if we are to worship a personal
God, why might not a conscious and religious hydra, with equal
right, worship an infinite stomach, and the annelid a god of mere
brute force?

There stands in Florence a magnificent statue by Michel Angelo. A
human figure is only partially hewn out of the stone. He never
finished it. If you could have seen the master hewing the chips with
hasty, impatient blows from the shapeless block, you would have been
tempted to say that he was but a stonecutter, and but a hasty
workman at that. Even now we do not know exactly what form and
expression he would have given to the still unfinished head. But no
one can examine it and hesitate to pronounce it a grand work of a
master-mind. In any manifestly incomplete work you must judge the
purpose and character and powers of the workman or artist by its
highest possibilities, just so far as you have any reason to believe
that these possibilities will be realized. You must look at the
rudely outlined heroic human figure in the block of stone, not at
the rough unfinished pedestal, if you would know Michel Angelo. So
in the hydra and the annelid you must look at the possibilities of
the nervous system before you or he think that digestion and muscle
are all.

Once more the highest powers dawn far down in the animal kingdom.
There are traces of mind in the amoeba, and of unselfishness in
the lower mammals. If there were a goal of human development higher
and other than unselfishness, wisdom, and love, we should have seen
traces of it before this. But have we found the faintest sign of any
such? Moreover, remember that a function continues to develop about
as long as it shows the capacity for development. And during that
period environment is a power making for its higher development. But
is there any limit to the possible development of the three mental
activities mentioned above? I can see none. Then must we not expect
that environment will always make for these? And will environment
ever manifest itself to man as the seat or instrument of a power
possessing higher faculties other than these? Man must worship a
personal God of wisdom, unselfishness, and love, or cease to
worship. The latter alternative he never yet has been able to take,
and society survive under its domination. So I at least am compelled
to read the finding of biological history.

But let us grant for the sake of argument that man contains still
undeveloped germs of faculties capabl