d birds in whose midst he dwelt, he suggests that it was

Rather some random throw
Of heedless Nature's die,
'Twould seem, that from so low
Hath lifted man so high.
If, then, our rise from gloom
Hath this capricious air,
What ground is mine to assume
An upward process there,
In yonder worlds that shine
From upward tracts of sky?
No ground to assume is mine
Nor warrant to deny.
Equal, my source of hope, my reason for despair.

But, with great admiration for Mr. Watson as a poet, it is impossible
not to recognise that at least two radical flaws lurk in his agnostic
argument. In the first place, he makes the mistake of judging issues
by origins instead of origins by issues; the sub-human beginnings of
man trouble us not at all, since we can see in the subsequent history
of the race how great were the possibilities infolded in that
"gibbering form obscene," and unfolded in a Plato, a Raphael, a
Shakespeare. That such a development from such a lowly initial stage
should have been so much as possible, is in itself significant of much;
for nothing is evolved that was not first involved. But in the second
place, Mr. Watson's assumption that the process which lifted man from
the level of the {229} brute to one immeasurably higher was dictated by
"hap and hazard" strikes us as wholly gratuitous. On the face of it,
that process, in itself so little to be expected, bears the mark, not
of chance but of its very contrary. That the cosmic drama should have
followed this particular course; that from the cooling down of fiery
nebulas there should have come forth the orderly system we behold in
nature; that life should have climbed up from the speck of protoplasm
"through primal ooze and slime," making its way step by step through
all the lower creation until it "blossomed into man"--this, to the
unbiassed mind, does not wear the aspect of mere incalculable accident,
but of all-embracing wisdom and directivity. And once we have shaken
off the delusion that the marvellous order and progress we behold in
nature are the outcome of chance, we have the best of reasons for
assuming that the same "upward process" will still continue, reaching
forward from the seen to the unseen; at any rate, so well-qualified and
thorough-going an evolutionist as Professor Fiske gave it as his mature
opinion that "in the course of evolution there is no more philosophical
difficulty in ma