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 Romance of evolution, and its relation 
 
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Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029074825 
 
THE ROMANCE OF 
 EVOLUTION 
 
 AND ITS RELATION 
 TO RELIGION 
 
 BY 
 JOHN C. KIMBALL 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION 
 
 1913 
 
 f\ 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The writer of these essays was a vigorous 
 thinker and a man of conspicuous gifts of 
 public speech. Through his love for natural 
 beauty he was early led into scientific research 
 and he made himself one of the most convincing 
 of the interpreters of the philosophy of evolu- 
 tion. He combined a scientific habit of mind 
 with a deep interest in spiritual realities. He 
 was independent in judgment, sincere in utter- 
 ance and vivid and picturesque in his capacity 
 to translate truth into terms of life. 
 
 John C. Kimball was born at Ipswich, Mass., 
 on the 23d of May, 1832. He graduated at 
 Amherst College in 1854 and after teaching for 
 several years entered the Harvard Divinity 
 School where he graduated in 1859. From 
 I860 to 1871 he was the minister of the First 
 Parish Church in Beverly, Mass., though dur- 
 ing two of these years he served as chaplain of 
 the Eighth Massachusetts Volunteers. For 
 two years he did eff'ective pioneer work on the 
 Northwest coast, and then returned to New 
 England to hold pastorates of five years at 
 
IV 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 Newport, R. I., ten years at Hartford, Conn., 
 and four years at Sharon, Mass. In 1904< he 
 built a house at Greenfield, Mass., where he 
 made his home with his daughter and her fam- 
 ily until his death on February 16, 1910. 
 
 Mr. Kimball was a man of a wide range of 
 reading, thorough, exact and untiring. He 
 was sometimes truer to his convictions than to 
 his convenience and preferred the approval of 
 his own conscience to the applause of the multi- 
 tude. He was accustomed to speak his mind 
 with great freedom not only upon the philo- 
 sophical and religious beliefs which he cher- 
 ished, but also upon the vexing social problems 
 of his generation. He was upright and down- 
 right, courageous and persistent. He was also 
 remarkably productive, for in spite of his busy 
 life of study and of pastoral service he wrote 
 unceasingly upon the subjects and in behalf of 
 the causes which enlisted his enthusiasm. A 
 graphic article of his appeared in the Spring- 
 field Repiiblican on the day before his death, 
 and another in the Christian Register on the 
 day after his death. 
 
 Many of the essays in this book were pre- 
 pared for delivery as lectures before the Brook- 
 lyn Ethical Society and were also delivered at 
 the Meadville Theological School and before 
 various clubs and scientific societies in different 
 
PREFACE V 
 
 parts of the country. Several of them were 
 also probably used as sermons or may have 
 grown out of sermons. They are remarkable 
 for their combination of dramatic language 
 with scientific accuracy, and for a certain 
 pungency and persuasiveness of style which 
 makes them real and lasting contributions to 
 the literature which deals with the contacts of 
 science and religion. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 chaftt:r faoe 
 
 I The RdMAifCE op Scientific Discovebt . . 1 
 
 II What EvoLimoir Is 29 
 
 III The Theee Giieat Stages of Evolution . . 46 
 
 IV The Proofs op Oboanic Evolution ... 64 
 V Evidence op Inorganic Evolution ... 84 
 
 VI The Evolution op Life 103 
 
 VII The Evolution op Love 118 
 
 VIII The Evolution of Society 136 
 
 IX The World's Coming Betteb Social State . 158 
 
 X How Evolution is Related to Religion . 191 
 
 XI Does Evolution Necessitate a First Cause? 200 
 
 XII What Becomes of the Fatherhood op God 
 
 Under Evolution? 228 
 
 XIII A Spirit World as the Necessary Outcome 
 
 of This World's Evolution 255 
 
 XIV The Warrant for Phatteb Under Evolution 287 
 
 XV The New Meaning and Position op Work 
 
 Under Evolution 310 
 
THE 
 ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 THE ROMANCE OF SCIENTIFIC 
 DISCOVERY 
 
 Poetry and physics, chlvklry and chemistry, 
 what concord could they have with each other? 
 The minstrel's song and the laws of mathe- 
 matics, how can a man serve them both? What 
 possible sympathy can there be between the old 
 world of fancy peopled with gods and fairies 
 and full of mystery, and the new world of 
 science inhabited, two-fifths, by Brown, Smith 
 and Robinson, laid off in lots, lighted with gas 
 and run through with railroads ? 
 
 The first effect of scientific discovery was 
 beyond question the destruction and dissipation 
 of a great deal that was peculiar and beauti- 
 ful in the old realms of poetry and romance. 
 The elements lost their personality amid the 
 fumes of the chemist's retort. Naiads and dry- 
 ads fled away from the streams and the woods. 
 
9 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 The completed belt around the globe of geo- 
 graphical discovery left no room on its sur- 
 face for Spencer's gorgeous Faerie Land. A 
 hard, prosaic earth, destitute of all that could 
 charm the fancy or feed the taste, was the 
 early morning scene of the scientific day; and 
 it is no wonder that under its influence phi- 
 losophy and life became for awhile unromantic 
 and material and that the soul should some- 
 times cry out for the warmth and grace of the 
 old imaginations. 
 
 Nor is it to be denied that even now there 
 are some aspects and associations of science 
 in which it is difficult to find much that is pre- 
 eminently romantic. The enthusiasm of the 
 medical student inviting his lady-love to an 
 elegant dissection will not compare artistically 
 with that of the olden knight asking her to the 
 cutting and slashing of a tournament. The 
 chemical and physiological view of Amelia her- 
 self as composed of four simple elements, 
 oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen, mixed 
 up with a few earths and salts, and arranged 
 in two hundred and forty bones, seven hundred 
 muscles and a variable amount of nerves and 
 adipose tissue is beyond question less adapted 
 to lyrical expression than the old conception 
 of her as all purity and sweetness, warmed with 
 love and set forth in lily cheeks and raven hair. 
 
THE ROMANCE OF SCIENCE 3 
 
 The teaching that poetry itself and all 
 thought depend for their excellence on the 
 amount of phosphorus secreted in the brain, 
 and that the best way to get them is to eat 
 plenty of eggs, cheese and fish, contrasts very 
 badly from the romantic point of view with the 
 classic image of the bard feeding on dew and 
 dreams and pouring out verses from the crea- 
 tive impulse of his own soul. The elective 
 affinities of acids and alkalies cannot be wrought 
 into novels and poems by any known process 
 of the art so effectively as the affinities of loving 
 hearts. Then, too, the scientific way of select- 
 ing a wife and falling in love, going first to a 
 phrenologist and getting a chart of her skull 
 with all its bumps, combativeness, destructive- 
 ness and the like marked upon it, then to the 
 physiologist to find out whether her tempera- 
 ment is bilious or phlegmatic, then to the 
 family physician to make sure she is free from 
 scrofula and consumption and then to the 
 woman herself to exchange, not vows but charts 
 and certificates, is not certainly on the face of 
 it quite so romantic as where Arthur and 
 Amelia fall in love with each other at first sight, 
 and after the requisite number of haunted 
 castles, diabolic rivals and cruel partings rush 
 exactly at the end of the second volume ecstatic 
 into each other's arms. 
 
4 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 This destructive and prosaic side of science, 
 however, is only its beginning, only the clearing 
 away of the old rubbish to lay the foundation 
 of a nobler and fairer structure. Its first 
 object is indeed truth, truth whatever the ugli- 
 ness and humility of its outlines may be. But 
 truth and beauty in their final result are always 
 sure to blend together and always nourish and 
 require in those who follow them to the end 
 something at least of their own grand and he- 
 roic qualities. Truth here, the same as else- 
 where, is found to be stranger than fiction, the 
 world eflTect, however prosaic its surface may 
 be, to have roots which go down to infinite 
 depths of mystery. And scientific discovery 
 dealing with these truths and facts has come 
 already to a revelation, lit up the world too with 
 a light, that for romance and wonder surpasses 
 all that was ever seen or dreamed of in the 
 grandest days of old. 
 
 Look, first, at the new realms it has opened 
 before the astonished eye to be traveled 
 through and explored. It would seem to the 
 superficial glance as if the opportunity was 
 about exhausted for the adventurer to go forth 
 into regions strange and pastures new. The 
 outside of the planet has been fully traveled 
 over and explored. No Nma, Pinta and Santa 
 Maria can sail forth to-day for new worlds 
 
THE ROMANCE OF SCIENCE 5 
 
 over untraversed seas; no Robinson Crusoe 
 come to isles rising out of the deep that the foot 
 of civilized man never has pressed ; no new Hud- 
 son and Joliet and De Soto hope to find mighty 
 rivers, lakes and bays all fresh to bear their 
 names. And as we look over the map and see 
 everything plain and clear, every nook and 
 cape from the jungles of India to the wolf's 
 long howl on Oonalaska's shore, we can but wish 
 for new worlds to explore, wish we could stand 
 again with the world-seeking Genoese as he set 
 sail the first time for the wonderful West, climb 
 with Balboa the steeps of Darien for the first 
 glimpse of the mighty undreamed-of Pacific, 
 follow Cook with only the through ticket of his 
 own pluck in putting the girdle of a ship's 
 wake around the mysterious globe and float 
 with some new Joliet and La Salle down the 
 Mississippi's ever ebbing tide, — wish that we 
 had some fresh food for that hunger of ad- 
 venture which gnaws forever in the human soul. 
 It is this very thing, however, that is being 
 done for us on the grandest scale by natural 
 science. This outer earth that was explored 
 by voyagers and travelers of two centuries 
 ago is only the binding and outer leaf of a vast 
 volume thousands of pages thick and reaching 
 back through myriads of years, every one of 
 which is a realm with oceans and continents and 
 
6 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 a flora and fauna of its own waiting to be ex- 
 plored. Mighty streams of electricity, mag- 
 netism and light are flowing around us whose 
 sources are as much a mystery as those of 
 Egypt's great enigma for 3000 years, and 
 with a tide that will take the voyager through 
 realms that surpass in novelty anything which 
 ever lay on the banks of the Amazon and Miss- 
 issippi. The tiniest drop of water is shown 
 under the microscope to be a globe crowded 
 with strange forms of life, and, most likely, 
 with its own capes and islands which no Ma- 
 gellan has yet circumnavigated or more than 
 begun to explore. Marco Polo starting out 
 on his travels through the strange countries 
 and peoples of Asia had nothing before him 
 which could rival what awaits the learner of 
 natural history to-day in every grove and sod 
 and fallen tree. What isles of fronded palm 
 rising out of southern seas, what plumage of 
 tropic birds and mysteries of leaf and flower 
 unfolded to the first travelers in Yucatan and 
 Brazil, what novelties of custom, dress and lan- 
 guage in Abyssinia and far Timbuctoo and up 
 the Indus and the Nile can surpass the combi- 
 nations of that magic realm which opens upon 
 us with ever more and more of wonder in the 
 chemist's laboratory ! And looking above, what 
 is the whole earth, all its continents and isles 
 
THE ROMANCE OF SCIENCE 7 
 
 and mountain peaks and glittering seas in com- 
 parison with those archipelagoes of light and 
 piled-up shores of worlds which await the 
 voyager across the ocean depths of space. It 
 is said of a celebrated Hellenic scholar who 
 spent his whole life in writing a treatise on the 
 declension of the Greek noun that he regretted 
 on his death-bed that he had tried in his studies 
 to cover so much ground, remarking that if he 
 should live his life over again, he should confine 
 it wholly to the dative case. So with the 
 realms of science. The fields, instead of being 
 exhausted, are found continually to be but the 
 doors into yet wider domains. We live still on 
 the border-land of vast, mysterious worlds. 
 Strange woods and fruits and bits of carving 
 are drifting to our feet to-day from over the 
 great sea of the unknown as they did to those 
 of Columbus four centuries ago. Unseen 
 barks fanned with the breath of mind are 
 fitting out from a thousand little ports again 
 to plow untraversed depths for other realms on 
 the great globe of truth. New Balboas climb 
 mountain chains still to behold vast Pacifies 
 stretching farther on. Reports come to us 
 every year of capes doubled in some far-off 
 realm the human mind for ages had struggled 
 with in vain. And as the first intimation which 
 its discoverers had of America with all its vast- 
 
8 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 ness and wonder was a faint light glimmering 
 out of the night shadows, so with each year's 
 progress there sparkles some gleam of truth 
 out of the darkness beyond, which is found ever 
 and ever to be the herald of a new untrodden 
 world. 
 
 Look, too, at the qualities of mind and char- 
 acter which are employed in carrying on this 
 wonderful work. The stock picture of the nat- 
 ural philosopher as an ugly, dried-up old man 
 gazing bewildered at the stars or stooping use- 
 less over a few withered leaves, and with no heart 
 or imagination, nothing but the cold dry light 
 of intellect, is the very opposite of what is true. 
 Nearly all great discoveries have been made in 
 the fire and freshness of youth or in the rich- 
 ness and strength of maturity. Newton was 
 but twenty-five years old when the idea of 
 gravity as the power which held the planets in 
 their orbits first began to draw him into its 
 great circle of truth. Laplace at the age of 
 twenty-four had already won his place in the 
 French Academy of Sciences. Leverrler's great 
 discovery of Neptune, nothing less than giving 
 to astronomy a new world, shed its luster on 
 him at the age of thirty-five. Kepler at 
 twenty-three had already begun that canvass- 
 ing of the stars which made him at last the 
 legislator of the skies; and Galileo was only 
 
THE ROMANCE OF SCIENCE 9 
 
 eighteen when he won his first laurels in that 
 campaign, the brightest Italy ever saw, which 
 ended with the conquest of half a dozen new 
 kingdoms to the empire of truth. 
 
 The picking up of dry, dead facts is only the 
 beginning of their work. Enthusiasm, love, 
 gallantry, courage, imagination, not a few 
 of the finest qualities which go to make up a 
 manly and heroic character are brought to 
 bear in carrying it on. No Red Cross knight 
 in Spencer's Faerie Realm loving the holy 
 Una, no army of Crusaders under Godfrey de 
 Bouillon or Richard the Lionhearted, launch- 
 ing themselves out to rescue the Holy City from 
 the hands of the Infidel, ever exhibited more 
 heroism and devotion than those with which the 
 picked army of scientific discoverers, age after 
 age, have gone forth to the service of truth. 
 They, too, have had their Holy City to be re- 
 deemed from the hands of ignorance and super- 
 stition. Out into unknown realms through 
 toil, diflSculty, want and darkness they have 
 forced their way, past bodies of fact con- 
 scripted from every land; huge columns of 
 figures trained with more than a soldier's skill, 
 have been marshaled by them around its walls. 
 Strange weapons out of the chemist's labora- 
 tory, vast batteries of the far-reaching tele- 
 scope, all the subtle enginery of the cal- 
 
IQ THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 cuius and the higher mathematics, have bat- 
 tered against its defenses. And then, perhaps, 
 as it still held out, the scientific imagination, 
 daring and dashing as the most romantic 
 knight of chivalry's golden age, has sallied 
 forth in some brilliant charge up to the gates 
 and over all barriers, and been the first to raise 
 the shout of victory. No workman who was a 
 mere dry formalist and nothing else has ever 
 succeeded. It is the same genius dealing with 
 everlasting harmonies that in the one case has 
 given us the philosophy of creation and in the 
 other its song. The discovery of the solar 
 system was as true a poem as any that was ever 
 put in verse. The imagination of Newton was 
 what first leaped forward and seized the great 
 law of gravitation, his figures and facts only 
 coming up afterwards to support the position 
 already taken. Copernicus, Leibnitz, Newton, 
 Herschel, Franklin, Kepler, even old Galileo 
 himself in spite of his single act of weakness, 
 were not only first-class philosophers, but first- 
 class men. They wrought not for wealth, not 
 for applause, not for any mean and selfish 
 motive, but for truth, for stars of honor that 
 sparkled only in some far-off skies, for kingdoms 
 to rule in which only the mighty forces of na- 
 ture were their subjects, for treasures to lay up 
 which had no prices quoted in any markets of 
 
THE ROMANCE OF SCIENCE 11 
 
 earth. Their love was truth. And when her 
 bright form was won, how often with great 
 strong hearts and all knights' chivalry and un- 
 flinching faith behind the sharp edge of intelleet, 
 have they stood up for her against the neglect 
 and scorn of the world. "The book is written," 
 said the enthusiastic Kepler when he had com- 
 pleted the great work which made him legislator 
 of the skies, "to be read either now or by pos- 
 terity, I care not which, it being willable to 
 wait a century for a reader as God has waited 
 2000 years for an observer." 
 
 Nor is the vindication of this faith and the 
 way in which science has come up from its 
 humble birth and won the homage of the Church 
 and the world the least thing in its romance. 
 No boy starting out of his cottage home in 
 life's bright morning, friendless and alone, his 
 whole capital the brave heart in his breast and 
 the little bundle of clothes at his back, to win 
 a place in the world ever began lower down or 
 went through a series of more trying adven- 
 tures. Philosophy out of its empyrean heights 
 looked down on its plodding methods with con- 
 tempt. If there was one thing which war and 
 trade and the world at large regarded as more 
 impracticable and of less value to themselves 
 than another, it was its truths and speculations. 
 And religion, — Roger Bacon languishing for 
 
12 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 ten years in a Franciscan prison as the penalty 
 of his meddling with retorts and gases ; Kepler 
 obliged to turn aside right in the midst of his 
 most brilliant discoveries and spend five years 
 in defending his old mother from the charge of 
 witchcraft ; Copernicus hesitating to reveal the 
 truth of the material heavens for fear of losing 
 his place in the New Jerusalem ; Galileo^ work- 
 ing out the shining problems of astronomy on 
 the walls of the Inquisition; these are types of 
 the position it occupied age after age. The 
 demonstrations of geometry were confuted 
 with a bull of the pope ; little bits of Scripture 
 brought to bear against the most established 
 facts of nature ; the earth made to stand still by 
 putting in prison the man who said it moved, 
 and each new discovery of reason confronted as 
 an answer with all the antiquity of faith. Yet 
 against these obstacles the young stripling step 
 by step has won his shining way to the fore- 
 most places in the realms of truth and power, 
 his path marked not more by the brilliancy of 
 his own discoveries than by the thousand errors 
 and superstitions he has split open and battered 
 down among his foes. There never was another 
 career, even on the pages of the novelist and 
 poet, that was more romantically successful or 
 such a testimony to the force and skill of simple 
 truth, never one that on the whole has been 
 
THE ROMANCE OF SCIENCE 13 
 
 more nobly or modestly used. What if he is a 
 little overbearing sometimes to his old antago- 
 nist the church, or rather to the old spirit of ec- 
 clesiasticism and priestcraft and likes to give it 
 now and then a sharp thrust? It is only poetic 
 justice. A few years ago an eccentric amateur 
 of science in Brooklyn, N. Y., was terribly an- 
 noyed by urchins who came and rang his door- 
 bell at all times of the day and night, making 
 their escape before ever he could get to the 
 door. He bore it patiently awhile; but at last 
 attached the bell-wire to a powerful electric 
 battery, and with a smile, calmly awaited the 
 result. It was not long before a band of 
 urchins silent and sly crept up to give it 
 another pull; and not long again before there 
 was a terrible outcry of pain from an amazed 
 pair of lips, and a very hasty exit of the whole 
 band with their feelings woefully shocked. So 
 with the priests that age after age have gone 
 to the house where science lives, calling it up 
 day and night on all sorts of frivolous charges 
 and often dragging it away to dungeon-cells 
 and midnight tribunals, — it is not an un- 
 pleasant thing to see that now there is a power- 
 ful battery attached to the door-handle and that 
 every time they go near it, they, too, come 
 away terribly shocked. 
 
 But if not in religion, yet surely in every- 
 
14 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 thing else science has proved itself the advocate 
 and friend of what is noblest and best in human 
 progress ; has come back in its manhood to the 
 old neighborhood from which as a boy it went 
 in such poverty and disgrace, as the large- 
 hearted and munificent benefactor. Specula- 
 tive philosophy is proud to own it brother. 
 Every vessel that crosses the seas, every art 
 and industry, every sphere of our common life, 
 is enriched by its bounties. No god of the old 
 Olympic knights, going down to mingle in the 
 wars of men, ever carried such a tremendous 
 presage of victory with him as the side to which 
 it now goes in battle. And when the old spirit 
 of personal heroism and the new one of science 
 are combined as they were in that grandest 
 product of our civil war, the noble old Far- 
 ragut, it is hard telling which shows to the 
 most advantage, the one as the hero of Mobile 
 Bay lashed to the mast of the Hartford damn- 
 ing the torpedoes and taking his flagship into 
 the very hell of the fight, or the other as the 
 same hero at New Orleans, ranging his fleet 
 two and three miles away, and amid all the 
 excitement of a battle dropping a shell with 
 the accuracy of a clock every thirty seconds 
 for six days into the heart of the beleaguered 
 forts, — only this being certain, that nothing on 
 this earth can stand them both, nothing be 
 
THE ROMANCE OF SCIENCE 16 
 
 found in the famous wars of old that can equal 
 for romantic valor these battles fought with 
 manhood's heart of fire in science' ribs of steel. 
 Look, too, at some of the special incidents in 
 this brilliant career. The smallest events open 
 up with dramatic ingenuity into the grandest 
 fields of action. Vast Amazons and Missis- 
 sippis of truth out of springs far back in the 
 mountains that a pebble might have stopped. 
 How like another story of the oriental genii 
 rising out of their casket up to the very heavens 
 is the record of galvanism with the telegraph 
 and all its vast stretch of wonders, originating 
 from the twitching of a frog's leg hung up 
 accidentally with a copper hook on an iron nail, 
 and that the telescope which has been to science 
 as another eye out of which it has looked how 
 far and discovered wonders how great, should 
 owe its existence to the little son of a spectacle- 
 maker playing with the glasses in his father's 
 shop ! Who can remember without a thrill that 
 silent hour of night under the fair Italian skies 
 when Galileo turned the Tuscan optic glass the 
 first time to the heavens and beheld what no 
 mortal man had ever gazed on till then: phases 
 of Venus, the rings of Saturn, the mountains on 
 the moon and the four satellites of Jupiter; 
 the dividing hour of the old astronomy from 
 the new.'' What is there in the most romantic 
 
16 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 novel's description of the meetings of Arthur 
 and Amelia, in the depths of the forest, after 
 their long parting, that is more thrilling 
 or has a more wonderful series of events grow- 
 ing out of it than the scene when Franklin went 
 out into the fields that summer afternoon to 
 meet and woo the lightning, — the black thunder- 
 cloud in the background angry, one might 
 think, at the prospect of losing its long secret, 
 the little kite stooping out of the sky as an 
 angel bearing a message unheard of before in 
 all its annals, the silent earth around hushed as 
 if to catch the first whisper of the new truth 
 yearned for more than summer shower, the long 
 moment's agony of doubt, and then the bristling 
 up of the little threads beneath its tread as 
 the mighty secret along its slender way came 
 rushing down, the heroine of science into its 
 hero's arms? Who is not willing to forgive 
 apples which from the times of Adam and Eve 
 down to the ones we ourselves ate green as chil- 
 dren through those of Paris and Helen have 
 often played such a conspicuous part in human 
 destiny all their maligner influence for the 
 sake of the one noble specimen, sweet and rich 
 with so many precious truths, that fell before 
 Newton's eyes bringing with it the great law 
 of gravitation? And what is there in any 
 chase that knightly band went forth to, out of 
 
THE ROMANCE OF SCIENCE 17 
 
 baronial hall with winding horn and mettled 
 steed and eager hound in the proud days of 
 old, equal in excitement and grandeur and 
 romance to that on which Leverrier started 
 forth one glorious morn, his game another 
 world, the forest in which it roamed a wilderness 
 of stars, the only footprints it was known ever 
 to have made, the perturbations of another 
 planet two billions of miles away so slight as to 
 carry it only a few minutes out of its course, 
 and with simply his long array of figures and 
 algebraic signs, as the hounds, with which to 
 hunt it down, — ^what victory, too, more grand 
 than when after seventeen months' pursuit over 
 paths and through depths of far-off space not 
 even thought had ever trod before, his trained 
 and faithful band hemmed in and brought to 
 bay a monster world three billions of miles 
 away from earth which human eye had never 
 known till then, so that writing to his friend in 
 Germany where to look, having no glass him- 
 self, the telescope the next night was turned 
 to the spot, and lo, there it was within a single 
 degree of where the figures had pinned it down. 
 And the results of scientific discovery, the 
 majestic facts which year after year it has 
 brought to light, how they appeal to wonder, 
 to admiration, to the imagination, to our sense 
 of the beautiful and sublime, to almost every 
 
18 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 faculty of our being that poetry itself has ever 
 reached. The human body, the body of the 
 humblest Amelia that ever charmed the rustic 
 eye, though resolved by the first touch of 
 science into only a few salts and gases, is shown 
 by its deeper reading to be a magnificent pal- 
 ace, the masterpiece of nature struggled up to 
 through myriads of years and put together 
 with a skill, style and beauty of finish that no 
 architecture of the middle ages, no artist of 
 to-day ever devised for princely blood, a throne 
 of the spirit where a thousand subtle forces 
 form a realm as wide as the universe, and pay 
 their homage, worthy in its glory of all the 
 most enthusiastic lover has ever put in song. 
 Matter itself, the mere dust which is blown 
 about our streets and pressed beneath our feet, 
 the despair of the poet, the symbol of all that 
 is vile and worthless, the thing which even 
 theology has made the type of death and source 
 of evil, rises up under its magic touch endowed 
 with laws and qualities, and possibly arranged, 
 each particle of it, in world systems as rich 
 and harmonious as those of the brightest stars 
 above, and with a substance as immortal and 
 for aught we can now say as godlike as that 
 of the purest human soul. It opens the bosom 
 of earth, this earth it was accused at first of 
 rendering so prosaic and commonplace, and 
 
THE ROMANCE OF SCIENCE 19 
 
 reveals it through myriads of years iall filled 
 with animals and plants, scenery and action, 
 that for strangeness, variety, for picturesque- 
 ness and dramatic unfolding, make the gods, the 
 fairies and genii, the myths and marvels of the 
 Arabian Nights, the Norse Edda and the old 
 classic mythologies only as the crudest shadows, 
 yea, tells out of its cavern mouths and stony 
 throats and lava tongues, the history of cre- 
 ation with a fullness of detail and a wealth of 
 illustration that not even the religious vision 
 had ever given it before; — carries us back 
 through the long ages of the past to that far 
 day when the globe was all a molten ocean 
 with surges of fire that swept from pole to 
 pole; teUs of a time when chaos and night sat 
 brooding o'er the dark profound, when the roar 
 of the hurricane above was answered from hour 
 to hour by the crash of the earthquake be- 
 neath; a time when continents rose and fell as 
 the tides of the sea, and mountains were doubled 
 as bits of cloth and the world as a bird in its 
 shell under the spirit that brooded over the 
 deep was taking its first rude shape; turns us 
 onward to the scene when the first beam of 
 sunlight broke through the Cimmerian darkness, 
 when the first rock raised its head above the 
 ocean surges, when the first blade of grass sent 
 its shaft life-laden out of the soil and when the 
 
20 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 first bird broke with its voice the long discord 
 of the elements and sent over a wilderness world 
 its harmony, prelude of what the angels sang 
 and prophecy of the anthem in which all its 
 myriad children are at last to join. 
 
 So with the realms above, so with the phe- 
 nomena which, day by day, are passing before 
 our eyes. There is not one it does not clothe 
 with beauty, not a poetic myth of the olden 
 time it sets its foot upon, that it does not lift 
 in its place a score of grander truths. The 
 myriad particles of vapor rising up everywhere 
 on electric wings from the watery surface of 
 the globe, marshaling themselves in cloud 
 squadrons over the summer sky and coming 
 to the relief of drouth-beleagured cities and 
 fields in the long serried columns of pattering 
 rain, then making the whole world, from dewy 
 flower and evening sky to woman's cheek and 
 childhood's form, flame up afresh with loveli- 
 ness, are surely no unfitting counterpart to the 
 old myth of how Venus the goddess of beauty 
 was born from the foam of the sea. It can 
 hardly be spoken of as a loss even to poetry 
 that the lightnings of the summer shower in- 
 stead of being the angry flashes of Jove's 
 wrath are recognized as the subtle lances 
 that electricity is shooting through a thousand 
 monsters of miasma and disease in a mighty 
 
THE ROMANCE OF SCIENCE 21 
 
 war it is waging for the welfare of man. 
 The moon as the lover's lamp and the queen 
 of night and with all the pretty epithets which 
 the poet has hung around it is now trivial in 
 its appeal to the imagination as compared 
 with the thought of science that it is the dead 
 child in the great household of worlds, a globe, 
 once indeed with its verdant fields and swarm- 
 ing cities, its throbbing hearts and eager 
 minds, its poems and knowledge and civiliza- 
 tion and history, but now every vestige gone, 
 as gradually through the long ages of the 
 past the air and water on which they lived 
 were combined with its solid elements, leaving 
 it to swing forever a gSded tomb in the silent 
 sky. What is the classic fable of the sun as a 
 fiery chariot that Phoebus is driving with flam- 
 ing steeds across the azure arch, to the vision 
 that blazes upon us through the telescope and 
 spectrum, of a molten world, composed of the 
 same elements as our own earth, only twelve 
 hundred and fifty thousand times as large, a 
 world where the winds and clouds are vaporized 
 metal and the heavens melted brass, where the 
 oceans and rivers are made of liquid gold, where 
 fountains bubble up with fire and the showers 
 descend in silver rain, where the snow-drifts are 
 quartz and diamond and the dewdrops literally 
 are precious stones. How the old notion of the 
 
22 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 heavens as an arch, covered over with the ab- 
 surd figures of men and beasts, is dwarfed be- 
 fore the splendid truth of astronomy that they 
 are the boundless reaches of space filled with 
 myriads of suns and worlds and systems of 
 worlds endless in variety, by the side of which 
 our own earth is but a grain of sand on the 
 sea-shore, many of them so far away that 
 light itself is ages in coming to tell their story ; 
 yet aU bound together with harmonious laws 
 and peopled, it may be, with a myriad forms 
 of conscious life, a single dash of science that 
 in place of the old intelligences it has swept 
 away, gives us what crowds of beings for the 
 fancy to play among! The story of the an- 
 cient argonauts launching out for four years 
 along the untraversed shores of the classic 
 world in search of the golden fleece and appeal- 
 ing so with their strange adventures to our 
 young imaginations, who will say it is not 
 more than matched to-day by the astronomic 
 story of our whole earth and its kindred worlds 
 launched on the soundless depths of space 
 sweeping onwards for millions of years under 
 breaths no sails are raised to catch, spoken 
 ever and anon by flaming comets, plunging 
 through meteoric streams that blaze with 
 phosphorescent light around their prows, 
 rounding in the course of ages vast sidereal 
 
THE ROMANCE OF SCIENCE 23 
 
 capes, beholding the star groves they have 
 left myriads of miles away close slowly up be- 
 hind them, and bound for a golden fleece to be 
 reached at last who shall say on what far 
 astral shore! 
 
 Then, too, there are some of the fairest 
 dreams of the ancient philosophy that the 
 magic hand of science is touching, only to 
 transmute into a still grander reality. The 
 old Ptolemaic notion of the music of the 
 spheres finds its consummation in the beauti- 
 ful fact that the waves of light which make 
 the different colors, pulsing out forty and 
 sixty thousand of them to an inch and at the 
 rate of one hundred and ninety-two thousand 
 miles a second, all have a rhythmic relation to 
 each other just as much as the waves of sound, 
 and that planets and suns and stars, the whole 
 vast host of the heavens above us, are actually 
 moving onward to melodious measures and with 
 literal truth "forever singing as they shine." 
 In the autumn of 1859 as the astronomer 
 Carrington was watching the sun with a power- 
 ful telescope, a bright spot was seen suddenly 
 to leap upon its surface, and instantly the self- 
 registering magnetic apparatus of the Kew 
 Observatory was sharply disturbed, a violent 
 magnetic storm began its sweep over the earth, 
 telegraphic offices were set on fire, brilliant 
 
34. THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 auroras flamed up In the northern and south- 
 em hemispheres, a thousand human lives hang- 
 ing by subtle threads in hospitals and sick- 
 rooms were cut off or lengthened out, and the 
 magnetic wave sweeping onward from the con- 
 fines of earth dashed in amid the asteroids, 
 made the huge body of Jupiter thrill from pole 
 to pole, played a moment over Saturn's silver 
 rings, rolled over the shores of far-oiF Nep- 
 tune, and spent its force, who shall say in what 
 far-off depth of stellar space. It makes of 
 the solar system not only a vast unmeaning 
 machine bound together with the laws of grav- 
 ity but a mighty organ whose keys, far down 
 in the sun's depths of light and heat and mag- 
 netism and actinic force, have need only to 
 be touched by the divine fingers and lo, a 
 new song of life and death, a new march of 
 peace and war, is played through uncounted 
 worlds, a hint, is it not, of how spirit acts 
 on spirit and how the touch of prayer is made to 
 send its thrill, and of hate its shudder amid the 
 realms of soul ; at any rate affording a grander 
 reading than any commentary of theology has 
 ever given of the Apostle's words: "We are 
 members one of another." Light itself, so sub- 
 tle, so wonderful, so swift, so like a flash of 
 spirit, has not only been measured and picked 
 apart, and its threads of color untwisted and 
 
THE ROMANCE OF SCIENCE 26 
 
 made to give up the inmost secrets of its own 
 being, but is actually found under the eye of 
 science to be written over in its spectral lines 
 with a language impressed upon it by every 
 substance which has sent it out, a language 
 which can be read as surely as that of the 
 printed page, and which it conveys as swiftly 
 as though Ariel had indeed brought its mes- 
 sage sliding down to earth on a sunbeam's 
 slanting ray, and which tells us of the very 
 things of which the heavenly orbs are 
 made, tells us of salt in Sirius and bismuth 
 and lime in Beltegeux; that they burn 
 hydrogen gas in far-off Eta Argus, and 
 that there are parts of the Milky Way in the 
 heavens above us which literally are paved 
 with gold. The Darwinian theory of Crea- 
 tion, recognizing only one great tree of life 
 rooted far down amid Ihe rocks of the geologic 
 ages, growing upwards for myriads of years 
 and sending out of itself all the world has 
 ever known of being, thought and civilization, 
 a theory full of mystery, full of romance, 
 aye, and in spite of all the Church has said 
 against it full of religion too; a theory un- 
 proved as yet, but bearing on its brow the very 
 lineaments again of all past truth, what is it 
 but a new and grander form of Yggdrasil, the 
 mystic tree of life, bearing the natives on its 
 
26 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 branches and having memory and hope, having 
 all history and philosophy and literature in 
 the whisper of its leaves, the wonderful ash 
 that plays such a part in the old Scandinavian 
 mythology. Science unpoetic, science filling 
 the world only with dreary facts ! Why, under 
 its magic touch what is the whole universe but 
 a mighty romance whose characters are stars 
 and planets and the elements, not less than 
 human beings ; whose chapters the geologic 
 ages, and scenery the gorgeous heavens and 
 vastness of stellar space; a romance of most 
 startling interest whose far beginning we have 
 read and some new page of which is published 
 from day to day, but whose plot, so intricate 
 and wonderful, no human skill can unravel, and 
 whose denouement in the eternity to come 
 science alone, science without the subtler sight 
 of faith, must try in vain to tell. 
 
