f a species to produce
fewer and fewer children. This drift may be really evolutionary, because
it is stupid.

Darwinism can be used to back up two mad moralities, but it cannot be
used to back up a single sane one. The kinship and competition of all
living creatures can be used as a reason for being insanely cruel or
insanely sentimental; but not for a healthy love of animals. On the
evolutionary basis you may be inhumane, or you may be absurdly humane;
but you cannot be human. That you and a tiger are one may be a reason
for being tender to a tiger. Or it may be a reason for being as cruel as
the tiger. It is one way to train the tiger to imitate you, it is a
shorter way to imitate the tiger. But in neither case does evolution
tell you how to treat a tiger reasonably, that is, to admire his
stripes while avoiding his claws.

If you want to treat a tiger reasonably, you must go back to the garden
of Eden. For the obstinate reminder continued to recur: only the
supernatural has taken a sane view of Nature. The essence of all
pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really in this
proposition: that Nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard
Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a step-mother. The main
point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is
our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same
father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to
imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a
strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn
mother to the worshippers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother
to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of
Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and
even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as
well as loved.

This, however, is hardly our main point at present; I have admitted it
only in order to show how constantly, and as it were accidentally, the
key would fit the smallest doors. Our main point is here, that if there
be a mere trend of impersonal improvement in Nature, it must presumably
be a simple trend towards some simple triumph. One can imagine that some
automatic tendency in biology might work for giving us longer and longer
noses. But the question is, do we want to have longer and longer noses?
I fancy not; I believe that we most of us want to say to