false, higher forms are more completely conformed to their
environment than lower; and man has attained the most complete
conformity of all. Our biological history is therefore a record of
the results of successive efforts, each attaining a little more
complete conformity than the preceding. From such a history we ought
to be able to draw certain valid deductions concerning the general
character and laws of our environment, to discover the direction in
which its forces are urging us, and how man can more completely
conform to it.

If man is a product of evolution, his mental and moral, just as
really as his physical, development must be the result of such a
conformity. The study of environment from this standpoint should
throw some light on the validity of our moral and religious creeds
and theories. It would seem, therefore, not only justifiable, but
imperative to attempt such a study.

Our argument is not directly concerned with modern theories of
heredity, or variation, or with the "omnipotence" or secondary
importance of natural selection. And yet Naegeli, and especially
Weismann, have had so marked an influence on modern thought that we
cannot afford to neglect their theories. We will briefly notice
these in the closing chapter.

CHAPTER I

THE PROBLEM: THE MODE OF ITS SOLUTION

The story of a human life can be told in very few words. A youth of
golden dreams and visions; a few years of struggle or of neglected
opportunities; then retrospect and the end.

"We come like water, and like wind we go."

But how few of the visions are realized. Faust sums up the whole of
life in the twice-repeated word _versagen_, renounce, and history
tells a similar story. Terah died in Haran; Abraham obtained but a
grave in the land promised him and his children; Jacob, cheated in
marriage, bitterly disappointed in his children, died in exile,
leaving his descendants to become slaves in the land of Egypt; and
Moses, their heroic deliverer, died in the mountains of Moab in
sight of the land which he was forbidden to enter. You may answer
that it is no injury that the promise is too large, the vision too
grand, to be fulfilled in the span of a single life, but must become
the heritage of a race. But what has been the history of Abraham's
descendants? A death-grapple for existence, captivity, and
dispersion. Their national existence has long been lost.

Was there ever a nation of grander promise than Greece or