 And this fact, the fact that with aU Its 
 powers it is not able of itself to solve the great 
 problem of the universe, brings us finally to 
 the thought that science is not wanting in 
 that element which is needed to make every ro- 
 mance complete, the element of love and mar- 
 riage. Ages ago it was not only the friend 
 but the lover and betrothed of religion. 
 Born amid the retorts and crucibles of old 
 Friar Bacon and nourished awhile under the 
 
THE ROMANCE OF SCIENCE 87 
 
 sheltering roof of the Church, religion knelt 
 with it beside the altar, captured not a few of 
 its tools, some of which, as the crucible, bear 
 names of her betrothal down to this present 
 day, and lavished upon it all the fervor and en- 
 thusiasm of her early love. But like so many 
 other lovers they soon had their quarrel. The 
 one was proud, aristocratic, conservative, or- 
 thodox; the other earth-born, democratic, radi- 
 cal, heterodox. Sharp words passed between 
 them; their hands and their paths parted. 
 But it is a separation which cannot last for- 
 ever. Religion, though it has had many other 
 lovers, — philosophy, logic, wealth, literature 
 and state, has never met one yet that has come 
 so near to her heart as this. And science, 
 though it has grown rich and strong and found 
 a glorious happiness in its work, is still home- 
 less, incomplete and with a yearning ever and 
 anon for the help which only religion can give. 
 They are, after all, complements of each 
 other, the one masculine, daring, strong, the 
 other reverent, loving, tender, — ^both the chil- 
 dren of God, both embodiments of the ever- 
 lasting truth, both sent to earth on a mission 
 of love. And at last the one liberalized and 
 the other sanctified they shall make up their 
 quarrel and stand together as lovers again be- 
 fore the great altar of nature. God himself 
 
28 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 shall perform their marriage rite, the fairest 
 stars of heaven sparkle as the jewels around 
 their brow; earth brings its flowers from ten 
 thousand fields to throw at their feet, all the 
 harmonies of this lower world join with the 
 choirs above in singing again as their wedding 
 song: "Glory to God in the highest, peace 
 on earth, good will to men." And the 
 romance of scientific discovery shall be com- 
 plete in its finding what is richer than all the 
 jewels of earth, fairer than the brightest orbs 
 of night, grander than all the laws of matter, — 
 the pearly gates of the spirit world, the luster 
 of the immortal soul, the heaven-born laws and 
 the long-lost love of a sweet and true religious 
 faith. 
 
II 
 
 WHAT EVOLUTION IS 
 
 This old world of ours, though so monoto- 
 nous and prosaic in its ordinary events, has 
 had ever and anon its special incidents, incon- 
 spicuous at the time, but which, as seen now, 
 are thrilling beyond anything romance has 
 ever devised. One such was when the first hu- 
 man hand struck a spark of fire out of earth's 
 physical darkness, sending its light down the 
 long vista of civilization's future ; another when 
 the first human mind struck the idea of deci- 
 mal notation out of its mental darkness, giving 
 to progress an intellectual helper second only 
 to what fire has been in its physical realm; yet 
 another when Faust first put his movable type 
 together, sending out over the world the light 
 of thought; others when the words liberty and 
 love first trembled on the lips of society and 
 religion, — and others still, when Columbus, 
 voyaging with his three ships across the sea, 
 first beheld this new world, and Galileo, voy- 
 aging with his optic glass across space first 
 
30 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 saw the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus 
 and this new universe, and Newton, voyaging 
 with his figures across a sheet of paper, first 
 beheld the secret of what holds all worlds and 
 the universe itself together. But, after all, 
 none of these have surpassed in significance 
 the proclamation a generation ago of the great 
 doctrine of evolution, none given the world a 
 light so splendid or wrought in its other ideas 
 'changes so vast. Ridiculed and trampled 
 down at first, as all seed truths are sure to be; 
 charged with making man a monkey and God 
 a monad, it has won to itself, in a single genera- 
 tion, the faith of all scientific thinkers, the 
 homage of newspapers and reviews, and the 
 respect of pulpits and theological schools. 
 Though not by any means new in its material, 
 though itself an evolution on whose parts all 
 sciences and all thinkers from the very begin- 
 ning of mind have been working, it is most em- 
 phatically a new use of the material, a putting 
 together in one vast structure of what hith- 
 erto had been regarded as separate buildings. 
 Other philosophies, to be sure, have attempted 
 the same thing with regard to special depart- 
 ments of the universe, — some its cosmogony, 
 some its organic kingdoms, some its society 
 and politics, and some its religion and ethics, 
 but the grandeur of evolution is that it shows 
 
WHAT EVOLUTION IS 31 
 
 how one set of principles runs through the 
 product of everything, from the making of a 
 weed to the making of a world, and from the 
 lowliest realm of matter up to the loftiest 
 reach of society and the soul; to the striking 
 out of a spark which lights up all the past as 
 well as all the present, and reveals the connect- 
 ing link of aU worlds in time, as gravity does all 
 worlds in space. And though it is not by any 
 means complete, has many missing links to be 
 supplied and some of its territory fiercely in 
 dispute, its main principles are settled as sure 
 as truth itself, and transcending all the other 
 grand contributions of our age to the world's 
 progress, it bids fair to be the one thing which 
 is to make the nineteenth century forever 
 memorable in the history of human thought. 
 
 Who will say that such a subject is not one 
 which every person living in the world to-day 
 ought to know something about.? It is not a 
 mere far-off speculation, not a department of 
 knowledge which belongs properly to a few 
 professional philosophers, but one which is full 
 of great practical truths, one which embraces 
 the laws of all healthy living and successful 
 work, one which affects the aspect of every 
 object the whole universe has to show. 
 
 Several years ago, while exploring with a 
 party of friends one of the many crablike arms 
 
39 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 with which Puget Sound on the western side 
 of our country crawls back from the sea up 
 into the land, our boat anchored for the after- 
 noon in a picturesque spot under the Olympic 
 Mountains to allow the amateur artists on 
 board, mostly ladies, to make a sketch of its 
 beautiful scenery. Suddenly the silence of 
 lead-pencils which had reigned supreme for an 
 hour or so, was broken by the horrified ex- 
 clamation of a feminine voice: "Oh! oh! oh! 
 we're all adrift." It was occasioned by a 
 change of the tide, which up there among the 
 innumerable inlets it has to visit, often loses 
 all sense of its obligations to the almanac and 
 the moon, a change from ebb to flow that was 
 bearing our boat from its anchor a cable's 
 length the other way. On coming to a stand 
 again, which it did in a few moments, most 
 of the artists recognized the changed per- 
 spective and began their sketches all over 
 again, but others, hating to lose their previ- 
 ous work, went on and finished up what they 
 had started upon by adding to it the incom- 
 pleted things, some as they remembered them 
 and some as they now appeared. At the close 
 of the afternoon we organized an extempore 
 art exhibition in which the wholly new pic- 
 tures, though somewhat hasty, showed up 
 fairly well. But the others ! Besides the hor- 
 
WHAT EVOLUTION IS SS 
 
 rifled jerk of the pencil where the exclamation 
 "we're all adrift" had come in, as unmeaning in 
 art as the sudden quirk was in chirography 
 which used to adorn our writing books at the 
 district school at the point where the master 
 had come up from behind and rapped our 
 knuckles with his ruler to keep us from mak- 
 ing crooked lines, — ^besides this, the most ludi- 
 crous results had arisen from the mixing up in 
 them of the two perspectives, the houses and 
 logs with both ends visible, the dog, the Indian 
 and the white man each with a double back- 
 ground, and a beautiful waterfall and long 
 vista through the woods, which could not be 
 seen at first, compelling a place for themselves 
 in the final sketch; and as we compared the two 
 sets of work, we all concluded that the best 
 way to make pictures when the tide has turned, 
 is to drop the old sketches and draw every ob- 
 ject from its new point of view. Well, what 
 took place with our tugboat on Puget Sound, 
 has taken place in our day with the bark of 
 thought on the sea of life. Its tide has 
 changed, the great tide of philosophy, and 
 changed with it the point of view from which 
 the whole universe is to be seen. 
 
 There are some beholding the change who 
 are exclaiming in horror that we are all adrift ; 
 some who refuse to recognize it, going right 
 
34 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 on with their work as if still at the old crea- 
 tion standpoint; and some, who while recog^ 
 nizing that they are at a new position, think 
 that the only safe way is to mix up the two 
 views in their work, — ^look at nature and nat- 
 ural science from the standpoint of evolution, 
 and at religion and ethics from that of crea- 
 tion, and who, with a miracle of perspective 
 such as the devoutest saint painter of the mid- 
 dle ages never dreamed of, represent the Bible, 
 Jesus, Christianity and our human nature as 
 having at the same time a natural and a su- 
 pernatural origin. But evidently, if we would 
 not make our work ridiculous, the only true 
 way is to lay aside reverently all forms of it 
 drawn from the old position, keeping only the 
 ripened skill gained from it, and do everything 
 now from the new standpoint of evolution. 
 
 Preeminently is such a change needed with 
 regard to religious work. Its great eternal 
 objects, God, man, the universe, duty, virtue 
 and immortality, are indeed the same in them- 
 selves, but their perspective, their lights and 
 shadows, and their relations to each other and 
 to the eye which sees them, these have widely 
 changed. Their supernatural sides and ends, 
 those which from the old standpoint were often 
 the only ones seen, have disappeared, and their 
 natural ones come, as never before, into view. 
 
WHAT EVOLUTION IS 36 
 
 Henceforth, if we are to have any complete 
 and harmonious religion at all, it must be the 
 one which evolution reveals. And it is a most 
 remarkable coincidence that now, when under 
 the influence of science and criticism and the 
 world's changed spiritual atmosphere men's 
 faith in the written Bible as an authority is 
 being so rapidly weakened, this larger, unwrit- 
 ten Bible, with its new interpreter, should so 
 naturally and commandingly sweep into its 
 place. 
 
 What, then, is evolution? We all know the 
 famous definition of it given by Herbert Spen- 
 cer : "An integration of matter and concomitant 
 dissipation of motion during which the matter 
 passes from an indefinite, incoherent homo- 
 geneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, 
 and the retained motion undergoes a parallel 
 transformation." It is a definition which is 
 admirable for scholars who have the strength 
 of mental jaw that is necessary to crack open 
 the nut of hard words and get out their inner 
 meat of meaning. But there is a much shorter 
 and easier one for those who like their intel- 
 lectual food more free of shells, which expresses 
 its central idea equally well. It is that simply 
 of growth, is the doctrine that everything 
 which now is or ever was or ever will be, in- 
 cluding the universe itself with all its changes. 
 
36 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 is the outcome by natural laws and forces of 
 all its preceding states. It is not a principle 
 thus stated which in itself is very new or 
 startling, is what men have always known and 
 held to be true of some things in the universe, 
 as the flower, the tree, the animal, the state, 
 but is something they had hardly thought of 
 before as holding good with reference to the 
 universe as a whole. They were like the negro 
 girl Topsy, who, when told that God made her, 
 loudly denied the statement as ascribing to 
 that individual too exclusive a credit, affirming 
 that what God made was "just a little tot so 
 high" and that "she herself had growed the 
 rest," — only the theologians laid the chief 
 stress on God's part of the world affirming that 
 he made the universe so high that all it had 
 growed itself was a little tot here on earth. 
 Evolution, therefore, merely extends to the 
 whole what everybody had thus believed in 
 part, — teaches that it all grew, earth and oak, 
 universe and animal, solar system and soul. 
 Arcturus and his suns, Adam and his sons — 
 give allopathically in suns and stars the truth 
 which others had administered homeopathically 
 in acorns and animalcules, and set forth also, 
 as never before, the method of its one growth. 
 What converted me to it at first was not Dar- 
 win or Spencer, but an illustrated lecture on 
 
WHAT EVOLUTION IS ST 
 
 the growth of an egg into a chicken which was 
 given years ago by a naturalist who was then 
 a decided anti-evolutionist. He drew repre- 
 sentations of what took place in the egg each 
 day, from its condition as a simple homogene- 
 ous cell through its segmentation, gastraea 
 stage, separation into ento-, endo-, and meso- 
 blast, and unfolding of these into intestines, 
 heart, lungs, bones, brain, eyes, feathers, wings, 
 till out of that one material, without any out- 
 side help, there came the living, many-organed 
 animal, able thenceforth, till man's need of 
 chicken broth came round, to take care of itself. 
 And as I saw the process, I said to myself, and 
 said afterwards to him, "Why, what is this but 
 a type of the very thing which evolution claims 
 has taken place with this whole universe, — 
 the segmentation of its nebulous egg into solar 
 systems, then their folding over into the three 
 layers of suns, planets and satellites, and, 
 finally, their gradual development into the 
 backbone of continents, the arteries and heart 
 of rivers and seas, the limbs of genera 
 and species, and the eyes and wings of 
 mind and soul?" He answered: "But there 
 is a life principle in the egg without which it 
 never could have taken place;" to which I 
 replied, "True, and so as a Christian I have 
 always believed there is in the universe, — that 
 
38 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 it is not a dead universe, but a live one, — ^has 
 been so from the start; and if this little finite 
 life of an egg can evolve within itself a 
 chicken, why not in the same way the infinite 
 life of a nebula evolve the universe?" I did 
 not see the lecturer again till five years had 
 passed away ; and then, to my delight, I found 
 that he, too, was a full-fledged Darwinian lec- 
 turing on evolution, had got his fledging, as 
 he told me, the same as I had mine from 
 the wings of that chicken. And the best way 
 in which for anyone to prepare his mind for a 
 flight into the loftier regions of this whole 
 subject is for him to begin as Darwin himself 
 did with the familiar everyday phenomena 
 which are right around him — go out into the 
 barnyard and dove-cote to learn the origin of 
 species, study the flower in the crannied wall 
 to know what God and man is, and touch the 
 hem of the garment of nature's great miracle- 
 worker in weed and worm, to get a knowledge 
 of the mystic virtue out of which come sun 
 and star. 
 
 The growth of inorganic things, sun and 
 star and the world at large, is indeed differ- 
 ent, in many respects, from that of seed and 
 egg, the one being the result, apparently, of 
 external forces, while the other is the unfolding 
 of a principle from within. But the differ- 
 
WHAT EVOLUTION IS 39 
 
 ence is one of degree rather than of kind. 
 The egg and the seed are dependent on outside 
 warmth and food and a suitable environment 
 for their growth, while who has ever watched 
 the shaping of a crystal, each particle going 
 to its own exact place without outside help; 
 or the wonderful combinations of chemistry 
 where each element selects, unaided, its own af- 
 finity; and not felt that equally with organic 
 growth its controlling power was within ? How 
 inevitable in the world around us is each new 
 state of things the outcome by natural laws 
 and forces of its preceding state, and that 
 again of some other, and so back as far as 
 mind can go? Who has not had repeated ex- 
 periences in his own career, of how little in- 
 cidents, chance meetings and careless words 
 too insignificant, apparently, to be noted even 
 in the minutest diary, have been the grains of 
 mustard-seed out of which have come great 
 trees in whose branches all the birds of his life's 
 air have made their nests? What is all history 
 but a process in which every event is at once 
 a fruit of the past and a seed of the future, 
 a seed which often grows more wonderfully 
 than any that was ever planted in garden or 
 nourished with food? Moses carried from the 
 Nile a few select principles of the old Egyptian 
 civilization, leaving its massive tree to die, and 
 
40 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 out of them developed what splendors of 
 Hebrew thought. Jesus, a direct product of 
 Hebraism, scattered on the soil of Palestine, 
 — he himself called them only seeds, — and to- 
 day half the world is eating what they grew to. 
 Almost three hundred years ago a couple of 
 vessels crossed the sea, one with slavery, the 
 other with liberty, in its hold; and, planted 
 on the same soil and influenced by the same 
 environment, read on a thousand pages of 
 American history written out in black and 
 white and red, what they ripened to. Two 
 hundred years later a descendant of that old 
 Puritan stock, mobbed, ridiculed, despised, sent 
 forth his ringing cry : Emancipate the slave ! 
 
 "And his air-sown, unheeded words 
 In the next age are flaming swords" 
 
 on the points of which blossom Gettysburg 
 and Appomattox Court House, and, added to 
 the human race, four millions more of free 
 men. And with the great field of all time 
 filled with such things as these, who will say 
 that there is any better definition of evolution 
 than to call it simply growth. 
 
 In subsequent lectures I shall speak of the 
 various stages and factors of this growth, of 
 its bearing on the several doctrines of religion, 
 and of how beautifully it lights up and explains 
 
WHAT EVOLUTION IS 41 
 
 some of the darkest features of nature and 
 society, and intensifies our hope for a better 
 future alike here and beyond the grave; and 
 I shall try to do it not by doctoring the 
 genuine article with any pious supernatural 
 drugs, not by covering up its secular week- 
 day working limbs with any tailor-made Sun- 
 day clothes, but by presenting it from the 
 scientific standpoint exactly as it is, looking 
 squarely at its darker and more terrible aspects, 
 and only putting in words the higher meanings 
 which its own dumb lips are speaking in signs. 
 At the opening meeting of a class for its study 
 which I had in Hartford, Conn., made up from 
 people of all faiths and of no faith at all, I 
 laid down a similar platform, — said I should 
 not try to twist it into the support of any doc- 
 trine or any church, but aim, first of all, to get 
 at its own exact truth, and asked that they 
 would then join with me in recognizing what- 
 ever either of religion or anti-religion that 
 truth itself might stand for. Conducted thus, 
 many people who could not have been drawn by 
 a cart-rope into a professedly religious service, 
 felt free to come into what was only by nick- 
 name "Mr. Kimball's Prayer Meeting," and 
 though some sensitive souls were now and then 
 troubled with the shock it gave to their old 
 ideas, it was merely to come out afterwards into 
 
4.2 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 a richer new faith, and at the close of the first 
 year, one young man representing many others, 
 said to me, "Until I came to these meetings I 
 was a downright atheist; and if you had at- 
 tempted to use them directly for my conver- 
 sion, I should have taken the alarm at once 
 and fled, but when you proposed that we should 
 all be ready simply to look where the thing 
 pointed, I could not refuse ; and now I want to 
 tell you that while I am very far from being a 
 full noon-day Christian, I have got the first 
 gleam of light on religion that I ever had, and 
 that I am so well pleased with it that I am 
 going to follow it up and try for more." 
 
 Does not the conception of the universe as 
 the outgrowth, all through, of its own inherent 
 forces without the need of an outside Creator, 
 fairly viewed, increase a thousandfold rather 
 than diminish its real religious significance? 
 It is only savagery which thinks that a thing 
 to be done by Deity at all, must be done by him 
 from the outside, and each thing by a separate 
 act, — it is the first step of science to recognize 
 that it may be done more divinely from within, 
 and by the hand reaching from one thing into 
 another of natural cause and effect. When 
 we were children, and little baby brothers and 
 sisters came into the family, and we older ones 
 were curious as to where they came from, our 
 
WHAT EVOLUTION IS 4& 
 
 modest aunts and fathers used to tell us that 
 the doctor brought them, an answer with which, 
 inasmuch as that functionary was always 
 around at such times, most of us were satis- 
 fied. But now and then an inquisitive youth 
 will ask the question back of that, as to where 
 the doctor got them, an inquisitiveness for 
 which, as we well know, its exhibitor was gen- 
 erally given a slap on the back and told to go 
 to bed. And that was the old way of answer- 
 ing the question as to where new species of 
 animals, plants and worlds came from, that a 
 doctor Deity brought them, an answer with 
 which multitudes of grown children were once 
 satisfied, though occasionally even then an in- 
 quisitive scientific brother would ask yet fur- 
 ther where Dr. Deity got them, resulting, 
 alas, how often, in having a theological father 
 shut up his mouth forever and send him to a 
 graveyard bed. But now man has grown up 
 to manhood, and there is no longer any reason 
 even in the prudery of theology why he should 
 not be told the whole exact truth, — that species 
 come from species, and worlds from worlds, by 
 a power within themselves; that the universe 
 itself, with all its grandeur, was once a mere 
 embryo babe in the womb of time ; and that 
 ■nature everywhere, as its name implies, is what 
 forevermore is being bom, evolution every- 
 
4.4! THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 where what forevermore is growing up. The 
 very last thing with which to charge such a 
 view is irreligion. Who that has not had his 
 eyes blinded with custom, can go out into his 
 garden in springtime, and see the humblest 
 plant making its way without spade or hoe out 
 of the dark soil, unfolding, unschooled, its 
 needed stalk and leaves, and painting and carv- 
 ing its flower and fruit from an ideal within 
 itself, and not feel a thrill of wonder? Who can 
 take his little daughter in his arms, a mere lump 
 of flesh, and behold feature after feature round- 
 ing into beauty and faculty after faculty into 
 brightness, till glorious womanhood is reached, 
 all by a power which he knows is not his own, 
 and not feel that here is a temple above all that 
 art has ever built, in which to worship, here an 
 image transcending any that Angelo ever 
 carved or Raphael ever painted, before which 
 to bow? And to look with the eye of science 
 on this whole universe sending up its first 
 tender shoot out of matter's primeval soil, and 
 carving on it the stalk of constellations and 
 the leaves and fruit of satellites and suns, and 
 to behold a baby-world shaping itself into the 
 features of sea and continent, unfolding on 
 its cheek the beauty of sunsets and flowers, and 
 growing up into the faculties, one after another, 
 of love and thought and soul, — ^if there is any- 
 
WHAT EVOLUTION IS 46 
 
 thing, anywhere which can give man a sense of 
 the Infinite Mystery, is it not such a sight — 
 anything, anyhow, which can move him to re- 
 ligion, is it not such a marvel? 
 
m 
 
 THE THREE GREAT STAGES OF 
 EVOLUTION 
 
 Evolution was defined in my last lecture as 
 only the more scientific term for what is ordi- 
 narily known as growth. But what is growth? 
 The idea commonly prevailing that it is merely 
 an increase of size, loses sight of its most es- 
 sential features, and is one which, in the in- 
 terests alike of science and morality, we need 
 most emphatically to get rid of. You have 
 heard the story of the old deacon, who mistak- 
 ing the label which had dropped from his wife's 
 spool of cotton for a piece of court-plaster, 
 deliberately placed it, one Sunday morning, on 
 his naturally enormous nose so that as he went 
 round for the contributions, all the smiling 
 congregation read on it, "Warranted to hold 
 out 200 yards." And yet, ridiculous as the 
 deacon's mistake was, how many are the million- 
 aires, and how many the cities, and nations, and 
 even churches, that as the evidence of their 
 
 growth, are striving consciously and proudly 
 46 
 
THREE STAGES OF EVOLUTION 47 
 
 to label its one enormous feature with precisely 
 the same outward assurance. What we need 
 to learn is that the chief element of all real 
 growth is interior, the arrangement of its 
 material, whether more, or less, into new organs, 
 and these into the capacity for new functions. 
 The growing nation is not the one which is 
 adding Canadas and Cubas and Hawaiian 
 Islands to its borders and half-breed millions 
 to its population, but the one which is adding 
 arts and sciences, and a higher civilization, and 
 a better internal organization to the extent 
 and people it already has ; the growing church, 
 not the one that is increasing in noses and 
 square feet, but the one which is increasing in 
 knowledge and square conduct; and as regards 
 the individual, it is not till he has done growing 
 as an animal that he grows fastest of all as a 
 man. So with evolution. It is a process which 
 goes on within, an increase in organs and 
 functions; and there are three great stages to 
 it, each of them independent of any outward 
 enlargement, which to get a clear idea of it, 
 need to be carefully studied. 
 
 The first is that of homogeneity, or same- 
 ness, a stage in which the material to be evolved 
 is all of one kind in one condition and without 
 any division whatever into organs or parts. It 
 is a stage whose recognition is one of the great 
 
48 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 distinctive points in the modern Spencerian idea 
 of evolution, as against the idea of it which 
 once prevailed. The old theory held that the 
 starting place of all growth was a minute 
 image of its adult form, a germ in which every- 
 thing existed exactly as it was afterwards to 
 be, only on a smaller scale ; and it was thought 
 that if science merely had a microscope power- 
 ful enough, it would see in every cell a portrait 
 of the future animal, and in every seed a pic- 
 ture of what was to rise from it as a full-grown 
 plant, a theory, very singularly, which in a 
 modified form lies at the foundation of Weis- 
 mann's famous doctrine of heredity. As a 
 matter of fact, however, the most powerful 
 microscopes, instead of revealing any such 
 images in the germinal cells of animals and 
 plants, are able to find in them only a minute 
 particle of almost wholly unorganized proto- 
 plasm, with no more resemblance to what grows 
 from it than a bed of clay has to a completed 
 and many-roomed brick house. And though it 
 is doubtful whether there is anything in the 
 universe now which is at its perfectly homo- 
 geneous stage, even its raw material having 
 been ages ago wonderfully elaborated, yet, 
 whenever we do go back to the starting-point 
 of any of its special forms, we find infallibly 
 an approach to such a stage. The oak begins 
 
THREE STAGES OF EVOLUTION 49 
 
 its growth as an acorn, without root or limb 
 or trunk ; the animal as a blending of two pro- 
 toplasmic cells, without muscle, bone or brain; 
 all life as we go down the rocks, in simpler and 
 simpler forms till its two kingdoms unite in 
 one protistic root. Society, at first, had no 
 distinction of classes, or occupations, or institu- 
 tions, or property, or even of wives and chil- 
 dren, each of its members being at once hunter, 
 warrior, farmer, mechanic, and all things being 
 held in common. Even in the realm of mind, the 
 five senses of the earliest animals were merged 
 together in that of feeling alone; all their fac- 
 ulties in those of nutrition, reproduction and de- 
 fense. Language, to start with, was only a sin- 
 gle guttural sound; grammar for ages only a 
 noun and verb ; mathematics only a counting of 
 five and ten; and religion only a superstitious 
 fear. Back of all history the earth itself was a 
 molten globe without mount or meadow, sea or 
 shore. And going back still further, evolution 
 holds that the universe as a whole, — all worlds, 
 all animals and plants, all matter and all that 
 matter has ever been or will be, — ^was simply a 
 nebulous mist, homogeneous in substance and 
 all diffused in space, or, as the old Bible has 
 it, was "without form and void." 
 
 It was an original state of things which, es- 
 thetically viewed, was dreary enough; a cloud 
 
50 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 unrelieved with even the possibility of a silver 
 lining, but one which from the standpoint of 
 evolution was full of profoundest interest. 
 What mother bending over the undeveloped 
 face of her babe asleep in its cradle, ever found 
 it dull and dreary, — did not read in its un- 
 written lines entrancing prophecies of a mighty 
 future, and in its unprinted features whole 
 volumes of heroic deeds and shining virtues ; 
 and when the undeveloped face was that of a 
 baby universe lying asleep in its cradle of space, 
 how much more fascinating to the scientific eye 
 its apparent blankness. As Henry Ward 
 Beecher was walking along a country road one 
 day, he came across a boy playing in the mud, 
 and thinking to quiz him a little, he inquired 
 what he was doing. "Making a meeting-house," 
 replied the boy. "Yes," said Mr. Beecher, "I 
 see the meeting-house, but where is the 
 minister.? Why don't you make him, too?" 
 "Because," answered the boy, glancing at the 
 cloth of his mquisltor, and taking in the situ- 
 ation, — "because there wasn't mud enough here 
 to make a minister with." But in nature's 
 original mud there was no such deficiency. 
 Space was filled with enough of it to make not 
 only ministers and meeting-houses with, but all 
 even of the subtlest things they have ever stood 
 for, since. And though it had no actual image 
 
THREE STAGES OF EVOLUTION 61 
 
 of anything within it, it had the possibilities, 
 and the laws, and forces, out of which every- 
 thing was to come, had them, too, independent 
 of any disturbing environment, so that an in- 
 telligence knowing them all, might have read 
 in it then, not with a mother's fancy, but with 
 a mathematician's figures, the whole of its after 
 history, — all the starry worlds it would sparkle 
 with, all the races, nations, civilizations and 
 religions it would give rise to, all its coming 
 literature and science. Homer's "Iliad" in some- 
 thing more original than its own native Greek, 
 and Spencer's "Evolution" in the very atoms to 
 be evolved, — all its battlefields and hero deeds 
 and manly deaths, its every lover's vow and 
 maiden's yes, Beethoven's symphonies while 
 yet in the eternal silence, the Parthenon while 
 still in its elemental dust, all even that any 
 American Congress will ever do, its every event 
 till the whole thing sinks back into a nebula 
 again, — such the raw material, the great neb- 
 ulous egg, with which evolution began its work. 
 Its second stage is that of differentiation, 
 the gradual separation and variation of its 
 homogeneity into a myriad distinct parts. We 
 hear a great deal said in our day about the 
 blessedness of unity and equality, — are inclined 
 to look on dividedness and diversity as the 
 source of all evil, indeed have implied as much 
 
59 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 in one of the names Deuce or Second, given to 
 the devil; and sometimes think that to get rid 
 of them and get oneness and likeness in their 
 place, especially as regards religion, would be 
 to get very near the kingdom of heaven. 
 There was a young man residing in Boston, 
 awhile ago, who was engaged to one of a pair 
 of twin young ladies out on Commonwealth 
 Avenue, both of them very beautiful, and so 
 exactly alike that their own parents were con- 
 tinually mistaking one for the other. Some- 
 one asked him how in the world he wal able, 
 Sunday nights, when he went to do his court- 
 ships, to distinguish them apart — ^know which 
 to kiss and caress and which to be only a 
 brother to, a question this Boston youth, who 
 in everything else had been taught to distinguish 
 carefully between tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum, 
 answered by saying unblushingly, "Well, to 
 tell the truth, I do not try." And so there are 
 many would-be reformers who would have every 
 thing in the world, especially all churches, all 
 creeds, all estates, all classes, so twinlike and 
 perfect that there would be no rivalries, no 
 competitions, no jealousies between them, no 
 person interested to get the favors of the one 
 any more than of the others. But nature, ex- 
 cept now and then to a Boston youth, does not 
 gratify such a desire, has made division and 
 
THREE STAGES OF EVOLUTION 63 
 
 differentiation not lapses out of good, but a 
 normal and vital part of all upward progress. 
 The moment a thing begins to grow, it begins 
 to divide and to have its divisions differ, — the 
 seed into radicle and plumule, and then into 
 all the multiplied roots, limbs, leaves, tissues 
 and flowers of the full-grown plant; the cell 
 into segments, and these into all the myriad 
 organs: bones, brain, nerves, muscles, stomach, 
 heart and the like, of the adult body; and life 
 itself into the animal and vegetable kingdoms, 
 and these into all the varied classes, orders, 
 genera, species and varieties that zoology and 
 botany are familiar with. The earth grew by 
 separating its original nebulous mass into 
 water, land and air, and these into all the long 
 list of natural divisions that geographical boy- 
 hood, with a prize in view^ learns to rattle off ; 
 the stellar universe by separating its diffused 
 nebulous mist into suns, planets, satellites and 
 comets, having its one star differ from another 
 star in glory; the nebulous mist, probably, by 
 differentiating matter into its sixty-seven 
 chemical elements ; and possibly matter itself 
 out of some primitive substance where with 
 ether and force it was all one. Mind divides in 
 the same way into its varied appetites, affec- 
 tions, aspirations and faculties ; speech into 
 languages, literatures, sentences, words; poli- 
 
54 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 tics into parties; philosophy into schools; and, 
 under precisely the same law, is it not, religion, 
 into religions, sects, creeds, churches and 
 church splits. Even where there seems at first 
 an exactly opposite law, what Darwin calls 
 "the persistence of the type" — species of 
 animals and plants, the same now as in the 
 geologic ages, nebulae that have never func- 
 tioned into worlds, religions and social states 
 stationary since man became man, and an old 
 fogginess now and then in our human nature 
 itself which seems a part of its old primal 
 mist, — even in such cases it is only a subtler 
 method of variation, is differentiation itself 
 differentiated; and its result a vastly greater 
 diversity than would be possible under its uni- 
 form action. 
 
 What is the use of this dividing and differ- 
 ing that nature is so full of, what the part it 
 has to act as a stage in evolution.'' One of its 
 uses, seen especially in the organic world, is the 
 getting of more food. Variety is not only 
 the spice of life, but very largely its meal- 
 earner, its cook and its main dish. One of the 
 mathematical truths taught the youth of our 
 land at college, and usually forgotten as soon 
 as taught, is that while the bulk of bodies in- 
 creases in proportion to the cube of their di- 
 ameters, their surface increases only in pro- 
 
THREE STAGES OF EVOLUTION 65 
 
 portion to their squares. It is a truth which 
 every little cell, animal and vegetable, had to 
 learn ages ago as the very first condition of 
 its continued existence; that, too, without any 
 colleges, or professors, or black-boards, or even 
 brains. For its food being taken by absorp- 
 tion through its surface while its use of it was 
 by its whole body, the larger it grew, the larger 
 the disproportion became between its demand 
 and supply, that is, every time it doubled in 
 thickness, it had eight times as much body that 
 needed food, but only four times as much sur- 
 face through which to get it; and the question 
 was. What are you going to do about it.'' — a 
 question it had at once to solve, or starve. It 
 solved it how? Simpty by dividing its body 
 into two parts, and then as fast as it grew, 
 dividing it again, so that with the more sub- 
 stance to be fed, it always had in its smaller 
 divisions more surface through which to get 
 the food. I do not suppose there has ever 
 been since, a mathematical problem on the face 
 of this earth on which so much depended, — 
 reproduction and all the immense social system 
 of which it is the base. The wisdom it involved 
 is what the statesman of the world with all their 
 boasted brains, especially the Jingo part of 
 them, have never yet caught up. We still 
 think, even in our own land, that the mathe- 
 
56 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 matical law is the other way, namely, that the 
 more a nation grows in bulk, the larger will 
 be the proportion of its growth in the means 
 of life, so are trying all the time to enlarge our 
 territory. But nature does not change her 
 mathematics in passing on from amoebas to 
 Americas, and from cells to states ; and so it is 
 a most remarkable fact, that while nations with- 
 out number, trying to perpetuate themselves 
 by adding to their outward size, have age after 
 age disappeared, that first microscopic cell, 
 which without book or brains solved the prob- 
 lem by making itself many and small, is, ac- 
 cording to Weismann, the one living thing on 
 this earth which has thus far proved itself 
 immortal. 
 
 It is a wisdom which nature herself has used 
 very largely all through her kingdom. Why 
 does the tree separate into its myriad branches, 
 twigs and leaves? Because thereby it gets 
 more sunshine and. air to aid in its growth than 
 it could with them all condensed in a single 
 trunk. Why do animals and plants divide into 
 their different needs and capacities they get 
 orders, genera and species.? Because with 
 vastly more nourishment out of their common 
 earth than they could if all were of the same 
 structure and had to feed on the same things. 
 And is not this the very reason why, in the 
 
THREE STAGES OF EVOLUTION 67 
 
 divine economy, religion, also, has divided into 
 its innumerable sects, churches and creeds, — 
 that matter about which so many people, de- 
 spising the lessons of evolution, are so terribly 
 troubled, because it gets thereby more of the 
 eternal sunshine and air, and of truth and God, 
 than it could if it were all gathered, as so many 
 would have it, in a single church? 
 
 Along with the gain in food, which comes 
 from differentiation, is its equal gain in effi- 
 ciency. One of the sentences set for us to learn 
 penmanship by in our old writing-books, was 
 "Union is Strength," but coming in before that 
 in the copy-book of nature was the exactly 
 opposite maxim that division also is strength. 
 An army with its forces differentiated into 
 artillery, cavalry and infantry, officers and 
 men, is surely a stronger army, though as 
 regards the officers and men some of our militia 
 regiments seem to think otherwise, than the 
 one which has them all united in a single de- 
 partment. The sun which is going to make 
 things grow, cannot, evidently, be one in mass 
 with the planet on which the growing is to be 
 done. The apostle Paul wisely asks, "If the 
 whole body were an eye, where were the hear- 
 ing? If the whole were hearing, where were the 
 smelling?" What would society be as to effi- 
 ciency, if all its members were mechanics or mer- 
 
58 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 chants or even ministers ? That was a wise old 
 deacon who thanked the Lord for his saints, but 
 who praised him, also, that as long as there was 
 so much dirty work yet in the world to be done 
 (it was at the close of a great political campaign 
 in which his party was victorious), there were 
 also a plenty of sinners exactly fitted for its 
 doing. And in the universe all through, it is its 
 endless diversity of taste and talent which en- 
 ables it to accomplish its endless diversity of 
 work, — the worm which crawls, things which 
 would have to remain forever neglected, if it 
 were a twin with the bird that sings or the 
 soul that soars. 
 
