
environed that will bring them into relations
with each other, there can be no question. Wo
see it in the different colors the different seasons
make in the fur of animals at the North; in the
modifications which have taken place in the
whale, once beyond question a land animal, to
fit it for the water ; in the dependence of a
child on the talk of other children to develop
its own powers of speech, and in the need with

266 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

us all of a civilized atmosphere in which to
grow up as civilized human beings. On the
other hand, how can there be any stronger
proof than the eye itself that there is around
it a world of light ; than the ear that there is in
contact with it an atmospheric world of sound,
and our intellectual faculties that the world in
which we live is an intelligible and truth-re-
lated world?

Why now does not the same proof hold good
with regard to the origin in man of spiritual
vision and the existence around him of a spirit
world? When all his other faculties had been
started, his spiritual environment acted on his
inner sensitiveness in the same way that his
light environment had on his original nerve
sensitiveness, and the result was at last an inner
vision for its own diviner radiance. Of course
it was at first very imperfect in its development
and efficiency. Like the bodily eye it would
not recognize itself as a distinct entity, but
only the physical objects that it seemed to be
reflected from. But a beginning had been
made, the origin of a new species in the king-
dom of mind, so that thenceforth it was only a
process of ordinary evolution for it to dis-
tinguish spirit itself from the strange physical
things which aroused it into action, and if we
can trust evolution's law of the environment

A SPIRIT WORLD 267

anywhere, then surely man as a spiritual being
must have, not far away, but right around him,
a spirit world.

The discussion thus far may seem to be a look
backward instead of forward, an inquiry into
the beginning of things rather than into their
eschatology But before showing the possi-
bility of a life beyond this present world, the
first step must evidently be to show the possi-
bility of a world beyond this one into which
for the life which is here to evolve ; and with
such a one shown, and shown also to have be-
gun its work on man already in time, it will be
seen that the presumption of his being des-
tined to enter it altogether at last, is not a
little increased.

Passing now from human nature to inquire
of physical nature through the same inter-
preter what its teaching is as to its having
anything at last to send on into the spirit
world, its answer at first is even more discour-
aging than was the opening result of its in-
quiries within. If the universe is full of
evolution, — forces which build up, it is full
also of dissolution, forces which tear down.

"Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good,
And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the
mud."

268 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

The flower unfolds into beauty but to fade into
dust; the forest into verdure, but to drop into
death ; the animal into strength but to age
into weakness. Mountains, rocks, continents
are only the flowers of a little longer day ;
species, races, nations, only the animals of a
little larger growth. While minds grow god-
like with maturing years and have their
thoughts widened with the process of the suns,
yet as the years ripen more and the suns pro-
ceed farther, even minds sink earthward and
have their thoughts narrowed again. Write at
twenty-five the inspiring words, —

"Not in vain the distance beacons, forward let us
range/'

and at eighty-five the despairing wail, —

"Gone the cry of forward, forward, lost within a
gath'ring gloom."

And with birth, growth and decay the history
of all the separate parts of the universe, how
direct appears the inference that it will finally
be the same with the universe as a whole, its life
wither as the rose, its humanity perish with the
animals from which it sprang, its ripened star
fruit

A SPIRIT WORLD 269

"World by world drop mellowed off
The winkling stalk of time/'

and its mighty trunk, dead at the core and dead
in its every nebulous branch, tumble back like
the tree into the chaos from which it came.

Direct, however, as such an inference seems,
it is really only nature's outside answer, only a
method of condemning superficiality in her stu-
dents such as she uses everywhere. Going
deeper down into her teachings, going, espe-
cially, with evolutionary principles as our
guide, it will be found that nature's old path-
way of death, hitherto so full of darkness, is
itself partly luminous with life's light, that out
of its very decay there shines a mild phos-
phorescent glow. And, faint though it may
be, as compared with what we could wish for,
yet with so many of the other lights paling on
which in the past humanity has relied, it surely
is well to open our eyes as widely as possible
to its revelations.

What, then, is death as interpreted by this
new philosophy? Not the antagonist of life,
not a destroyer who wholly undoes what growth
accomplishes ; but only one of a larger life's
conditions, only a movement one way of a grow-
ing universe's mighty heart-beat. Two of the

270 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

great principles of evolution, as you well know,
are the struggle for existence between different
agencies, and the survival of the fittest. Na-
ture has used these in the realm of animals and
plants between death and unbroken life ; and
paradoxical as it sounds, it is literally true that
death has survived because in the struggle it
has been found the fittest to make animals and
plants live. It has come about in this way:
among the original protoplasmic cells in which
all life began, variation produced some that
continued their lives and produced their off-
spring by simply dividing themselves and never
dying ; others that continued their lives by dif-
ferentiating themselves into two kinds without
dividing, one of which nourished the other and
after reproducing its offspring out of them,
itself died. Some of the first kind, dividing
and redividing as fast as they grew, have come
through all the geologic eons to this day, are
the ones, as Weismann has shown that thus
far have been immortal. But they have never
get beyond their original cell life, — could not,
because simply repeating themselves by divi-
sion they had no extra cells to be used up in
ministering to higher vital functions, no chance
for variation in their offspring, and nothing in
themselves for improved environments to act

A SPIRIT WORLD 271

upon. They are the amoebic forms which are
to be found any summer day in our ditches and
pools, — down there that we have to go to find
earth's genuine immortals, not to any French
academy, — are likewise the world's genuine
conservatives, and real unadulterated first
families.

On the other hand, the cells which began life
with dying are the ones that have forever pro-
gressed. Keeping their differentiations to-
gether they could organize and use a part of
their number up in other functions than those
of reproduction. When the parents died, a
vast amount of the old habits and conserva-
tisms that were fitted only for an old environ-
ment died out of the race with them. W7ith a
new set of cells to be built up around the trans-
mitted ones in each generation, there was a
chance for variation and the new environment
to make improvements. The children to be as
good as their parents, had to be better. So
life has gone on, mounting with each set of
deaths into higher and higher and higher forms,
till it has culminated in man. Do you want to
see the contrast between the outcomes of the
struggle for existence between these two prin-
ciples, dying and continued living, look at a
scientist in his laboratory bending his eyes over

272 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

his 80,000 power microscope and the wriggling
amoeba in its object glass, that he is using all
its powers to see.

It is a process which is still going on in the
man. He lives by dying. The reproductive
cells out of which he is bom remain immortal,
but all the somatic ones by which he grows
and acts, are with every moment having some
of their number used up and replaced by new
ones. That is what eating is — filling up the
ranks of the little killed cell-soldiers in life's
battle with fresh recruits. Love and life have
always been known to have a close connection
with each other. But how? It is through dy-
ing,— the skeleton death the finest who joins
their hands and speaks their benediction. The
undying cells continue life by division, the dy-
ing ones by uniting. The sex relation among
animals came into existence side by side with
their mortality. Strange and wonderful still
is their connection. The thrill of reproduc-
tion is the thrill of death. If to love is to live,
to love is also equally to die. And in science
the real figure of what is called the last enemy
is not a skeleton but the blooming cheek and
rounded limbs of youth filled with that sex at-
traction which draws men and maidens to-
gether,— cupid's arrows that are death's real
darts.

