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CHAPTER VIII

THE PROSPECT

OUR brief and desultory review of the factors of human progress and the manner of their operation may well leave us wonderstruck at the progress and accomplishment of mankind. How short has been the time of this achievement! All the sciences testify to the brief period during which man has been man upon the earth.

It is true, size and time seem to count for little ; things are more wonderful as they get smaller, like the nucleus of the germ-cell or the electrons of the atom! Mind has no size at all, and changes instant by instant. Nevertheless, everywhere upon the earth, if not throughout the universe, successions of antecedents and consequents are to be traced, and of all such successions nothing is so wonderful

as man.

He is but one out of myriad organisms. Men and women are animals in their origin and growth and propagation. Like other animals, and plants for that matter, they assimilate food and each individual grows through a process of cellular

multiplication and plastic function: everywhere fundamentally the same process, and as astounding in the oyster or the germinating oak as in man. Yet in this general environment, and passing through like physical stages, man alone has become man. Having somehow reached his animal manhood, thereupon in the small space of historic or quasihistoric time, he has made the prodigious advance from savagery to his present state of complex civilization, as we call it.

Again, note well: the same physical conditions have surrounded, have nurtured, all animals and plants, and man has risen from all the rest. Environment! physical, economic conditions! the laws of nature! what have they made of snakes and bears and buffaloes, or even apes? Man alone seems to have defied or used them.

The evolution, or the descent, of genus homo, of homo sapiens, is taken not to have differed essentially in process and working factors from the manner of descent or evolution of other species. But man alone became man: however descended, he alone has ascended. One may think that somehow he must have been endowed with mind.

The fossil ants encased in amber indicate that some species have endured unchanged through geologic ages far exceeding the period of man and the higher mammals. What then produced the rapid and comparatively recent evolution of the human body, or of the human mind and body?

What could it have been (under God) but the plastic and planning mind of this creature constantly impelling it to new bodily activities, which in turn called forth some answering action of the mind?

Perhaps no absolute separation is to be made between him and other animals; he may not be essentially different in kind. But infinitely in degree. His nervous structure is more complex, further developed; that is a fact, whatever be its bearing. But we may be sure that it is in his mind, and in the free action of his mind and the balanced autonomy of his whole nature, that man differs most from other animals. And whencesoever sprang the human mind, and howsoever it has developed till it has become the genius that it is in gifted individuals howsoever this may have come to pass, the human mind, and not any physical environment or conditions, is the well-spring of human progress.

He

Hail to the human mind, and hail to man! Hail to the progress of mankind! And hallowed be our thought of the Power that made this divine creature. For creature is he still. Whatever we may think of man, we cannot think him as an initial self-creator. He did not start himself! seems the creature somehow of a god, a god who is spirit, who is love, who is all the valid qualities that can be found in man. Men may wallow, foolish and recalcitrant, in the pit from whence they have been digged; or the wiser individuals,

perhaps responsive to the inner voice of the divine, may uplift their vision, which shall be ever larger and more free as further range is won. The disparate elements in the balanced autonomy of these finer natures seem to have joined their forces, ever making this advance the achievement of the whole

man.

Whither does the tale seem to point?

Only brisk and shallow minds profess to understand this great matter, profess to see what it all means, or deny all meaning to it. Most shallow and self-limited are those who discern physical law portending human chaos; as if the vast evolving web of natural life, with its infinite adaptations and pervading beauty, should result in a meaningless confusion and a wrecking of that state of man which the long processes of nature or the spirit of God-finally made possible. We simple folk do not fully understand it all, nor can we arrange everything in clear causal sequences, and declare the specific rationale of each event. We can only assemble such elements as we perceive of the stupendous movement, and ponder upon their values, while admitting in honesty that our judgements are likely to follow our temperaments.

We may profitably recognize that all sides and phases of the age-long human endeavour have a unity of origin in the action of the mind responding to impulses, all somehow homing in the individual. Yet we also recognize that the marvellous and many

sided human attainment has never been, and is not, the product or achievement of any one function or phase of human faculty or capacity or potency. It has not resulted altogether from the toil and effort of mankind to satisfy their material needs, so constantly expanding; it has not been altogether a sheer economic progress, nor dependent altogether upon the varying conditions of man's physical environment.

Nor has it altogether been the product of human reason working in its self-efficiency. It has not altogether sprung from the reason exercising itself in logic and metaphysics; nor from the reason, in conjunction with the perceptive faculties, prospecting the visible, tangible, ponderable, measurable worlds of inorganic and organic nature; investigating the bodily constitution of man and other animals, and delving into the minute and marvellous sources of his natural life. Nor has it altogether sprung from faculties of social adjustment, through which human groups have been formed and human societies, and states and governments, and economic, social, and political institutions. Nor has the progress of mankind exclusively and assuredly arisen from man's recognition of the moral law, or from his tremendous sense of physical and spiritual consequences, working through the fatal or benignant power of his acts, or through the retributive and rewarding efficiency of God. So far as we may see, it has not altogether resulted from religion,

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