 More important still, if life had grown up a 
 single homogeneous unit, it would necessarily 
 have had as its moral qualities only selfishness 
 and self-regard, would have been only a single 
 spoiled world-child. It is because it has dif- 
 ferences, that each of its members has some- 
 body besides himself to love and enjoy; because 
 it has differences that it has affections and 
 friendships and families and society and self- 
 sacrifice and ethics and all the highest qualities 
 of soul; and with all the strife and alienations 
 which it also involves, who that has ever known 
 what love is, will say that the dividedness which 
 has made it possible is not worth a myriad 
 times over, all its cost? 
 
THREE STAGES OF EVOLUTION 59 
 
 It is this love made possible through differ- 
 entiation, which opens up into the third great 
 stage of evolution, that of integration, or the 
 coordination and joining of its diversities, 
 each undestroyed, into a single organic whole. 
 Separation with all its prominence in nature 
 is not an end, but a means ; and as spon as the 
 parts have been separated long enough to be 
 in no danger, when left to themselves, of flowing 
 back again into homogeneity, the alienations 
 and hatreds which kept them apart die away 
 to make room for integration, and it is to be 
 especially noticed that the differences them- 
 selves, instead of being obliterated, are the 
 very things which are made use of, as with the 
 spring and wheels and hands and face of a 
 watch, to render the integration the more com- 
 plete. It is not a process which in nature's 
 workshop has to wait till differentiation is 
 finished before it can be entered upon, but one 
 which is going on side by side with it all the 
 time ; things like the bones of the human body, 
 which are differentiated from each other, being 
 integrated as a skeleton, and that in turn be- 
 coming a differentiation from the muscles and 
 nerves, and then with all the other parts, a 
 member of the body as a whole. And though 
 the process as yet is very far from being every- 
 where finished, though we have wolves and 
 
60 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 tigers and nations and churches and social 
 classes separated widely from each other with 
 hatreds, rivalries, persecutions, tariffs and 
 wars, we do already have some things, as the 
 solar system, the human body, the family and 
 to some extent the world's business, in which 
 it has proceeded a long way, and these are 
 prophecies of what the whole universe, even its 
 religions, are destined at last to become. 
 
 What, now, is the use of integration? What 
 the purpose it fulfills in the economy of nature ? 
 The answer, so far as its finite forms are con- 
 cerned, is plain enough. It is the same as that 
 with regard to differentiation, only more so, 
 greater efficiency in getting food and doing 
 work. It is commonly laid down as an indis- 
 putable axiom that the whole cannot be greater 
 than the sum of its parts, or a society have any 
 virtue above what is in its individual members; 
 but, however true in mathematics and meta- 
 physics, it is utterly false as regards evolution. 
 Heap the parts of a watch together forever, 
 and, no matter how well made they may be as 
 parts, they will never keep time. Coordi- 
 nate them as an integrated whole, and they will 
 run on parallel with the sun itself. Add the 
 members of the human body one to another, 
 and you do not get even a live animal ; organize 
 them in their relations and you get a loving, 
 
THREE STAGES OF EVOLUTION 61 
 
 thinking, aspiring man. And when all the 
 myriad parts of this vast universe are thus put 
 organically together, its races, nations, 
 religions, trades, professions, parties, pleas- 
 ures, pains, suns and stars, keeping time like 
 the watch, and animated with one spirit like the 
 body, who shall say what it will not be capable 
 of, for God and man? 
 
 It is a stage of evolution which suggests in- 
 evitably the natural and divine ideal of church 
 unity, not the bringing of all men into one 
 creed, one ritual, one polity, but the bringing 
 of them, with all their diversities just as they 
 now are, many members, into one body, ani- 
 mated with one spirit. Religion has tried long 
 enough the making of them into one belief. 
 Henry Ward Beecher, going on the platform to 
 make an antislavery speech during the dark 
 days before the war, was met by a proslavery 
 mob who, the moment he opened his mouth, 
 began to hiss him down. Waiting with a smile 
 till they had to stop to take breath, he man- 
 aged to slip in the words, "You remind me of 
 my grandfather," when instantly there was a 
 hush of curiosity to hear how. "My grand- 
 father," said he, "was a blacksmith, and I am 
 sorry to say not a very good blacksmith. But 
 one day he thought he would make a broad-ax. 
 So he got a piece of steel on which, after heat- 
 
63 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 ing it at the forge, he hammered and ham- 
 mered ; but somehow the more he hammered the 
 less it looked like a broad-ax. Then he 
 thought 'I'll make it a common ax.' So he 
 heated it and hammered and hammered again, 
 and as he did so, the less and less it looked 
 like a common ax. Then he thought, 'Well, 
 I'll make it a hatchet,' and once more he heated 
 and hammered, but with the same result. 
 Then he got mad, and heating it white hot 
 he plunged it into a tub of water exclaiming: 
 'Well there's one thing I can do at any rate, I 
 can make a plaguey good hiss,' " a story which 
 secured Mr. Beecher a most amiable and at- 
 tentive audience. Well, that is exactly the 
 way grandfather church used to work at mak- 
 ing religious unity. It could take a heretic 
 and heat him and try to hammer him first into 
 a broad-ax saint, then into a common ax 
 one, then into a hatchet one, and then it would 
 get mad and heat him up in an auto-da-fS 
 and plunge him down into hell where at any 
 rate, it could make with him a plaguey good 
 hiss. But in either case it was very poor 
 blacksmithing. Evolution's way is to take 
 every man exactly as he is, and make the best 
 of him possible along his own line, feeling that 
 a good heretic is better in the kingdom of 
 heaven than to make a good hiss with him down 
 
THREE STAGES OF EVOLUTION 63 
 
 in the kingdom of hell, and then to integrate 
 them all somewhere into religion's great 
 spiritual universe. Who shall say it is not the 
 way along which the whole of nature points 
 the finger? 
 
 Such are the three great stages of evolu- 
 tion, homogeneity, differentiation and integra- 
 tion, oneness, divergence, and, on a higher 
 plane, oneness again. What flower ever had 
 a more beautiful unfolding, what poem a plot 
 where one thing opened more logically into 
 another than this flower of the universe, this 
 poem of all things? It is not indeed an un- 
 broken progress. It has its degeneracies and 
 dissolutions ; has its long periods of apparent 
 going backward. But as a whole it is im- 
 measurable growth; shows in the large that 
 through the ages one increasing purpose runs. 
 It is like the Bible. It opens with a book of 
 Genesis, and gives us the long wandering in 
 the wilderness, the dividing up of the promised 
 land, the bloody reign of judges and kings, 
 and the horror of the imprecatory Psalms ; but 
 it gives us, also, the long line of nature's 
 prophets, the coming of the Son of Man, and 
 the vision of the New Jerusalem. 
 
IV 
 
 THE PROOFS OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION 
 
 You remember the old classic story of how 
 Ulysses after the siege of Troy and his long 
 wanderings in many lands, proved himself on 
 his return home to be the rightful lord of 
 Ithaca and the yet-alive husband of its beau- 
 tiful queen. Arriving home at a time when 
 Penelope, believing him to be dead, and worn 
 out with a crowd of imperious suitors, had 
 promised her hand, as a means of getting rid 
 of them, to the one who would bend his bow 
 and shoot an arrow through a line of twelve 
 rings, he appeared among them at the trial 
 scene disguised as a beggar, and when their 
 pretentious hands, one after another, had failed 
 even to bend the stubborn arch, being allowed 
 amid much opposition and ridicule to try what 
 he could do, the apparent beggar having care- 
 fully felt over the weapon to make sure of its 
 condition and selected one arrow from a quiver 
 the others of which were left for his rivals' 
 
 hearts, 
 
 64 
 
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 65 
 
 "Now sitting as he was, the cord he drew. 
 Thro' every ringlet levelling his view. 
 Then notched the shaft, released and gave it wing; 
 The whizzing arrow vanished from the string, 
 Sang on direct and threaded every ring," 
 
 showing him to be the true master by a deed 
 which he alone of all on earth was able to do. 
 
 The story is a good illustration of how evo- 
 lution coming to man after its part in nature's 
 great struggle for existence and long journey- 
 ings through the material universe, proves it- 
 self to be the rightful lord of philosophy, and 
 properly entitled to the world's belief. Ap- 
 pearing in the lowly garb of matter among the 
 pompous systems of theology and metaphysics, 
 it has been allowed, only with much opposi- 
 tion and amid endless sneers, to try its hand 
 at that mighty cosmic problefn in dealing with 
 which they have all so signally failed; and now 
 lo, the great master having carefully with 
 the hand of science felt all over its segment of 
 matter and cord of force to learn its condi- 
 tion, "draws the bow and draws with ease," 
 sending its arrow of explanation through all 
 the myriad rings which nature has set up from 
 circling atom and planet's orb and Milky Way 
 ellipse on to the farthest rounds of duty, life 
 and soul. 
 
 Compare it in this respect with some of the 
 
66 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 other most noted claimants to the hand of faith. 
 Metaphysics for ages has been laboring at 
 nature's Penelopean test. What wrenchings 
 of intellect, what mazes of logic, what platforms 
 of a priori reasoning, what arrays of great 
 names, — Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, 
 Spinoza, Descartes, Carlyle, Comte, — have been 
 brought to bear on its solution, and yet how 
 empty their result. The genial Dr. Oliver 
 Wendell Holmes tells the story that having 
 got the notion in the early days of anaesthetics 
 that the subjective mind, when under their in- 
 fluence, might have marvels revealed to it, if 
 they could only be retained, far beyond the 
 reach of any ordinary intellect, made arrange- 
 ments on taking his first dose of ether, to 
 write down as soon as he should come to con- 
 sciousness, before it could be lost, whatever the 
 mighty revelation might be. Inhaling the gas 
 with this in mind, as his vision closed to all 
 earthly things the veil of eternity seemed to 
 be lifted, and the one great truth which under- 
 lies all human experiences, concentrates in itself 
 all wisdom and solves all the problems of the 
 universe, and which all the philosophers of the 
 ages had sought in vain, seemed to stand out 
 clear and distinct before his mind, and, with 
 returning consciousness, staggering to his feet, 
 he hastened to secure in black and white the 
 
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 67 
 
 precious all-embracing sentence. And what 
 do you suppose it was? It read thus: "A 
 strong smell of turpentine prevails through- 
 out." And that is about the result of the 
 labors of the metaphysicians down through all 
 the ages, in getting at the secret of the uni- 
 verse: "A strong smell of turpentine prevails 
 throughout." 
 
 Another set of claimants are those of the- 
 ology. One of them is the doctrine that its 
 Almighty Creator spoke it into being all at once 
 just as it was six thousand years ago, took an 
 armful of preexisting nothing and said over 
 it, Let there be a universe, and immediately, 
 without any secondary agencies, a universe 
 there was. At the close of a lecture on the 
 geology of the Pacific Coast given in Portland, 
 Oregon, several years ago, and illustrated with 
 a series of fossil bones, indicating the vast age 
 of the earth, an invitation was extended the 
 audience to come up on the platform and in- 
 spect the specimens close at hand. Near me 
 was an old Presbyterian elder, as much a fossil 
 as any of the dead ones out of the rocks, 
 "Oh," said he contemptuously, as we stood be- 
 fore the miocene remains of the ancestor of the 
 horse, the mesohippus, dug up from a thou- 
 sand feet below our present soil — "Oh, the ab- 
 surdity of a man's allowing his religious faith 
 
68 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 to be disturbed by these old bones ! They were 
 created by the Lord where they were a thou- 
 sand years ago, exactly as the Bible tells us; 
 it was just as easy for him, when he spoke, 
 to create dead bones under the earth as live 
 ones on its surface." I told the lecturer after- 
 wards of the remark, to which he laughingly re- 
 plied: "Poor old man; he might as well go to 
 the graveyard yonder, where he will go soon, 
 and say that the Lord created all the bones 
 there just as they are, instead of their being 
 live ones first, as to say it of those in the 
 rocks." And so he might. It is the method 
 of magic. It belongs to the world of the 
 Arabian Nights, not that of Christian days, to 
 the platform of legerdemain rather than to 
 that of nature. Nobody ever saw it done, 
 even on the smallest scale. If the Bible teaches 
 it, which it hardly does, it was not a matter 
 evidently of which the writer could have had 
 any personal knowledge. And with it em- 
 bodied in persons like that old Presbyterian 
 elder, is it any wonder that the Penelope of 
 faith should have regarded it as hardly a fit 
 suitor for her hand and heart .J" Another theo- 
 logical claimant is that of the universe's divine 
 manufacture, taking its eternally preexistent 
 raw material and putting it together part by 
 part, as a carpenter does a house. It is the 
 
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 69 
 
 theory of it which Milton so graphically de- 
 scribes in "Paradise Lost." He took 
 
 "The golden compasses to circumscribe 
 This universe and all created things. 
 One foot he centered, and the other turned 
 Round through the vast profundity obscure 
 Till earth self-balanced on her center hung." 
 
 And when he came to its living creatures, he 
 is thought to have made out of the dust the 
 first pair of each species full grown and com- 
 plete. 
 
 "The grassy clods now calved and half appeared 
 The tawny lion pawing to get free 
 His hinder parts, then springs as burst from bonds 
 And rampant shakes his brindled mane." 
 
 It is a picture so ludicrous that it is wonderful 
 how men like Agassiz and Cuvier and Linneus 
 and others familiar with the ordinary processes 
 of nature could ever believe in it as true to life. 
 Nobody ever saw the faintest inkling of such 
 a thing in the real world. And while the doc- 
 trine of it as having occurred "once on a time," 
 like the stories we tell children, may do well 
 enough for the long bow of fiction, it can 
 hardly be regarded as deserving a place in the 
 golid one of fact. 
 
70 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 Turning now to evolution as a theory of 
 the universe, it is to be noticed that the 
 proofs with which it begins, the first rings it 
 puts its arrow of explanation through are 
 not those of a far-off nebula, — ^but of close-at- 
 hand, every-day objects. There are multi- 
 tudes of things all around us — indeed the 
 woods and sea and land are full of them — 
 in which we can see its whole process g'oing' on 
 directly before our eyes. The plant comes out 
 of a seed, and that seed from some other, and 
 so on as far back as we have any knowledge of 
 plants at all, each as the result of its own 
 inherent force and law. The grassy plains do 
 not now calve, but the animals themselves, and 
 their ancestors, and so on generation after 
 generation up the steeps of time. When the boy 
 becomes a man, it is not by having the boy 
 die out of him and a man created and put in 
 his place, but by the natural unfolding of boy- 
 hood into manhood. And when we wake up in 
 the morning and see a world around us differ- 
 ent in some of its aspects from any we have 
 ever seen before, no one, not even a Presbyterian 
 elder, is so simple as to think that sometime 
 during the night it was spoken into existence 
 by the Almighty just as it is, — pantaloons, 
 watch, primitive fields and himself, or that it 
 did otherwise than unfold naturally out of what 
 
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 71 
 
 the world was on all its preceding days. 
 Such facts as these are of immense significance. 
 They show that evolution is not a mere phil- 
 osophical theory of the scholar, but an actual 
 working process of nature itself, something 
 which is in part true at any rate; and with 
 everything in our sight going on now under its 
 law, it is at least a fair presumption that things 
 always and everywhere have been done in the 
 same way. 
 
 But, while it is undeniable that individuals 
 and things right around us originate thus from 
 their predecessors, it is said that even with 
 such a starting point, the presumption is too 
 great that worlds and life and species and es- 
 pecially man with his body, mind, and soul, all 
 so different from each other and those we have 
 actual knowledge of, could have originated in 
 that way, or otherwise than directly from the 
 Deity's own creative hand. It is here that the 
 struggle against evolution is most fiercely car- 
 ried on. Even with regard to such things, 
 however, though we cannot see the whole proc- 
 ess going on, as we can with the others, there 
 are a multitude of equally solid facts acting 
 with the presumption that we can see equally 
 all around us, and it is on these, as on the 
 measured base line from which the surveyor 
 gets the dimensions of a mountain peak he can- 
 
72 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 not bodily climb to, that the evolutionist plants 
 himself to get his knowledge of origins up the 
 steeps of time which are beyond his visual 
 reach. 
 
 First, as regards the origin from a common 
 stock of the world's different species of animals 
 and plants, we have right before our eyes 
 the beginnings of such a process. Every 
 mother who has had two children, has had two 
 varieties of human beings who, along with their 
 resemblances, have differed somewhat from her, 
 and the father, and from each other in features, 
 temper, talent, taste, — almost every quality of 
 body, mind and soul; has had, therefore, two 
 incipient species. Every orchard and farm- 
 yard is filled with like illustrations of what 
 nature is continually doing to originate dif- 
 ferences out of the same stock, even within 
 the limits of a single generation. And though 
 the differences may be very slight at the start, 
 as with railroads running from the same depot, 
 nevertheless how wide they will become even 
 within the limits of history, the old Bible story 
 of the two nations which sprang from the 
 twins, Esau and Jacob, is evidence, — enough, 
 surely, when the diverging began, some of it, 
 millions of years before history, to account 
 for the world's present myriad diverse species. 
 
 Then, wide apart as the existing species 
 
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 73 
 
 may be at their extremes, man and monad, for 
 instance, there is between them a regular 
 series of connecting links and especially of 
 structural resemblances, — ^homologies, as they 
 are called, which make it as easy as going up- 
 stairs, for the one to have arisen from the an- 
 cestors of the other. As Emerson prophet- 
 ically wrote, 
 
 "A subtle chain of countless rings 
 The next unto the farthest brings, 
 And striving to be man, the worm 
 Mounts up through all the spires of form." 
 
 They all alike, whether animals or vegetables, 
 are endowed with the same great mystery of 
 life, — all alike are born and eat and reproduce 
 and grow old and die. Lordly man shares his 
 backbone and heart and muscles and brain with 
 the pig, the monkey, the lizard and the fish. 
 Creatures as wide apart as the whale, the 
 quadruped and the bird, have either rudimein- 
 tally or fully developed their double lungs and 
 four limbs and warm blood; and even in the 
 realms of mind and soul, fear, hate, love, cu- 
 riosity and conscience, rising to their climax in 
 humanity, rest their base on the brute. Not cre- 
 ation, but modification, is everywhere Nature's 
 law. When wings are wanted for a bird, she 
 does not make them outright, but, like a thrifty 
 
74 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 woman with a last year's bonnet, refashions 
 them out of an old reptile's forelegs ; or even a 
 place in which to hold a human brain, she 
 does not build a fresh skull, but, like a wise 
 mother with a growing girl, simply lets out the 
 tucks from the top of a monkey's backbone. 
 Ladies would be surprised to know what some 
 of the most apparently distinctive charms they 
 are so proud of are vamped over from, in the 
 anatomy of their despised lower relatives. 
 The rounded cheeks of children thought to aline 
 them with cherubs, and so conspicuous in Ra- 
 phael's pictures, are really a connecting link be- 
 tween them and a species of ape, where they 
 are used as the places in which to stuiF food. 
 And, with so many known cases in which the 
 organs of one species are made from those of 
 another, how direct the inference that species 
 themselves are but the varied outgrowths of 
 one primitive protoplasmic life. 
 
 It is an inference derived from surface facts, 
 which is confirmed most strikingly by the 
 deeper ones of paleontology. The rocks of the 
 earth are a mighty, many-paged volume in 
 which are printed and pictured, by the animals 
 and plants themselves, a history of their growth 
 into species, genera, orders, and the like, be- 
 ginning, as under evolution ought to be the 
 case, with those which were the most simple 
 
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 76 
 
 and protoplasmic, and branching out as we go 
 up, like the limbs of a tree, into those which are 
 on the page that is being written to-day. A 
 few years ago, while a party of scientists were 
 exploring the ruins of ancient Nineveh, they 
 came across a brick on which was the print of 
 a dog's foot, evidently made there three thou- 
 sand years before by his stepping on it when 
 the soft clay was laid out in the sun to dry, 
 another brick very possibly being thrown at 
 him for his mischief. Since then vast empires 
 have risen, and kings and statesmen and war- 
 riors and scholars without number have written 
 their names on the scroll of fame only to have 
 how many of them fade into oblivion; the 
 mighty Nineveh itself has risen to glory and 
 perished ; but what a satire on human renown ; — 
 the mark made by that little dog remains a 
 memorial of himself as clear-cut to-day as 
 when he signed it in that far-off age. So 
 when nature was building this great city that 
 we call earth, her animals were continually 
 treading on its soft clay, or getting their whole 
 bodies entombed in its mud; and what ages, 
 what empires, what religions they have sur- 
 vived, to tell us, as no logic could, evolution's 
 splendid truth. The Connecticut Valley is full 
 of such prints, varying in their length from 
 one inch to eighteen, and in their stride, from 
 
76 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 half a foot to three yards. When I was in 
 college, they had just been investigated by 
 President Hitchcock, and were thought by him 
 to be those of birds and classified as such. 
 But other geologists doubted. The sandstone 
 belonged to a period that was too early for 
 birds. Moreover, it was found that some of 
 them had left the marks of tails dragged be- 
 hind them, a most remarkable thing for ani- 
 mals which had no such appendage. So the 
 controversy ran high; and it was never settled 
 till Darwin's "Origin of Species" was published, 
 when it was found that both sides were right, the 
 tracks having been made just as some of the 
 old reptiles were evolving into birds, and pos- 
 sessed, therefore, some of the characteristics 
 of each, reptilian tails and avian feet, — a 
 splendid instance of how one higher truth will 
 often reconcile the contradictions of two op- 
 posing half truths. The rocks are crammed 
 with such connecting links, branches of life's 
 tree, separate above ground which underneath 
 unite in ever fewer and fewer limbs ; and 
 though some needed ones are yet missing, new 
 ones are being found every year, and enough 
 already exist to make a chain capable by it- 
 self alone of holding up the whole truth of 
 Darwinian evolution. 
 
 It is not in the rocks alone, however, with 
 
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 77 
 
 their dead forms that we find such a chain, 
 but also in the animal nature itself, a similar 
 one made up of living links, that upholds the 
 same great truth. It is a most interesting 
 and astounding fact that each individual of a 
 species including even man, repeats hastily in 
 its own growth, some before birth and some 
 afterwards, a series of all the forms along its 
 own line that are below it in the scale of being. 
 Nature seems to believe very strongly in re- 
 views, and so, at the beginning of each new 
 term of her school, makes the pupil spend the 
 first weeks before taking up any new studies, in 
 running over everything from a, b, c, up, that 
 as advance work she had been ages upon. The 
 simplest and probably the earliest form of life 
 that appeared on earth, was a single proto- 
 plasmic cell, and it is as such that every crea- 
 ture, Socrates and Shakespeare, amoeba and 
 ascidium makes his start to-day. Organization 
 begins now, as doubtless it did at first, with the 
 folding over of a layer of cells into a minute 
 sac, the gastrasa stage, and it is in such a 
 sac that every child of nature's school above 
 the cell, no matter where he is going to gradu- 
 ate, has for awhile to carry his luncheon, his 
 eye-glasses and also his brains. It is a fishy 
 story, but not less a scientifically true one, that 
 all vertebrates, no matter how much they after- 
 
78 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 wards live on the land and dread the water, 
 even the small boy, pass through an embryonic 
 period of having gills and being able to live 
 only in a fluid environment. Each of the 
 upper classes, however select the society it is 
 going to confine itself to after birth, not ex- 
 cepting a college fraternity, has its time of 
 being only a reptile and amphibian. And if 
 an examination is made at the age of four 
 weeks, not even the smartest scientific com- 
 mitteeman can find any diff^erence in form or 
 faculty between a bird, a dog, a tortoise and 
 a man. The lower animals when they come to 
 their species, graduate out into the world, that 
 is, are born, but those which are destined for 
 a higher rank, like the pupils in a college, keep 
 on through the upper grades, and even after 
 they are born take a sort of resident graduate 
 course, during which some of the topmost 
 stages are passed through. It is such ones 
 that we do not have to go into any ghastly 
 dissecting room to see, but that are beautifully 
 visible in the great living-room of nature. I 
 was in a lady's parlor a while ago, where on 
 the center table was a glass basin in which a 
 tadpole was evolving from a fish into a frog, 
 as refined and nice as the unfolding of a bud 
 into a flower. Who has not watched with 
 wonder the blossoming of a lowly worm into 
 
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 79 
 
 one of those winged flowers we call butterflies? 
 There are good scientific reasons for the epithet 
 so often applied to the small boy, "You little 
 monkey," that being exactly the post embry- 
 onic stage at which he has arrived; and every 
 mother who holds in her arms a child, holds 
 there a little animal that she is to see continue 
 right along the process that was begun before 
 birth, and stage by stage unfold through the 
 puppy, the tiger, the ape and the savage up 
 at last into the man. 
 
 What does all this mean,— what its cause? 
 Why, it is simply a phase of heredity, the off'- 
 spring's inheriting the peculiarities of its an- 
 cestry, — there is no other explanation of it; 
 but just as certainly as the unfolding likeness 
 of a child to its parents and its grandparents 
 shows its descent from them, just so certainly 
 its unfolding likeness to the various species of 
 animals one after another, its ontological par- 
 ents and grandparents, proves its descent from 
 their loins. It is the genealogical table in the 
 great Bible of nature written afresh in each 
 copy by the patriarch species themselves, reach- 
 ing, less divine, less certain than the genea- 
 logical graves, corresponding microscopically 
 with the record there which is written out in 
 full length ; and who will say it is less interest- 
 ing, less divine, less certain than the genea- 
 
80 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 logical tables that we find on the printed 
 Hebrew page? 
 
 Nor is this all. Every animal not only 
 passes in its growth through all the stages that 
 its ancestry has passed through, but retains, 
 also, in its own form, remnants here and there of 
 what they were ; has in it a living paleontology 
 corresponding with the fossil one that is found 
 in the rocks; splint bones to the horse which 
 are simply shriveled-up toes whose diminishing 
 can be traced right down through five different 
 species ; rudimentary teeth and hairs and pelvic 
 bones in whales ; suppressed hind legs in snakes ; 
 a mingling of the convex and concave vertebrae 
 of reptiles and birds in the old connecting links 
 between them; gill arches in lizards; and in 
 man, over fifty such things, some of them, as 
 the c£ecal appendage to the intestines, not only 
 useless, but often of great harm, — now and 
 then, also, single animals that have atavistic 
 marks which belong to others widely different, 
 as horses with zebra stripes, and human beings 
 with the extra fingers and toes of far-off am- 
 phibian forms. Who can believe that an Al- 
 mighty Being making his creatures all at once 
 out of new material would have mixed in them 
 these resemblances of other creatures? Are 
 they not rather the very things we ought to 
 find under the view that the organs of one 
 
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 81 
 
 species are modified to make those of others, 
 and not yet wholly shriveled up by disuse? 
 When a white man was captured by the Indians 
 in the early wars of our country and carried 
 off into the wilderness, his way of marking ^he 
 trail so that it could be followed, was to leave 
 behind here and there an old shoe, or a frag- 
 ment of dress, or the broken branch of a tree; 
 and pioneer scouts became very skilful in fol- 
 lowing such trails and capturing the captive 
 back. And that is what nature has done in her 
 long journey from monad up to man, she has 
 left old shoes and bits of dress and broken twigs 
 at each camp along the way, and evolution adds 
 to all its other proofs of being on the right 
 trail, by simply going after her and picking 
 them up. 
 
 When Ulysses made his famous archery con- 
 test at the court of Ithaca, having once let the 
 arrow fly from the twanging bow, it had, of 
 course, to go through all the rings at once 
 under its single impulse, without any stopping 
 to be shot again, or let the spectators rest. 
 But the rings of nature that evolution has to 
 shoot its arrow through are more than twelve, 
 and I must leave those which are beyond the 
 range of species — such as life, mind, society, 
 religion and the inorganic world, to be tried 
 for in another lecture. In closing the work 
 
82 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 already attempted, however, let me call at- 
 tention to the -wonderful way in which the 
 proofs reenforce each other and make a united 
 whole. The first consists in showing that 
 throughout the organic world, as it now is, 
 there is a regular gradation of species, both 
 those of animals and plants, from the lowest up 
 to the highest, and multitudes of cases in which 
 the organs of the one are simply modifications 
 of those which are in the others. This is the 
 classification argument. The second consists in 
 showing that the remains of animals and plants 
 found in rocks, constitute, in a general way, a 
 similar series unfolding from the lowest up, 
 ever nearer and nearer, into the ones that we 
 have on earth to-day. This is the, paleonto- 
 logical or phylogenetic argument, and, as you 
 see, greatly strengthens the other. But these 
 proofs, though they show the grades, neither 
 of them shows one grade actually producing the 
 other, and so with these alone it might still be 
 said that the Creator simply made the parents 
 of each species a separate pair. To answer 
 this we have the third argument, derived from 
 embryology, showing in the growth of each in- 
 dividual animal a repetition on a small scale, 
 and in a few weeks of the process by which the 
 organic world at large, and through long ages, 
 was produced, and, what is more, showing one 
 
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 83 
 
 species actually producing that above it which 
 is next in order. This is the ontogenetic ar- 
 gument. And then, binding all the rest to- 
 gether, we have the remnants of organs in the 
 higher species of each series, the living, the 
 geological, and the embryo one, that were of 
 great use in some lower species, but are of no 
 service now. This is the rudimentary argument. 
 The Bible tells us that a threefold cord cannot 
 be broken, but here is a fourfold cord. How 
 could anything be more finely knit together.'' 
 It is not customary to speak of logic as a thing 
 of beauty. It is ordinarily regarded as in- 
 congruous as it was for the medical student to 
 invite his lady-love to go with him not to the 
 theater, but to the most lovely opening of a 
 cadaver that was to come off the same night in 
 the dissecting-room. But if there ever was a 
 real masculine Apollo Belvidere piece of illa- 
 tive grace, is it not the one you have looked at 
 in this survey.? And so far as the organic 
 world is concerned, shall we not say that the 
 wielder of its bow and arrow, the Ulysses of 
 evolution, is worthy of having at our hands 
 the Penelope of faith? 
 
EVIDENCE OF INORGANIC EVOLUTION 
 
 There are doubtless many who have accepted 
 evolution from the start, and to whom all fur- 
 ther efforts to prove its truth are as much a 
 work of supererogation as arguments would be 
 to convince them that the sun shines or the 
 earth revolves. But such is very far from 
 being the case with all, even intelligent people. 
 I have before me the report of a sermon re- 
 cently delivered in Boston, the preacher of 
 which says, "If evolution is true, then the 
 Bible is not true, and God did not make man 
 in his own image holy, and hence man never 
 fell, and Jesus Christ is of no use." There are 
 multitudes of respectable families who still have 
 the old idea that evolution gives them a very 
 much despised ancestry — is a theory liable to 
 explode their human origin, and with which it 
 is just as well not to be caught monkeying. 
 
 Most of these disbelievers are encased in such 
 Harveyized steel plates of prejudice, that no 
 
 proof, even though it came at them with the 
 
 84 
 
INORGANIC EVOLUTION 86 
 
 force of a sixteen-inch solid, shot from a thirty- 
 foot dynamite gun, would knock into them a 
 conviction, — are like some Protestants in their 
 relation to the Roman Catholic Church; so ab- 
 solutely sure its adherents are of the Evil One, 
 that if they should get into heaven and find 
 them there, too, they would feel at once, in 
 spite of golden streets and angel songs, that 
 by some awful mistake on the part of the 
 Almighty they had got into the wrong city, 
 and with all possible speed would hurry out of 
 it into the other place. 
 
 But there are many others impressed in a 
 general way with its truth, who would like to 
 have their faith in it clarified and strengthened, 
 and would like, especially to have its consist- 
 ency with their religious belief made plain. 
 As regards those who from the first have been 
 its confirmed adherents, I doubt not, as to me, 
 the whole thing, proof and what is proved, is 
 a grand poem, a majestic hymn of creation, 
 something not merely to be gone through with 
 once and then laid aside, but to be enjoyed 
 over and over a hundred times, each time re- 
 vealing new meanings between the lines, and 
 each line a new sweetness in itself, 
 
 My preceding lecture was devoted to its 
 evidence, as the process by which the different 
 species of the animal and vegetable kingdoms 
 
86 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 were originated from a common homogeneous 
 root. 
 
 It seemed best to take up these evidences of 
 organic evolution to start with, because their 
 field is the one in which they are the most con- 
 clusive and the most unitedly applied, and 
 because it affords the best vantage-ground from 
 which to go on into more difficult realms. It 
 is a field which is associated forever with the 
 great name of Darwin, and so brilliant was his 
 exposition of it, that to many persons, even now, 
 it is the whole thing, and he its whole discoverer. 
 But, as needs to be emphasized over and over, 
 the organic world with all its importance is 
 only one of its departments, and Darwin with 
 all his greatness, the highest name in only a 
 part of its calendar. Evolution is cosmic, in- 
 cludes all worlds, has as its supreme and 
 earliest expositor the splendid name of Herbert 
 Spencer. Proceeding now to this larger field 
 I shall try to show that its proofs, though more 
 fragmentary in their application, are of the 
 same kind and force as those which are so 
 cogent with respect to Darwinian evolution. 
 