A SPIRIT WORLD 273

It is a law which holds equally good in so-
cial relations and with regard to humanity as
a whole. Individuals, institutions, races, reli-
gions are but larger cells. The conservatism
that would preserve them would keep society
forever in its protoplasmic state. It is by
their dying that the world increases in its finer
life. As Wendell Phillips used to say: "Na-
ture's method of reform is to kill off the old and
train up the young." Humanity's march is a
funeral march, — one-half of all the stepping
stones of progress gravestones, the brightest
vista of earth's future that which opens
through its tombs. We do well to cover our
dead with flowers, well to adorn our cemeteries
with lawns and groves and pleasant things,
for they symbolize as nothing else can, the
ever finer life which is to grow out of them.
Personal mortality written out scientifically
means social immortality ; the burial of the in-
dividual the resurrection of the race. It is
dead lips that speak the world's better proph-
ecies ; the pyramids of Egypt that catch on
their peaks with each rising sun a fairer light
of man's new day than ever flashed on her
thrones.

"My sister sunshine smiled on me,
And of my visage made a shade.

274 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

Behold, she cried, the mystery

Of which thou art afraid.
For death is but a tenderness,

A shadow that unclouded love
Hath fashioned in its own excess

Of radiance from above."

But accepting this as the interpretation which
evolution gives of death in this world and for
the race here, what light, it may be asked, does
it throw on it with reference to another world
and the individual soul? To find it conducive
to a higher life and a blessing on so large a
scale is surely something even in this direction
— affords at any rate the presumption that
what is a beneficence and has an upward trend
for the whole, cannot be entirely the opposite
in its bearing on the parts. Look first and
see what it really does in its dealings with the
parts beginning with the humblest ones, even
here.

The leaves of the tree unfolding into beauty
with the breath of spring, do indeed, with au-
tumn's waning suns, fall withered to the
ground, and to the casual glance it seems as
if the tree which bore them, had returned, at
the year's close, to the exact condition it was
in at the year's beginning. But its condition
is not the same. Something out of each tiny
leaf has gone into the wood of the tree, a bal-

A SPIRIT WORLD 275

ance over death, as it were, the leaf's little
soul,— which is stored up in it as the
stock with which to begin its next year's
growth.

The tree lives fifty, seventy, a hundred years,
and then that too dies. But death even then
does not put things all back where they were
at the start. The soil beneath it is made the
richer by its decaying wood, and its fruit has
gone from year to year as the food of beasts
and birds and as the seed of other trees, and
it is in them that something out of it still lives.
These in their turn perish, but their instincts,
habits, experience, life, — a subtle essence out
of all they have gathered up, is transmitted
to their offspring, helping to develop the spe-
cies, genus, order, to which they belong. Spe-
cies, genus, order in the long course of ages
die out, as in many a "scarped cliff and quar-
ried stone" we have the evidence ; but it is only
to have new ones with an inheritance of what
is best in the old ones born in their place — a
point where Darwin's theory as to the origin of
species supplies grandly what otherwise would
be a missing link. And by and by, as the result
of all these livings and dyings, man becomes a
possibility in nature, man at first, indeed, but
little above the brutes, but by a continuance of
the same process, the living and dying of in-

276 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

dividuals, tribes, nations, civilizations, religions,
each adding something to the stock, man at
last in the full splendor of his nineteenth cen-
tury estate.

All growth repeats thus the growth of a
single tree, is itself really the growth of a
larger tree, the mighty tree Yggdrasil, as our
Scandinavian ancestors called it; all Junes do
what Lowell has sung so poetically of a single
June,

"Every clod feels a stir of might,

An instinct within it which reaches and towers
And groping blindly above it for light,
Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers/'

and then to a soul in man. And it is in man,
individual and social, that the accumulated
essence of all these climbings is stored up, in
his soul that all of them which is finest and
best, freed by their dyings from what was crude
and temporary still lives, an immortality, you
see, infinitely higher than that of the bare origi-
nal protoplasmic cells that death has never
touched.

But what is to be the final result of this
mighty process still going on, what the com-
pleted outcome of these myriad accumulations
of life over death that the world is getting
full of?

A SPIRIT WORLD 277

For awhile the answer, apparently sanctioned
by science, was the unfolding here on earth of
a perfect race, living in a perfect world, a real
Eden in the future that would more than equal
the storied one of the past,

"Every tiger madness muzzled, every serpent pas-
sion killed,
Every grim ravine a garden, every blazing desert
tilled,"

and then the concentration of all nature's
forces ever after in its preservation.

It is a beautiful conception, the coming in-
deed here on earth of a kingdom of heaven,
an immortality not of ourselves as individuals,
but of our race, of all that is best in ourselves
and in all past races going on to live in others,
the immortality George Eliot has sung so
charmingly in her "Choir Invisible."

But it is an immortality that we now know,
as a matter of scientific forecast, can never be
realized. The earth will indeed reach in the
far future its stage not of perfection, but of
betterness, its golden age when all that earth
can be, it will be. But it will not remain at
that stage forever, any more than the October
fruit will always remain on the tree, or the
June sun always in the summer sky. The law
of death will indeed be carried out then the

278 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

same as it is now, — after ripeness decay, after
evolution dissolution. Humanity will become
an old man, society a withered flower, civiliza-
tion a fallen tree, the world a dilapidated
house. A time will come when its last child will
be born, its last love-word spoken, its last man,
sole heir of all its treasures, look over his king-
dom, a time when the earth itself shall be a
vast tomb without a breath of air to stir its
stillness or a falling raindrop to break its peace,
a time when this whole material universe, its
every sun expired, its every motion made, sink
back to that from which it came. And with
such a fate before it, evidently we must seek
some other answer than that of a continuance
here for all that evolution through the ages
has accumulated in human souls. What else
must it be, — the death of these also, the ab-
sorption of them back into Deity, or like a
flame the blowing of them out altogether?

It is an answer that in the light of evolution
has a meaning of horror to it such as it never
did before, one against which man's whole
moral nature, one of the choicest products of
evolution, instinctively revolts, one which
makes the universe a tragedy in comparison
with which all the tragedies ever enacted in it,
sink into insignificance. Think for a moment of
all the enormous cost at which even up to what

A SPIRIT WORLD 279

it is now, it has been evolved, — of the myriad
brutes that toiled on its foundations before the
advent of man, and of the myriads since, that
have died to furnish it with food ; of the sav-
age races that groped their way through the
chill and dark of long glacier ages and super-
stition's nights to civilization's dawn; of the
mothers who have travailed in pain to bring
forth its children; of the workmen who have
wrought in weary mines and fields and factories
to heap up its material treasures ; of the vast
armies that have fought and bled and died in
battle agonies to decide its questions; of the
horrible sufferings that have come from its ac-
cidents ; of the thinkers and scholars who have
delved and soared, and line by line have sought
out its truths; of the singers whose inspired
souls have poured out its treasures of poetry
and song, and of the martyr throngs who gen-
eration after generation have laid down their
property, their lives, their all, on its altars of
liberty, religion and reform; — and what, with
such an ending, is the good, at last, of their
life-long toil, what the advantage, when the
summing up comes, of the martyr's devotion and
the patriot's zeal, what the difference weighed
in their final dust between virtue and vice,
saint and sinner, Jesus and Judas, a life among
the stars and a life among the clods?

