il ourselves of the
fact that we come into the world as little children with
undeveloped powers wherein lie latent all the boundless
possibilities of a higher and grander Humanity than has yet been
seen upon the earth.

II

THE PART PLAYED BY INFANCY IN THE EVOLUTION OF MAN

The remarks which my friend Mr. Clark has made with reference to
the reconciling of science and religion seem to carry me back to
the days when I first became acquainted with the fact that there
were such things afloat in the world as speculations about the
origin of man from lower forms of life; and I can recall step by
step various stages in which that old question has come to have a
different look from what it had thirty years ago. One of the
commonest objections we used to hear, from the mouths of persons
who could not very well give voice to any other objection, was that
anybody, whether he knows much or little about evolution, must have
the feeling that there is something degrading about being allied
with lower forms of life. That was, I suppose, owing to the
survival of the old feeling that a dignified product of creation
ought to have been produced in some exceptional way. That which
was done in the ordinary way, that which was done through ordinary
processes of causation, seemed to be cheapened and to lose its
value. It was a remnant of the old state of feeling which took
pleasure in miracles, which seemed to think that the object of
thought was more dignified if you could connect it with something
supernatural; that state of culture in which there was an
altogether inadequate appreciation of the amount of grandeur that
there might be in the slow creative work that goes on noiselessly
by little minute increments, even as the dropping of the water that
wears away the stone. The general progress of familiarity with the
conception of evolution has done a great deal to change that state
of mind. Even persons who have not much acquaintance with science
have at length caught something of its lesson,--that the infinitely
cumulative action of small causes like those which we know is
capable of producing results of the grandest and most thrilling
importance, and that the disposition to recur to the cataclysmic
and miraculous is only a tendency of the childish mind which we are
outgrowing with wider experience.

The whole doctrine of evolution, and in fact the whole advance of
modern science from the days of Copernicus down to the