 First, as regards the raw material of the in- 
 organic world, there are many curious facts 
 about the chemical elements, so called, which 
 render a common source highly probable. 
 Their atomic weights mount up from the 1 of 
 
INORGANIC EVOLUTION 87 
 
 hydrogen to the 240 of uranium in a series, 
 each member of which is approximately a mul- 
 tiple of half that of hydrogen, as if somehow 
 the unknown substance to which that half be- 
 longs was their one starting point. They do 
 not succeed each other in their chemical 
 qualities, individually, right along from one to 
 sixty-seven, but are divisible into ten or eleven 
 groups, as copper, silver and gold, iron, nickel 
 and cobalt, fluorine, chlorine, bromine and 
 iodine, in each of which the chemical qualities 
 succeed each other regularly for awhile, and 
 then begin with similar ones over again, the 
 groups rising one above another, and the first 
 element in each corresponding in its qualities 
 with all the other firsts, the second with the 
 seconds, and so on. They are like the octaves 
 in music, where after each seven notes there 
 comes the eighth which harmonizes with the first 
 on a new scede, — are like the classes of the 
 animal world where the flying fish, the bat and 
 the bird, though belonging in their homologous 
 structure to entirely different groups, resem- 
 ble each other in their special wing-like ap- 
 pendages ; copper, for instance, being related 
 to silver and gold as one fish is to another, but 
 to iron and fluorine as the flying fish is to the 
 bat and the bird; and very significantly are 
 in the same way like the vibrations of ether, 
 
88 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 which divide its common substance up into the 
 known groups of actinic, light, and heat rays, 
 while the Roentgen ray is moSt probably one 
 simply of another group, — all indicating that 
 even the raw material of this old world of ours, 
 apparently so full of discord, is set to music; 
 sure, therefore, at last in its completed struc- 
 ture to beat itself into harmony. And that 
 such a rythmic grouping, so far as its chemical 
 elements are concerned, is not a mere fancy, is 
 shown by the fact that MendelejefF, who first 
 pointed it out, was able to predict from the 
 vacant places in its tables for which there were 
 then no known elements, that new ones to fill 
 them would eventually be found and what their 
 characteristics would be ; a prediction which has 
 already been fulfilled with regard to two of 
 them by the discovery of gallium and germa- 
 nium each with the very qualities . the vacant 
 places required, a discovery in chemistry which 
 parallels that of Neptune in astronomy and 
 those that Cuvier foretold in zoology. A large 
 part of the chemist's difficulty in reducing these 
 elements all to a common base, seems to arise 
 from a lack on earth of sufficient heat, just as 
 in the Arctic regions would be the case with 
 steam, water and ice. But in the brighter stars 
 there is no such difficulty, their temperature 
 being vastly above anything that a theologian 
 
INORGANIC EVOLUTION 89 
 
 ever conceived of as necessary to reduce even 
 sin to holiness; and very singularly the spec- 
 trum of the most brilliant orbs shows only one 
 element, hydrogen, while that of the red and 
 parti-colored ones, which are the least hot, 
 shows the other elements in continually in- 
 creasing numbers, thus suggesting that the 
 same cooling process which is evolving the 
 original cosmic fire-mist into worlds, is evolving 
 out of it the varied chemical elements which 
 later on are to play such an important part in 
 rendering at least some of these worlds fit places 
 for habitation, and in providing for their in- 
 habitants the fit garb of life. So beautiful and 
 far-reaching from the start are nature's laws, 
 so much more wonderful than any magical 
 creation out of nothing, evolution's way of 
 providing nature with even its raw material. 
 And as an indication of what the human mind 
 is capable of, and of the unseen universe in 
 which science not less than religion is at work, 
 it is to be remembered that these marvelous de- 
 ductions are made by dealing with particles of 
 matter some of which are less than one five- 
 hundred millionth of an inch in diameter, that 
 a cubical box a thousandth of an inch in thick- 
 ness would contain more than seventy thousand 
 millions of them ; that magnified in the propor- 
 tion of a pea to this whole planet they would 
 
90 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 be only the size of a grape; that they are two 
 hundred thousand times smaller than anything 
 the most powerful microscope ever made has 
 rendered visible; that even if a microscope were 
 invented capable of magnifying them to a vis- 
 ible size, they are moving back and forth so 
 rapidly, some of the gaseous ones at the rate 
 of a mUe a second, which thus magnified would 
 be two hundred thousand miles a second, 
 that no human eye could foUow them; 
 that even though it could, their nature is 
 so contradictory of everything known about 
 matter in the mass, that when they com- 
 bine chemically, one so exactly occupies the 
 space of the other as entirely to disappear, as 
 much so as if when a policeman overtook a 
 thief, he should be so completely absorbed by 
 him, — clothes, club, badge and body, there 
 would be only one person left, and he neither 
 policeman nor thief, but possibly the citizen 
 robbed, or the judge on the bench. What need 
 of children's brownies, or of Alice's Wonder- 
 land, when evolution as a part of its sober 
 scientific equipment gives us figures and facts 
 such as these? 
 
 Passing from the little to the large, we have 
 as regards the evolutionary origin of the earth, 
 the same kind of proof that paleontology 
 affords with regard to that of species. Its 
 
INORGANIC EVOLUTION 91 
 
 strata not only contain the fossils of animals 
 and plants graded one above another into those 
 which now exist, but the rocks themselves are 
 fossils, fossil worlds graded one above another 
 till their summit is the one which is now a-top. 
 Each of them, so dead, so dark, so buried in 
 eternal silence to-day, was once a realm at the 
 surface, played over by the waters, danced on 
 by the winds, brightened by the sunshine and 
 alive with ten thousand joyous things; each a 
 fulfilment of Emerson's words, 
 
 "When the old world is sterile 
 And the ages are effete. 
 He will from wrecks and sediment 
 A finer world complete." 
 
 And as we go back through the wrecks and 
 sediment we find their appointments, the same 
 as their inhabitants, growing more and more 
 primitive till they end in one which shows 
 beyond question 
 
 "The solid earth whereon we stand 
 In tracts of fluent heat began." 
 
 The first geologists explained its changes as 
 all the result of tremendous convulsions which 
 destroyed one after another its old formations, 
 and opened the way for a supernatural power 
 to come in, and make in each new one all things 
 
92 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 new. Convulsions there were, — earthquake 
 shocks that rent its crust into faults, like that 
 along the Appalachian Mountains, five miles 
 up and down and hundreds of miles in length; 
 volcanic outbursts, like that on the west of the 
 Rocky Mountains which covered what is now 
 whole states with ashes hundreds of feet deep; 
 and elemental battlefields in which the oppo- 
 nents like Milton's angels plucked up crested 
 hills and used them as the missiles of their awful 
 fight. But since the studies of Lyell it has been 
 recognized that the same slow agencies that 
 are at work on the earth now, have also always 
 been at work, and that the two together are 
 fuUy adequate to account naturally for all 
 geologic changes. Coarse and blundering as the 
 shapers of a world do indeed seem, — the fingers 
 of the earthquake, the volcano, and the glacier 
 and hardly less so those of the frost, the rain, 
 and the air, — ^no sculptor's chisel or house- 
 wife's hands ever left traces of greater skiU 
 behind them than they have in carving and 
 ordering the earth. Man has stored up books 
 in libraries, but geologists tell us of long ages 
 before books, during which these blind natural 
 forces stored up the oil by whose light the far- 
 off coming eyes were to read their words. The 
 earth's surface, when it cooled down from its 
 molten state, was richly provided with iron, 
 
INORGANIC EVOLUTION 93 
 
 but it was in the form of a red oxide so minutely 
 scattered and mixed up with the soil, just as 
 we see it now wherever red earth is, that for 
 man alone to get it out would have made it 
 rarer and costlier than even silver and gold. 
 Its red oxide is insoluble in water, but among 
 the earth's earlier products was a coarse vege- 
 tation, which dying and mingling with it in the 
 soil furnished the carbon whose greater affinity 
 for oxygen took away a part of it from the iron, 
 and thus changed it to a black oxide in which 
 condition it is soluble in acidulated water, the 
 oxygenized carbon providing at the same time 
 the needed acid. In this form it was taken up 
 by the rains and floods and carried into ponds 
 and bogs where, away from the carbon, it took 
 back from the air its lost oxygen and became red 
 again, the same thing exactly which now occurs 
 in the purifying of our blood. As a red in- 
 soluble oxide it sank to the bottom, becoming 
 thus, instead of scattered particles, a great heap 
 ready, ages after, for man's reduction of it into 
 the metal which has played such a part in 
 human progress, so that the very pen with 
 which the theologian writes his argument 
 against evolution is itself the proof of its 
 reality. The carboniferous forests grew the 
 vegetation whose decay is the base of our 
 enormous coal beds, but their prostrate forms. 
 
&4i THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 left exposed to the sun and air, would soon 
 have wasted back into their native elements 
 again, had not a great convulsion of the earth 
 sunk them beneath the sea, and there sealed 
 them up air-tight with mud and sand, just as a 
 woman does her summer fruit with wax and 
 glass. Then another convulsion lifted them up 
 for another growth, to be followed in due time 
 with another sinking. Nine times in some places 
 was this process repeated; and now, on nine 
 different shelves in earth's cellar the mighty 
 cans, filled with their precious treasures, stand 
 waiting for human use, all of which beautiful 
 economy is denied and lost sight of by those 
 who in the interest of religion, as they call it, 
 shut their eyes to the evolution they point to, 
 and hold that the whole thing was done at once 
 by a single magic word. What gives the earth 
 its fertility? Not the least of its sources is the 
 loosening and mixing up of soils, begun long 
 before the days of agricultural schools, by the 
 waters and frosts which seemed to be only 
 tearing it to pieces, and about the time of man's 
 appearing on the scene, completed by those huge 
 glacial plows whose glittering shares a thou- 
 sand feet thick have scratched the proofs of 
 their existence all over our northern bed rocks. 
 Why do nearly all the great mountain chains 
 and continents of the earth run north and 
 
INORGANIC EVOLUTION 95 
 
 south, thus allowing its torrid and its arctic 
 waters and airs to modify each other and make 
 parts of it habitable that otherwise would be 
 sealed up with perpetual snow? They are 
 gigantic proofs of the far-off time in the earth's 
 evolution when revolving on its axis faster than 
 it does now, and consequently bulging out more 
 at its equator, it was compelled, as it slowed 
 down, and bulged out less, to shrivel up with 
 its ridges lengthwise rather than with them 
 east and west. 
 
 So with scores of other things. Geology is 
 the typewriter girl of evolution. The earth's 
 progressive unfolding does not have to be 
 reasoned out: it is written out, written on its 
 own massive tablets of continent-wide stone. 
 The footprints of the advancing eons are just 
 as plainly impressed on its pages as are those 
 of its reptilian birds. If, as Tennyson says, 
 its life 
 
 "Was battered by the shocks of doom 
 To shape and use," 
 
 it was by a doom that was in itself. The 
 modification of old structures into new ones 
 so conspicuous in species, is equally clear in 
 strata. There are rudimental boulders in 
 modern soils which teach the same lesson as 
 rudimental bones in modern animals; aortic 
 
96 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 arches of ancient rivers, as with the Connecti- 
 cut between Hartford and New Haven, which 
 have been as visibly dried up in the land's pass- 
 ing from its jural to its triassic formations 
 as those of the lizard have in its passing from' 
 its fish to its reptile forms ; primitive rocks yet 
 at the surface, as, for instance, the granites, 
 which, like the mosses and shells of protozoic 
 time, have survived unchanged all the con- 
 vulsions of the ages. And, as if to make the 
 whole thing sure beyond any possible doubt, 
 just as we have in every pond amoebas and 
 rhizopods to show us what the animal world 
 started from, so here and there over the earth 
 we have protoplasmic lava streams bursting up 
 from the burning core below, to give us speci- 
 mens of the very stuff out of which the material 
 earth originally came. 
 
 Turning now from stones to stars, their 
 immense distances, their apparent diversity 
 from all that we have on earth, and the absolute 
 impossibility of our ever watching from infancy 
 to age their eon-long growth, would seem to 
 render the getting from them of any evidence 
 as to how they came, an almost hopeless task. 
 They are the very framework of the universe 
 itself, reach in space out into infinity, in age 
 down into eternity, — often reveal their existence 
 only to the telescope's twenty-inch pupil and 
 
INORGANIC EVOLUTION 97 
 
 the photograph's sensitized retina. Yet even 
 to them evolution has put its question, O ye 
 shining stars, what light of knowledge can you 
 give to man about your birth and growth? O 
 bands of Orion and sweet influences of 
 Pleiades, burning suns and clustered worlds, 
 what truths will you reveal to finite minds as to 
 your laws and forces and your relations to one 
 another and to our own little earth? And the 
 question has been answered by their tongues of 
 light, answered, if not in all its fullness, yet 
 with not a little of that same kind of evidence 
 that we have received from the things of earth. 
 As regards our solar system, what are the 
 globular shapes of its members, their being all 
 made of matter, all obeying the laws of gravity, 
 all revolving on their axes, and nearly all 
 moving in the same elliptic plane, but the like- 
 nesses and homologies which indicate, as they 
 do among animals and plants, that they have 
 had a common parentage, their birth one after 
 another from the same cooling and contracting 
 nebular mist? What, rightly viewed, are, also, 
 their differences in size, satellites, times of revo- 
 lution, stages of progress, baby Jupiter and 
 old-age moon, reverse rotations of Uranus and 
 Neptune, erratic comets, and multiplied aster- 
 oids, facts so often pointed to as proofs of 
 their unlike origin, but the manifestations of 
 
98 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 that variability which is so vital a character- 
 istic of all evolution, and so conspicuous in the 
 animal kingdom, — elephants and microbes, 
 quadrupeds which fly and fishes leaving their 
 watery plane to travel on land. If Nature had 
 deliberately planned to give man an indisputable 
 rudiment of the circular form that, according 
 to evolution, all the planets and satellites have 
 passed through, — had in traversing the wilder- 
 ness of sky purposely left behind a fragment 
 of her dress, or — shall we say — an ornament 
 of her fingers, so as to enable man the surer to 
 follow her trail, what could she have better 
 chosen for it than those wonderful rings which 
 still sparkle on the planet Saturn nine hundred 
 millions of miles out in the depths of space? 
 And then as regards that integration of dif- 
 ferences which is the highest stage of evolution, 
 that divine unity in which each member of the 
 system does his work without jar or friction, 
 where can we find a better example of it than 
 in this shining family of the skies? There is 
 no Venezuela question between Venus and Mer- 
 cury; no part of the earth, not even England, 
 that wishes to grab anything on Neptune or 
 Uranus. Mars is named after the god of war, 
 but not even any newspaper has ever heard of 
 his being ready for a fight. Jupiter has belts ; 
 but the rest of the planets do not have to make 
 
INORGANIC EVOLUTION 99 
 
 laws against his arranging on their soil for a 
 pugilistic encounter ; Saturn rings, but there is 
 not the slightest reason for supposing they 
 have anything to do with political corruption; 
 and the huge, hot-tempered Sun himself, in- 
 stead of acting the part of a Russian bear to 
 the other members of the planetary alliance, is 
 more like a big bird gathering them all, even 
 the little asteroids, under his warm wings and 
 without any need of fighting off his brother 
 suns, leading them all in safety about his vast 
 stellar yard. 
 
 Mounting up with the telescope and the 
 spectroscope into the great sidereal universe, 
 we find that with all its distances and all its 
 differences, it has its points of contact with our 
 own little earth, has its grades which make it 
 easy for evolution, without even a flying leap, to 
 rise from its lowest to its highest point, instead 
 of being that cold, glittering, motionless realm 
 which it often impresses us as being on a 
 winter's night. No buzzing factory, when bus- 
 iness is good, was ever more alive with workers 
 than are its majestic rooms with world- weavers 
 and sun-forgers, no woods and meadows in 
 springtime more varied with insects, and birds, 
 and flowers than are its radiant fields with bud' 
 ding planets, bright-winged stars, and many 
 colored suns. Digging into the depths of our 
 
100 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 own earth, we find in its heated core the evidence 
 of a time in its far-oiF youth when even out- 
 wardly it was one of their glowing brotherhood. 
 They are all composed of the same material, only 
 in different stages, that we are, all have at their 
 cores the same hot blood. Gravity is their one 
 law, ether their common light, motion their 
 united life. That same fierce struggle for ex- 
 istence and survival only of the fittest, which are 
 such awful agencies of evolution in our terres- 
 trial woods and fields, are in operation upon 
 all the sidereal heights, world eating world to 
 keep alive, and star starving star to get its 
 needed food. They, too, have their youth, 
 maturity, old age, and time to die. Every 
 summer's night, turning to the southern sky, 
 you can see one of them, Antares in the neck of 
 the Scorpion, going with varied colors through 
 its dying agonies. Ceasing to be sun species, 
 they give birth to planet species. And just as 
 here on earth to-day you can find every grade 
 of animal and plant that the animal and plant 
 kingdoms in their age-long growth have ever 
 known from amoeba up to man and from desmid 
 on to daisy, so in the realms of sky, though we 
 cannot go back into eternity and trace their 
 course, we can find as contemporaries of our- 
 selves every grade of stellar and planet life, 
 from the protoplasmic nebula of Orion just 
 
INORGANIC EVOLUTION 101 
 
 wriggling into shape, up to sparkling Sirius 
 walking in beauty the winter sky, and from the 
 firefly meteors of earth opening their wings a 
 moment but to die, on to the unsetting Ursa 
 Major bidding the north forever know its 
 place, — every phase that the stellar and planet 
 kingdoms have ever been through, all the steps 
 of one mighty stair-way, all the links of one 
 splendid truth. 
 
 This discussion may seem, in some of its as- 
 pects, to be only a proof of material evolution 
 of the body, and not the soul of the universe, 
 but is not the seeing of how such a body has 
 been prepared, one of the best ways of rising 
 up to an appl-eciation of its indwelling soul? 
 "I am thinking after him the thoughts of God," 
 said the astronomer Kepler reverently, as he 
 first came to some of these great stellar truths. 
 And that is what we really have been doing, 
 thinking after him the thoughts of God. And 
 what delving in dusty manuscripts, what 
 wandering in the mazes of theological specu- 
 lation, what pondering even over the pages of 
 Christian Scripture, could give us thoughts of 
 his which are more truly sublime than this 
 tracing of what he has done from atom to star ; 
 what put us in a more reverent mood towards 
 him than this standing for a space in his great 
 temple of the universe? A pious French abbe 
 
102 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 complained to a scientific friend, one day, about 
 the indifference of his flock to sacred things, 
 how in spite of his most careful expositions of 
 Scripture setting forth the wisdom and good- 
 ness of Almighty God they would yawn and go 
 to sleep. His friend advised him to drop awhile 
 the written book and preach to them the glories 
 of God out of the great book of nature, — and 
 meeting him the next week, he inquired the 
 result. "Oh, wretch that I am !" exclaimed the 
 priest, "I did as you advised, told them about 
 the size and splendor of the sun and wonder of 
 the stars, and how great he must be who made 
 them all ; and alas, alas ! they did not indeed go 
 to sleep, but they went to the other extreme: 
 they profaned the house of God by breaking 
 into applause." That special way of approving 
 what God does is doubtless too Frenchy for us 
 sober Americans to be in danger of its use. 
 But if the light of the stars as they now are 
 can keep men's bodily eyes awake, how much 
 more ought the light of the process by which 
 their shining came, keep their souls from 
 stupor; and if the wonder of the universe as 
 it reaches through space can throw them into 
 ecstasies of worship, what, in view of the eons 
 of time added to space through which its 
 wonder was unfolded, ought to be their 
 emotions.'' 
 
VI 
 
 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE 
 
 The method of proving the truth of evolu- 
 tion which I have tried to follow in this course 
 of lectures, has been not to begin with the origin 
 of things in a far-off nebula and take them in 
 their chronological order, but to start in with 
 the easy and undeniable ones right around us 
 that we can actually see are the outcome, by 
 natural laws and forces, of their preceding 
 states, and thence pass on gradually to those 
 which are more remote and difficult. "You will 
 admit that two and two make four, won't you?" 
 said the irrespressible village logician to his 
 opponent in the grocery store whom he was try- 
 ing politically to convert. "No, I won't," re- 
 plied the man who had experienced at other 
 times the logician's argufying powers, "for if 
 I do, you will lead me on and on with more twos 
 and twos till I have either got to accept your 
 doctrines or deny at last that they make four, 
 and I may as well make a fool of myself by deny- 
 ing it at the beginning as at the end." So 
 103 
 
104 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 with the opponents of evolution. Their only 
 safe way is to start in with denying that the 
 two and two of natural laws and forces will 
 make four. With the facts right before their 
 eyes, they are hardly able to be fools as soon 
 as that, and so they wait tiU they have reached 
 some remoter and obscurer fours, those, 
 perhaps, where a new species of things comes 
 in, before they set up the doctrine that they 
 must be the product of something else than 
 two and two. At the very pleasant tea-table 
 where I was sitting one evening when away from 
 home on an exchange, the minister's wife and 
 sister, both of them the graduates of a high- 
 toned academy, and the latter a teacher in one 
 of our glorious public schools, got into a dis- 
 cussion as to where the moon rose. The min- 
 ister's wife was sure it rose in the west because 
 she had seen it there over her right shoulder, 
 while the teacher had a glimmering idea that its 
 rising was in the east because somebody's 
 poetry had made it rhyme with yeast. So 
 along with the tea and the toast they mildly 
 argued the matter for some time, and then each 
 politely yielding something to the other, as 
 Christian ladies will, they harmoniously settled 
 down into the agreement that when it is an old 
 moon it rises in the east, but when a new one, 
 in the west, a good illustration of the kind of 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE 105 
 
 truth to which most compromises lead. And so 
 as regards evolution, there are not a few 
 religious teachers and minister's wives' hus- 
 bands who hold that when things are old and 
 familiar, existing animals and plants and the 
 "fours" of our daily lives, they originate in the 
 natural east and from the twos and twos of an 
 earthly parentage, but that when they are new 
 and strange, as the beginnings of species and 
 worlds and life and soul, they can rise only in 
 the supernatural west and by a miraculous 
 creation. We have seen the evidences, however, 
 that the new moons of species and planets and 
 stars rise exactly where the old ones do, and 
 that so far as material things are conceived, 
 additions to them at the beginning are by the 
 same fundamental rules of arithmetic that they 
 are afterwards. And now I proceed to the 
 reasons for believing that the same is true of 
 those things which transcend matter and which, 
 though close at hand, are more diiBcult to deal 
 with than Ursa and the Milky Way. 
 
 The first of these is life. What is it and 
 whence does it come.'' We all have it in our- 
 selves ; without it could not ask the question, 
 and it is all around us in a myriad other things ; 
 has its special marks that we all know; does 
 continually what nothing else can; builds on 
 earth a vast, twofold kingdom, and is the base 
 
106 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 of that intelligence without which all the rest 
 of the universe, splendid as it is, would be only 
 an empty house. 
 
 Yet how difficult is its definition even to our 
 thought. Religion calls it on the one hand a 
 breath of the Almighty, and on the other a 
 vapor which appeareth for a little while and 
 then vanisheth away; poetry, "a bubble," "a 
 cheat," "a walking shadow," "a confused noise 
 between two silences." One of the ponderous 
 dictionaries tells us, learnedly, that it is "a 
 state of being alive"; Mr. Mantalini that it is 
 "a demd horrid grind." English pragmatism 
 declares that it is "the sum of the tendencies 
 which resist death," French epigrammatism go- 
 ing to the other extreme, that "it is itself 
 death." Herbert Spencer's famous statement 
 of it as a "definite combination of heterogene- 
 ous changes both simultaneous and successive 
 in correspondence with external co-existences 
 and sequences," while setting forth admirably 
 its phenomena, fails to set forth the thing it- 
 self; is like speaking of a tree as a definite 
 combination of heterogeneous growings, but 
 without saying what it is that grows ; and the 
 simpler definition of it given by Mr. Fiske, as 
 "the internal and external activity of an or- 
 ganism in relation to its environment" shuts 
 out on the one side such things as seeds and 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE 107 
 
 germs which are alive without being active, 
 and includes on the other, such things as 
 steam-engines driving factories, which are ac- 
 tive without being alive. And then as to its 
 origin, no eye has ever seen it rising in nature 
 from the world's preceding inorganic state; no 
 experiment in the laboratory succeeded in get- 
 ting it from what beyond question was other- 
 wise than alive. Sir Wm. Thompson's idea 
 that it might have come to earth on a meteor- 
 ite exploded from another planet, only puts 
 the question a little further off, — is about as 
 senseless a solution of it as anything that a 
 man of scientific standing ever put forth. 
 And taking these facts all together, and espe- 
 cially the wide remove of its higher qualities 
 from those of matter, it is no wonder that 
 supernaturalists have made it one of their great 
 rallying points as an instance of something 
 which must come from a Being who is outside 
 of natural law and force. 
 
 But the two realms with all their separations 
 have here also, as everywhere else in nature, 
 a multitude also of connecting links^ There is 
 a Hindoo myth that the gods and Asuras, a 
 race of genii, sat for ages on the shores of 
 the ocean, part on one side and part on the 
 other, churning its waves to bring forth out 
 of them the Amreeta, the waters of life. Eon 
 
108 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 after eon as they churned, the moon and many 
 other strange things appeared, but not the 
 Amreeta. Nevertheless they kept on with their 
 churning, and finally, one day, the stubborn 
 ocean yielded, and the precious, long-desired 
 waters appeared. The genii are the mighty 
 forces of nature ; the ocean, the vast sea of 
 nebulous mist. Out of their churning we have 
 seen sun and moon and stars and many other 
 strange things already appear that are her- 
 alds and hints of the stranger one which is on 
 its way. Who has ever watched the subtle 
 operations of chemistry, each element selecting 
 its own special material with which to be united, 
 or the wonderful shaping of a crystal, each 
 particle guided naturally to its own place, re- 
 producing from an inner type the parts of it 
 which are broken off, and using sometimes a 
 germ-like particle from another crystal of the 
 same kind with which to get a better start, 
 and not felt he was in the presence of a mys- 
 tery second only to that of life.'' Protoplasm, 
 the living raw material out of which all organic 
 forms are made, is composed chemically of the 
 same elements, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and 
 carbon, that are found in a multitude of inor- 
 ganic things, has had not a few of its higher 
 compounds once supposed to be makable only 
 in the laboratories of life, reproduced equally 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE 109 
 
 well in those of science. Organic growth goes 
 through the same three great stages of homo- 
 geneity, differentiation and integration that 
 are the characteristics of inorganic evolution. 
 And though no one has ever seen ordinary mat- 
 ter converted into living matter without the 
 help of life, yet everyone with such help sees 
 it continually done all around him, plants 
 evolving it out of the soil into vegetable mat- 
 ter, and animals out of plants into animal mat- 
 ter. In fact, the very thing which there is 
 so much mystery about in nature is being re- 
 peated every day at our tables ; particles of 
 matter which are absolutely dead, killed, baked, 
 boiled, roasted, fried and chewed dead, being 
 eaten one hour, and three hours afterwards 
 made alive again and floating in our blood, and 
 of the same protoplasmic substance as that 
 which is afloat in our ponds and is the begin- 
 ning of all life, a process how analogous to the 
 embryonic repetition of racial growth which 
 takes place later on in all animals, and is so 
 conclusive an argument for the natural origin 
 of species. 
 
 Then, as regards the life principle itself 
 which is in the protoplasm and in all living 
 things, and is their really distinctive quality, a 
 large part of the difficulty about its inorganic 
 evolution disappears, if it is conceived of as a 
 
110 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 differentiation and function, not of matter 
 alone, but of that force which is in matter and 
 in all the inorganic world. It has been the 
 custom of some scientists to ridicule the idea 
 of vital force as an exploded superstition ; but 
 it is hard to see why. Its recognition simply 
 coordinates it with mechanical force, chemical 
 force, electric force, crystallizing force and the 
 like, as variations, such as nature everywhere 
 else is filled with, of one underlying energy, 
 that energy, it may be, the outflow of 
 the world's eternal, all-pervading spirit ; and 
 as crystallizing force, chemical force and 
 the like are not the product of crystals 
 and chemical compounds, but are their pro- 
 ducers, so vital force is not the result of 
 vital organizations but is itself the organizer, 
 or, supplementing Spencer's definition, is the 
 agency which carries on "its definite combina- 
 tion of heterogeneous changes." Taken thus, 
 life with its special qualities is simply the 
 mounting up of inorganic force one octave 
 more in that great diatonic scale that we have 
 found in other things, and on which the uni- 
 verse everywhere is apparently arranged. And 
 just as matter in cooling seems to have come 
 to a stage never repeated, in which it was ex- 
 actly fitted for having matter pass into its dif- 
 ferent elemental groups, so, later on, it is rea- 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE 111 
 
 sonable to think it came to a condition in which 
 the force that had always been associated with 
 matter was differentiated, just as naturally, 
 from its other groups into that of vital force. 
 The evidence that its material embodiments, 
 its animal and vegetable kingdoms and its dif- 
 ferent species, have all originated from its first 
 protoplasmic form, has already been pre- 
 sented; but coming in here as more especially 
 a phase of life, are the evidences of the evolu- 
 tionary process by which it is continued in its 
 individual possessors, and transmitted from one 
 generation of them to another, and of how it 
 is related to death. In the individual it is by 
 the constant using up the old cells in which 
 it is stored, and the putting in their place of 
 the new ones derived from food. The old 
 Frenchman was at least half right when he 
 defined life as death. The two are not con- 
 tending foes, as they are sometimes repre- 
 sented as being, but a firm of great cooperat- 
 ing partners, life being possible only by con- 
 tinuous death, and death only by continuous 
 life. Every time we move, every time we think, 
 every time we feel, every time we in any way 
 live, it is only by having some part of us die. 
 In the vegetable world the dead parts are util- 
 ized, some to give its trunks and stalks stabil- 
 ity, and some to fertilize the soil beneath them 
 
112 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 for other growths; and in the animal world a 
 part to keep the body warm, and a part to go 
 the round of the elements into life again. It 
 is a process which explains why we eat food. 
 It is not merely for the fun of it as some of 
 its eaters seem to think. It is for the same 
 reason that the engineer puts coal into the fur- 
 nace of a steam-engine, to generate the force 
 by which the functions of life, acting, think- 
 ing, feeling, are to be carried on, another rea- 
 son for believing in vital force; and then, in 
 turn, the hunger for food and the absolute ne- 
 cessity of getting it, become the great driving- 
 wheel that keeps the factory of the big world 
 alive and in operation ; so naturally in evolution 
 does one thing arise out of another. 
 
 But it is not the cells of the body alone 
 which are used up in living. Little by little 
 the whole body itself grows old and effete, is 
 worn out and dies. That is exactly what death 
 is, life's material used up in living; begins at 
 the cradle, ends only at the grave; can be pre- 
 vented only in one way, by our not living, 
 merely existing, as sometimes a frog does, 
 sealed up in a rock or tree. While in the 
 army I was sent on one occasion with some dis- 
 patches from Roanoke Island across Albe- 
 marle Sound to Elizabeth City. Our boat was 
 a miserable little steamer captured from the 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE 113 
 
 foe; and aU night, not daring to land any- 
 where, we struggled against the fierce March 
 wind, again and again nearly going to the bot- 
 tom. Towards morning our wood and coal 
 gave out, and then to keep the boat in motion 
 we had to begin tearing to pieces its cabin and 
 decks and putting them under the boiler, our 
 last available stick being in embers as slowly 
 and gaspingly we crept up to the wharf. 
 That is how it is with this body of ours in 
 which the soul is sent with dispatches from 
 time to eternity. Battling with the gales of 
 earth, it has to use itself up in getting there 
 and, did it exist as one generation alone, the 
 end would again be universal death. But in 
 anticipation of its fate, while it is yet in its 
 vigor, the same thing takes place with the body 
 as a whole, that all along has been taking place 
 with its single minute cells. It imparts its life 
 to another body endowed with a fresh set of 
 cells. Reproduction, therefore, is simply a 
 differentiation of growth; and what the cell 
 is to the individual, the individual is to the 
 race, is simply a larger cell helping by its be- 
 ing used up and dying to keep humanity alive ; 
 so beautifully again does one thing in evolu- 
 tion unfold naturally into another, so wonder- 
 derfuUy what under the old theology was the 
 penalty of disobedience and the curse of God, 
 
114 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 becomes under this new revelation the result 
 of obedience and a gift to man of an ever 
 greater blessing. 
 
 There are five different ways in which phys- 
 ical life is continued from one generation to 
 another. The first and earliest is that of fis- 
 sion, the one in which a single-celled animal 
 simply divides itself into two parts, the very 
 thing which takes place in all growth; the last 
 and highest, that in which the two sexes blend 
 their lives in a child which is distinct from them 
 both. Looked at superficially, it seems as if 
 the two ways were the exact opposites of each 
 other, the first a division and the last a union 
 of cells, and as if there could be no natural 
 evolution of the one into the other. But 
 Haeckel has shown most conclusively that the 
 other three ways, those of budding, germ buds, 
 and germ cells, are the connecting links be- 
 tween the lowest and the highest, and that even 
 in the highest there is always a repetition of 
 the lowest; that is, a dividing of substance 
 from each of the parents first; and so repro- 
 duction becomes in its highest phase simply a 
 continuation of growth, a growth of the race 
 instead of the individual, a growth in which 
 all the oldness and wornness of the parental 
 bodily cells are left behind, and only the fresh- 
 ness and vigor of its new specialized ones, filled 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE 115 
 
 with the deeper inheritable qualities of the 
 parents, are passed on. So easily does Nature 
 grade the way from generation to generation, 
 so wonderfully out of life's old age get for- 
 ever and forever life's immortal youth, so 
 honestly recompense her children for the pain 
 and loss of growing old and being worn out 
 themselves in her service, by giving them what 
 is more precious than their own lives and what 
 they otherwise would never have known, the 
 joy of having, rearing, and loving those 
 through whom the world's life is to be passed 
 on. 
 
 Following life up from its roots has thus 
 brought us, almost unconsciously, into the very 
 midst of another great phase of evolution, 
 that of love. But this in its origin and de- 
 velopment is of itself so wonderful and beauti- 
 ful as to deserve a separate treatment, and 
 reserving its consideration for another lecture, 
 let me round off our thoughts about the evolu- 
 tion of earthly life, by calling attention to its 
 bearing on the great question of an immortal 
 life. If physical life is, on the one hand, the 
 mere result of physical organization, like the 
 movement of a watch of its making, as ma- 
 terialism claims; or, on the other hand, is a 
 gift of God supernaturally breathed into the 
 physical organization as theology has taught, 
 
116 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 then the death of the body, as with the de- 
 struction of a watch, may well be regarded as 
 the end of its movement, and the penalty of 
 its sin. But if life is the unfolding of a force 
 which everywhere else in nature is immaterial, 
 and which, as we have seen, can be transferred 
 from one material body to another, and can 
 even make the death of the material body it is 
 in the very means of such continuance, why is 
 it not fair to believe that it can also be con- 
 tinued from a material to a spiritual body, and 
 make death there also the means of its continu- 
 ance ? It is not life anywhere which really dies, 
 but only what life was in. It is a view, to be 
 sure, which makes the final change different in 
 some respects from all the others, but this 
 only renders it so much the more natural. 
 The trunk of the tree continues its life in the 
 limbs, and the limbs in the branches, and the 
 branches in the twigs, and all these are alike 
 in form, but when it comes to the twigs, they 
 transfer it into what? Why, into flowers and 
 fruit, different how widely and how beautifully 
 from all its other forms. So with nature as 
 a whole ; it puts its life first into animals and 
 species and races and individuals, all material, 
 but when it comes to the end of individuals, 
 and wants to continue the process, what should 
 we expect the next step to be, but spiritual 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF LITE 117 
 
 bodies, something above matter, the flowering 
 and fruitage of its other forms? And thus we 
 see how naturally and inevitably under the 
 touch of evolution the life which is rooted in 
 sod ripens in soul. 
 
VII 
 THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE 
 
 My preceding lecture in this course was on 
 the evolution of life, — its definition as that in- 
 terior power of an organism which enables it 
 continually to readjust its inner changes to 
 its outward environment; its probable origin 
 as a differentiation of natural force ; its rela- 
 tions with mechanical force, chemical force, 
 electric force, crystallizing force, and the like; 
 the wonderful methods by which it is continued 
 in growth and reproduction from cell to cell 
 and from generation to generation, — itself 
 never dying, but only what it is in; — and the 
 natural possibility of its being continued at 
 last from a material to a spiritual body, and 
 so of immortality's being provided for in the 
 very nature of life and death. 
 
 Side by side with the wonder of life itself is 
 
 the evolution out of it, of that tie which binds its 
 
 different forms together and which in human 
 
 beings has reached such heights of beauty and 
 
 power, — the tie of love. Darwin has shown, 
 118 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE 119 
 
 carefully and scientifically, what an immense 
 factor it has been even in the animal and vege- 
 table worlds, for the development of their cour- 
 age, strength and shapeliness ; and in the 
 human world, as revealed to the most casual 
 eye, how wide over camp and court, hovel and 
 throne has been its sway, how mighty its in- 
 fluence. It is no small part of the power which 
 drives the shuttle in that roaring loom of time 
 out of which comes the web of our common 
 daily prosaic lives. Like a vein of gold it 
 runs through all heroism and gallantry, 
 all poetry and romance. It has been one of the 
 great factors of history, — kissed away king- 
 doms, folded nations in its arms, whispered 
 battles with its breath. Religion has borrowed 
 its language to express the grandest of her 
 own truths, — told us that God is love, and the 
 sum of all duty, loving. It mingles its luster 
 with the great hope of immortality, — ^makes 
 half of our conception of heaven and more 
 than one-half of its attractions. And the 
 marriage relation in which it finds its con- 
 summation, having as its central idea that each 
 person in going out into the world should not 
 be left to fight its battles and bear its burdens 
 alone, but have a helper bound to him by the 
 sweetest of all ties, another self yet different 
 frojn self, the two nursing each other in sick- 
 
120 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 ness, defending each other in assault, and 
 making for each other a common property and 
 a common home ; that out of their union should 
 come a blended continuation of themselves in 
 those dearer than self, and that with passion's 
 flame sobered into friendship's fire, they should 
 walk in its warmth through the chills of age, 
 helpers still to the final home, however short of 
 its ideal it may come practically,-^could there 
 be, at least in its conception, a more exquisite 
 device for promoting the world's welfare, and a 
 surer evidence that at the heart of things is 
 somehow Infinite Goodness? 
 