280 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

"Spring, summer, autumn and winter, and all these

revolutions of the earth,
All new, old revolutions of empires, — change of

the tides, — what is all of it worth?
What the philosophies, all the sciences, poesy,

varying voices of prayer,
All that is noblest, all that is basest, all that is

filthy and all that is fair?
What is it all, if we all of us end but in being our

own corpse coffins at last,
Swallowed up in vastness, lost in silence, drowned

in the deeps of a meaningless past?
What but a murmur of gnats in the room, or a mo-
ment's anger of bees in a hive?"

Of course the difference between them is im-
mense as we go along ; of course, taken day by
day and hour by hour, it is better to do right
than wrong, live nobly than live meanly; and
with all the world's sorrow and pain, it must
from the very start have had a preponderating
amount of happiness, otherwise it never would
have evolved at all.

But this alone does not satisfy — does not
really give any meaning to an evolution which
in the end evolves nothing. It takes something
more than happiness, more even than virtue's
happiness, to make life worth living, takes an
object ahead for the virtue to enable virtue to
be really happy, or, perhaps, even to exist at all.

A SPIRIT WORLD 281

A poor tramp, asking of a man something to
eat and set by him to wheeling sand from one
side of the road to the other and back again
over and over, to earn the food, after trying
it a few times rebelled at the task, and asked
for something, even though harder, that would
be of some use. "Why," asked his employer,
"what difference does it make whether you
wheel sand back and forth, or dig a well, so
long as I pay you for it the same wages?" He
could not explain the difference in words, but
he felt somehow in his miserable tramp soul
that there was a difference, and that a life spent
so would be more thoroughly a waste than to
stroll along the country roads, doing nothing,
or to lie down at once in the desert dust and
die. What now is a universe beginning and
ending in fire-mist but such a shoveling of its
atom sand from one side of eternity to the
other, all without final use and having its myriad
shovelers do it simply to get their meals? And
however excellent the meals may be as the work-
men go along, having evm happiness for one of
their viands, who will not say with the tramp,
that rather than waste life so, if would have
been better to have had its potencies lie down
forever undeveloped in their original atom
heap ?

Directly opposite to this is the answer that

282 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

evolution must necessarily give to the question
of what is to become of its gains, stored up
human souls, when this material universe shall
reach its end. To say that they are to end
and that out of what held them nothing is to
come, is to contradict its own fundamental
teaching as displayed everywhere else, — is to
make nature after acting for countless years
along the line of evoking out of every other
death some higher forms either of life, or of
life's dwelling, when it comes to the highest and
finest thing of all, a universe, reverse its prac-
tice, give up its principle. If true to itself,
it must say, rather, that as out of the myriad
dying things of the past, — seeds, animals, na-
tions, races, civilizations, religions, there have
come, as a rule, ever other finer and better
things up to mind and soul, so when the en-
casements of mind and soul, including the world
itself, are destroyed, out of their d}7ing, by the
same law, there will come something finer and
better still, into which their life, their growth,
their essence shall go.

What can this finer thing be? Nothing
made of matter, for in the final dissolution all
material forms must necessarily disappear.
What but the spiritual part of the world, the
human souls, in which the finer results of evolu-
tion are already stored up, leaving the material

A SPIRIT WORLD 283

universe to be resolved back to its nebulous
mist and possibly to be used over and over
again, as the elements of our bodies now are,
for the evolutions of other and yet other ad-
ditions to the spirit world, or, as a field is, on
which in time's unnumbered larger years for
repeated crops of souls to be raised?

It is not an answer that gives us all the par-
ticulars that we may wish to know, is not one
that is without some very decided limitations in
its scope. But it docs give us the central
truth that we want assurance of and it carries
with it, if not directly, yet by implication a war-
rant for not a few of our great hopes. It
will be a better state than our present one, for
that is what in the past all evolution has meant.
Yet not a new and strange one, for its begin-
nings are what we have become familiar with
here on earth. Its immortality will be indi-
vidual and personal, for it is in individuals and
persons, as the highest outcome of evolution,
that what it is constituted of is stored up here;
and with no new beings born out of them, as
they are in the continuation of life and its
qualities in the natural world; with the new
birth, as we know it already, the birth <>f new
spiritual faculties in the individual soul,— the
only conceivable way of an evolution from
earth into the spirit world is through tin's

284 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

world's conscious spiritual beings. And as
what is possible for one soul quickened with
spiritual life, must be possible for all souls in
a like manner quickened, and as we have the
evidence on earth that evolution does not wait
for the perfecting of the old before starting
the new, physical life appearing long before
the completion of the physical earth, — the child
before the parents' maturity, and the fruit of
the tree while the tree itself is yet growing,
so it is a legitimate inference that the evolution
of spiritual beings into the spirit world should
not wait till the far-off ripening of humanity's
stock on earth, but should begin with its first
dying child.

All honor, then, to the philosophy which gives
the world this ray of new light, imperfect
though it is, on that old, old way, so dim and
to many so dark, which all earth's children
sooner or later have to travel. It derives it,
as you see, not from a miracle, or from the in-
terference in any way with the common laws of
nature, and not by bringing in any new force
or principle, but from nature's ordinary work-
ing and by supposing it to go right along,
using the forces and principles it has been act-
ing on from the starting of its first atom feet,
— justifies the poet's words.

A SPIRIT WORLD 285

"Gone forever! Ever? No—for since our dying
race began
Ever and forever was the leading light of man."

It takes the material world at its darkest place,
its myriad dissolutions, and out of its very
deaths wrings the lessons of life, — grapples the
most terrible weapon of doubt and turns it into
a beam of faith. It has a ray of light, also, not
for humanity alone, but for all other animal
creatures walking with it the same dark way,
gives a meaning to their lives, their toils, their
deaths such as nothing else ever has, makes the
spirit world the outcome, not of human growth
alone, but of the whole earth, something to
which the lowest monad as well as the loftiest
man has contributed a part. For as the best of
everything which has ever lived has remained
over and helped to make human beings and hu-
man conditions and is represented in their lives
now, so it will have helped to make all that
human beings will ever be, however high they
mount, and will be represented in them through
all years and all worlds. It gives animals, if
not individual immortality, yet the immortality
which comes from "the sweet presence of a good
diffused and in diffusion ever more intense";
is the scientific endorsement of Tennyson's

286 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

hopeful trust, that "not a worm is cloven in
vain;" is a side truth from Darwin's maligned
"Origin of Species" which lights up religiously
what realms of nature's economy as to brute
suffering hitherto so awfully dark; and under
it Emerson's mystic words as to nature's inner
meaning become how literally true.

"Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know
What rainbows teach and sunsets show,
Verdict which accumulates
From lengthened scroll of human fates,
Voice of earth to earth returned,
Prayer of saints that inly burned, —
Saying what is excellent
As God lives is permanent?"

XIV

THE WARRANT FOR PRAYER UNDER
EVOLUTION

The problem of prayer, and especially of its
petitioning element, is unquestionably one of
the most difficult to the modern thinking mind
of any in the whole range of theology. There
are many persons, not sceptics or sinners, but
cordial believers and doers of religion in its
other parts, who feel that its praying for di-
vine favors is the mere tradition of a darker
age, inconsistent with the larger views of Deity
and of the divine economy that men have come
to in our time, and is what reverence itself
demands should be eliminated alike from pri-
vate and public worship. Said a respected
parishioner to me awhile ago, "I do not see how
you as a believer in science and evolution can
ask things of God whose giving would be a di-
rect violation of their most fundamental prin-
ciples ; and for one instead of such prayers I
wish you would offer for our meditations simply
some noble thoughts or lofty aspiration." Its
287

288 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

practice has actually been given up by many
liberal thinkers ; and there are others, not yet
prepared to drop entirely out of their worship
what custom has so long endeared, who would
compromise the matter by asking simply for
spiritual blessings, or by expecting answers to
their petitions only in their reflex influence on
themselves, or by making their prayers consist
wholly of thanksgiving and praise.

