197

VII. SOCIAL EVOLUTION AS A BIOLOGICAL PROCESS 241

VIII. EVOLUTION AND THE HIGHER HUMAN LIFE 278

INDEX 313

I

EVOLUTION. THE LIVING ORGANISM AND ITS NATURAL HISTORY

The Doctrine of Evolution is a body of principles and facts concerning the
present condition and past history of the living and lifeless things that
make up the universe. It teaches that natural processes have gone on in
the earlier ages of the world as they do to-day, and that natural forces
have ordered the production of all things about which we know.

It is difficult to find the right words with which to begin the discussion
of so vast a subject. As a general statement the doctrine is perhaps the
simplest formula of natural science, although the facts and processes
which it summarizes are the most complex that the human intellect can
contemplate. Nothing in natural history seems to be surer than evolution,
and yet the final solution of evolutionary problems defies the most subtle
skill of the trained analyst of nature's order. No single human mind can
contain all the facts of a single small department of natural science, nor
can one mind comprehend fully the relations of all the various departments
of knowledge, but nevertheless evolution seems to describe the history of
all facts and their relations throughout the entire field of knowledge.
Were it possible for a man to live a hundred years, he could only begin
the exploration of the vast domains of science, and were his life
prolonged indefinitely, his task would remain forever unaccomplished, for
progress in any direction would bring him inevitably to newer and still
unexplored regions of thought.

Therefore it would seem that we are attempting an impossible task when we
undertake in the brief time before us the study of this universal
principle and its fundamental concepts and applications. But are the
difficulties insuperable? Truly our efforts would be foredoomed to failure
were it not that the materials of knowledge are grouped in classes and
departments which may be illustrated by a few representative data. And it
is also true that every one has thought more or less widely and deeply
about human nature, about the living world to which we belong, and about
the circumstances that control our own lives and those of our fellow