 What, now, under evolution, is the source of 
 the agent which has played such a tremendous 
 part in the world's progress, and which is still 
 so precious an element in the world's attain- 
 ments? Poets have sung it as 
 
 "The sacred fyre ykindled from above 
 Emongst the eternall spheres and lamping sky 
 And thence poured into men." 
 
 And truly if there is anything on earth which 
 in its finer forms would seem to be the direct 
 breath of Deity, anything which at first view 
 it would seem impossible to account for as 
 rising out of protoplasm and dust, it is its 
 "sacred fyre." Evolution, however, finds the 
 same law prevailing here as everywhere else in 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE 121 
 
 nature ; first, the lowly germ embedded in a pre- 
 ceding state of things, then the coarse material 
 stalk growing gradually out of it, and then on 
 this stalk the fragrant flower and rich fruit. 
 And though to pass from its sentimental splen- 
 dors to its scientific source may seem like going 
 up like a rocket and coming down like a stick, 
 nevertheless, I think I can show that the real 
 process is going up as a stick, and then burst- 
 ing into rocket splendors for which there shall 
 never be any coming down at all. 
 
 Going back to its starting point in living 
 creatures, all love has necessarily to begin with 
 self and to take the form of self-love. The 
 only thing a creature can be conscious of at 
 first is its own existence, and, if it is going to 
 live, the only thing that it can care for at the 
 start is the supply of its own wants. To care 
 for a thing, however, is to love it. That is 
 what the word "care" means in Latin, love ; and 
 we have the same connection in English through 
 the word dear, a word which on the one side 
 means costly in the way of money and effort ; 
 and on the other, beloved, a dear dress and a 
 dear friend. It is a connection which holds 
 true of all love. Care is its food and nurse. 
 The mother loves her child, the husband his 
 wife, the citizen his country, the Christian his 
 church, the soul its God, just in proportion as 
 
129 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 they take care of them and do for them; and 
 the cares of life, — those things of which men so 
 often complain, — without them it would be im- 
 possible to have what we all so much rejoice 
 in, its loves. Theologians in the past have 
 identified self-love with sin, have told us that 
 the first thing to be done before we could have 
 any higher love was to crush it out. But this 
 was never the teaching of Jesus. His com- 
 mand was: "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as 
 thyself," recognizing not only that our neighbor 
 is a part of ourselves, but that love to ourselves 
 is the starting point of love to him and is of 
 the same religious quality; arid science agrees 
 with him, — shows that love to self is the nec- 
 essary condition of all life and that without it 
 there could not be anyone either to love or to be 
 loved. 
 
 Passing on to its next form, love between 
 the sexes, a large part of its problem is the 
 origin of these two great divisions in the sphere 
 of life, itself one of the most wonderful facts 
 in nature. Of five hundred theories which have 
 been propounded for its explanation, while no 
 one as yet has been freely established, and 
 while food, environment, parental age, time of 
 union and the like, are doubtless all factors, 
 and in the lower animals sometimes apparently 
 overruling factors, the one which lies at tne 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE 123 
 
 basis of the others and best explains the equal 
 numbers of the sexes and the subtler and finer 
 differences between them, is the view that the 
 little protoplasmic cell in which life begins, 
 has its two opposite poles, each, like all po- 
 larity, with its different characteristics which, 
 when the cell propagates itself by dividing, as 
 we found to be the case in all growth, all re- 
 production, all continuance of life, become nat- 
 urally the starting points of two sides, two 
 kinds of living things. As with polarity 
 everywhere else, it is those with the opposite 
 sides which attract each other; and as their 
 possessors increase in size and complexity, the 
 differences in their organizations, as the re- 
 sult of them, become more and more pro- 
 nounced, developing sometimes in the same in- 
 dividual, as with many plants, and at last, as 
 with the higher animals, always in two, and 
 repeated embryonically in each individual's 
 growth, — these that culminate physically in 
 the two great halves of the human family so 
 like yet different, while the lowly influence which 
 drew them together at first, so akin with what 
 every bit of iron displays, mounts up on the 
 animal side through a myriad lower creatures 
 into the love which is so often their guiding 
 needle on the stormy sea of life, and in the 
 vegetable kingdom, through a myriad plants 
 
124. THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 into the orange flowers that are the symbol of 
 their wedded lives. How far the division of 
 that far-off protoplasmic cell in which, accord- 
 ing to this view, love began, may account also, 
 atavistically, for the miffs and quarrels and di- 
 vorces into which, like the zebra stripes on a 
 horse, it ever and anon, even now, breaks forth, 
 evolution can only hint, but it gives a scien- 
 tific basis for the terms magnetism, attraction, 
 drawn to, and the like, which are used so com- 
 monly as the synonyms of love ; and it is a good 
 illustration of that oneness, differentiation and 
 oneness again, which are the three great stages 
 of all evolution. Mr. Drummond and other 
 writers have spoken of sex as an anomaly in 
 creation, "a phenomenon which stands abso- 
 lutely alone in the field of nature," — as what 
 "has nothing at all like it," and is without a 
 parallel in the world. But this is a groundless 
 assertion. Wherever force is, there is po- 
 larity. Every magnet, every blade of grass 
 attracted with its stem up and its root down, 
 every electric cloud swinging through the 
 skies, our whole earth with its north and south 
 poles, every planet swinging through space, 
 every beam of light, nay, possibly the universe 
 itself with gravity at one extreme drawing to- 
 gether, and the opposite of gravity at the 
 other, driving apart, are its analogues. Love 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE 123 
 
 is simply vital force polarized, — is related to 
 chemical force and crystallizing force as the 
 wings of the bird are to those of the fish and 
 the bat, or among the elements, as copper is to 
 iron and fluorine; is the first note in the great 
 octave of life. See, too, how directly and in- 
 evitably it grows out of life, the very division 
 by which alone its primal cell can get food and 
 so live, making it a necessity, — ^how rooted, 
 also, it is through force in the very constitu- 
 tion of the universe itself. We cannot live, 
 nay, we cannot even be, without some form of 
 love. Then the equality of the sexes, not in 
 numbers alone, but in rights and powers, — 
 that, likewise, lies at the very foundations of 
 their existence. Who shall say there is any 
 difference between the polarities in which they 
 both begin.'' When life's primal protoplas- 
 mic cell divided, it divided, as it does now, in 
 the middle, divided equally the common goods. 
 Woman has never given up that original birth- 
 right, never could and never can give it up. 
 When I hear lawyers and politicians talking 
 about their being no natural rights, and that 
 what women or any other human beings are 
 to have, are a gift of legislation and a matter 
 of expediency, I want to send such children 
 for awhile to the primary school of evolution. 
 There are statute books older than those of 
 
126 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 Judea and Rome, commentaries wiser than 
 Blackstone and Kent, epistles more authori- 
 tative than those of Paul, legislative halls 
 which antedate those of empires and repub- 
 lics. They began with life, are based on the 
 constitution of the universe; and it is from 
 them that women, and all of us, get our rights. 
 
 Notice, also, how closely the scientific ac- 
 count of the way in which sexes originated 
 coordinates itself with the Bible account. The 
 story of the rib has been often ridiculed as 
 the acme of nonsense, but the old Scripture 
 writer was wrong only in the names and de- 
 tails. His Adam's scientific name is Amoeba. 
 The rib out of which Eve was made was not 
 bone but protoplasm, and it was Amoeba's 
 whole side, not a part of it, out of which she 
 was taken. But the reason for it given by 
 evolution is precisely the same as that of 
 Scripture, that it was not good for Adam, even 
 in his amoebic state, to be alone, and the ulti- 
 mate purpose was the same as that given by 
 Christianity, that these twain should be again 
 one flesh. 
 
 But while thus recognizing the rapture and 
 romance of love between the sexes, and the holi- 
 ness into which it finally climbs, it is to be rec- 
 ognized, also, that this is not its highest form; 
 their paradise, not its truest heaven; their 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE 1^7 
 
 intercourse not all which is needed to make 
 man a family and earth a home. The love of 
 the parent for the child, and preeminently the 
 love of the mother for her babe, that is where 
 it takes its richest hues, that where it rises to be 
 the type of what Deity feels, that where it builds 
 the walls and kindles the fires and puts on the 
 roof of a family and a home. Whence does 
 this form of it come.'' How direct and clear 
 the evidence that this, also, is evolved naturally 
 out of life and, what is more, out of animal 
 life. When the two sexes unite in transmitting 
 life to their offspring, it is a part of each 
 other and of themselves that they transmit, 
 and inevitably, therefore, the love they have 
 for each other and for themselves goes with it, 
 constituting parental love, and as the off- 
 spring was first in the form of an egg and then 
 of a babe, they were moved by their love and 
 love's desire to protect its weakness to provide 
 it with some kind of nest. That nest, that 
 shelter, — I never see one now that I do not 
 reverence it, — rough and rude as it was, was the 
 beginning of a long line of abodes whose far- 
 ther end is the stately mansions of civilization, 
 nay, rather, is that great house of many man- 
 sions into which, as offspring of the Eternal 
 Parent, our souls are at last to be gathered. 
 "What makes you call that house your home?" 
 
128 THE ROMANCE OP EVOLUTION 
 
 asked a gentleman, quizzing a little boy who 
 was just returning from school; "it looks just 
 like the houses where all the other folks live." 
 "Because," replied the boy puzzled for a mo- 
 ment, and then pointing to the window where 
 he caught sight of his mother looking out for 
 him, — "because she lives there !" And there 
 have been myriads of children clad in feathers 
 and fur and unable to express it in articulate 
 words, that have known what theirs was by the 
 same sign. 
 
 Then the care and devotion of animal par- 
 ents to their young; who can fail to recognize 
 in them the beginning, nay, often the full rich 
 growth, of those very qualities which make the 
 wonder of human parental love? When the 
 female monkey brushes away the flies from her 
 sleeping babe, and later applies a stick to the 
 appropriate part of his person to guide him 
 into good behavior, or when the paternal ba- 
 boon plants himself at the foot of the tree all 
 night, to keep leopards and tigers away from 
 the mother baboon sleeping with her infant 
 child in the branches up above, who shall say 
 that the hair on their bodies makes even a hair's 
 difference between the nature of their affec- 
 tions and that of the human beings who, for 
 their offspring, do the same things.'' I read, 
 awhile ago, of a gentleman whose land was over- 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE 139 
 
 run with prairie-dogs, and who attempted to 
 drown them out. As he stood watching the 
 proceeding a little prairie-dog mother came 
 rushing back to a hole near him where her 
 young had been left, and diving into it all 
 flooded with water, brought up one of the 
 young ones and laid it at his feet. Returning 
 fearlessly she brought up another, and then a 
 third. A fourth time she went down, but this 
 was too much ; she never came up, sacrificing 
 her own life for that of her offspring. The 
 same day, or soon after, I read of a human 
 mother whose house caught on fire, and who 
 rushed in three times to save as many of her 
 little ones, and who going the fourth time per- 
 ished in the smoke and flame, sacrificing her life 
 for those of her off'spring. Did the fact that 
 one did it on four feet, and the other on two 
 make any difference in the love which moved 
 the feet to go? A little King Charles spaniel 
 carried into one of those hells of cruelty which 
 Christianity yet allows vivisection to make on 
 earth, — worse, I sometimes think, than devils 
 ever thought of down below, — gave birth, right 
 in the midst of her being cut up alive, to two 
 puppies ; and, forgetful of self, with her 
 breasts severed, her hind legs and back para- 
 lyzed, and the unspeakable pain of peritonitis 
 racking every nerve, began at once her care of 
 
130 THE ROMANCE OP EVOLUTION 
 
 them, her last act being to lick with her tongue 
 what with her mangled breasts she could not 
 feed. Which now, if love is indeed a specially 
 human attribute, must we call the real brute, 
 the dog which so died, or the eminent scientist 
 who so inflicted the death? And what are 
 these and the myriad other like stories that 
 the records of the world's lower life are full of, 
 some having their prototypes even in the vege- 
 table world, but proofs that the family tree 
 is all one and that what the human baby finds 
 in its home at the top was branched to, along 
 its growth by baby beast and baby bird! 
 
 Sexual and parental love are doubtless the 
 earliest and the deepest-rooted of all love's 
 forms, but they are necessarily limited and 
 narrow in their range, and are very far from 
 showing the whole of its capacities. There is 
 a form of it which goes out wider and farther 
 than any of these, and which takes in at last 
 the whole of the human race, nay, farther still, 
 and takes in all living things ; a form of it 
 which is to the love of sex and offspring what 
 gravity is to the attractions of chemistry and 
 cohesion. It is a love which is often thought 
 to be exclusively human, and the product, even 
 in man, of a supernatural religion. The 
 cruelty and antagonism of animals and na- 
 tions and races to each other, and their mutual 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE 131 
 
 slaughter and struggle for existence as the 
 only way of their living at all, are pointed out 
 as evidence that this love could never have 
 originated out of life, and that hate is their 
 natural condition. And the immense gulf be- 
 tween egoism and altruism, care for self and 
 care for others, the one pulling in one direc- 
 tion and the other the opposite way, is empha- 
 sized as too wide for any natural evolution 
 ever to have leaped. 
 
 There is no denying these antagonisms as 
 they now are and for ages have been; but go- 
 ing back to where life started, and is ever and 
 ever restarting, we find that the sides of the 
 gulf are so near that even a microscopic cell 
 spans their space. When that first cell di- 
 vided, it was not out of any hate or rivalry, 
 but because each division in doing so, could get 
 more food, and each was a part of one common 
 self. Later, when parenthood came in and the 
 first child was produced, what was it? An-" 
 other self, and yet at the same time an exten- 
 sion of the parental self. What the parent 
 did for it, therefore, it did for its own larger 
 self. That is where altruism came into the 
 world. It was a part and parcel of egoism, 
 was a direct outcome of life. And then, when 
 other oifspring were produced, what was their 
 relation to each other.? Why, that of natural 
 
133 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 brothers. With their multiplied descendants 
 came the swarm, the flock, the herd, the tribe, 
 their members all naturally related to each 
 other. Early association, common tastes, mu- 
 tual assistance in getting food, and, what is 
 not to be forgotten, even the assaults and an- 
 tagonisms of other tribes, as their separations 
 became wider and there was need among them- 
 selves of closer union ; all helped to strengthen 
 in knots, here and there, the tie of a common 
 brotherhood. Among animals it was largely 
 a social instinct, not rising into what is prop- 
 erly love ; but even in their ranks instances 
 are not wanting of those altruistic qualities in 
 it, which are foregleams of nature's coming 
 full humanitarian day. What farmer has not 
 seen instances, out in his barnyard, of a genuine 
 Damon and Pythias friendship, among animals, 
 sometimes those of different species, that was 
 simply an enjoyment of each other's company 
 untainted with one particle of self-interest? 
 A rat is not an animal that we very much re- 
 spect ; but when two clear-sighted ones were 
 observed, as was the case awhile ago, leading 
 an old gray blind one carefully down to the 
 water for a drink, what is it but the seed 
 planted in our common life-soil far below hu- 
 manity, which blossoms at last up above in 
 our civilized blind asylums? There are many 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE 133 
 
 Christian people who think the doctrine of 
 their relationship with monkeys and baboons 
 degrading; but when a mother monkey adopts 
 and cares for a whole group of little orphan 
 monkeys, and a troop of baboons is attacked 
 by dogs and all escape to the hills but a young 
 one which mounts a rock and cries for help, 
 and a stout old baboon heroically comes back, 
 facing the whole pack of hounds, and bears 
 him away in safety, where is there a true 
 mother's or hero's heart that does not in- 
 stinctively pay its tribute of honor to such 
 deeds as having in them the very accent of 
 altruistic affection? Sometimes the contrast 
 between a brute's conduct to others and that 
 of a human being is very much to the credit 
 of the brute ; as in that case out on a Kentucky 
 frontier where two babes, lost out in the woods 
 over night, were found by the searchers the 
 next morning, being nursed along with her own 
 cubs, by a she-bear, which foster-mother they 
 at once shot. Self-sacrifice for others, giving 
 up voluntarily one's own life to save theirs, is 
 justly regarded as the crowning evidence of 
 humanitarian love, but, as a little girl, in a 
 Michigan town, was passing on her way to 
 school through a stretch of forest, she was 
 met by a huge cougar, six or seven feet long, 
 which would undoubtedly have eaten her up, 
 
134 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 had not a small dog, hardly a foot in length, 
 flown to her rescue, being torn to pieces him- 
 self, but giving her a chance to escape ; an act 
 the more striking because he was not the 
 child's dog, but one which had followed her 
 from the post-office, and so must have done it 
 out of pure regard for her as a human being. 
 And what are all such things — mere specimens 
 of what animal history is full of — ^but proofs 
 that love in its essence is all one, and that one 
 the direct outcome of life; that what the poet 
 sings in songs and the lover lisps in vows, and 
 the mother feels in babes, and the martyr 
 shows in racks and stakes, are but variations 
 of what the plant blooms with in flowers and 
 fruit, and the animal rises to in nests and 
 lairs ; proofs, too, that Jesus was scientifically 
 correct when he said: "Thou shalt love thy 
 neighbor as thyself," recognizing self as the 
 natural and normal starting point of love, or 
 as Pope puts it 
 
 "Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake. 
 As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake. 
 The center moved, a circle straight succeeds; 
 Another still and still another spreads. 
 Friend, parent, neighbor first it will embrace, 
 His country next, and next the human race." 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE 135 
 
 Love is the staple of all novels and is sup- 
 posed especially to have an affinity for fiction 
 as its garb, but was there a novel ever written 
 so romantic in its rise, so dramatic in its inci- 
 dents and so wonderful and unexpected in its 
 denouement, as this story of love itself set 
 forth in sober scientific fact? It is the very 
 child of life; and to get them both not super- 
 naturally from Deity and the spirit world, but 
 naturally from animal and earth, instead of 
 degrading them, as some have thought, — 
 what is it but adding to their might and mar- 
 vel? To drop them out of heaven were easy 
 and commonplace ; — ^to raise them out of 
 earth, there is wonder, there an act which is 
 worthy of a God. It is an origin which does 
 not drag them down, but lifts their source up, 
 makes dust divine, matter mystery, nature 
 miracle ; is a putting a power on this near earth 
 that we once thought was in far-off skies. 
 And with life and love thus bound together at 
 their very birth here in time, who shall say 
 there is any eternity in which they are likely 
 ever to be parted ; and with the wonderful prog- 
 ress they have made together in the past, what 
 Hebrew prophet ever uttered promise more in- 
 spiring as to the heights they may united rise 
 to, in the eons yet to come? 
 
VIII 
 THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY 
 
 The subject of my last lecture was the evo- 
 lution of love in its various phases out of life, 
 — self-love, sex-love, family-love and race-love ; 
 and now, as coming naturally next in order, 
 I take up the evolution of society, a manifes- 
 tation of life in which the connecting link be- 
 tween its parts, while akin to love, is more 
 directly self-interest, cooperation and compan- 
 ionship. 
 
 It is a subject whose importance can hardly 
 
 be stated in terms which are too strong. 
 
 Everybody, to be sure, has moods in which he 
 
 wants to be alone, — ought, now and then, to find 
 
 in his own thoughts good company, — reaches, 
 
 perhaps, the climax of his being when he can 
 
 stand up, and, in all the grand meaning of that 
 
 little word, can say /. There is usually a time, 
 
 also, in his experience, when the presence of one 
 
 other person is enough for his happiness, a 
 
 time when he would very much rather have no 
 
 one but her around, not even her old father, 
 136 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY 137 
 
 or dear mother, or mischievous young brother, 
 and when he thinks that with her a desert isle 
 would be a sevenfold heaven. And again, there 
 is the possibility of finding for awhile a de- 
 lightful companionship with nature and nat- 
 ural objects, — 
 
 "A pleasure in the pathless woods, 
 A rapture on the lonely shore, 
 Society where none intrudes, 
 
 By the deep sea and music in its roar." 
 
 But in his deepest nature and his most endur- 
 ing wants, man is preeminently a social being. 
 Other relations are to him the luxuries, — the 
 moonshine, cake and poetry of life ; but society 
 he has to have as the necessities, — the sunlight, 
 the daily bread and the sober prose, of ex- 
 istence. It is only in connection with his fel- 
 low creatures that he can rise up into his 
 highest individuality, only by first dwelling in 
 society that he can really enjoy nature. A 
 babe growing to maturity in the woods, grows 
 only to be a mature brute, — never learns even 
 to speak; while a man left, like Enoch Arden, 
 wholly to himself, sinks, even amid the grandest 
 natural surroundings, into abject misery, — 
 exclaims, as Cowper makes Alexander Selkirk, 
 
 "O Solitude, where are the charms 
 That sages have seen in thy face! 
 
138 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 Better dwell in the midst of alarms 
 Than reign in this horrible place." 
 
 And in the world at large, it is society alone 
 which has made civilization and progress pos- 
 sible, its millions of common men doing with 
 their differentiation and cooperation what one 
 man, with all their brains and hands heaped to- 
 gether, never could; and its multiplied institu- 
 tions being the mighty bowl in which the 
 inventions and discoveries of one generation, 
 dipped up from the spring of thought, are 
 handed down, amid the continual deaths of their 
 original holders, in ever-increasing amounts to 
 the generations that are their followers. 
 
 It is a subject preeminently which every 
 young person coming now on the stage of ac- 
 tion ought to know something about. The 
 great saving hope of mankind hitherto has been 
 theology, the science of man's relations to God 
 and the spirit world. The great saving hope 
 of mankind in our day is sociology, the science 
 of man's relations to his brother-man and to 
 the social world. Nine-tenths of the problems 
 that we all have to meet as we go out into life 
 are social problems. The air is fiUed with won- 
 derful socialistic schemes for the improvement 
 of man's condition here on earth. All busi- 
 ness, all politics, all reform are social matters. 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY 1S9 
 
 And to act intelligently with reference to any 
 of these interests, everybody needs to know 
 something of the origin, nature and history of 
 the great institution out of which they grow. 
 
 What is society? It is made up of indi- 
 viduals, and in the confusion with reference to 
 the subject which once prevailed, it was 
 thought these were all. But a collection of 
 individuals merely, as in a railroad car, around 
 a street fight, or at a ballroom, even though 
 the individuals be those of a university fra- 
 ternity or a New York's Four Hundred, do not 
 of themselves constitute society any more than 
 a thousand bricks constitute a house. They 
 must have some permanent relations to each 
 other, must be organized, and each contribute 
 something to the common good, in order to have 
 anything of the real distinctive social quality. 
 
 Then, secondly, it is not an artificial but a 
 natural organism, is not something which men 
 have intentionally put together as they do a 
 factory or a watch, but is something which has 
 grown up of itself by the action of man's own 
 interior unconscious life force, as the solar 
 system, the earth and the whole animal and 
 vegetable kingdoms have. It is a distinction of 
 the most vital importance, and it is one that 
 Mr. Spencer and the evolution philosophy are 
 to have the credit, if not of first teaching, yet 
 
140 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 at any rate of calling attention to, and making 
 one of the most precious parts of their great 
 system. It was the old idea that society was 
 intentionally and artificially put together, an 
 idea which lies at the basis of Plato's "Repub- 
 lic," and Hobbe's "Leviathan" and Rousseau's 
 famous "Social Contract." It supposes that men 
 were originally only individuals, most of them 
 barbax'ian individuals, and that once on a time 
 they came together and said, "Go to now, let 
 us unite and be a society," and that from that 
 time henceforth a society there was. A great 
 deal of the same nonsense prevails now. Men 
 confound states with society ; think that be- 
 cause they can change politics, they can change 
 principles ; because they make the laws of na- 
 tions they can make those of nature, forget- 
 ting how small a part of society the state is. 
 And nearly all the socialistic schemes the world 
 is so full of to-day, Mr. Bellamy's, for in- 
 stance, are based on the idea that society is 
 like an old house needing only its worn-out 
 structure torn down, and plenty of lumber and 
 carpenter's tools and a modem architect carted 
 to its site, to have a new one in a year or two 
 rise up in its place. 
 
 There is no denying that man has the power 
 to cooperate with nature in promoting social 
 growth, but it is only to modify, not remake, 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY 141 
 
 only as he has power to cultivate and improve 
 the apple-trees and pear-trees of his garden, 
 not cut them down and build new ones with 
 other wood and flowers and fruit ; only as he 
 has power to dress and feed and develop his 
 own body obeying its laws, not to take it apart 
 and make it over again, conforming it to a 
 pattern he himself has devised. What we need 
 to recognize is that the social tree is a living 
 organism, that it did not have to wait for 
 philosophers and politicians and legislative 
 halls and dress coats and Easter bonnets to 
 come along before it could appear on earth, 
 but that it began with life itself, and is what 
 can no more be cut down and made over afresh 
 than could the solar system, or the human 
 body, or the whole animal and vegetable king- 
 doms. 
 
 Going back to its origin, when nature's first 
 protoplasmic cells in growing, divided and be- 
 came two cells, — as we found to be the process in 
 all growth, — while some of them wholly divided 
 and became separate creatures, others clung to- 
 gether as parts of one creature, and gradually 
 differentiated themselves into its various organs 
 and performed its various kinds of work. All 
 organic bodies are really societies of cells, co- 
 operating with each other for the common good. 
 Their food is simply great companies of other 
 
14a THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 cells going along in the blood to take the place 
 of the older ones which have been used up. 
 They are free at first, but as soon as they have 
 joined their different organizations, bones, 
 brain, muscles, heart and so on, have as little 
 will of their own as the members have of a labor 
 organization. The social system of the in- 
 dividual physical body is that of an absolute 
 monarchy in which the individual cell life is 
 whoUy dominated by the larger common life, 
 each cell going to brain or foot, heart or en- 
 trails exactly as it is sent. Ordinarily it is a 
 contented kingdom, each subject by his obedi- 
 ence and cooperation getting more comfort 
 than he could alone, and the whole having the 
 same efficiency, as compared with what its cells 
 acting separately would have, that a disciplined 
 army has in comparison with a mob. But now 
 and then difficulty occurs. Too much work or 
 too little pay or the wrong food is given some 
 of the cells. The dominating life gets idiotic 
 or overbearing, and perhaps a lot of outside 
 bacteria come in as walking delegates and stir 
 up trouble ; and then sickness follows. That is 
 what sickness is, the cells of the individual social 
 body getting up a rebellion, going off on a 
 strike. Setting up for themselves an inde- 
 pendent life. Usually it is an entirely justi- 
 fiable proceeding ; and the true remedy is not to 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY 143 
 
 introduce scab labor in the shape of medicines, 
 or call out the military in the shape of the 
 surgeon's knife, but simply to do the cells 
 justice by giving them better food, shorter 
 hours of labor and an improved boss-life, a 
 wisdom that might well be imitated in dealing 
 with the workmen of the world's larger social 
 body. 
 
 But nature's aim was to make these little 
 condensed monarchial societies only as a pre- 
 liminary to something else. As they became 
 more developed and began to produce their off- 
 spring by the union of sexes, another and 
 higher set of social relations was evolved. The 
 offspring, instead of being joined with each 
 other physically, as the cells are, remained 
 separate individuals, and were joined together 
 by an invisible social tie, first as families, and 
 then as they multiplied and spread out, into 
 swarms, herds, flocks, tribes, nations and races. 
 
 The family was thus the beginning of what 
 is properly society, growing, as you see, 
 naturally and inevitably out of increasing life ; 
 and the social body differed from the physical 
 body at the start, only in the fact that while the 
 one in growing kept its growing parts phys- 
 ically united, the other in growing kept them 
 physically separate and united only with a 
 spiritual tie. It is a pareUelism, as Mr. Spencer 
 
14.4 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 says, which is not to be pressed too far, but 
 one that in some respects is wonderfully exact. 
 Individuals are simply the cells of the great 
 social body. What are differentiated in the one 
 as bones, brain, muscles, arteries, nerves, viscera 
 and senses, are differentiated in the other as 
 chiefs, classes, occupations, workshops, roads, 
 telegraphs, post-offices, sewers, schoolrooms and 
 churches. As physical growth is accomplished 
 by the division of its cells and clusters of cells, 
 so social growth is accomplished by the enlarge- 
 ment and then division of its individuals and 
 clusters of individuals. Even the physical 
 methods of reproduction by budding, germ- 
 budding and mating, have their social analogues 
 in the planting of colonies, the addition to the 
 state of outlying territories, and the inter- 
 mingling of different tribes by emigration and 
 conquest. Social life itself is, like physical life, 
 the continual readjustment by its own forces of 
 internal to external relations ; is kept up in the 
 social body by the constant using up and dying 
 off of its individual members, as it is in the 
 physical body by the constant using up and 
 dying off of its cell-members. And as regards 
 rebellions and strikes and mobs and anarchies 
 and crimes, what are they but the fevers and 
 sores and consumptions and inflammations and 
 diarrhoeas of society, caused by the oppres- 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY 146 
 
 sions, bad foods, poor wages, injustices and ig- 
 norances of the social body as a whole, needing 
 therefore, like a sick man, not so much 
 violent medicines and sharp bayonet thrusts, 
 as a more thorough social pathology and a 
 better application of social sanitary laws. 
 But, while recognizing the parallelism in these 
 respects, there is this very important difference 
 between the two, that while the dominating life 
 of the animal body is in it as a whole, the dom- 
 inating life of the social body is in its parts. 
 Society has no one brain, or stomach or heart, 
 but does its work by the consensus of its many 
 brains, stomachs and hearts. Most important 
 of all, while it is the tendency of the animal 
 organism to lessen the individuality and free- 
 dom of the cells and make the perfection of the 
 body its supreme aim, the tendency of the social 
 organism is to increase the individuality and 
 freedom of its members and to make the per- 
 fection of its distinct personal parts the su- 
 preme thing, yet with man as their center both 
 uniting most wonderfully, even along these con- 
 tradictory ways, in promoting his individuality. 
 Viewing society as thus a natural organism 
 differentiated from the physical body and 
 starting as a family, its first function in evolv- 
 ing must evidently have been to provide itself 
 with food, clothing and shelter, articles which 
 
14.6 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 in its primitive state, both among animals and 
 man, it doubtless gathered direct from nature, 
 and, except with its young, each one wholly for 
 himself alone. But with the increase of itself 
 and other families, there necessarily arose after 
 awhile a competition between them as to which 
 should have the most of what was too little for 
 all, a competition which, sooner or later, led to 
 fights, which fights in their turn, while sepa- 
 rating species from species and tribe from tribe, 
 tended to unite more closely, as their only means 
 of success, those that were of the same species 
 and the same tribe. At first all members of the 
 species and tribe would take part in the fight; 
 but among human beings this could not last. 
 The fighters had to have food and weapons to 
 carry on a long war; those which had them 
 most abundantly, as in our Civil War, being 
 most likely to triumph ; so a differentiation took 
 place, some remaining at home to gather food 
 and shape weapons, while others went forth to 
 use them in the field. Thus we have the origin 
 of those two great systems, the military and the 
 industrial, which ever since have been such 
 protninent features in all human society, and 
 out of which, as with the exoderm and endoderm 
 of the animal body, all its other organs are 
 found to grow. 
 
 At first the tribe was nomadic, exhausting the 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY 14T 
 
 food in one locality, and then moving to an- 
 other, but as industries, wealth and strength 
 increased, it found it desirable and possible to 
 settle down in the better places as permanent 
 abodes where larger houses could be built and 
 stronger defenses put up, so towns and villages 
 arose. 
 
 For a long period all property, consisting as 
 it did of weapons and utensils, flocks and herds, 
 which all in common had helped in producing, 
 was by all in common owned and used. But 
 with a fixed abode and more numbers, more in- 
 dustries sprang up, and more property was ac- 
 quired; one man got a facility for doing one 
 thing and another another ; one was industrious 
 and another lazy ; and in the end each naturally 
 wanted what was best fitted to his person and 
 his family and into which he had put the most 
 work ; so private ownership came in, and with it 
 that difference between the rich and the poor 
 which has become such a conspicuous and, to 
 many, such a terrible feature in society as it is 
 to-day. 
 
 With the facility that the skilful and in- 
 dustrious acquired for doing some things better 
 than others, they inevitably accumulated more 
 of some than they needed, and less of others, so 
 they exchanged products and trade was started. 
 At first the trade was only among neighbors, 
 
148 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 but towns, countries, nations were so situated 
 as to produce some things the others lacked; so 
 commerce followed, involving ships, wagons, 
 roads, canals, post-offices, telegraphs, — all that 
 vast network of intercommunication that is the 
 veins, arteries and nerves of the social body in 
 our time ; involving, also, on the one side 
 cheating, lying, taxes, tariffs, money, gold- 
 bugs, silverites, and cut-throat competition, 
 and on the other side, still more largely, honesty, 
 acquaintance with other countries, human- 
 itarianism, toleration, free trade, the desire for 
 peace, and leisure for the culture of letters, 
 art and scie^ice. At the beginning of society 
 the father as the strongest and wisest, was 
 naturally its leader both in peace and war ; but, 
 when he died, his ablest and bravest son 
 would become its chief in war, and when the war 
 was over and he returned a conqueror, its chief 
 also in peace, bringing with him a warrior's 
 method of personal command ; thus government 
 arose, and a government which at the start was 
 inevitably despotic. That is what war always 
 means, despotism. You cannot fight battles 
 with town-meetings, or capture forts with 
 ballots ; and whenever a nation has an army, 
 down must go the people and up again the 
 potentate. But in the course of time many 
 strong men arose, some in other arts than those 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY 149 
 
 of war, who as counsellors and administrators 
 shared in the government. The people, also, of 
 the little towns and villages got together in 
 town meetings, and the tradesmen of cities in 
 guilds and clubs, and talked over their local 
 interests and made rules for their own especial 
 assemblies. This was a most important step, 
 for town meetings and voluntary unions, so 
 powerless on battlefields, are the very seeds of 
 power in times of peace. So little by little, 
 amid awful scenes of revolution and confusion, 
 monarchies were undermined, and in place of one 
 man's will, government was carried on by the 
 many's law. 
 
 While a part of the people increased in 
 virtue, peacefulness and civilization, others 
 lagged behind, kept something of their old 
 vices, violence and savagery. That is what 
 makes evil, the rise, not the fall of humanity; 
 and as a result laws had to be made to punish 
 wrong-doing; and to enforce the laws, society 
 had to inaugurate its police, constables, courts, 
 juries, jails and hangmen. 
 
 There are a myriad little matters of social 
 intercourse, however, that law cannot attend to, 
 and these from the very start were regulated 
 by custom, fashion, convenience, good sense 
 and public opinion, and they gave rise even- 
 tually to courtesy, manners, politeness, eti- 
 
150 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 quette, all those graces which lubricate life and 
 constitute what is called good society. 
 