But the asking element, though not by any
means the whole of prayer, is historically its
root and starting point. Whatever else it may
unfold into, there are times in every person's
life when it becomes the central and all-ab-
sorbing thing; emergencies when the soul feels
it must have not only communion with God, but
the direct help, also, of his everlasting arm ; and
even to have it exert a beneficial influence on the
petitioner himself there must be in it the sin-
cerity which can come only from a belief in its
outward efficacy.

It is a matter with regard to which science
has indeed hitherto spoken with a most
discouraging voice; but science and es-
pecially science in its new garb of evolution,
has here, the same as in many other places, two
voices that are in some respects directly the op-
posites of each other. It is the most radical
and destructive, and also the most conservative

THE WARRANT OF PRAYER 289

and protective, of all forms of thought, — tears
off ruthlessly the outside of ancient things, but
often keeps its grip on their core when every-
thing else, even the most backward-looking
philosophy, has given them up, scatters the
petals of religion on the ground, as nature is
now doing those of the apple tree, but only to
unfold beyond them as the apple tree will, the
more precious fruit. It seems to me it does so
with prayer; and in discussing the subject I
want first to set forth the difficulties it puts in
the way of its being answered, and then
the finer voice with which it tells us, as a part
of itself, that it has in a large way always been
answered.

Foremost of its difficulties is the modern
view of what the universe really is and of how
its affairs are carried on. The view under
which prayer originated was that of the world
as a comparatively small abode consisting of
various independent realms, each presided over
by its own special deity who conducted its af-
fairs, like a human absolute sovereign, by the
direct edicts of his will ; and under such a view
of it there was of course no inconsistency
in a person's asking his god to do for him one
thing rather than another, and to favor his
own subjects rather than those of a foreign
deity. But under our modern scientific view

290 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

the universe consists of a myriad worlds cor-
related with each other in a vast system whose
Deity is one all-pervading spirit conducting
its affairs by laws and forces which are inher-
ent in the thing itself; and to ask to have any
event in it made different from what it would
naturally be, is apparently to ask to have a
new force introduced into it and to have all
subsequent events in it made different from
their natural course, that is, means an alteration
in the very constitution of the universe.

Then, assuming the possibility of such an-
swering so far as Deity is concerned, the dif-
ficulties are equally great in the way of its
being of any real benefit to man. In the mad-
dening maze of things who, as a finite being, can
know what to pray for as his real good? How
true are the words that

"We, ignorant of ourselves,
Beg often for our harms";

and if, to prevent our being cursed by the
granting of our requests, we add at the end
of them as we ought, "Thy will and not mine
be done," why should we not rest in its being
done at the start? Why be to all the trouble
of asking our own will to be done only to wind
up with asking it not to be?

But man is not one alone. The world is full

THE WARRANT OF PRAYER 291

of diverse and clashing interests, some persons
praying for one thing and some for another,
and how can all be granted their requests, how
any of them without an unfatherly partiality?
If the prayer be that he will answer the most
deserving, what does it imply but the idea that
if he was left to himself he would not do so?
Or if Dr. Bushnell's notion be accepted that
he goes by the will of the majority, what
becomes of the doctrine that prayer is
the special resource of the weak and soli-
tary?

Men, in planning their business, need a rea-
sonable assurance as to the regularity and uni-
formity of nature's laws and forces ; but if this
regularity and uniformity are liable to be in-
terfered with in some emergency by the grant-
ing of prayers, so they cannot be depended
upon, how great to the rest of God's children
would be the harm. Suppose, for instance,
that after the weather office at Washington had
made up its indications for the day and tele-
graphed them all over the country, some humble
Christian in Connecticut who wanted rain, or
some pious farmer in Massachusetts desiring
sunshine, should be able to get his wish granted
by kneeling down to "move the arm which moves
the world," what would the indications be worth,
— what help to the merchant who was planning

292 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

to send his ship to sea, or even to the Sunday-
school children who were in doubt about start-
ing out on their picnic?

Then as regards the influence of such peti-
tions on the prayer-maker himself, — if always
answered, would not the answering as the easiest
way of getting things done, almost inevitably
slacken his own exertions and in the end make
him a mere parasite on Deity ; and if answered
only occasionally, would not the omissions
sooner or later catch him at a time when his ex-
pectation of an answer had led him to neglect
the precaution he otherwise would have used,
so result in a loss that would offset all his gains?
A few years ago, while a party of children were
playing on the banks of a Western river, one of
them fell into its waters and had just lost con-
sciousness, when he was seized and dragged a-
shore by a noble dog which came bounding along
— life was not yet extinct and, if his playmates
had been only ordinary unsanctified little boys
and girls, they would at once have obeyed the
prompting of their natural hearts to rush off
to the nearest residence for human help. But
they were all nice Sunday-school children taught
to look to God for help in emergencies, so they
at once knelt around him in pra}-er to God for
his restoration, sentimentally a beautiful sight,
but scientifically the worst thing possible, for

THE WARRANT OF PRAYER 293

when at last older people came, it was too late
to use natural means, and the prayer's answer
was a dead child. A similar thing has hap-
pened again and again to adult devotees. It
was experienced in Montreal, a few years ago,
on a terrible scale when its more ignorant
Roman Catholic population insisted on trusting
to the intercession of their priests to save them
from the smallpox, rather than to the skill of
physicians ; and everywhere the disposition to
rely on it is one of the greatest obstacles sani-
tary science finds in its way.

It needs to be said, also, that the difficulties
in the way of prayer are not confined to peti-
tions for material blessings, but are equally
strong against those for spiritual good. The
unseen world, so far as we know anything about
it, is not a separate system of the universe but
is under the same reign of law and order, cause
and effect, as its visible counterpart. To the
larger view it is just as much an interference
with the established divine economy to pray
for a descent of the spirit as to pray for a
descent of rain, just as demoralizing to a man
for him to depend on the gift of a revival to
get him out of sin as on the gift of health to
get him out of disease, or of a miracle to
get him out of drowning; and taking these dif-
ficulties all together, it is no wonder that

294 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

thoughtful men have been staggered as to the
value of supplicatory prayer.

What has science to say on the other side?
It begins with saying simply this, — that man
is a being not of reason and understanding
alone, but of instinct and impulse also, and that
prayer, its asking element especially, is one of
the great primal instincts of our human nature,
one of those things like eating and drinking,
laughing and crying, loving and living, to which
lie is moved, not by any knowledge of their use
coming from without, but by an impulse to it
coming from within. Men in all ages, all lands,
all religions, have prayed. It is not an artificial
act imposed on the world by bibles, churches and
priests, but a prompting of the soul out of which
bibles, churches and priests arose; and though
with the progress of civilization and the smooth
play of our ordinary life it may seem to be lost,
yet in all times of danger and distress, when the
depths of our being are thrown open and that
deeper subconscious self, which in all of us lies
beneath the surface conscious one, asserts itself,
it reappears as strong as ever, and man in spite
of learning, logic, atheism, sin, breaks forth
into prayer.

What does this mean? Until recently it was
supposed to have no meaning at all, or, at any
rate, as against the deductions of reason and

THE WARRANT OF PRAYER 295

the understanding, to be only as a feather
against the universe, or as the mind of a brute
against the mind of a man. But within the
last few years science, under the guidance of
evolution, has been studying the instincts alike
in brutes and in man, and it finds them full of
profoundest meaning, finds truths in them
equaling all that logic and learning in their
farthest bounds have ever reached. Man's con-
scious faculties, his memory, judgment, reason,
imagination, the ones that of old were thought
to be so godlike and whose deliverances received
such exclusive attention, are now beginning to
appear as only the outside of the mind, only as
the sunlit peaks of a mountain, as compared
with the immensity of the earth out of which
they spring and the grandeur of the heavens
to which they point. Who has not stood under
the glittering skies some clear summer night,
and set his eyes wandering and his thoughts
leaping and his soul wondering, first among the
starry orbs within his sight, then beyond our
own galaxy, beyond the farthest nebula, beyond
anything the telescope's keen vision or the
camera's patient retina has ever reached, into
that vastness of space where the flight even of
thought grows weary, and not been thrilled
with the mystery which in spite of science,
rather all the more through science, there still

296 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

is in our physical universe? But under these
later investigations we are finding that it is yet
more thrilling, more suggestive, more an appeal
to wonder and worship to stand on the shore of
our own souls and look off beyond sense, beyond
reason, beyond memory, beyond any faculty of
the mind we are conscious of, into that vast
spiritual realm that is a part even of the
humblest human being.

The instincts belonging to this realm of the
unconscious self are now known to be inherited
habits, — faculties as old as our race, some of
them as old as life itself. They began as con-
scious acts needed for food, defense and the
keeping of their possessor physically alive.
Thev were done over and over till the prompt-
ing to them became fixed in the individual doer,
and as such was transmitted to its offspring.
Those that kept them up survived as being the
fittest; those that failed to keep them up
perished in the struggle for existence with no
offspring, as being the unfit, and so generation
after generation they have come down to our
day as the inborn means by which every crea-
ture is enabled to live. The wild goose takes
its flight north or south with each changing
season because it is the descendant of geese
which among the many that tried other direc-
tions and so were lost, found these to be the

THE WARRANT OF PRAYER 297

ones by which to get their requisite food and
surroundings, and did it year after year, and
flock after flock, till it became a habit fixed in
their blood. The newborn babe when hungry
or hurt or in danger, cries out for its mother
to feed it and save it, because it is the descend-
ant of babes who, ages ago, out in their wilder-
ness home, found such crying to be the surest
way of attracting the mother's attention, the
ones who did not so cry being the ones who
oftenest perished. Why does the man who
falls into the water, or into danger of any
kind, instinctively cry out for human help,
even when no human help is in sight? It
is because men in past ages, placed in like
circumstances, have found that the cry as
a whole, though amid many disappointments,
has been of some avail in bringing them
assistance. So with their cries to God, even
when no God is seen or believed in. They
are the voices of the race ; and they are uttered
— there is and can be no other explanation
— because the race amid a myriad disappoint-
ments has found that somehow they had a
saving power, and because those parts of the
race which uttered them the most, are the ones
that amid a myriad dangers have pulled
through.

The praying which has thus come down to us

298 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

as an instinct of the race, is of course based on
the old idea of its gaining an outside super-
natural help, and as such it has to be held, as I
have shown, in direct opposition alike to the
science and religion of our day. But now ad-
mitting this, the question further arises, is this
idea absolutely essential to prayer, or is it
possible to drop it so as to harmonize the two
things and to still retain its real life? What is
the essential thing about prayer to God? Not
surely the formal asking of him for a blessing ;
not the idea of its coming from without nature ;
not the idea that it must be entirely a gift. It
is simply a desire for it directed towards him,
wherever he is, and to have it come through
him by whatever means. As the familiar hymn
expresses it, —

"Prayer is the soul's sincere desire
Uttered or unexpressed,
The motion of a hidden fire
That trembles in the breast."

And as Coleridge has said, —

"Ere on my bed my limbs I lay
It hath not been my use to pray
With moving lips or bended knees,
But silently by slow degrees,
My spirit I to love compose
In humble trust my eyelids close

THE WARRANT OF PRAYER 299

With reverential resignation,
No wish concerned, no thought expressed,

Only a sense of supplication,
A sense o'er all my soul impressed
That I am weak, yet not unblessed,
Since in me, round me, everywhere
Eternal strength and wisdom are."

And this desire, this inward sense of supplica-
tion, is what underneath all its supernaturalism
has existed in all ages and all lands as the real
heart of prayer, this with all its supernat-
uralism stripped off that may still remain as
strong a light as ever.

The element, however, thus found in it is not
only reconcilable with reason and science, but
is demanded by them everywhere as one of the
most vital elements of all success. Desire, ambi-
tion, the earnest craving for a thing "uttered
or unexpressed," this is the primal source of all
getting, this the thing in the farmer, the
mechanic, the artist, the scholar, the Christian,
without which labor, acquaintance with the laws
and forces of nature, preaching, the faculty of
reason, and belief in right, truth and God, are
of but little use. A man may be equipped with
everything else, a good body, keen senses, a
brilliant mind, and a noble soul ; but, if he has
no desires for anything, no inward heart of
prayer for it, nothing will ever be attained.

300 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

It is desire, not in the language of prayer-
meetings alone, but of all science, which "moves
the arm which moves the world." The whole
universe is divided between this element of
prayer on the one side, and its answer on the
other. Every planet and every atom asks for
companionship; every blade of grass for the
sunshine, every flower for the dew, every insect
for its food, every animal for growth and hap-
piness, every faculty of our being for the means
of life; and when man voices his asking in the
words of prayer, instead of its being unwar-
ranted by anything which science can find in
nature, it is only his part of a grand litany in
which every living thing from animalcule to
angel, joins, and whose answer God is giving in
every^ thread of gravity, every drop of dew,
every ray of sunshine, every throb of love,
every word of truth, every resurrection of
springtime and every raising him to himself.

But still, it may be said, admitting all this,
admitting that the essence of prayer is desire
and as such is rational, why not call it desire?
Why not cherish and nourish it like all other
desires, with its own appropriate food? Why
not direct it like all other desires, to its own
special objects, — the desire for food to food,
the desire of truth to truth, the desire for good-
ness to what is good? Why call it a prayer

THE WARRANT OF PRAYER 301

and direct it to a God? The question is
a fair one, is the last link in the chain of a
prayer's logic, often, however, left unforged ;
and is capable, I believe, of a full scientific
answer.

How is it that our desires are nourished,
strengthened and directed to their appropriate
objects? One way is by their use, by the culti-
vation of those special faculties which lead to
them, and by the food for them which exists
naturally in those objects themselves. For
instance, if a man wants more truth, he turns
his desires for it in that direction, cultivates
his intellectual faculties, and uses each item of
truth which is attained, as the food with which
to nourish his desire for more. But this is only
a part of the process. Another thing needed
is quickening, inspiration, enlightenment, and
the enlarging, refining and uplifting of the
whole soul. We know how it is with the mind,
know how much brighter, quicker, more eager
for truth, and more capable of its discernment
it is at one time than at others. Why? Not be-
cause the mind itself is changed either as to its
desires or faculties ; but because it is inspired,
touched somehow by an influence from the out-
side which is breathed into itself. So with all
our faculties, even down to our muscles and
nerves ; their strength and capacity depend not

302 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

on themselves alone, but on something which
operates upon them from without, almost as
much as the organ's music does on the bellows'
breath. What is the source of this quickening?
What but that great Divine Spirit which is all
around us, in matter, in nature, in food, in love,
in truth, in everything, that wonderful some-
thing whose existence no science can deny, which
is recognized by Spencer and Darwin as much
as Jesus and Paul, and in which philosophy and
religion alike say we live and move and have our
being, that breath which makes the great organ
of the universe alive with music, and that
radiance which is

"The master light of all our seeing
The fountain light of all our day."