 Women at first were the mates of the whole 
 tribe alike, and marriage probably came in 
 through capture and purchase, each man feel- 
 ing he had an exclusive right to what he had 
 dragged at the risk of his life from another 
 tribe, or paid her parents for in pelt and prov- 
 ender. The marriage ring that ladies wear so 
 proudly now, is a remnant of the marriage 
 shackles they wore ages ago, and what to-day 
 are figuratively called marriage bonds were 
 once very literal bindings. Women with their 
 children to bear and bring up, naturally made 
 home their sphere, developing in its quiet those 
 gentler graces and attractions which hsive been 
 such a power in softening and elevating society ; 
 chose their husbands when choice came, because 
 of their strength in giving them protection, 
 while the husbands chose their wives as they 
 could, because of their beauty, which explains 
 why men are so strong and ugly, and women so 
 weak and lovely. But with the days of danger 
 passing away, and women able to go freely out 
 into the world and share in its work, their nat- 
 ural equality will come back, and with their 
 fewer vices than men, the pendulum may swing 
 the other way, and they for awhile be the 
 superior sex in giving society its coming shape. 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY 151 
 
 The evolutions of mind, morals and religion 
 are so unique and important as to deserve 
 special lectures; but let me say briefly that 
 they are very largely social growths. Man's 
 great struggle for existence was the nurse not 
 only of bodily strength, but still more of intel- 
 lectual keenness and power. So with morals. 
 Men, in order to live together, must have fore- 
 bearance, fair dealing, self-restraint, and some 
 degree of veracity, self-sacrifice and regard for 
 each other's rights. Morality is simply the 
 law of social health, as hygiene is of bodily 
 health, ever enlarging as society grows more 
 complex, and in the one as in the other, killing 
 off those who disobey its laws, and preserving, 
 as the fittest to survive, those by whom they are 
 kept. And as regards religion, while it began 
 in the individual soul, it has been in its develop- 
 ment preeminently a social quality, instituted 
 at a very early date ; its special rites and cere- 
 monies dominated the world for ages through 
 fear, blossomed with the brightening centuries 
 here and there into love, and while doing some- 
 thing to shape society, has been in its doctrines, 
 its liberties, its organizations, and its rituals, 
 an outcome how largely of society's own ever- 
 increasing growth. 
 
 That the hasty survey thus given of the 
 world's social evolution is not a mere fancy, we 
 
152 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 have many of the same proofs that we do with 
 regard to the evolution of its other parts. 
 Take, for instance, the passage from the society 
 of united cells in the animal body to the society 
 of disunited animals in a flock or herd. There 
 are creatures which ordinarily swim with their 
 parts distinct, like a shoal of minnows, but 
 which, when alarmed and needing to defend 
 themselves, instantly put their parts together 
 and become one large animal, and others which 
 begin their existence as a single organism, and 
 then pass gradually into a full community. 
 What are swarms of bees but little buzzing 
 groups of cells, that without ever being joined 
 together are really, in their motions and con- 
 trolling spirit, only a single composite animal? 
 What are ant hills and flocks of birds and 
 shoals of fishes but cruder manifestations of the 
 social tie which higher up draws human beings 
 into cities and tribes, a unity of life that Words- 
 worth alludes to in his words : 
 
 "The cattle are grazing, their heads never raising, 
 There are forty feeding as one." 
 
 And even among plants how inevitably do those 
 which are of the same kind group themselves, 
 pines with pines, oaks with oaks ; with what 
 soldierly comradeship the serried ranks of the 
 forest lock arms and breast the winter storm; 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY 153 
 
 how socially the groves, those first temples of 
 God, arch their limbs into roofs, and lift their 
 tops into pinnacles, and with their leaves as 
 hymn-books and the breezes as breaths, join in 
 their choral song; how loving the violets and 
 innocents, unable alone to attract their insect 
 fertilizers unite their forces in great patches 
 of color which can not fail of being seen. And 
 even the wicked weeds when they go forth to do 
 their mischief, how well does every farmer know, 
 it is not as single robbers but as great maraud- 
 ing bands that they make their assaults, — -all 
 evidences of how thoroughly the socialistic idea 
 is rooted in nature and with what easy steps it 
 rises from cell to soul. 
 
 Coming to man, however, it has long been the 
 teaching of theology that his movement has 
 been the other way, that he was placed on earth 
 at first as a civilized being, and that falling 
 first out of Eden into sin, he kept on falling till 
 he landed in utter barbarism and savagery ; and 
 indeed apart from theology there is no denying 
 that he has had great and terrible lapses, — ^not 
 only individuals, but cities, tribes, nations, 
 whole civilizations, Assyria, Egypt, Persia, 
 Greece, Spain. But regarded scientifically, 
 theSe have been only the rhythmic movements 
 that we find in all progress ; are like the aging 
 and death of generations and species ; no more 
 
154 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 an indication of what is taking place with the 
 growing part of humanity than the swash of 
 the waves is of how the tide is setting along the 
 ocean's shore. The different grades of society 
 are spread over the earth now, rising regidarly 
 from the lowest to the highest, just as the dif- 
 ferent species of animals and plants are, so that 
 to-day you can see the stone age in Africa and 
 our savage sires socially in the living men of the 
 southern seas. All history sets its shoulders 
 square against the idea that man began as a 
 civilized being and sank through sin into sav- 
 agery, and plants itself on the side of his 
 gradual rise, every existing civilization, as you 
 trace it back, growing cruder and cruder till it 
 is lost, not in the sunlight of Eden, but in the 
 night of barbarism and superstition. Beyond 
 the age of iron, where written history finds man 
 and begins his record, the Implements that are 
 found in caves and gravels and mounds and 
 shell heaps and at the bottom of Swiss lakes 
 tell in their written words of a bronze age, and 
 back of that of a smooth-stone age, and back 
 of that of a rough-stone age, where his only 
 tools are such as an Intelligent baboon is found 
 now to use. Nor Is It in the earth or In old 
 records alone that we find the evidence of his 
 rude primitive state. Just as man's living body 
 has all through it the rudimental and atavistic 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY 155 
 
 organs of the animal bodies from which he 
 came, so our living society has all through it 
 the rudimental and atavistic forms, qualities 
 and actions, that prove equally the savage and 
 even the animal society out of which it has been 
 evolved. When an Ashantee woman wants to be 
 very dressy, she breaks off the twig from a tree 
 and ties it to her back hair, — this and nothing 
 more, — and who shall say that so far as the up- 
 per part of her person goes, the fashionably- 
 dressed ballroom belle of civilized America does 
 not touch shoulders with her very closely as — if 
 I may be allowed the word without seeming to 
 make a pun — a missing link. Start a panic 
 in an army, or in a crowded assembly or any- 
 where that a large company of people are 
 gathered, and see how quickly they will lose 
 their separate individuality of will, thought, 
 and action, and become as much one animal 
 moved by one impulse as ever a swarm of bees 
 or shoal of fishes was. The story is told of a 
 cat who was magically transformed into a 
 fine lady and acted her part so successfully in 
 the most fashionable social circles as to resist 
 all efforts to make her betray her origin, till one 
 day her artful rival dropped a rat on the parlor 
 floor when, instantly springing to the carpet 
 on all fours, she went for it mouth and claw. 
 Who has not seen whole churches apparently 
 
156 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 transformed into angels, and resisting all other 
 allurements into lower traits who have done 
 precisely the same thing when an heretical rat 
 has been let loose in their presence? Every- 
 body who is familiar with a farmyard has 
 noticed how inevitably a brood of chickens, 
 when a strange one has strayed among them, 
 will turn on it and peck it to death or drive it 
 off; and what is it but the very thing that all 
 fashionable circles do when a woman with a 
 strange bonnet comes into their brood; and all 
 conservative men-circles when a crank with a 
 new idea comes into their coop? Put a parcel 
 of boys together free of restraint, even college 
 boys, and see how soon they will be up, or, 
 rather, down, to the embryonic monkey tricks 
 of the social stage through which their ancestry 
 came. Dig down under the present crust of 
 society anywhere, and you will find specimens 
 of its primitive state just as surely as you will 
 in the rocks of its primitive animals, — tigers in 
 Tammany Hall, bulls and bears in Wall Street, 
 the lion's tail in English statesmanship, and the 
 eagle's talons in American oratory. City 
 streets which have at one end churches and 
 schools and homes and the nineteenth century, 
 have at the other superstitions and ignorances 
 and hovels and the dark ages. And indeed what 
 is the church itself but a vast system of social 
 
THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY 157 
 
 paleontology, the fossil remains of the world's 
 past beliefs, rites and ceremonies tufted at the 
 top with a thin growth of fresh and living 
 social activities. 
 
 Such has been the evolution of society, such 
 the earmarks it yet carries of the animal and 
 the savage herds from which it has come. You 
 see the new meaning it gives to history, to an- 
 tiquities and to all existing habits and customs, 
 makes them no longer columns of beads on a 
 string, but rows of letters setting forth wonder- 
 ful truths. It is a process which is still going on, 
 and going on more rapidly now than ever before. 
 What changes have we seen in it during our 
 own time, slavery wiped out, liberty enlarged, 
 and inventions made and truths discovered that 
 under our very eyes are giving it a new shape. 
 It is something of which we too, individually, 
 are a part, living cells in its mighty body, help- 
 ing to make it not only what it is, but what it 
 is to be. And seeing how it has been evolved in 
 the past, are we not the better prepared to do 
 our part in helping it on to that day when what 
 is rooted so deep in time and been nourished with 
 such myriad lives, shall bear on its branches 
 what vastly beyond its own perfection is to be 
 its final outcome, the blossoms and fruit of even 
 finer and distinctive individual men and women.? 
 
IX 
 
 THE WORLD'S COMING BETTER SOCIAL 
 STATE 
 
 AS INDICATED BY EVOLUTION 
 
 When the schemes and all the systems, kingdoms 
 
 and republics fall, 
 Something kindlier, higher, holier, all for each and 
 
 each for all. 
 
 Men in all ages have been discontented with 
 their own times and have delighted in picturing 
 to themselves a better social state. With some, 
 its location has been in the far-oiF past, a Gar- 
 den of Eden, and a golden age ; with others in 
 the far-off future, a heavenly home and an im- 
 mortal existence; with yet others in an ideal 
 world independent of any special time or place, 
 a Plato's Republic and a More's Utopia, and 
 with not a few right here on earth in a day soon 
 to dawn, a Christian millennium and a cooper- 
 ative commonwealth. And while now and then 
 it has been only an object of pleasant thought, 
 
 no more to be sought for practically than 
 158 
 
BETTER SOCIAL STATE 159 
 
 Spencer's Faerie Land or the gorgeous realms 
 of a sunset sky, it has with multitudes of our 
 race, indeed with all reformers, been their 
 dearest hope, struggled for amid all the agonies 
 of battlefield and martyr fire. 
 
 Preeminently is our own age characterized 
 by such dreams and discontent. The splendor 
 of its attainments in wealth, art, science, letters, 
 liberty, rights, almost everything which relates 
 to human welfare, is almost lost sight of in 
 the multitude yet remaining of its poverties, 
 miseries and wrongs. Literally is it having the 
 old Scripture fulfilled that your sons and daugh- 
 ters shall prophecy, your young men see visions 
 and your old men dream dreams ; and alive with 
 its spirit there is hardly a newspaper falling 
 short in its morning supply of scandal and 
 crime, which does not eke out its vacant space 
 with an improved social system, hardly a crank 
 failing to earn a living for himself with the 
 hammer and hoe, who does not work out for the 
 world with his fancy a new scheme of universal 
 financial prosperity. 
 
 Nor is it a tendency which even in its wildest 
 manifestations is to be wholly despised. The 
 age which never dreams will never do. All the 
 world's great days of sober fact have had 
 their morning sunrise in some splendid 
 fancy. 
 
160 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 "Dreams in their development have breath. 
 Are rudiments of the great state to be." 
 
 The very word Christian, now so fondly clung 
 to by those who would maintain the existing 
 social order, meant originally the adherent of 
 a person regarded as especially anointed of 
 God to lead men to a better state of things 
 right here on earth, — is now, in the occasional 
 lapses of its ministers into sympathy with new 
 social movements, only being true to the dreams 
 of its own divinest youth. And the socialistic 
 hope, condemned often as outside of all religion, 
 is really only a fresh outbreak in our day of the 
 world's old Messianic hope, its visions but 
 new chapters in humanity's larger, unclosed 
 Apocalypse, and its demands but the modern 
 wording of our old endeared Lord's Prayer, 
 "TJiy kingdom come." 
 
 But while such dreamings all have their use, 
 all help to keep men from settling down into the 
 despairing belief that society as it now is, with 
 its myriad evils, is necessarily a fixture. The 
 great drawback to most of them as social states 
 actually to be worked for, is that they are only 
 dreams, only pictures drawn by the ungulded 
 fancy of what for the moment seems desirable, 
 and not forecasts based on a study of society's 
 own inherent laws and whose realization we can 
 
BETTER SOCIAL STATE 161 
 
 help nature practically to bring about. There 
 is one truth in the matter which our modern 
 acquaintance with the principles of evolution 
 ought to make us absolutely sure of: it is that 
 there will be and can be no coming better social 
 state which is not the direct outgrowth of the 
 one which is now and here, preeminently no 
 better one which can arise from the present 
 one's mere destruction. The present one is the 
 survival of the fittest from among all the myriad 
 experiments which up to date it has been 
 possible for nature to try, — ^would result if 
 wiped out and tried again, only in its mere 
 repetition, — has within it as the costly product 
 of all the ages of its growth the germs of the 
 best that man can ever have. And to know 
 what the world's coming one is to be, it is evi- 
 dently to this present one, to the forces and 
 laws already within it out of which the coming 
 one is to be evolved, that the student must go. 
 Evolution, to be sure, even with such a basis to 
 work from, cannot give us all the details of its 
 coming state, the exact size to which its sleeves 
 will swell and hats arise, — cannot do with the 
 star of empire what the astronomer can with a 
 star of the skies, predict from a part of its orbit 
 the whole of its course, for, aside from the 
 mighty factor of man's free will acting on 
 society as it never does on star, nature itself 
 
162 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 breaks forth ever and anon into great flying 
 leaps of action which are liable, as Tennyson 
 says, to make the future, — 
 
 "Something other than the wildest modern guess of 
 you or me." 
 
 But it can give us, if not astronomical pre- 
 dictions, yet weather bureau indications of what 
 in the world's great to-morrow its social state 
 is likely to be, and it is some of its larger 
 features thus pointed out that I shall try to 
 set forth. 
 
 It indicates first that it will be a better state 
 than it is now. Evolution does indeed have its 
 degeneracies and dyings out, its "scarped cliiF 
 and quarried stone, from which a thousand 
 types are gone," and the time will surely come 
 when in this world, at least, it will have reached 
 its climax and begin to descend; the time when, 
 as Huxley says, "its fittest forms to survive 
 will be again the mollusc and the moss." But 
 that climax is yet a long, long ways ofl'. Of 
 the eight great periods which a planet's life 
 normally passes through, mist, liquid, rock, 
 lower life, human life, dying, being dead and 
 dissolution, each of them lasting millions of 
 years, the earth as yet is only in the early 
 part of the fifth, only when man is at the very 
 beginning of his maturity, — ^has, therefore, 
 
BETTER SOCIAL STATE 163 
 
 barring the accident of a comet across its path 
 or the assaults of some unusually harmful 
 meteoric bacteria, at least five millions of years 
 before reaching its turning point of old age, — 
 is what, if there were insurance companies which 
 issued policies on stars, as sometime, judging 
 by the way they are now extending their bus- 
 iness there may be, would be considered a very 
 good risk. And all this time evolution will 
 mean as a whole the world's growing better, 
 mean even with its degenerations a degenerating 
 forward, and with its dyings out a dying into 
 higher forms of life. 
 
 Moreover, it is to be noticed that the special 
 part of the world which is now evolving is its 
 social part. Nature is not doing much in our 
 day at making mountains or continents or seas, 
 or new species of animals or plants or men, — 
 not doing much directly at improving the in- 
 dividual body or bones or even brain. But she 
 is at work now as never before, on the world's 
 social structure, is building up the individual 
 human brick, molded for so many ages out of 
 her original protoplasmic clay into an edifice 
 which does indeed promise to be sky-high, — 
 this fact that Mr. Kidd, among all the thousand 
 and one fallacies of his wonderful book, has 
 strikingly made plain. It is what renders 
 sociology such a fascinating study; social re- 
 
164. THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 form such fascinating work. We think some- 
 times we would like to look back into the eons 
 of the past and see our material earth, its seas 
 and shores and living things actually evolving 
 under nature's plastic touch; but we can, if 
 we will, do better than that, — see our social 
 earth, its grander shores and finer life, visibly 
 taking shape before our eyes ; be, if we will, 
 partners with nature in the work. And with 
 this certainty of its ultimate betterness to 
 fall back upon, what though we also see races, 
 nations, institutions, religions, some of them of 
 immeasurable cost and worth, perishing all 
 around us, we need not fear, as some do, that 
 society itself is going to perish, need not fear 
 but that from every fall, the same as with 
 physical nature, it will rise up a fairer spring. 
 
 "Grown wiser by the lesson given, 
 I fear no longer, for I know 
 That where the share is deepest driven 
 The best fruits grow." 
 
 What will be the nature of society's better 
 coming state? Nearly all dreamers have an- 
 swered, material, moral, civil perfection, a 
 state in which all the forces of nature will be 
 in harmonious action, all the problems of society 
 satisfactorily solved, all the ten thousand forms 
 of the world's evil utterly eliminated, and all 
 
BETTER SOCIAL STATE 165 
 
 the races of men freed from anxiety and care, 
 working only as they wish, and healthy, happy 
 and good, or, as Tennyson says, 
 
 "All diseases quenched by science, no man halt or 
 deaf or blind, 
 
 Stronger ever born of weaker, lustier body, larger 
 mind, — 
 
 Every tiger madness muzzled, every serpent pas- 
 sion killed. 
 
 Every grim ravine a garden, every blazing desert 
 tilled." 
 
 But fascinating as in some respects such a 
 vision is, evolution is very far from pointing 
 to it as one ever likely to be realized. Man's 
 present use of the earth, instead of tending to 
 make it a natural garden, is tending more and 
 more to make it a natural waste, — slashing 
 down its forests, burning up its coal, exhausting 
 its soil, poisoning its airs and letting loose its 
 cyclones and floods. Its big wild beasts may 
 be becoming fewer, but how about its little 
 bacteria? Its new West producing larger 
 crops, but what of its old East.'' Its machinery 
 doing more and more work, but where is its 
 lessening of our human anxieties and cares? 
 Each new discovery brings with it a new 
 danger, — railroad speed, railroad smash-ups, 
 electric dynamos, electric deaths. Each settle- 
 
166 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 ment of an old problem reveals a dozen bigger 
 ones to take its place, shows ahead of us from 
 each mountain climbed. 
 
 "Hills peep o'er hills and alps on alps arise." 
 
 While the average length of human life is in- 
 creasing by preservation of the young, who 
 shall say that Lombroso is mistaken in thinking 
 that its real stock vigor, as shown by its fewer 
 old people, is going the other way.'' And as 
 regards its moral health, though its temptations 
 and tempters in our modern life may be less 
 outward and crude than of old, what evidence 
 is there that their assaults on it inwardly are 
 any less terrible, or the struggles needed for 
 their resistance any less fierce than when, at the 
 start, its primal Adam and Eve yielded to those 
 of an apple and a snake ? No : evolution does 
 not promise to take us forward to an Eden in 
 the future any more than backward to one in 
 the past, — does not promise even to give us a 
 sunshine without a shadow or a crown without 
 a cross. 
 
 But it does promise with its unfolding around 
 us of more difficulties, more evils, more prob- 
 lems to be met, to unfold within us more 
 strength and skill for their meeting and more 
 success in winning out of them food, health, 
 happiness, manhood. It is this which has been 
 
BETTER SOCIAL STATE 16T 
 
 its trend all through the past, — not fewer foes 
 and battles, but more victories and spoils; not 
 smaller apples and snakes as the tempters, but 
 stronger Adams and Eves as the resisters ; not 
 the earth unmade a wilderness, but the earth 
 out of its very wildernesses made to bloom as 
 Eden never did; not its strata of coal undi- 
 minished down below, but its layers of the 
 lightning tapped and mined up above ; not man 
 less liable to disease, but man endowed by his 
 very wrestlings against disease with a health 
 such as nature never gave; not society without 
 a hell, but society using its hells to make out of 
 them and make for itself, an ever finer heaven. 
 And everything points to this as its direction 
 still more grandly in the future. Just as a 
 French gardener can already take a bit of pave- 
 ment, and by the use of his chemical fertilizers 
 make out of it in three years a bit of Paradise, 
 so when this old earth of ours shall have become 
 so dry and desert-like that, left to itself, it 
 would not feed a mouse, science and art are to 
 clasp it as a woman does a sponge, and squeeze 
 out of it harvests such as watered Egypt never 
 waved with ; compel Sahara with its own heat to 
 make ice and snow; have around either pole, 
 by reason of its delicious mingling of frigid 
 cold and torrid warmth, hotels and picnics and 
 the summer girl; shut the western cyclone, in- 
 
168 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 stead of the western farmer, down in a "dug- 
 out" as a source of electric energy for driving 
 his plow and reaping his wheat ; and make man 
 as little afraid of bacteria as he now is of bears, 
 tame them, perhaps as he has the dog and the 
 cow to be his guardians and help his health. And 
 while vaster and vaster problems will con- 
 tinually foUow his solution of the old ones, the 
 vaster and vaster strength that he will get from 
 their solving, will make him look back on those 
 which to-day are so puzzling, — the silver ques- 
 tion, the tariff question, the adjustment of 
 labor and capital, the management of big cities 
 and big hats, and the like, — very much as the 
 man of sixty now does on his childish wrestlings 
 with a, b, ab, and two and two make four. 
 Meliorism, not optimism, an ever bettering, not 
 an ever best, that is the principle, that the 
 promise of evolution, as regards the world's 
 coming social state. 
 
 And after all, is not that what we really 
 want, that the thing which really is best? Who 
 dreads difficulty, toil, sacrifice, agony, when to 
 meet them he has health, muscle, courage, brain, 
 — ^who, rather, does not welcome them as man- 
 hood's truest joy.? A perfect world to dwell in 
 would mean to its dwellers inevitably the 
 wasting away through ease, of their long, toil- 
 won powers. It is only imperfection which can 
 
BETTER SOCIAL STATE 169 
 
 keep alive perfection; only a heaven before us 
 forever unreached, the struggle for which can 
 make a heaven within forever reached; and 
 amid all the frightful pictures theology has 
 painted of a realm where 
 
 "Infinite day excludes the nighty 
 And pleasures banish pain." 
 
 "And everlasting spring abides 
 And never withering flowers," 
 
 it is an immense satisfaction to feel that evolu- 
 tion will never cease, at least in this world, to 
 provide us amply with manhood's meat of 
 sorrow, hardship and care, — great problems to 
 be solved for humanity, and great sacrifices to 
 be made for those we love, — never cease, there- 
 fore, to give us a betterness in which souls can 
 grow. 
 
 How far will society's coming betterness be 
 a realization of what socialism has in view, a 
 betterness in which all its property will be owned 
 by the state and all its industries, — farms, 
 factories, trade, travel and the like, admin- 
 istered by the state's ofGcials.'' We all know 
 how largely such a consummation is the ideal of 
 our time, and what thousands not of cranks 
 merely, but of society's best men and women 
 are working for it as the one remedy including 
 all others, for the waste, inequality, rivalry and 
 
170 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 wrong with which the world now is so fearfully 
 cursed. Far be it from me to utter one word 
 of disrespect for their zeal, or of denial as to 
 the really strong arguments urged for their 
 plan. But whatever else may be said in its 
 favor, looked at in the light of evolution and 
 through the long vista of history, it is an ideal 
 whose realization for the future is utterly hope- 
 less, one as regards which the movement is all 
 the other way. There are three great stages 
 in all evolution, whether it be of worlds, plants, 
 animals, or society, homogeneity, or sameness ; 
 that in which everything is in common, as a 
 nebula, a seed, an animalcule; then differentia- 
 tion or diversifying, that in which the common 
 mass is divided, subdivided and divided again 
 into a multitude of distinct parts, as with 
 planets, the limbs of a tree and the organs of 
 the human body; and finally integration or or- 
 ganization, that in which the parts while still 
 remaining as distinct as ever in their own forms 
 and functions, are joined by their common life 
 principle in a large and complex whole which 
 is capable of functions infinitely beyond what 
 either the original mass or the divided parts 
 could accomplish, as the solar system, the fruit- 
 growing tree and the marvelous human body. 
 Now society, like everything else, began in 
 homogeneity, or sameness, began with having 
 
BETTER SOCIAL STATE 171 
 
 lands, dwellings, wives, children, rights, reli- 
 gion, everything, owned and held in common 
 by the family and the tribe, and administered 
 for it by the father and the chief. And it was 
 then, beyond question, its most desirable state, 
 survived for ages variously modified as the 
 fittest in which to withstand foes and secure 
 food, lifted man from savagery to Greek 
 and Roman civilization, — is what Puritanism 
 sought to reestablish here in America, and has 
 its illustrations to-day religiously, alike its ex- 
 cellencies and its defects, in the great Roman 
 Catholic Church. 
 
 But it is now most emphatically a back num- 
 ber in the issues of time, has left far behind it 
 the environment which of old made it a success ; 
 and to go back to it would be like the limbed 
 tree's going back to its common trunk, or the 
 starred universe to its undivided fire-mist. 
 Evolution is not traveling at all that way. 
 The rise of humanity has been the rise of the 
 individual; freedom, that ideal for which such 
 battles have been fought, such rivers of blood 
 poured out, such heroisms of earth's noblest 
 and best displayed, has been freedom first of 
 the state, and then freedom just as certainly 
 from the state; commercial progress, the 
 growth of property into private hands away 
 more and more from legislative interference, 
 
m THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 and Mosaism, Christianity, Protestantism, 
 Liberalism, religion's great steps, each a step 
 forward in the soul's throwing off some com- 
 munity's shackles to stand forth and give an 
 account of itself before God. And with this 
 mighty law of evolution within it, where now is 
 the probability that society's movement is to 
 be reversed, and its differentiations rolled back, 
 even partially, into the homogeneity out of 
 which they have been so long and so painfully 
 evolved? Where the likelihood that humanity 
 after struggling five thousand years to get its 
 neck out of the yoke of a sovereign person, is 
 going to put it right away into the yoke of a 
 sovereign state? 
 
 What though the property thus massed 
 away from the individual is still to be owned 
 by the community of which the individual is a 
 part? That will not make his real control of 
 it any more than when formerly it was owned 
 by a chief or a king. An old New Hampshire 
 farmer tried to celebrate his Fourth of July 
 one year by going on board a magnificent war- 
 ship at anchor off of Charlestown Navy Yard, 
 and making himself very much at home, in- 
 specting its guns, engines, cabins, compasses 
 and the like. An officer, on beholding the in- 
 truder, peremptorily ordered him ashore. "I 
 won't go," said the old man, "I am an American 
 
BETTER SOCIAL STATE 173 
 
 citizen, I'd have you know ; and helped pay for 
 this 'ere boat, and it is as much mine as it is 
 yourn." "All right," answered the officer, 
 picking up a sliver from the deck and handing 
 it to him, "here is your part of it ; take it and 
 begone." Well, that sliver represents just 
 about the control the American citizen would 
 have of his property after he had lumped it 
 all into a great ship of state. 
 
 What though the officers who control its 
 affairs are to be chosen by the officers them- 
 selves.'' That is not going to make their indi- 
 vidual liberty under them any greater than it 
 was when their rulers were imposed upon them 
 by blood and birth. Jam, the New York 
 soldier, who was so outrageously strung up by 
 the thumbs a few years ago, helped to choose 
 his officers, yet when he attempted to express 
 his opinion as a freeman, wherein was he better 
 off than the subject of a czar.? The people 
 of the United States choose their lawmakers as 
 things are now; yet who, looking at the kind 
 of wisdom they display at Washington from 
 winter to winter, can wish to put any more of 
 his interests into such hands.'' Changing the 
 name of a government, calling it a fraternity 
 instead of paternalism, is not going to change 
 its nature. Wherever the political carcass is, 
 there will the political eagles be gathered to- 
 
174 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 gether; and a family in which an elder brother 
 is given the rule is not likely to be any more 
 acceptably abused than one in which the ac- 
 customed father holds the rod. 
 
 No, while the parts of the people who have 
 special axes to grind, may be as ready as ever 
 to bring them to the public grindstone, it can 
 hardly be said that those who have to do its 
 turning, — and some of us farmers' boys, who 
 used to have to turn the stone about mowing 
 time know what that is, — are likely to be very 
 much pleased with such an enormous addition 
 to their work. It is honest men, not rascals, 
 who to-day are getting a distrust of politician- 
 made justice, — honest men who, seeing how law 
 has left its seat in the bosom of God, where 
 old Hooker beheld it, to take one on the bench 
 of a lobby, is woven by a congress only to be 
 riven by a court, has narrow meshes for the 
 poor workman's cart and obsequious gates for 
 the big corporation's coach, — they who are rely- 
 ing more and more on themselves, independent 
 of law, for conducting their business. And 
 anarchism, — ^not the anarchism of dynamite and 
 disorder, but the anarchism of Jesus and Paul, 
 each man's doing right without rulers from a 
 principle within because it is right, — though 
 such a terrible word now, as liberty was once, 
 
BETTER SOCIAL STATE 175 
 
 is destined, like liberty, to be a mighty word and 
 an honored one in the years to come. 
 
 But, while State socialism, that is, the own- 
 ing and managing of things by the State and 
 its officers, is thus hopeless under evolution, 
 there is another kind of socialism, that of 
 voluntary individual association, the integra- 
 tion of society's differentiated parts not by 
 outward authority, but through their own in- 
 herent law, into grand organic wholes, which, 
 as being In the very line of all evolution, — its 
 third great stage following naturally after 
 that of differentiation, — is sure more and 
 more to come about. State socialism says 
 union is a good thing, and therefore all men 
 shall unite; nature socialism says union is a 
 good thing and therefore aU men mil unite — 
 two little words, but having between them all 
 the difference there is between despotism and 
 liberty. Society is going to take nature's 
 way, — ^has already begun it, — indeed has been 
 walking in it from the very start side by side 
 with its making men individually free. The 
 age in which we live is preeminently one of vol- 
 untary individual associations, people joining 
 hands to do things themselves, instead of kneel- 
 ing at the feet of a prince, or, worse still, of a 
 politician to get them done. Who will say it 
 
176 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 is not the manlier way? And its use is to go 
 on with increasing ratio, the State always, 
 perhaps, doing some things, those which experi- 
 ence shows it can do best, but becoming at last 
 only one of ten thousand voluntary associ- 
 ations. And under the action of these two 
 great forces, differentiation and integration, 
 the one giving man the priceless boon of indi- 
 vidual liberty, the other the equally priceless 
 efficiency of cooperative labor, the world's 
 great social solar system of its coming age is 
 to swing forth along its starry way. 
 
 But, excluding thus the idea of property's 
 being owned and managed by the State, the 
 question yet further arises, what are to be its 
 distributions in private hands, and what es- 
 pecially between those of labor and capital.'' 
 It is a question of tremendous significance. 
 The differentiations of wealth in our day have 
 passed all former bounds, — are heaped upon 
 one side in multiplied millions, hollowed out on 
 the other in multiplied miseries. The strug- 
 gles for it between labor and capital are 
 rivaling in cost and ferocity the world's old 
 military wars. "What!" exclaimed an African 
 chief to the traveler Burton, "do you think 1 
 am going to starve when my sister has children 
 she can sell?" There are business chiefs, not 
 in Africa, who with equal indignation are ex- 
 
BETTER SOCIAL STATE 177 
 
 claiming, "Do you think I am going to submit 
 to a starvation ten per cent, of profit, when 
 my sister Labor has children by the sale of 
 whose toil into what is practical slavery, I can 
 make twenty!" And with this process of dif- 
 ferentiation still going on, fortunes becoming 
 larger and larger as the result of natural law, 
 and corporations more and more arrogant as 
 the result of human law, it is no wonder that 
 to many persons the outlook ahead seems des- 
 perate and dark. What has evolution to say 
 of the matter. J* 
 
 It says first of all, do not scare,^ — that huge 
 fortunes are not unmixed evils ; that a million 
 dollars honestly gained means in its very gain- 
 ing a million dollars' worth of service to the 
 world, and after its gaining a million-dollar 
 mountain from which copious streams of 
 spending are bound inevitably to flow down 
 into the plains ; and that so far as they are 
 evils, dishonestly gained, they will of them- 
 selves fail to survive. Evolution has had big 
 things to deal with before ; has seen the animal 
 monsters of the geologic ages superseded so 
 entirely by lesser ones, that man's real danger 
 to-day is from those which are too minute for 
 eyes to see; seen the emperors and kings, prin- 
 cipalities and powers of the political world go 
 down again and again before the plain common 
 
178 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 people; and it has at least two of its great 
 forces already at work which are sure, in due 
 time, to bring about a similar result in the 
 financial world, with its property monsters and 
 capital kings. One of them is the transfer of 
 its struggle for existence, or, in other words, its 
 fierce competitions, from the ranks of labor to 
 those of capital by the popular education of 
 more persons into the capacity for using 
 capital. It is the excess of laborers now 
 notoriously which keeps down their wages, the 
 scarcity of capitalists which makes their enor- 
 mous gains possible. Equalize their numbers 
 by equalizing their ability, make brains as 
 common as brawn and you equalize their 
 rewards. The school-book, this is the best 
 lever, if labor would but see it, for lifting up 
 wages, — the slate-pencil, this is the best blud- 
 geon, if labor would but use it, for knocking 
 down scabs ; and instead of lamenting and re- 
 sisting the increase of capitalists, as it now 
 does, it ought to rejoice in every one which 
 goes up among them from its own ranks as a 
 helper transferred to the very citadel of its 
 foes. Evolution's other force helping along 
 the same result is the union of labor with 
 itself, the matching of millions of money with 
 millions of men, the solid shot of capital with 
 the Gatling gun of toil. It is a weapon which 
 
BETTER SOCIAL STATE 179 
 
 has proved eifective everywhere else in the 
 struggle for existence of the weak against the 
 strong, for it was not good old Dr. Gatling 
 down at Hartford, but Nature herself who was 
 its original inventor, — used it ages before man 
 on her awful geological battlefields where, when 
 her monsters got too large, she not only pitted 
 them against each other individually, but 
 assailed them with whole flocks and herds 
 acting together, six hundred a minute of her 
 smaller creatures ; and it is one which labor can 
 rely upon with equal certainty of success in its 
 battle against the dinosaurs and megatheriums 
 of capital. 
 
 But this is not all. Evolution here, as 
 everywhere else, means beyond war peace, 
 beyond division a finer union. A husband and 
 wife who had invited to dinner a gentleman 
 friend recently divorced, had with them at the 
 table their little son, a regular enfant terrible 
 full of embarrassing questions sure to pop out in 
 the most embarrassing places. He had doubt- 
 less overheard a little of his parents' talk about 
 the divorce, and with the first lull in the con- 
 versation, fixing his eyes on the "marriage-is- 
 a-failure" victim, demanded of him, "Where is 
 your wife.'"' Trusting to quiet him with one 
 straightforward statement the gentleman 
 answered "Divorced." Instantly the question 
 
180 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 followed, "What did you get divorced for?" 
 With a flushed face the unhappy wretch seeing 
 that he was in for it, explained that all married 
 people were not as congenial as his happy 
 father and mother were, and that temper had 
 made the difficulty. "Well," he continued, 
 before his horrified parents, who hitherto had 
 enjoyed the fun, especially the compliment to 
 themselves, could choke him off, "what made 
 you get divorced for that? Why didn't you 
 do as pa and ma do, when they get their 
 tempers up, stick together and fight it out?" 
 Well, that is exactly what labor and capital 
 are going to do under evolution. Instead of 
 getting divorced as the result of their dis- 
 agreements, they are going to do as pa and ma 
 did, stick together, not as master and servant, 
 but as husband and wife, and fight it out. Labor 
 will always exist and always be labor, — the 
 golden age have dust on its floors and dirt in 
 its streets, the millennium its shining robes to 
 be washed and its white horses to be groomed. 
 But there is no reason why labor, because it 
 deals with dirt and coarseness and brutes, 
 should itself be dirty and coarse and brutal. 
 A large part of its degradation in the past has 
 come from the old theological doctrine that 
 the matter it deals with is in its very nature 
 degraded and vile. But science has in our 
 
BETTER SOCIAL STATE 181 
 
 day, thank Heaven, utterly rid it of that 
 slander, has shown it to be as beautiful in its 
 laws, as wonderful in its nature and as 
 immanent all through with Deity as spirit is. 
 The worker in it, as it is now revealed, even in 
 its lowest dust ; the greasy mechanic and the 
 despised mudsill; touches grandeur, stands face 
 to face with mystery, has that to deal with which 
 challenges his loftiest powers and is capable of 
 drawing out his noblest qualities. Filth ! What 
 form of it has matter ever assumed, even in its 
 lowest sewer, so utterly repulsive as that which 
 has been revealed again and again as existing 
 at the very heart of European culture, some- 
 thing which must be vile indeed when it is too 
 vile for even a modern newspaper to make 
 money on. If we are to have dirt at all, give 
 it to us, I say, in the blackened hands and 
 stained dress that are on the outside of manly 
 toil rather than in the blackened tastes and 
 smudged souls which are inside of fashion's 
 dainty dress and sestheticism's whitened skin, 
 the honest dirt of the cabbage's root rather 
 than the nameless nastiness of the sunflower's 
 gaudy disk. And with matter thus raised to 
 honor by science, there is no reason why the 
 worker in it should not be raised to an equal 
 level, — ^be paid as much wages, eat as good food, 
 wear as good clothes, go into as good society, 
 
18a THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 and have at church as broad-aisled a pew as 
 the worker does in business of mind or 
 soul. 
 
 Capital also, will always exist, can no more 
 be got rid of by labor than the mill pond can 
 by the stream. And making labor an equal, it 
 will find in it, as every husband does in his wife, 
 a helper who, beyond any servant, will save him 
 enough more and make him enough happier to 
 pay tenfold over for all its extra cost. 
 
 Then, as society evolves, may we not fairly 
 look forward to a time when they both will 
 estimate wealth and reward in something else 
 than dollars and cents ; to a time when knowl- 
 edge will be gain, and art and science riches, 
 and inward growth income ; to a day when news- 
 papers will speak of millionaire souls and of 
 deeds registered in heaven as really treasures, 
 and when at a man's death his character will 
 be counted as well as his cash in reporting 
 what he was worth.'' And will not this be a 
 solution of the property problem infinitely 
 better than any mere equalized distribution of 
 its silver and gold.'' 
 
 I have time left only to speak briefly of the 
 other great elements which are to enter into 
 the world's coming social state, piety, morals, 
 brotherhood, womanhood, nationality and the 
 like, what they are to be. Evolution affords 
 
BETTER SOCIAL STATE 183 
 
 no indication that society's separations on these 
 points are ever, as some hope, to be closed up, 
 and all men be of the same tastes, caliber, 
 political opinion and religious faith, — tends, 
 rather, to accentuate their existing divisions. 
 There will always be farmers, mechanics, mer- 
 chants, lawyers and possibly — though their 
 chance seems poorest of all — even ministers ; 
 always radicals and conservatives, believers and 
 skeptics, saints and sinners, Mikes and 
 Bridgets, Sir Galahads and Lady Clara Vere 
 de Veres. But evolution does indicate the com- 
 ing of a time when out of their separations, 
 here, the same as everywhere else, its other 
 principle of integration shall arise, under which 
 all harsh feeling between them shall pass away, 
 and an organic union take its place, in which 
 their very differences shall be each other's help. 
 Mr. Kidd has shown conclusively that it is only 
 those people who have the most fraternity, 
 morality and public spirit with which to hold 
 themselves together and hold in themselves 
 each generation's slow increment of progress, 
 that in the world's fierce struggle for existence 
 can survive; these qualities, therefore, which 
 are sure to become more and more prominent 
 in the world's coming state. Pride and scorn 
 and class airs will be lessened. Bridget will 
 always get a smile in the street from Lady 
 
184) THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 Clara, and Mike a bow from Sir Galahad. 
 Protestants and Catholics shake hands together 
 instead of fists; Democrats and Republicans 
 tell truths about each other instead of lies. 
 "You can't whip me now, father, for I am 
 sitting down on the spot," exclaimed the small 
 boy to his irate approaching sire. So even 
 Robt. IngersoU shall have his spot to sit down 
 upon, safe from the pulpit father's theological 
 lash. Marriage, like everything else, shall 
 have less law in it and more love — not begin in 
 courtship and end in courts, as too often it 
 does now, but have the fixedness of freedom and 
 the oneness not of the oak and the vine, but of 
 the two-celled heart. Each sex, completely 
 developed along its own line, "full summed in 
 all its powers," man ever manlier and woman 
 ever more a woman, shall lay aside more and 
 more its outward ferocities and foibles, he his 
 "swelled head," and she her "swell" hat; and 
 society in rising up into the splendors of its 
 new morning and singing the sweetness of its 
 new song, will find that it must have them both 
 acting everywhere together as its two wings 
 on which to soar ; and, to make all the sweetness 
 of its song, the gifts of each set to those of the 
 other 
 
 "Like perfect music into noble words." 
 
BETTER SOCIAL STATE 185 
 
 While nations, also, so far as feature, cus- 
 tom, character and capacity go, will always 
 remain distinct members of the world's great 
 social structure. Nature has not spent such 
 countless ages and such outpourings of blood, 
 treasure and hate in evolving them as separate 
 peoples only to end in resolving them all back 
 again into one conglomerate humanity. But 
 differentiation here, as everywhere else in evolu- 
 tion, will be followed by an integration of the 
 parts that will utilize their very diversities in 
 building out of them a grand organic unity 
 which each people by keeping alive its special 
 entity will render the more complete. Nation- 
 ality, as we know it now, bristling with bay- 
 onets and centered in self, is but a passing 
 phase in humanity's growth; patriotism as it 
 is to-day, fed on battle memories and beautiful 
 with an outward red, white, and blue, but a 
 single petal in the flower of a people's love. 
 All harsh barriers between nations shall in the 
 world's better day be broken down. Armies 
 shall be turned into embassies, forts into gate- 
 ways, tariffs into wastebaskets. Boy brigades 
 and military drills shall die out even from 
 our Sunday-schools ; and the difficulties between 
 great peoples — as difficulties doubtless there 
 will always be — ^will be settled not as now by 
 the barbarian fisticuffs of war, but in the 
 
186 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 parliament of man, the federation of the world. 
 There was a time in the far-off geologic ages 
 when the highest organization on this earth was 
 a worm, a series of animated segments out- 
 wardly linked together as one animal, but each 
 with its own circulating motor and nervous 
 systems and each in all, but its outward form 
 a distinct existence. Then after long ages a 
 creature appeared of the amphioxus type, 
 having a faint thread-like nerve running length- 
 wise through the segments and uniting them in 
 a common life system. It was a step forward, 
 that bit of notochord, which was second in 
 importance only to the appearance on the 
 planet of life itself, was the beginning of a 
 backbone and a brain and of all the marvels 
 of vertebrate existence ; and it has gone on 
 from species to species till now, in place of a 
 segmented worm crawling the earth as its 
 highest product, we have articulated man walk- 
 ing the planet as its master, and unfolded mind 
 walking the universe as friend of its Maker. 
 Society with its different nations strung to- 
 gether in segments over the earth, outwardly 
 one humanity, but each with its separate 
 economic, military and governing systems, was 
 all through its great historic ages only at the 
 worm stage of its development. In 1858 a 
 slender telegraphic wire was laid across the 
 
BETTER SOCIAL STATE 187 
 
 sea connecting two of these segments, England 
 and America, together. That wire was the 
 evolution of humanity's notochord, that the 
 beginning of society's amphioxus stage. It is 
 to go on with the race, as it has with the indi- 
 vidual, bringing its parts into ever closer 
 relations. And what man, with his body, mind 
 and soul, is now to the segmented worm, that 
 the vertebrated, vasculated, brain-governed 
 humanity of the future is to be to even the 
 mightiest nations of the past. 
 
 Friends, the subject I have thus imperfectly 
 discussed, is not simply a refined philosophical 
 speculation, but a matter of transcendent 
 practical value. Human beings were meant to 
 be not mere idle lookers-on in this part of 
 nature's work, — not mere passive blocks wait- 
 ing to be built by other hands into the coming 
 social state, but live helpers in its doing, or as 
 the old Bible puts it, laborers together with 
 God. And to give this help wisely and well 
 they evidently must know something of what 
 nature's plans are, see something of what 
 nature is aiming to bring about. "John," said 
 a dying woman to her fond husband, "you have 
 always eaten the crusts at our table yourself, 
 haven't you-f"' "Yes," answered John, "I 
 always have." "John," she continued, "you 
 have always eaten them because you wanted to 
 
188 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 save me from doing so, haven't you?" "Yes," 
 replied John tenderly, "that is why I have." 
 "John," she gasped out with her final breath, 
 "I always liked crusts myself," leaving John 
 the double sorrow of having sacrificed himself 
 all his life on the altar of eating crusts, and 
 sacrificed her on the same altar of having no 
 crusts to eat. How many are the reformers 
 eating the crusts at Nature's table their whole 
 lives long, when it is in her own stomach they 
 are really wanted, — ^how many the cross-bearers, 
 who, if they only knew her real likings, might 
 help things along a great deal better by eating 
 its soft parts themselves ! Rightly under- 
 stood, I do not know of anything in all the 
 ranges of thought hardly excepting religion 
 itself, which is so practical, so hopeful, so in- 
 spiring as the evolutionist's faith, anything 
 which amid all its struggles for life and over- 
 shadowings of death, has before it so sure a 
 future for alike great and small as the evolu- 
 tionist's work. During our last war with 
 England, a large frigate sent out to convoy a 
 fleet of merchantmen from one port to another 
 on the Atlantic coast was overtaken just at 
 night by a terrific storm and had hardly time 
 to signal its charge what course to take and 
 what rendezvous to seek, when the darkness fell 
 
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 189 
 
 and shut them all from each other's sight. 
 The frigate itself ably manned, after battling 
 three days with the gale, succeeded just as 
 night was again descending, in reaching the 
 appointed port. But where was its convoy.'' 
 Not one of them was to be seen, and it can well 
 be imagined with what an anxious heart the 
 captain lay down to his needed rest. But how 
 great was his joy, when rising early the next 
 morning he beheld a score of them lying at 
 anchor all around him, their long, tapering 
 masts lifted up to heaven as if in silent thanks, 
 and at the harbor's mouth through the mist all 
 the others borne in on the ocean's mighty flood 
 tide, the smallest, dullest sailer of the fleet, one 
 they had feared would never even in the sun- 
 shine reach any port, bringing up the rear. 
 The frigate's instructions had not been in vain. 
 So with evolution set to convoy all the myriad 
 interests of earth from the port of the past to 
 the haven of the world's better coming state. 
 The storms and convulsions of time's sea and 
 the awful night of the grave may indeed fall 
 upon them and drive them wide apart, — ^make 
 it look sometimes as if all were to be lost. But 
 signaled by their convoy what course to take, 
 and each doing its own best, they, too, shall 
 weather all their storms, survive all their 
 
190 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 nights, and borne along by nature's mighty 
 flood tide, flood not for six hours merely, but 
 for six millions of years, reach at last, even the 
 slowest, dullest sailer of them all, the port of 
 the World's Coming Better Social State. 
 
HOW EVOLUTION IS RELATED TO 
 RELIGION 
 
 Evolution buried for ages as a fruitless seed 
 in the dust of scholastic books, and then on its 
 first springing up in the fields o£ modern 
 science, ridiculed and denounced as a "mere 
 dirt philosophy," has become suddenly, in our 
 time, the pet word of society, winning to itself 
 in a single generation the adherence, with 
 hardly an exception, of all scientific thinkers, 
 the homage of newspapers and reviews, and the 
 respect even of ^ij^^ and theological schools. 
 It is a popularity, to be sure, for which it has 
 had to pay the penalty of being often vulgar- 
 ized and misapplied, — made a sort of Trilby in 
 the shops of thought ; and as a consequence 
 some of its more sensitive disciples are shrink- 
 ing back a little from its use. But there is no 
 cheapening of its name which can really 
 cheapen the thing itself. It is the grandest 
 philosophical generalization the human mind 
 has ever yet reached, the statement of a law 
 
 which runs through every thing, in nature from 
 191 
 
192 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 the making of a sod to the making of a soul, 
 the revelation of a tie which gives unity to all 
 things in time just as gravity does to all things 
 in space. And though it is not yet by any 
 means a completed system, though it has many 
 missing links to be supplied, and many vast 
 realms to be explored, its main principles are 
 settled beyond dispute, and transcending all 
 our ages' other magnificent achievements, its 
 discovery bids fair to be the one supreme thing 
 which is to make the nineteenth century 
 memorable forever in the annals of thought. 
 
 Evolution, however, is not only a grand 
 philosophical theory, but is even more a great 
 practical truth, one which affects the aspect of 
 every object of the universe man has to deal 
 with, and it has changed the point of view from 
 which the whole universe is seen. There are 
 some beholding the change, who are exclaiming 
 with horror that "we are all adrift" ; some 
 who, refusing to recognize it, are going right 
 on with their work as its objects appeared to 
 them at the old creation standpoint, and some, 
 ministers, alas, who, while recognizing their 
 new position, think the only safe way is to mix 
 up the two views, look at nature and natural 
 science from the standpoint of evolution, and 
 at ethics and religion from that of creation, 
 and who, accordingly, are depicting the Bible, 
 
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 193 
 
 Jesus, Christianity and man as having at the 
 same time a natural and a supernatural origin. 
 It is an impossible combination ; the true course 
 is to lay aside reverently every mental conclu- 
 sion which is vitiated by being drawn from the 
 philosophy of the past, keeping only the ri- 
 pened skill which has come from its study, and 
 redraw the picture from this standpoint of the 
 world's new thought. 
 
 Preeminently is such a change needed in 
 drawing our religious conclusions. God, man, 
 society, soul, universe, are indeed the same in 
 themselves as of old, and the light we are to see 
 them by is that same divine Light that from 
 the dawn of faith lighteth every man who com- 
 eth into the world. But their perspective, their 
 relations to each other and to the eye which 
 sees them, and the parts of them on which the 
 light falls, — these are widely different. Their 
 supernatural sides and ends, often the only ones 
 visible from the old creation standpoint, have 
 disappeared; their natural ones, as never be- 
 fore, come into view. And henceforth, there- 
 fore, if we are to have intellectually any com- 
 plete and consistent setting forth of religion, 
 it must inevitably be the one which comes from 
 the study and use of this philosophy. 
 
 Evolution is of necessity very closely related 
 to religion; is not only a new point of view 
 
194 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 from which to look at religious objects, but a 
 new way into the very heart of the thing it- 
 self. 
 
 All religions have had a cosmogony,' — the 
 Hebrew Bible begins with one; — all have had 
 to be mixed up with some kind of dirt phi- 
 losophy. For the first thing to attract man's 
 attention, as it evolves into consciousness, is 
 this wonderful material world in which he finds 
 himself placed; the first things to excite his 
 awe and adoration, the majesty and marvel of 
 it he is everywhere surrounded with. Whence 
 did it come? What is the power which keeps 
 it moving.'' How can man adjust himself to 
 its power so as to get its help and avoid its 
 harm.'' These are questions he has to ask, 
 these the ones which bring him face to face with 
 religion. The creation answer gives him an 
 outside maker, the evolution answer a maker 
 within. And while a person may study a manu- 
 factured article, a house or a world, and never 
 come into very close connection with the being 
 who put it together, he cannot study an evolv- 
 , ing one, a flower, a man or a universe, and 
 not feel that to know it all through, root and 
 all and all in all, he must, as with Tennyson's 
 flower in the crannied wall, know what God is, 
 know something of its indwelling originating 
 power. 
 
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 195 
 
 Under the doctrine, also, that everything in 
 the universe is the outgrowth, by natural laws 
 and forces, of its own preceding state, religion, 
 as a thing of the universe, has to be recognized 
 as such a growth ; a plant which somehow must 
 have had its seed, a species which somewhere 
 must have had its origin; and evolution, there- 
 fore, to be thoroughgoing, must show what 
 its seed was, investigate the species out of which 
 it originated, study its environment and its 
 inner laws and forces, and, in short, do by it 
 as it does with all other growing things. 
 
 Especially does it have a close connection 
 with the study not only of religion, but of re- 
 ligions. It is impossible to know any one of 
 them by knowing that one alone. They must 
 be classified and compared and their relation- 
 ships with each other traced out, that is, the 
 principles of evolution applied to their investi- 
 gation. It is the lack of such a guide which 
 has led theologians to place the Old Testament 
 as an authority on the same level as the New; 
 mix together in their conceptions of Deity the 
 attributes of the Jewish Jehovah and the 
 Christian "Our Father" ; go back to the literal 
 words of Jesus and his apostles for their state- 
 ment of what Christianity is ; coordinate as 
 brothers and sisters, religions whose real rela- 
 tionship was that of parent and child, uncle 
 
196 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 and nephew; and even in their definition of re- 
 ligion seek for some element that was common 
 alike to its fetich seed and its full-grown 
 civilized tree. It is only the study of how they 
 have been evolved which can show their true 
 connection. Liberality will be placed by it on a 
 solid scientific foundation, and while intensi- 
 fying the faith of its disciples in their highest 
 form, will show that for its age and environ- 
 ment even their lowest was the survival of the 
 fittest. Equally close is its connection with 
 religion on its humanitarian and ethical side. 
 To be sure of man's brotherhood we must know 
 something of his fatherhood. To deal rightly 
 with his divisions of race, and with their 
 hatreds, wars and persecutions they must be 
 studied in the light of nature's own principle 
 of differentiation. The wide contrasts be- 
 tween the moral principles in savage and m 
 civilized lands can be understood only by tak- 
 ing into account their wide contrasts of en- 
 vironment. And in all man's practical religious 
 work for the bettering of himself and society, 
 with evolution still going on in the world, the 
 only way in which he can hope to succeed is 
 not to act at cross purposes with it, but to fall 
 in with its trend; conform to its laws and 
 principles; show himself and what he is aiming 
 for, the fittest to survive; to do which he evi- 
 
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 197 
 
 dently must know what its trend and its laws 
 and forces are. 
 
 Finally, if there is to be a future world for 
 the human race, it must be the outcome in some 
 way of this present world. And its outcome 
 how.? Why, in precisely the same way that 
 this present is the outcome of those which are 
 past, by its evolving through natural laws and 
 forces from its preceding earthly estate. 
 And this means that its beginnings, its promise, 
 its evidence are now and here. The process 
 of its evolution may well be, as it has been with 
 the present one many times in the past, by the 
 origin of a new species of world as different 
 from our terrestrial one as the oak is from the 
 acorn, or the grown animal from its proto- 
 plasmic cell. But the acorn, the cell, the pre- 
 ceding estate, not the less are to-day in our 
 streets, in our churches, in our homes, in our- 
 selves ; have in them the promise and the potency 
 of all its splendor, all its fineness, all its eter- 
 nity ; are what a perfected knowledge of evolu- 
 tion would enable us now to see. And it is 
 along such lines, not fanciful and far-fetched, 
 but logical and scientific, that this "dirt phi- 
 losophy" is related to what is humanity's fair- 
 est hope and religion's crowning truth. 
 
 From dust to Deity, from cell to sainthood, 
 from monad to morals, the roots of the tree of 
 
198 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 life in the mist of the universe's primal nebula, 
 — that is its scope. It is not indeed a story of 
 unbroken progress, or of an altogether dressed 
 up Sunday-clothes goodness. It has its dark 
 and bloody chapters, its myriads of "red-with- 
 ravin" actors, its long pages of degeneracy 
 and dissolution, and its agencies that no one 
 would think of setting up in a modern pulpit 
 as those of the Christian ideal. But taken as 
 a whole, what poem ever had a more epic gran- 
 deur, what history a clearer evidence that 
 through the ages one increasing purpose runs, 
 what gospel along with jts Gethsemane and 
 Calvary the proclamation of a richer good 
 news? As a religious revelation it is of the 
 same order as our printed Bible. It opens 
 with a book of Genesis, and gives us the long 
 bondage of its children in the world's Egypt, 
 the weary wanderings of their feet in the wil- 
 derness of nature, the fierce battles they had 
 to fight for civilization's promised land, the 
 bloody reigns of their judges and kings, and 
 the horror of their imprecatory Psalms. But 
 it gives also the rugged grandeur of Sinai's 
 laws, the long line of nature's prophets, fore- 
 telling ever a better day, the coming on earth 
 in due time of the son of man, the acts of a 
 myriad apostles, and the vision at last of a 
 New Jerusalem and a tree of everlasting life. 
 
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 199 
 
 And reading it with the same reverence that we 
 give to the printed page, we shall find, I think, 
 that the word of evolution coming through the 
 lips of science, not less than the word of Scrip- 
 ture coming through saint and sage, is the 
 word of God. 
 
XI 
 
 DOES EVOLUTION NECESSITATE A 
 
 FIRST CAUSE? 
 
 The existence of the natural world with its 
 grandeur and beauty, its marvel of life and its 
 myriad apparent instances of intelligent de- 
 sign, has been regarded by the religious mind 
 in all ages as one of its strong arguments 
 for the existence behind it of a divine origi- 
 nating Cause. As every house has its builder, 
 and every watch its maker, so, it has been rea- 
 soned, this great house of nature, this mighty 
 succession of events, a little of whose time- 
 element the watch is meant to measure, must 
 have had correspondingly its builder and its 
 maker. And as before the age of machinery, 
 everything which man did he did immediately 
 with his own hand, and each time by a direct 
 act of the will, it was natural to suppose that 
 the divine Cause proceeded in the same way, 
 made the universe at first and everything in it 
 as fast as it appeared by his own direct touch, 
 and as the outcome in each case of his own 
 
 special volition. 
 
 200 
 
EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE 201 
 
 "God of the earth, the sea, the sky. 
 Maker of all above, below. 
 Creation lives and moves in thee 
 Thy present life thro' all doth flow." 
 
 It is an argument which modern science from 
 its very birth has tended in some ways greatly 
 to weaken. While enlarging immeasurably 
 man's conception of the size and wonder of the 
 universe, — and so of the Being from whom it 
 came, — its continual discovery of laws and 
 forces, more and more of them, in nature itself, 
 that are immediately producing the phenomena 
 once ascribed direct to Deity; — as, for in- 
 stance, gravity, its planetary motions; the 
 unequal heating of the atmosphere, its winds ; 
 and the violation of sanitary laws, its diseases ; 
 — these things known as secondary causes, have 
 pushed farther and farther out of sight alike 
 the need and the place of a First Cause. Some 
 positions, to be sure, along the way of the 
 arguments' retreat have been seized and held by 
 the church as necessitating, in their case at 
 least, the direct action of Deity ; — among them 
 the first appearance of life on the earth, the 
 coming of man, the rising of ethics and reli- 
 gion, and preeminently the advent of Christ 
 and Christianity, — ^but their defense all along 
 has been evidently the lack of some more com- 
 prehensive natural principle for their explana- 
 
203 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 tion. And now in our time, evolution, the 
 crown of all the sciences, has come on to the 
 field apparently to complete the process, teach- 
 ing as this very principle that everything in 
 the universe, even life, man and religion, is the 
 outgrowth by natural laws and forces of its 
 own preceding state; that matter itself had 
 within it from the very start the promise and 
 potency of all life; and that what has been 
 thought so long to be design, and the proof, 
 therefore, of a designer, is really only the 
 survival of what natural selection and the 
 struggle for existence have shown to be the 
 fittest for its environment; a theory which 
 "solves by some great force the mystery of 
 things, sees in dead matter both their source 
 and end;" and leaves no more need of a divine 
 Cause to come in among them than there is for 
 a farmer to take the place of nature in giving 
 his cattle their eyes and ears, or his trees their 
 flowers and fruit. 
 
 Is this the real inevitable logic of evolu- 
 tion? Must its disciples in accepting it give 
 up the argument for Deity which is based on 
 nature, and give up with it all belief in a 
 divine, intelligent First Cause? It is the awful 
 fear that such must be its outcome which is 
 the secret, beyond question. As Mr. Fiske 
 says, of the violent opposition from the reli- 
 
EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE 208 
 
 gious world with which evolution was received 
 at first; — not so much that it gave man a 
 monkey for an ancestor as that it took away 
 apparently his divine Father, not so much 
 that it made the Scriptures false as that it 
 seemed to rob the universe of its meaning. 
 And under such an impression, it is no wonder 
 it was heard with dismay, for there is no splen- 
 dor of a truth which can take the place in the 
 human soul of a truth-giver, no enlargement 
 of the house it lives in which can make up to 
 it for the loss of the house's head. 
 
 Evolution does indeed have its atheistic, or, 
 at any rate, its agnostic aspects, and it has 
 not been lacking in followers who have ac- 
 cepted them as its real teaching; but there 
 are others who, instead of acknowledging its 
 guilt in this direction, have sought to show 
 that it affords in its own principles a new and 
 strengthened argument for the existence of a 
 First Cause. 
 
 One of the ways in which they have done 
 so is by pointing out that it implies of neces- 
 sity a beginning of things in what has been, 
 evolved, and that it never by any possibility 
 could have begun itself. The most formidable 
 objection against the theistic argument hith- 
 erto has been the alternative theory that the 
 universe never had any beginning; that it is 
 
204. THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 self -existent ; and that what is going on in it 
 now has been going on forever; an infinite 
 round of summer and winter, birth and death, 
 growth and decay, 
 
 "A mighty whirling wheel of strife and stress" 
 
 without starting and without stopping, — a 
 theory, it was urged, which is no more in- 
 herently diiEcult than the doctrine of a self- 
 existent creator whose life had been going on 
 forever without a First Cause. And it was 
 an objection that the old natural theology was 
 never able really to meet. 
 
 It is one, however, that evolution at first 
 sight does seem fairly to overthrow. For 
 though some evolutionists have claimed that 
 their science is only the description of a proc- 
 ess, and has nothing to do with beginnings, 
 such a narrowing of it has no warrant either 
 in its history or in its principles. The very 
 name of Darwin's great work in exposition of 
 its organic field is the "Origin of Species" ; and 
 its whole professed object, as Herbert Spencer, 
 Haeckel, Huxley and others of its great ex- 
 pounders, set it forth, is to trace out the law 
 by which everything which now exists, no mat- 
 ter how highly differentiated and integrated 
 it may have become, must have had its starting 
 point in some kind of homogeneity. The fact 
 
EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE 205 
 
 is, it is a necessity, which appears to be involved 
 in the very idea of evolution, the evolution at 
 any rate of any finite thing. Where there is no 
 progress, only a series of changes out of which 
 nothing comes, its changes may indeed have 
 gone on forever without a beginning and con- 
 tinue forever without an end; but the moment 
 you introduce the idea of differentiation, one 
 of the stages as we saw of evolution, — a stage 
 in which the present condition of a thing has 
 been reached by dividing and varying the ma- 
 terial that composed its preceding condition, 
 going back to ever simpler and simpler forms, — 
 that moment you bring in the necessity of a 
 beginning. You all remember that old prob- 
 lem in arithmetic which used to be given us in 
 our school days: If a single cent was put to 
 interest at the opening of the Christian era, 
 what would the amount of it be in our day? 
 and how we used to wish that some old an- 
 cestor of ours living then, instead of spending 
 all his cents for candy or marbles, had been 
 thoughtful enough to put one of them in the 
 bank for our benefit. But, however large the 
 sum, we now should have had quintillions on 
 quintillions of dollars, enough to have filled 
 not only our globe, but this whole universe; 
 and however far back the interest began, even 
 with that old anthropoid ancestor who had 
 
206 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 a tail and lived in a tree ; we all knew it had to 
 begin with that first cent. So with the evolu- 
 tion of all our visible universe itself. Its ac- 
 cumulations are only a question of more 
 intricate interests, only a case in which we have 
 had the very thing done for us that we wished 
 as children; and, enormous as the amount now 
 is, it is equally true that it all had to begin 
 with the putting to interest of that first far- 
 off cent. 
 
 But if there must have been thus a begin- 
 ning to the universe, an accumulation, step by 
 step, of its enormous amount, who, this argu- 
 ment asks, could have been its beginner, who 
 the investor in nature's bank of its first won- 
 derful cent.? It could not have been its own 
 beginner. None of us as schoolboys in our 
 wildest wishes ever thought of a cent that on 
 its way to buy candy or marbles at the open- 
 ing of the Christian era, or at the creation of 
 the world, had stopped at a savings bank and 
 for our benefit put itself to interest. Matter 
 and force, the supposed constituents of the uni- 
 verse's primal homogeneity, or even that still 
 simpler world-stuff out of which even matter 
 and force may have been differentiated, — these, 
 with all the other potencies that materialists 
 have ascribed to them, have never had 
 that, to begin with, of self-determining 
 
EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE 207 
 
 will-power, never the ability to say to each 
 other at some point in eternity, Go to, now, 
 let us evolve a universe, — never the kindly fore- 
 thought which would prompt them to invest a 
 cent out of their pockets for a little humanity 
 boy, who was to , come into existence myriads 
 of ages after their day. 
 
 Yet, without such powers, think for a mo- 
 ment how impossible was the world's self-origi- 
 nation. All the laws and properties which were 
 in its matter and force then at the world's 
 beginning, must have been in them always, 
 otherwise, as you see, their state would not 
 have been a beginning; but if in them always, 
 then inasmuch as they could not start them- 
 selves, they must have been always in opera- 
 tion; and, if always in operation, then the 
 universe, or at any rate, all that is finite in it, 
 must from all eternity have been along, at least 
 as far as it is now. 
 
 Mr. Spencer in his "First Principles" at- 
 tempts to get rid of this difficulty about the in- 
 itiatory impulse, by supposing the original neb- 
 ulous matter of the universe was only partially 
 diffused, and that its forces were in a sort of 
 balanced condition which the slightest disturb- 
 ance would destroy and set in operation. But 
 the chapter in which he does so, entitled "The 
 Instability of the Homogeneous" is the most 
 
208 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 unsatisfactory of all his works. If the nebul- 
 ous matter was not universally diffused, it 
 could not have been in a state of homogeneity, 
 — would have had an outside and an inside, and 
 the outside particles, being more acted upon 
 by gravity than those within, it would from 
 all eternity have been evolving, and, being 
 finite, would from all eternity have been 
 evolved. 
 
 On the other hand, if the original material 
 was equally diffused through all space, as Kant 
 and Laplace and others have assumed, and at 
 rest, as the friction of its particles would have 
 necessitated, it never by any known natural 
 force, — gravity, cohesive attraction, chemical 
 affinity, or the like, — could have changed its 
 condition. Never by gravity, because being in- 
 finitely diffused, each atom would have been 
 equally drawn in every direction; and never by 
 cohesive attraction or chemical affinity because 
 in order to have them act, its atoms must have 
 parted with some of their heat; — impossible 
 again, inasmuch as filling all space, each one 
 would have to receive from the others exactly 
 as much as it gave to them. Thus whatever 
 condition is assumed as the original one, it is 
 inconceivable how the universe with matter and 
 force alone could have had any absolute begin- 
 ning; the difficulty being as in the case of a, 
 
EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE 209 
 
 balky horse, either its starting too soon or else 
 its refusing to start at all. 
 
 It is an inconceivability which Haeckel, the 
 most scientific and thoroughgoing of all evolu- 
 tionists, sees and acknowledges, the only one in 
 all his vast system which he does see and ac- 
 knowledge. "A great and unsolved difficulty," 
 he says ("History of Creation"), "lies in the 
 fact that the cosmological gas-theory furnishes 
 no starting point at all in explanation of the 
 first impulse which caused the rotatory motion 
 in the gas-filled universe." And it is one also 
 which Mr. Spencer, if not in his chapter on 
 "The Instability of the Homogeneous," yet 
 elsewhere sees and acknowledges. 
 
 He says, "The ultimate mystery continues as 
 great as ever; the problem of existence is not 
 solved by evolution ; it is simply removed farther 
 back ; and those who hold it legitimate to argue 
 from phenomena to noumena may rightly con- 
 tend that the nebular hypothesis implies a First 
 Cause as much transcending the mechanical 
 God of Paley as his does the fetich of a sav- 
 age." 
 
 The difficulty, it is claimed, is one that the 
 doctrine of an intelligent Will Power at the head 
 of the universe does solve, and is one, there- 
 fore, which logically compels his recognition. 
 It is like the weaving of a piece of cloth by a 
 
210 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 human being as compared with its being done 
 by an automatic loom. Both the man and the 
 machine have physically the same mechanical 
 devices and use directly a power which is sub- 
 ject to the same natural laws. But while the 
 machine, the moment it is wound up, has to 
 start the weaving, if it is going to start it at 
 all, and has to go on with it without stopping 
 till the work is all done, thus completing it in 
 a definite time, the man with his power of 
 choice can wait as long as he pleases before 
 setting his loom in motion and can delay as 
 long as he pleases before his cloth is done. 
 So while the universe, if self-evolving, would 
 from all eternity have to be evolved, the uni- 
 verse with volitional First Cause would be a 
 loom whose power-belt could be turned on at 
 any point of time, setting its warp of atoms 
 and molecules, suns and stars leaping up and 
 down, and between them, flying back and forth, 
 its shuttles of heat and cold, life and death, 
 threaded with the mystic woof which hour by 
 hour weaves the world. And the fact that its 
 long web is yet in the process of weaving and 
 has not from all eternity been finished and laid 
 away, is evidence, it is claimed, that it has at 
 its head a great living weaver who chose at some 
 special point of time to apply its power and set 
 it in operation. 
 
EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE 211 
 
 Is the argument sound? At first view it 
 seems to be so, — seems all that even Mr. Spen- 
 cer admits as to its cogency; and I am free 
 to confess that personally for awhile I rested 
 in its conclusion and rejoiced in evolution, be- 
 yond all even of its philosophical beauty, be- 
 cause it was apparently so logically theistic; 
 miade nature reveal, afar off, to be sure, yet 
 with intellectual certainty, the existence of its 
 God. 
 
 But more careful thought shows alike its 
 inconclusiveness to the mind and its unsatis- 
 factoriness to the heart. 
 
 First of all, as regards a divine First Cause, 
 himself, to ascribe to him will-power does not 
 really remove the difficulty of conceiving how 
 he could have willed to begin the universe at 
 any special point of time. Where there is 
 will-power there must be motive to act on it 
 before it can choose, just as certainly as where 
 there is a water-wheel there must be water to 
 make it go; this so far as we can see, as truly 
 in an infinite as in a finite will; and the ques- 
 tion inevitably arises as to how in an all-per- 
 fect and unchangeable Being there could be a 
 new motive arise. A motive must have an 
 origin as surely as a motion; and to say that 
 a First Cause was moved at its beginning to 
 start the universe, only sets us out in search 
 
aia THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 of what was the first cause of that First Cause, 
 and transfers the endless series from the realm 
 of matter to the realm of spirit. 
 
 Worse still, it makes matter and force origi- 
 nally separate from the First Cause of the 
 universe and able to exist without him till he 
 was needed to set it in motion; and then, after 
 he had done so, separate from him again, and 
 in no need of his presence; makes the world 
 atheistic, therefore, except at the one single 
 moment of its birth. It differs from that half- 
 way evolution which holds God interfered with 
 the processes of natural law and force at cer- 
 tain special periods, as at the introduction of 
 life, of man, and of religion, only by going a lit- 
 tle further back, going to the beginning of the 
 universe instead of going to the beginning of 
 some special part of it ; and logically and con- 
 sistently, if we make him thus a miracle — God 
 at one period, we might just as well allow him 
 to be such at all periods. 
 