And how are we to draw it from this great foun-
tain and make it available for our individual
enlightenment and inspiration? How conscious-
ly, but through prayer? We know how it is with
the illuminating gas of our cities. Out from its
great reservoir there is a network of pipes going
to every house, some larger and same smaller,
some clear and some choked with dust, and
ample pressure to send it into every cellar and
attic as well as every parlor. But this alone is
not enough. To have it illumine, the stop-cock
at the end of the pipe must be turned and the

THE WARRANT OF PRAYER 303

match applied. And all this is voluntary.
The citizen can live without it, grope around
with a taper, or by the aid of his other senses
do some things in the dark. But when the stop
is turned and the match applied, what an in-
spiration it is ! How much better he can see
to work, to eat, to read, to play, to do every-
thing! And to use it thus who will say it is a
mere superstition? Who that we might as well
direct our desire for light at once to the light,
rather than use the network of gas pipes?
Who say that the whole thing is not a grand
outcome of true science? So with prayer.
There is a spiritual network of communion
between our souls and the great illuminating
Light of the universe, something which runs to
every race and every man ; and prayer is the
stop-cock with which to turn it on. We can
live without it, can gratify many of our desires
by directing them right to food, love, truth and
goodness themselves, can grope around with our
ordinary senses and do some work. But to
turn on the divine light, to have our whole
being filled with its radiance, — who cannot see
how philosophical it is that it should help us
the better to eat, read, work, play, do every-
thing? Who not see that desire expressed in
this way may be certainly not less effective than
that which goes for them directly, in securing

304 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

us food, truth, love and goodness, all, too, in
perfect harmony with the laws alike of material
and human nature?

Or take another analogy, that of air. It is
not muscle or nerve or brain or bone or soul or
any part of man himself. It cannot be used
directly to run with, or read with, or see with,
or work with, or love with; and though it is all
around us, a person ignorant of its real prop-
erties, who wished for help in his pursuits,
might well sneer at its value. But we all of us
know practically that it is to us the very breath
of life; that muscle, nerve, bone, brain, every-
thing depend on it for their efficiency; that, if
a man desires to run, read, see, work, love or do
anything, he must first of all desire air; and
that though the lowest animals, the amoeba,
rhizopod and sponge, and even the embryo
child, may exist without any lungs for it, yet
that they are developed and increase just as we
go up the scale of being, and that they reach
their full evolution only in perfect man. So
with prayer. It is indeed "the Christian's vital
breath" ; is the process by which the soul takes
in the spiritual atmosphere that is all around it.
The inspiration it gives is felt in our study,
work, amusement, everything we do, giving an
answer to our desires for them so, as no direct
reaching out of our faculties to them could.

THE WARRANT OF PRAYER 305

And though a man may get along without it to
some extent, it is only as the rhizopod and
sponge, without breathing, and, as we mount
up into science and civilization, we shall evolve
not out of it, but like the physical man, into its
larger, deeper, fuller use.

And now, friends, have I not given you a
good, honest, rational and scientific justification
of prayer, recognized all its difficulties and in-
congruities, but met them with laws and facts
en the other side that are equally solid and in-
surmountable, shown that the only thing needed
to make it harmonize with the evolution of the
outward world is the parallel evolutions of its
own intrinsic meaning, and found a place for
it alike in our deepest instincts and our loftiest
and broadest philosophy? It is thus, as I
understand, which is in the true line of evo-
lution, not to root up and tear out and throw
away the old growths of the world anywhere,
but to throw off their old husks, unfold them
into richer and diviner meanings, and reap from
them new blossoms and new fruit. And, meet-
ing together from Sunday to Sunday, as pro-
gressives, liberals and evolutionists, instead of
relaxing or giving up prayer, shall we not on
this very ground, lift up our common wants all
the more to him who is the God alike of science
and Scripture, and who, as one result of this

306 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

very evolution, has enabled us to proclaim "Thy
servant, Lord, hath found it in his heart to
pray."

"For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If having hands they lift them not in prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them

friends,
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God."

And the instinct in the human soul which
prompts it with life's changing seasons to take
its flight in the direction of the spirit world,
and in God's child, when hungry or hurt or in
danger, to cry out to him for help, must have
had a similar origin. Men pray because they
are the descendants of ancestors who somehow
found praying a help to them in keeping alive,
they being the ones naturally who would have
children to transmit it to, so that at last it
became fixed in their race, while the ones who
did not use this means of help would be the ones
naturally to die out and to leave no descendants.
There is no other way of accounting for its
origin, and this does account for it perfectly.
It is what the doctrine of natural selection and
survival of the fittest means, the survival not
only of species, but of habits, forms, faculties,

THE WARRANT OF PRAYER 307

morals, tastes, religions, everything in him which
has been of use for safety and sustenance. Its
survival is the best possible proof that it has
been of such use. And to apply it to prayer
is not forcing its meaning, not making an ar-
gument of it which is unnatural and far-fetched,
but is simply coordinating it with its use in
relation to all the rest of our nature and all
through the organic world.

What though its help in continuing life, as
compared with that of the strong muscle and
the active brain, may have been small. Nature
is full of instances, as Darwin has pointed out,
where other things as slight as this, an extra
feather in the wing, or finer color in the feather,
a sweeter tone in the voice, an upward look in
the eye — have proved the very additions needed
to enable their possessors to come off as victors
over their competitors in the struggle for exist-
ence,— shows us the lily and the dove as
survivors of the paleoron and the pterodactyle,
shows us even in human history, Greek swords
edged with patriot love, and Cromwellian
soldiers weaponed with a psalm, as more than a
match for Persian hosts and roj^al guns ; and
it well may have been that the white wing of
prayer, the gentle tone of entreaty, the upward
look of supplication, devotion's lily and re-

308 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

ligion's dove, have proved of like help in secur-
ing a like survival in the case of man.

It is this, as it seems to me, that is the deeper,
sweeter, more trustworthy voice of science with
regard to prayer. It does not directly refute
the objections that are urged against it by its
other voice, does not present special instances
here and there of its being answered, but it
goes back of them all and shows the whole
human race as a proof of its value, shows not
by a long chain of reasoning but by a logic
which has only one link, the shortest, perhaps,
in all the realm of dialectics, that the best proof
of its being answered is its being asked. Talk
of giving it up now as passed, and as having
no standing place in science ! Why science has
only just reached out to the realm where its
roots really are, has just become large enough
itself to afford it room. It finds its seat to be
in the oldest part of our nature, in that which
goes down through all the strata of conscious
life to its primal fires, not likely, therefore, to
be blown away by any surface storms. With
Emerson it says, —

"The litanies of nations came
Like the volcano's tongue of flame
Up from the burning core below, —
The canticles of love and woe."

THE WARRANT OF PRAYER 309

And whatever may be the difficulties of the mind
and the understanding as to its answers, it
would have us keep up its practice for the very
reason given in the old Scripture words that I
have taken as a text, because "Thy servant
Lord hath found in his heart to pray."

XV

THE NEW MEANING AND POSITION OF
WORK UNDER EVOLUTION

Doubts about prayer are strongly felt in our
day, but the problem of work, so often set up as
the easy alternative of prayer, is one which to
a vast number of people in our time is infinitely
greater and more perplexing, and more in need
of light. The difficulties connected with prayer
are in regard to its relations with the material
order of the universe, how to adjust it to the
reign of law, to the idea of God as a perfect
Creator, and to the growth and use of man's
scientific and rational powers, and are largely
theoretical. The difficulties connected with
work are in regard to its relations with the
world's moral economy, how to adjust to the
reign of love, to the idea of God as a con-
siderate Father, and to the growth and use of
man's moral and spiritual faculties, and are in-
tensely practical. Whether or not to pray is
a matter of free choice, is what comes up for

decision only now and then in some quiet hour
310

WORK UNDER EVOLUTION 311

of meditation or some rare emergency of peril,
and is often only a question of pleasant
curiosity. Whether or not to work is a matter
where the choice is necessity; is what has to be
answered afresh every day and every hour, and
is a question of life or death. A person may be
an infidel with regard to prayer, may never
bend the knee at home for its blessings, or join
with others at church in asking for its objects,
and his penalty is only the loss of some spiritual
good now, or the threat of some physical woe
in the far-off future ; but let him be an un-
believer with regard to work, refuse to bend his
back to it in solitude, or ask for it with others
in society, and instantly its penalty comes in
hunger, suffering and death. And where there
is one man or woman who is wrestling with the
knotty points of prayer as a means of obtain-
ing good, there are millions who are being
crushed in their struggle with work as a means
of getting from God the things they need. It
is no wonder that a friend said to me: "What
the most of us in the Christian Church and every
other want to drop is not our prayers, but our
work; what we want justified by religion, not so
much our litanies as our labors." Is there any
light which modern science can bring to bear
on this problem, any new philosophy which
better than the old ones can help us to solve its

312 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

meaning and to bear its burdens? It is a
question whose religious significance no one can
deny. And so, what I did last Sunday for
prayer I want now to do for work, discuss it in
the light of reason and from the standpoint of
evolution.

We all know the explanation which the old
Hebrew Scriptures and the theologies based
upon them, give of work. It is the penalty of
sin, is the result of the curse pronounced on our
first parents because they had eaten of the tree
of knowledge in the Garden of Eden. It is an
idea which theoretically has been given up.
Labor is proclaimed to be a blessing rather than
a curse. The world is full of sentimental
orations on its dignity and divinity. The
garlands of poetry have been wreathed around
it; and it has been advocated as the true form
of prayer, "Orare est laborare." Yet by
myriads of God's creatures it is still practically
regarded as a curse. Its associations are those
of drudgery, dirt and disagreeableness. It
takes them away from the playground, the
restful couch and the atmosphere of freedom,
and gives them the rough field, the dark factory,
the narrow counting-room and the tumultuous
sea. Hard task-masters, soulless corporations
and the loud voice of arbitrary command are
its embodiments ; and it leaves them with

WORK UNDER EVOLUTION 313

aching muscles, sensibilities dulled to poetry,
beauty, truth and all the high things of the
world, and with a pittance of mercenary coin.
Is it any wonder that they fail to see in it a
blessing; any wonder that the reasons against
it from the moral standpoint seem to them even
stronger than those against prayer from the
standpoint of nature? A lady of my acquaint-
ance who had been very much impressed with
the fact that her horse was a great deal more
eager and spirited in getting back to his stable
than in going from it, and who thought that
after standing still all night and perhaps for
days he ought to be glad of the chance to ex-
ercise himself in a little carriage-pulling, asked
the hostler one day whether they all of them had
this reluctance to labor, or whether it was a
peculiarity of her beast. "Well," said he, with
the Yankee art of putting things in the aptest
way, "they don't none of them go out laughing
when they are hitched up." So with us human
beasts of burden ; it matters not how senti-
mentally we may talk about work, and how
delightful it ought to be to engage in it, when
the harness is actually put on, we don't any of
us go out "laughing" to its wagon-pulling.
And yet with one part of our nature regarding
it as a curse and set so strongly against it, it
is to be recognized here the same as with regard

314 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

to prayer, that there is another part of us which
instinctively regards it as a blessing, and which
in all ages, the same as with prayer, has drawn
us towards it. Man is naturally a working
animal. Mingled with the strong leash of
necessity which is ever driving him unwilling to
his toil, is the gentler cord of love for it, which
is ever leading him gladly to its burdens. One
of the chief things which distinguishes him from
the brutes is the fact that over and above
getting enough to satisfy his wants at their
present standpoint, he has a little bit of some-
thing in his nature which prompts him to put
forth an extra blow or two, for other wants not
yet wholly developed. It is on this residuum
of the attractive over the repulsive in work
stored up within, that is built all our wealth, all
our civilization, all our progress, this that is
the source of that much abused thing, capital.
If labor was wholly or preponderatingly a
curse, if it did not have a balance of blessing on
its side, it would be impossible to account for
the habit of it in our race, any more than for
that of prayer, or indeed for the race itself.
The working members of the human family have
survived and have transmitted their instinct for
it to their descendants, over the non-working
ones, on precisely the same principle as that on
which the praying members have survived and

WORK UNDER EVOLUTION 315

transmitted theirs, the principle that it is the
fittest, that is, that it gave them an advantage
in the struggle for life over those who worked
less, or not at all. And the burdens, the
drudgeries and the injustices of labor, the
things connected with it which apparently
drag men down, blunt their sensibilities to
higher things and rank them with the brutes,
are an argument against its blessedness only in
the same way, and to the same extent, that
the superstitions and falsities connected with
prayer are an argument against that, — to the
extent of its outside drapery and to that alone.

Admitting now in this general way that labor
cannot be a penalty and a curse, any more than
prayer, or any other instinct can a folly and
superstition, we want next to get at its positive
side, to learn its place and meaning and what it
is for in the economy of nature, and to ask how
it can be freed from its darker features.

Its object, as commonly understood, is to get
its doer the means of life, — food, clothing and
shelter first, and then after these, amusement,
beauty, truth, religion, all those which go to
supply his higher nature. Man, and not man
alone, but all other creatures, animal and vege-
table, are beings endowed with wants, beings
that, unlike inanimate things, cannot exist by
virtue of what is in themselves alone, but are

316 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

obliged to reach out for other things on which
to live, the lowest for bare soil, air and light,
and each above these in larger and larger circles,
and for finer and finer things, till we come to man
reaching out for his through all worlds and up
to all heights. It is around these wants, these
appetites, aspirations and desires, and with ref-
erence to their supply, that all the rest of our
organization, our limbs, senses, instincts, intel-
lectual faculties and spiritual powers, are built
up ; these which explain why the flower has its
petals, the tree its roots, the insect its feet, the
bird its wings, the tiger his claws and man
his hands, his eyes, his reason and his soul.
They are not shaped by chance or with refer-
ence to some preconceived ideal, but only as
the best practical apparatus to supply wants;
and it is their use for this purpose which
constitutes work, — this which gives us phil-
osophically its meaning and place in the order
of nature. Instead of its being an after-
thought of the Creator, a penalty of sin sug-
gested to him by man's disobedience, it is a
primitive and fundamental principle of the
animate world, entering into its very plan. To
live is to labor; to have faculties and powers,
to work. And instead of its being an ugly,
clumsy thing, the doing ourselves because
nature had no skill to do for us, there is nothing

WORK UNDER EVOLUTION 317

in all its round which is more ingenious and
beautiful than the machinery of which it is a
part. On the one side are wants, on the other
the things wanted. The only way in which
there can be life is by having the one get the
other. The only way in which this getting be
done, by the creation and use of various facul-
ties and powers ; and the getting itself, — this is
work. Wants are the engine that moves the
world; its movement is labor, and its result,
reaching the means of life.

But this is only the near, immediate object
of labor. The question now comes, What is the
object of this object? What the result that
is sought for by our having and using the means
of life? To gratify wants alone, and these so
largely the wants of food and drink, even with
living as their outcome, would be a very meager
reason, if this were the whole, for all the hard-
ship, pain, weariness and wear that work every-
where involves. The things labored for, the
meat and drink, the clothing, the houses, the
books, the nationalities, the civilizations and
even the religions, that are reached with such
toils, groans and tears, perish in the using, die
in making live ; and the animals, the men and
the races which use them, in a little while longer
they perish, too ; and then the whole thing, all
the round of labor has to be gone through with

318 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

again to supply a new set of creatures destined
in their turn likewise to perish. It seems out-
wardly a realization of the old classic stories
of Sisyphus rolling forever the stone up the
hill, only to have it roll down again, and Tan-
talus forever pouring water into sieves that im-
mediately let it out again. And it is this ap-
parent uselessness of labor that is the hardest
of all its burdens, this which makes the ques-
tion of whether it has any ulterior object be-
yond that of mere present living, one of tre-
mendous practical importance.

It is a question to which evolution gives a
complete and triumphant answer. It shows
first, that the object of labor beyond the build-
ing up of the individual, is the building up of
the race. The thing labored for does indeed
perish in its use, but in perishing it feeds the
laborer, gives him more strength and larger
wants, which in their turn labor for other
things ; and thus the process goes on back and
forth, the labor itself aiding in the growth till
the individual reaches his completeness ; and
then, though he dies, there is a subtle essence
out of his growth which goes into his stock
like that of the leaves into a tree, making that
the larger and richer, and his offspring the
more capable ; and so on from generation to
generation and from age to age. We have

WORK UNDER EVOLUTION 319

in our blood to-day the labors of the first man,
yea, and of the first animal, that ever toiled ;
our strength, our capacity for labor, our hu-
manity, is a fruit to which all the myriads be-
fore us who have ever delved with muscle, mind
and soul have contributed each a part; and
when the perfect man stands on earth, it will
be on the shoulders, through all the ages, of all
the earth's toil.

Nor is this all. The growing man must have
a growing environment, must have this evolved
side by side with himself. It is a work which
nature does in part, her forces and her laws
which toil on its outward structure, giving us,
age after age, richer soils, fairer skies and
more harmonious elements. But, beyond these,
society, government, letters, science, and re-
ligion, all that goes to make civilization is
needed ; and it is this finer environment that
man's work helps to build up. Its immediate
products, houses, temples, furniture, books,
paintings, statues, and the special forms of
government, science and religion do indeed per-
ish with their use, equally with our food and
drink; but out of them a subtle essence like
that from our food, remains and goes to nour-
ish the great structure of society and of the
universe. The stone of Sisyphus never rolls
back quite to the foot of the hill; the waters

320 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

of Tantalus never leak wholly out of the sieve.
The civilization of to-day is the result of its
long rolling and pouring; and when it is com-
plete, when a perfect world shall be the en-
vironment of a perfect humanity, in it will be
the labor, eternal as itself, of every man who
has ever dug a sod, driven a nail or thought a
truth.

And is evolution here the end of labor?
With a perfect humanity and a perfect world
accomplished by it, is it then to come to a
stand, then to see this mightier structure per-
ish? No; the same principle which demands
an object for labor beyond the life of the in-
dividual, demands an object for it be}^ond the
life of nature and the race. What can this be
but the growth out of them of a spirit world,
of spiritual beings and of endless progress?
The labors of time, not the immaterial ones
alone, but the humblest ones of the muscle and
the limb, are to reach over into eternity. Min-
gled with their stains of filth and dirt are the
glitter of spiritual splendors ; and rooted in
the noisy factory and the darksome mine they
are to blossom and fruit in the music of angel
choirs and the light of the everlasting day.

Who now will say that under evolution, work
as well as prayer does not have a meaning and
position such as even under poetry and religion

WORK UNDER EVOLUTION 321

it never did before? The old theology made
the world a prison in which work was inflicted
as a punishment. Political economy makes it
a factory where it is paid for on the wage sys-
tem of so much meat and drink. But under
this new philosophy it becomes a great co-
operative establishment where every man,
woman and child is a part owner and has his
proportionate share of the proceeds. And
who does not know the new zest which is given
to toil when the toiler feels that its object is
his own? Where is the carpenter who does not
enjoy building a house when he himself is to
have it and live in it, as he never does when his
toil on it is to be paid for in money ; where the
sailor who does not work with tenfold zeal and
fidelity in rigging the ship that he has a share
in, and which is to bear himself and his dear
ones over the seas? And this great house of
humanity, to feel that it is to be ours to live in
through all ages ; and this great world-ship, to
know that it is ours to sail in over all the seas
of time and into celestial ports, — is there any-
thing which can so make us forget the bruises
and stains and drudgery of their building, and
fill us with enthusiasm and fidelity to make it
good?

It is a principle which at last is to solve the
problem of work in all its minor fields. The

322 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION

wage system, the idea of the work by one man
and of its ownership by another, is false to the
order of nature and false to all sound phi-
losophy. Cooperation, every man working on
his own material and sharing directly in the
proceeds of his work, that is the position of
labor under evolution ; and that is the position
to which sooner or later it is bound everywhere
to come; that the one in which how many of
its difficulties, so perplexing to-day, will of
themselves disappear.

And finally, notice how harmoniously this
view of work blends with that of prayer.
The root of all labor is in want, desire, the
same thing that is the root of all prayer; the
answer of all prayer is to be found through
labor and found in him who is the animating
presence of all nature and all life. The larger
the desire is, that is, the more earnest the
prayer ; and the closer we come into communion
with him and into conformity with his laws,
which is science, the larger and the more cer-
tain will be the result of labor, — that is the an-
swer to prayer. And as the two have come
down together so far from the mighty past
and are twin instincts now in our human na-
ture, who shall say it is not the teaching of the
latest philosophy as well as of the oldest re-
ligion that they should be used together,

WORK UNDER EVOLUTION 323

prayer and work, as the twin forces, equally
needed and equally divine, with which to win
the good we need to-day and reach the heaven
of our vast to-morrow?

"The doom which to the guilty pair
Without the walls of Eden came,
Transforming sinless ease to care
And rugged toil, no more shall bear
The burden of old crime, or mark of primal shame:

A blessing now, a curse no more,
Since he whose name we breathe with awe
The coarse mechanic vesture wore, —
A poor man toiling with the poor,
In labor, as in prayer, fulfilling the same law."