 Then, as regards the beginning of the uni- 
 verse itself, it really explains nothing; — drives 
 the sceptic as to Deity only into an apparent 
 corner. All the difficulties as to how gravity, 
 cohesive attraction, chemical affinity, and the 
 like, could be kept from acting on a finitely 
 diffused homogeneity, or be made to act on an 
 infinitely diffused one, are exactly as great 
 
EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE 218 
 
 under the supposition of a will-power to set 
 things in motion at first, as under that of their 
 self-beginning. Of course it is easy to say 
 that an Infinite Being with a single .word could 
 speak them all out of the way. But this would 
 be resorting to magic to get rid of them in- 
 stead of natural law; and, if we are going to 
 have a fiat universe at all, we might as well 
 hold with the old theology that Deity spoke it 
 all into being ready-made out of nothing six 
 thousand years ago, as to be to all the trouble 
 of tracing it back over the long, slow path of 
 natural evolution millions of years, and then, 
 even there, have to evoke a divine fiat. 
 
 Still further, admitting all that the argu- 
 ment claims as to this present universe's having 
 had a beginning, it does not follow as the only 
 alternative that will-power must have been its 
 beginner. It may be said, and it has been said, 
 that the present universe, — beginning, evolu- 
 tion, and all, — may be only one of an infinite, 
 self-existing series which has been, and is to be, 
 evolved; that the homogeneous elements out 
 of which it started may have been simply the 
 remnants over from the decay of its myriad 
 predecessors, and that the power which enabled 
 it to start may have been merely the rhythmic 
 action of the old indwelling power which made 
 the others decay and which, by the law of the 
 
S14 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 conservation of energy, must have been gath- 
 ered up somewhere; just as a pendulum, when 
 it has swung its full extent one way, comes for 
 a moment to a dead stand, in which its po- 
 tential and kinetic forces exactly balance each 
 other, after which, without the need of any 
 new touch, but simply by its own inherent 
 weight, it begins to move the other way. Or, 
 instead of the entire universe coming to such 
 a stand at the same time, it may be that like 
 summer and winter on the earth, its evolution 
 and dissolution may alternate from one part 
 of it to the other, the released forces which in 
 one hemisphere have produced its decay, im- 
 mediately passing into the other to produce 
 its growth. 
 
 It is a theory incapable of direct proof, but 
 which does have, it must be acknowledged, a 
 multitude of actual, known phenomena in this 
 present world that analogically are in its fa- 
 vor. Evolution here on earth is everywhere 
 rising by its own inherent laws and forces out 
 of dissolution. Plants, animals, men, nations, 
 civilizations, even religions, are born, grow to 
 maturity, linger a little while, and then decay, 
 only to have others out of their dust do the 
 same. All the indications of science are that the 
 earth itself is at last to fulfill the law it has 
 imposed on such myriads of its children, "Dust 
 
EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE 216 
 
 thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." 
 And looking up, the skies, with all their splen- 
 dor, have in them already the shadow here and 
 there of their celestial doom, — stars like Anta- 
 res, dolphins of the upper deep, whose flashing 
 colors are those of expiring suns ; globes like 
 the moon that are the dead leaves yet undis- 
 solved of their vast stellar woods ; and nebulse 
 like those of Pegasus and the Hunting Dogs; 
 whose aspect is best explained as that of vast 
 systems of worlds, equal in size to our Milky 
 Way, which are just ending, rather than just 
 beginning, their lives ; all suggesting that what 
 is the round of birth, growth, decay and birth 
 again here on earth, is the law of the universe 
 as a whole. It is a use of its material vastly 
 more in accordance with the economy of nature 
 than to think of it as remaining forever, after 
 its life, a huge corpse filling space ; — is the only 
 known way in which the great law of the con- 
 servation of energy can be carried out ; — the 
 only imaginable way of answering xhat be- 
 comes of those vast tides of ether waves which 
 in the shape of heat, light and actinic force, 
 are sweeping off from every sun and star. 
 And with it recognized as a possibility, it will 
 be seen at once that all the cogency of the 
 argument for a First Cause, that is based on 
 the need of it at the beginning of evolution, is 
 
216 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 taken away. What made the homogeneity out 
 of which the universe came, broke it up. Death 
 itself had in it the seeds of life ; and as the last 
 expiring moment of December gives birth to 
 the first new moment of January, so, it ex- 
 plains, the last expiring breath of the uni- 
 verse's old order of things may have been the 
 power which started the present one on its 
 course. 
 
 Then, after all, it is the failure of an argu- 
 ment, promising as it seemed at first, over 
 which, rightly considered, there is really no 
 reason to mourn. Were it successful, it would 
 have given the inquirer only an attribute of 
 Deity and not Deity himself, only a chronolog- 
 ical First Cause and not an always and aU-per- 
 vading presence. And its want of success only 
 shows that the Eternal is not to be captured 
 like an elephant, by driving him with the weap- 
 ons of logic into a penned-up corner of the 
 universe; not to be found in the earthquake, 
 the thunder and the whirlwind of a beginning, 
 any more than in the displays of them after- 
 wards ; and it gives new significance to the 
 Scripture words, "Spiritual things are to be 
 spiritually discerned." 
 
 But leaving this part of the inquiry as 
 fruitless, there is another and grander way 
 
EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE S17 
 
 in which evolution does really necessitate the 
 recognition of a First Cause; one, also, which 
 is in harmony with the Scripture dictum as 
 to his spiritual discernment ; and that is by 
 its leading to him not merely as the source 
 once of some far-off beginning, but as that 
 out of which and in which now and always all 
 things rise and are. It makes him the First 
 Cause of the universe in the same way that the 
 fountain is the first cause, every moment, of 
 the stream which winds through the valley, and 
 that the sun is the first cause age after age of 
 the light which goes pulsing off into space. 
 Nay, even these connections do not express all 
 the closeness of his evolutionary relation to the 
 sum of things, for the stream after it leaves 
 the fountain, and the light after it leaves the 
 sun are separated in space from their source, 
 but the universal First Cause is not conceived 
 of by evolution as separate even in space from 
 anything to which he gives birth, any more 
 than gravity is separate from a moving planet, 
 or life from a living body; but as continually 
 operative in every atom as that from which it 
 comes, — 
 
 "A motion and a spirit that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought. 
 And rolls through all things," 
 
S18 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 a spirit, a Being who wills and loves and works 
 forever the eternal right. Under its reign the 
 old miracles, such as the turning of water into 
 wine, disappear, but the whole world shines forth 
 with the ever new miracle of turning chaos into 
 cosmos; the old Bibles lose their prominence, 
 but all truth becomes his revelation; super- 
 naturalism sets, but atom and star rise up his 
 prophets, flower in the crannied wall and nebula 
 in Orion's belt his apostles. He is made by it, 
 as never before, his own teacher. The truths 
 of transcendentalism join hands with those of 
 sense. He is not merely an occasional visitor 
 to earth, but from its birth out of the fire mist 
 till now its perpetual presence; its matter and 
 force not agents he operates upon from the 
 outside, but parts of himself ; the universe every- 
 where no longer an unconscious machine, run 
 with his hand on its crank, but a live tissue 
 thridded directly with his muscles and nerves 
 and growing, as all live things have to, with a 
 vitalizing force in contact with its every atom. 
 All the poet's raptures over nature; all which 
 even a Wordsworth has sung about 
 
 "A sense sublime 
 Of something far more deeply interfused" 
 
 than its outward charms ; all the emotions of 
 the religious worshiper in the presence of 
 
EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE ai9 
 
 mountain, sea, and midnight sky, are justified 
 by it as scientific realities; and not only those 
 who have the spiritual and poetic vision, but 
 those even who have only the eyes of sense, all 
 who can see anything, can see God. Yet 
 giving thus everything that pantheism ever did, 
 it separates itself, with its recognition of will- 
 power, by a broad impassable line from pan- 
 theism as such ; is in its essence theism still. It 
 does not solve all the problems about Deity; 
 those about his own mode of being; or how 
 existing from all eternity in connection with 
 matter and force he could have always been 
 what he is without exerting his will upon them ; 
 or the relation of evolution to his unchange- 
 ableness; or any of those mighty ones Mr. 
 Spencer presents as constituting his unknow- 
 ableness ; — makes him in some respects a greater 
 mystery than ever before. Yet even here it 
 has its side of hope, has it in its very name. 
 And with man, society, the universe, all that he 
 is identified with, still unfolding, instead of 
 fearing that faith in him under evolution will 
 die away, is there not good reason for believing 
 that the conception of him will expand with 
 their expanding; and that, while forever more 
 and more the Unknowable, he will be forever 
 more and more the Known? 
 
 The existence of such a First Cause is in- 
 
aaO THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 volved in the very nature of evolution. The 
 two primal constituents, which its expounders 
 have to assume the presence of everywhere it is 
 going on, are energy and matter, or, if these 
 are reduced to one, that one has to be energy. 
 Matter alone cannot be conceived of as either 
 moving itself at first or keeping itself in mo- 
 tion afterwards. All the forms of it anything 
 is known about, from atom up to world, are 
 pervaded with an immaterial something which 
 makes and maintains them what they are. 
 Nothing can be thought of as behind or be- 
 fore or within such energy to produce it, or 
 as being in any way its cause. Matter may 
 store it up as in dynamite or in a combustible 
 body, but their manifestations of it are only 
 the setting of it free. Even when a living 
 being puts it forth, lifts his arm, or exercises 
 a volition, he does not create it, is not a cause, 
 as Mr. Martineau in his discussion of the sub- 
 ject seems to think, but is only an agent, using 
 what has been gathered by him out of his food. 
 Scientifically there are and can be no such 
 things as "secondary causes," nothing but this 
 one original, all-pervading First Cause. And 
 not in some far-off beginning of things, reached 
 only by an intricate process of logic, but where- 
 ever now we see anything being done, wher- 
 ever any stage of evolution, there we are in 
 
EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE 231 
 
 the direct presence of the universe's First 
 Cause. 
 
 "They reckon ill who leave me out, 
 When me they fly, I am the wings, 
 I am the douhter and the doubt. 
 
 And I the hymn the Brahmin sings." 
 
 It is this that Herbert Spencer means by his 
 phrase, "that Infinite and Eternal Energy out 
 of which all things proceed," only the words 
 ought to be "out of which and in and through 
 which all things proceed." It is what those old 
 heathen poets whom Paul quotes, expressed 
 with wonderful accuracy, — Pagan gems which 
 shine even in their Christian setting, when they 
 said, "In him we live and move and have our 
 being"; — is what Paul himself rose to in his 
 words, "For of him and through him and to 
 him are all things" ; and it is what poetry in all 
 ages, — often supposed to be the antagonist of 
 science, but really the rosy morning of its sun- 
 lit day, — has been the herald of, singing as it 
 did in Faber, — 
 
 "God is never so far as even to be near: 
 He is within ; our spirit is the home he holds dear : 
 To think of him as at our side is almost as untrue, 
 As to remove his throne beyond those skies of 
 
 starry blue; 
 We walk the earth ourselves his sanctuary." 
 
THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 Such a First Cause, so far as evolution necesr 
 sitates its recognition, may seem to be only un- 
 conscious force, only a Deity as unsatisfactory 
 to the heart and to the spiritual nature as 
 matter itself is. But force is only one of its 
 forms, only that which shows itself in physical 
 motion its lowest form. It is something which 
 itself evolves, — that is recognized in the very 
 definition of evolution, a process in which the 
 retained motion undergoes, along with matter, 
 a parallel transformation from homogeneity 
 to heterogeneity. It shows itself step by step 
 in intelligent motion, puts things together with 
 a purpose, elaborates the crystal, rises up into 
 life; that is what life is, evolved force, not 
 merely the adjustment of inward to outward 
 conditions, but the cause which adjusts them; 
 and then rises up into consciousness, mind, 
 heart, soul, duty, religion, — all flowing from it 
 and retaining it as their substance, just as much 
 as stars, earth, body, species and all the 
 wonders of physical evolution do their prim- 
 itive matter. And to get our conception of all 
 that it really is as First Cause, it is to these 
 higher manifestations rather than to its lower 
 ones that surely in all scientific fairness we 
 ought to look, just as to know the real nature 
 of a tree we do not look at its roots alone, but 
 at its fruit, and not at its green and imper- 
 
EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE 
 
 feet fruit but at that which is ripe and per- 
 fect. 
 
 There is one other difficulty which needs to 
 be considered. Giving up the idea of any ab- 
 solute beginning to things as necessitating the 
 recognition of a First Cause, and accepting the 
 present universe as only one of an infinite 
 series whose First Cause is logical rather than 
 chronological, it may be asked what then be- 
 comes of evolution otherwise than as operating 
 within each term of the series? Plow is it 
 possible as a progressive change from one of 
 them to the other without its leading back to a 
 primitive one, beyond which there can be no 
 evolution, just as certainly as following back 
 the changes of the present one alone was found 
 to do? And, on the other hand, if there is no 
 progress from one to the other, if it is only an 
 infinite series of evolutions which in the end 
 evolve nothing but each other, a First Cause 
 which causes nothing in its last term more than 
 was in its first, what is a belief in it but a 
 giving up of any real, any eternal evolution, 
 and how is it any more satisfactory to the 
 mind than the old doctrine of an infinite series 
 of changes which evolved nothing at all? 
 
 The difficulty arises from taking into the 
 conception of the series only one kind of 
 infinity, that of time, and not those of space 
 
224 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 and degree. To believe in an evolution that 
 is without any absolute beginning, one that is 
 able to be progress from universe to universe 
 without either a first term or a last one, we 
 must believe in a universe that is infinite in 
 extent and infinite in its degrees of perfection, 
 a universe, some part of which at least, has been 
 forever in the past changing into something 
 finer and better, and all parts of which, in the 
 future, are to go on forever doing the same. 
 
 And who shall say this is not a possible con- 
 ception .!■ Who shall say this material universe 
 is the only one which in the eternal years has 
 ever been or will ever he? Who shall say that 
 the endless variety from nebula up to Milky 
 Way, and from amoeba up to man, which we 
 know to exist in this universe which stretches 
 through space, may not, also, be the law of 
 that series of universes which stretches through 
 time, giving evolution a field in which forever 
 to evolve; and out of the very heart of the 
 necessity which it puts us under of believing 
 in religion's foundation, an infinite First Cause, 
 unfolding also the necessity of our joining with 
 it religion's crowning truth an infinite and im- 
 mortal effect, making possible, also, an obedi- 
 ence forever of religion's injunction "Be ye 
 perfect even as your Father in heaven is 
 perfect." 
 
EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE 
 
 Aiming along this new path opened in our 
 day to learn whether nature would repeat the 
 answer that, questioned in other ways, she gave 
 of old, I have tried in its setting forth to avoid, 
 as much as possible, all merely technical terms 
 and all those subtle problems about the absolute 
 and unknowable which belong to the realm of 
 metaphysics, a realm in which I confess myself 
 an utter ignoramus, and to use only common 
 language and those principles which belong 
 fairly to the realm of physics and of natural 
 evolution. I know very well how narrow is the 
 path and how liable the student is to mistakes 
 when even in the realm of physics he comes to 
 that border-land where the finite, either of space 
 or time, reaches out into the infinite; know 
 that what is law and truth and solid ground in 
 the one may be disorder and falsehood and utter 
 nothingness in the other; know that even in 
 mathematics the exact truths with regard to 
 finite lines and angles become the inexactness 
 of those which are stretched out to infinity. 
 But this is as true of the arguments against a 
 First Cause as of those in its defense; and 
 though it be regarded as only a speculation, it 
 is a speculation which has the whole known 
 universe as its basis ; one that surpasses in 
 grandeur all other thoughts, and that is reaf- 
 firmed by what comes direct through the 
 
a26 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 spirit's vision. Evolution and dissolution are 
 but the systole and diastole of nature's great 
 heart ; life and death but the summer and winter 
 of time's vaster year ; all the myriad worlds the 
 keenest telescope takes in, but one pole of the 
 world's mightier globe; and all the long geo- 
 logic ages and all the uncounted eons since the 
 nebulous dust out of which our present universe 
 came, but a part-way swing of that matter 
 pendulum which ticks off eternity's seconds. 
 And it is of such a universe, such a system of 
 nature, that it gives us the cause, not the cause 
 which merely as an outside hand wound it up 
 in some far-off beginning, or repeated its wind- 
 ings on some special subsequent occasions, and 
 then left it to run of itself, but one which is 
 its mainspring and in all its movements then, 
 now and evermore. To evolve is the necessity 
 of his very being, as it is of the sun to shine 
 and of the plant to grow. There never was 
 and never will be a time in which he is to be 
 thought of as an idle, or a sleeping, or a self- 
 sufficient God; never was and never will be a 
 time in which anything evolved will be separate 
 from his pervading might. Not that he is the 
 all himself; the doctrine is no pantheism; but, 
 to use the exact Bible phrase, that he is the "all 
 in all"; is the central sun that is forever 
 shining and yet whose beams are never the same 
 
EVOLUTION AND A FIRST CAUSE aS7 
 
 as himself. Worlds, universes, alike material 
 and spiritual; there is no difference between 
 them except of species and degree ; they are the 
 ether waves which go pulsing out evermore 
 from his central warmth; evolution, that in the 
 last analysis is the shining into finite forms of 
 the Infinite Light. So believing, naturalism, 
 more truly than any supernaturalism, can 
 sing,— 
 
 "Thou art, O God, the life and light 
 Of all this wondrous world we see; 
 Its glow by day, its smile by night. 
 
 Are but reflections caught from Thee; 
 Where'er we turn thy glories shine 
 And all things fair are Thee and Thine." 
 
 And knowing its diviner meaning religion can 
 say of nature as earnestly as ever science has, — 
 
 "So welcome we from every source 
 The tokens of his primal force, — 
 Older than heaven itself, yet new 
 As the young heart it reaches to; 
 Beneath whose steady impulse rolls 
 The tidal wave of human souls. 
 Guide, comforter and Inward Word, 
 The eternal spirit of the Lord." 
 
XII 
 
 WHAT BECOMES OF THE FATHER- 
 HOOD OF GOD UNDER EVOLUTION? 
 
 Of all the various names which have been 
 applied to the Deity, setting forth one and an- 
 other of his attributes, the most distinctive and 
 precious is that of Father, our heavenly 
 Father. It is the high water mark of the old 
 type of religion, the religion of sentiment and 
 emotion as distinguished from the religion of 
 science and law, is the measure of the immense 
 progress which had been made from the time 
 when even among the most advanced races on 
 earth his highest symbol was a stick or a stone ; 
 and around it have been gathered age after 
 age, all the great hopes, beliefs, affections and 
 venerations of our larger Christian faith. 
 
 But how far can this conception of him be 
 retained under the new scientific light of our 
 time, — how far, especially, can it be made con- 
 sistent with the great evolutionary doctrines of 
 man's descent from the brute creation and of 
 the Deity as "that Infinite and Eternal 
 
THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD 229 
 
 Energy" out of which by natural force and 
 law, all things, alike the evil and the good, are 
 thought inevitably to proceed? A lady of my 
 acquaintance was present at an Orthodox 
 church awhile ago where the minister was 
 preaching on the absurdities of this new science 
 with regard to the origin of man. "An evo- 
 lutionist," said he, "looks up into the face of a 
 baboon or a monkey and proclaims 'Thou art 
 my father;' but we Christians look up into the 
 face of the all-loving and all-perfect God, and 
 say 'Our Father which art in heaven !' " 
 
 Deeper down, however, than this merely 
 superficial difficulty, is that awful shadow of 
 ferocity, cruelty, blight and wrong which over- 
 lies so large a part of the divine realm here on 
 earth, — the organic world's fierce struggle for 
 existence, its overpowering of the weak and 
 sick by the well and strong, and its necessity 
 of their eating each ^ther up as the only way 
 of their getting food; the awful convulsions 
 and severities of the inorganic world, the earth- 
 quake, the tornado, the drouth, the flood, the 
 frost, destroying myriads of living things with- 
 out even their use as food ; and the vice and 
 crime and tyranny and inequality and poverty 
 and suffering which prevail worst of all among 
 his human beings. Under the old doctrines of 
 the Deity as a Being outside of nature, and of 
 
230 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 Adam's Fall as having dragged the world down, 
 it was possible to explain such things as the 
 result of man's disobedience, and as occurring 
 without the immediate action of divine will, 
 thus relieving him to some extent, at least, of 
 their responsibility. But under the modern 
 scientific conception of God as immanent in 
 nature and as the energy out of which all 
 things immediately proceed, there is no possi- 
 bility of such an exculpatory explanation. 
 Science cannot have him in the sunshine and 
 leave him out of the storm, near in the flower 
 and far in the frost. The animal world's 
 struggle for existence and eating each other up 
 as food are shown by it to have been instituted 
 eons before there was any man to sin. And 
 with God the energy out of which all things 
 proceed, it must be his own arm directly which 
 starts the earthquakes, and his own breath im- 
 mediately which blows the whirlwind. "That," 
 said an eminent scientist to me once with whom 
 I was talking On the subject, taking down a 
 hawk's claws from his cabinet, — ^"that is what 
 I find in the God of nature, and when I 
 want this" — opening his Bible and pointing 
 to the words, "Like as a father pitieth his 
 children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear 
 him," — "when I want this kind of clause, I have 
 to go for it to the pages of Scripture." It is 
 
THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD 231 
 
 a difficulty which is not a mere theoretical one 
 of the scholar's study, but one which forces 
 itself on everybody's attention, one which 
 clutches at our nerves and heart-strings as well 
 as at our minds and philosophies. There are 
 multitudes who accept gladly the scientific 
 doctrine of the Deity as the great indwelling 
 spirit of the universe, and who can see that it 
 adds infinitely to his grandeur as an object of 
 reverence, but also feel that in doing so they, 
 to be consistent, rnust give up the genial home 
 warmth and sweet paternal relation which have 
 been so long associated with his endeared gospel 
 name; and perhaps there is no truth which the 
 words of this earth can express that to think- 
 ing, feeling men and women would be so com- 
 prehensive, so precious, so welcome, as the one 
 which would enable them, in the midst of the 
 natural world and in the full blaze of evolution, 
 to look up and say with the old faith and the 
 old love, "Our Father which art in heaven." 
 
 I am free to say that I do not think it 
 possible to make the two conceptions of him 
 parallel in all respects, any more than it is the 
 two of anything, one of which comes through 
 the mind and the other through the heart; do 
 not think it is desirable to do so, for in that 
 case neither of them would add anything to 
 what the other gave. But I do think the scien- 
 
33a THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 tific view of him includes in its drier light some, 
 at least, of the paternal attributes which are so 
 precious in the religious view. And it is on 
 this most important question, how far the God 
 of nature and of evolution can be spoken of as 
 Our Father, that I shall dwell in this lecture. 
 
 Look first at the matter subjectively. How 
 did religion get the name and conception of the 
 Deity as Father, our heavenly Father? It is 
 commonly thought that it was supernaturally 
 revealed through the lips of Jesus, and that it 
 was the distinctive gift of Christianity to the 
 world. But as a matter of fact it is older than 
 Christianity, older than any of the world's 
 existing faiths. It originated among our old 
 Aryan ancestors thousands of years before 
 the Christian era, in what to them was pre- 
 eminently a natural religion. Among their 
 many deities was one they called Dyaus Pitar, 
 literally the Sky Father ; and when the original 
 Aryan religion died out, the name was a part 
 of the precious goods it distributed among the 
 nations that were its descendants, becoming 
 with the Greeks Zeus Pater, with the Romans 
 Jupiter, meaning the same thing, with the Scan- 
 dinavians Alfadir, — ^All-Father — and with the 
 early Christians, "Our Father which art in 
 heaven." The name, therefore, is strictly a 
 natural evolution, not something which Chris- 
 
THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD 233 
 
 tianity gave to nature, but which nature gave to 
 Christianity; and though under Christian nur- 
 ture its contents of tenderness, care and spirit- 
 uality have been immeasurably enlarged, it is 
 only fair to argue that to the primitive Aryan 
 mind it must have expressed, as the root out of 
 which its after growth came, a real aspect of 
 nature, otherwise it is a name which would never 
 have been suggested. 
 
 The Dyaus Pitar, to be sure, has not been 
 the world's only nature god. The Aryans 
 themselves had other deities with other names 
 expressing other and sometimes the darker and 
 more terrible aspects of earth, air and sky, as 
 Rudra the god of storms, Agni, the god of fire. 
 
 Polytheistic also have been all the religions 
 which came from Aryan stock, many of them 
 with divinities whose attributes were the very 
 opposite of what is fatherly, as Ahriman, Siva, 
 Mars and Thor; and even in our Christian 
 faith the conception of a Father God has not 
 always been so all-embracing but that it has 
 had to be supplemented with such names as 
 Jehovah, Lord, King, Almighty, Triune and 
 the like, taking in what were thought to be 
 other of his attributes, and with such a being 
 as Satan to include his relation to the kingdom 
 of evil. But this only strengthens the argu- 
 ment for the reality in nature of what under- 
 
234 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 lies the word Father, for it shows the name has 
 been put to what in evolution is the supreme 
 test of a thing, the struggle for existence. 
 And it has survived, has killed out or absorbed 
 all the others because it has proved itself to be 
 the fittest, has expressed better than any of the 
 others what under the world's increasing in- 
 telligence has been found to be not only the 
 needs of the human heart, but man's larger 
 mental conception of what exists really at 
 nature's heart. Even amid the crudest beliefs 
 with regard to immediate evil divinities, faith 
 in a supreme one who has the paternal char- 
 acteristics has often curiously cropped out. 
 The story is told of a farmer in England some- 
 what unfortunate in his crops and in his family 
 affairs, whose minister sought to comfort him 
 by saying they were not accidents but the dis- 
 pensations of an All-Wise Providence, to which 
 he ought cheerfully to submit. "Oh, yes," was 
 the answer, "I well know it was Providence that 
 spoiled my crops and killed my children; 
 it is Providence does this, and Providence does 
 that, — nothing but Providence picking on me 
 all the time ; I hate Providence ; but I am thank- 
 ful there is One above who will at last set things 
 right." And in all the Ayran mythologies 
 along with their recognition of agencies in 
 nature that for the time being were setting 
 
THE FATHERHOOD OP GOD 235 
 
 things wrong, there has always been, dim or 
 clear, this trust in one above them who in the 
 end would set things right, — above Ahriman 
 Ormazd, above the tricksy pantheons of Olym- 
 pus and Asgard a paternal Being, whom alike 
 gods and men were bound to obey, and above 
 Sinai and Satan a heavenly Father who at last 
 would put all enemies under his feet and be the 
 world's all in all. 
 
 But we are reminded that man's conception 
 of what Deity is did not begin its evolution 
 with the old Aryan faith, or with divinities any- 
 where which had even the faintest lineaments 
 of a loving, paternal face. Spencer, Frazer, 
 Tylor, Robertson Smith and others have traced 
 back religion through the worship of idols, 
 animals, the heavenly bodies, sticks and stones, 
 to that of the ghosts of dead ancestors ; and now 
 Mr. Grant Allen comes along and after review- 
 ing and re-proving all these steps, goes back 
 beyond them, back even of the ancestral ghost, 
 and shows that the first step was the worship 
 of the mere dead body itself, apart from even 
 the crudest idea of spirit, — argues that even 
 the Christian conception of a heavenly Father 
 and the Hebrew one of Jehovah originated 
 in the homage paid to a dead savage chief- 
 tain. 
 
 It is a view on the face of it which is the most 
 
236 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 startlingly atheistic of anything scepticism has 
 yet set forth. The conception of Deity is 
 naturally thought of as meaning the same thing 
 as Deity himself, and the evolution of the con- 
 ception from the sight of a dead body or from 
 the shadow of a live one is thought of as cover- 
 ing the evolution from such a source of every- 
 thing which is divine; is tracing the broad 
 highway of Christianity in which God moves as 
 a Father, out beyond civilization and beyond 
 heathendom into a wilderness where it not only 
 narrows to a squirrel path and runs up a tree, 
 but to where it comes down even from the tree 
 and disappears as a hole in the ground. "Who 
 is your God.'"' asked a traveler in Arabia of a 
 Mesaleckh nomad. "It was Fadee," answered 
 the man, naming a powerful provincial chieftain 
 recently deceased, "but since his death I do not 
 really know who, at the present moment, my 
 God is." That is the first impression made by 
 these recent investigations, that having traced 
 him to the dead body of a savage chieftain 
 buried in the ground, evolution does not really 
 know who at the present moment its God is. 
 Most of the criticisms on "the ghost theory," 
 as it is called, have been based on such a confus- 
 ing together of the reality and the idea. Even 
 our friend, Rev. Mr. St. John, in his notice of 
 Grant Allen's book contributed to The New 
 
THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD aS7 
 
 World ridicules his work as "a sketch of the 
 evolution of God" and its author, because of it, 
 as having "clearly abdicated his throne of in- 
 tellectual leadership." 
 
 Mr. Allen is, perhaps, careless in some of his 
 expressions. But the very title of his book, 
 "The Evolution of the Idea of God," and his 
 explicit statements that his purpose is not "any 
 kind of inquiry into the objective validity of 
 any one among the religious beliefs," that "the 
 question whether there may be a God or gods 
 does not here concern us," and that he does not 
 attempt to "cast doubt upon the truth of the 
 evolved concepts," ought surely to have pre- 
 vented any such mistake. It would be just as 
 fair to say of a writer who, in giving a history 
 of astronomy, had traced it back through its 
 Tycho Braeic and Ptolemaic theories to the con- 
 ception of the sky as a fixed hollow sphere a 
 few miles above us, that he is ignoring the 
 real heavens; or of one who in describing the 
 development of electrical science should begin 
 with the attention drawn to it by the dancing 
 of pith balls and the twitching of a frog's leg, 
 that he made these the source of electricity 
 itself, as to charge that a scientist who finds 
 the starting point of a man's idea of God in a 
 dead ancestor, is thereby ignoring the infinite 
 reality and making the heavenly Father him- 
 
238 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 self grow up from the lifeless body of an earthly 
 parent. 
 
 The fact is, Mr. Allen's book, though open in 
 some places as he himself says to further 
 question, is a reverent and exceedingly inter- 
 esting summing up of the discoveries made in 
 recent years of how religion reached its present 
 advanced stage. It is as full of curious facts 
 about theological ideas as Darwin's "Origin of 
 Species" is about animals and plants. Many 
 things in our present ecclesiastical customs 
 otherwise unaccountable and hurtful, are ex- 
 plained by it as beautifully and satisfactorily 
 as the fossils of the earth's strata and the 
 rudimentary organs of the human body are 
 by geological and organic evolution; and 
 rightly viewed the process it describes is no 
 more degrading tO' religion than the tracing of 
 man up from his monster animal ancestors is 
 to our present human nature. 
 
 Then apart from any special theory, the evo- 
 lution of a natural religion from such un- 
 promising beginnings is the very thing we 
 ought to expect, so in harmony is it with the 
 evolution of all other natural things ; and in- 
 stead of doing away with the need of recogniz- 
 ing a divine reality behind it, is what implies 
 in the strongest possible way his actual exist- 
 ence. For according to the fundamental prin- 
 
THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD 239 
 
 ciples of evolution there must have been some 
 cause for this long and wonderful growth of 
 its inner God-idea, some, quickening at first by 
 a suitable environment of its humble germ, and 
 some corresponding nutriment afterwards for 
 its development, just as in the evolution of 
 astronomy there has been the actual sky, and 
 of electrical science electricity itself. What in 
 religion could this cause, this environment, this 
 nutriment have been? What but a divine 
 spiritual reality? The relation of Mr. Spen- 
 cer's dreams and shadows and Mr. Allen's dead 
 bodies and sticks and stones to the actual all- 
 embracing Deity has possibly been something 
 like that of foreign bodies, sometimes mere 
 specks of dirt or wisps of straw, to the solution 
 out of which crystals are formed. The foreign 
 substances do not of themselves make the 
 crystals and are no real part of them when 
 made, — rather often mar their appearance. 
 They simply afford the requisite starting points 
 and stimulants for the formation of them out 
 of and by the solution itself, — to the chemist's 
 eye would imply its existence by the use made 
 of them, even though it could not otherwise be 
 seen. And though the crystals at first may be 
 imperfectly shaped, owing to the crowding of 
 them together and the smallness of the vessel 
 in which the solution is held, yet, as the vessel 
 
240 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 is enlarged and scope afforded for their full 
 development, they take more and more their 
 own special shape independent alike of vessel 
 and of nuclei and at last show forth, next to 
 animals and plants, the most beautiful and 
 wonderful objects of nature. So with the 
 crude material bodies in the worship of which 
 religion begins. They are no part of the thing 
 itself, no indication of what its real divinity 
 is. They are only the specks and straws for 
 the mind's surrounding spiritual medium to 
 start from in forming its conceptions of the 
 Divine. It is the surroundiijg spirit which 
 makes the conceptions, — narrow and crude at 
 first and partaking, as might be expected of 
 the impurities and limitations of the minds in 
 which they are formed and of the objects from 
 which they began, but gradually getting away 
 from these, and crystallizing at last, in accord- 
 ance with the tendency of spirit's own intrinsic 
 nature, into that idea of God as a heavenly 
 Father which is so precious a part of our 
 Christian faith, the whole just as truly a cul- 
 mination in the process of natural evolution as 
 anything there is in the outward world, and not 
 by any means less wonderful or less reliable 
 because of its unpromising start and of the 
 strange forms it has taken along its way. 
 
 Turning now from this subjective conception 
 
THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD 341 
 
 of God as a Father reached by evolution, to 
 what evolution has to say about his being such 
 to human beings objectively and in his actual 
 relations to them as the presiding spirit of the 
 universe, the first point for comparison is that 
 of progenitorship, being the source from which 
 they have naturally come. The relation of an 
 earthly father to his children begins in his 
 being their originator ; and this means not that 
 he has created them artificially, or that he has 
 spoken them into existence supernaturally, or 
 that he has adopted them by a legal process 
 from some other family; but that he and the 
 mother have brought them forth naturally from 
 their own bodies and endowed them, in the very 
 act of doing so, with a part of their own life. 
 What is this, however, but the very thing evo- 
 lution teaches was the origin of man? He is 
 not an artificial product, not something which 
 was created all at once by a fiat of the divine 
 will, not a creature who was brought here from 
 another world, but a being who by a strictly 
 normal process was evolved out of nature, that 
 nature, including alike matter and its infinite 
 and eternal energy, which to science is only 
 another name for God. What though man 
 went through a myriad animal forms on the 
 way? That is what we know now every child 
 does embryonically in coming from his human 
 
24.2 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 parents, — starts on the lowest animal plane as 
 a mere cell, and unfolds partly before birth and 
 partly afterwards, step by step through every 
 stage that Darwin has shown that our race has 
 passed through in passing from moneron up to 
 man, some of them so like those of the lower 
 animals that it is only an expert anatomist can 
 tell the one from the other. Yet who thinks 
 that on that account human beings are any the 
 less his parents ? It is what we start from, not 
 what we go through along the way, which 
 determines origin. The most bigoted anti- 
 evolutionist knows beyond dispute that his 
 human ancestors a few generations back were 
 savages. Yet what would he think of a min- 
 ister who should get up in the pulpit and say, 
 "The anti-evolutionist looks up into the face of 
 a savage or a barbarian and says, 'Thou art my 
 progenitor,' but we Christian^ look up to the 
 Infinite and Eternal God and exclaim 'O thou, 
 our Father which art in heaven.' " Yet how 
 could this be a particle more absurd than the 
 implied argument of the minister that because 
 the evolutionist recognizes anthropoids a little 
 further back as in his line of ancestors, he is 
 therefore cut off from believing that he has a 
 heavenly parent.? The fact is, trace back man 
 as far as we will through the ages of the past, 
 his paleontological footmarks all start from 
 
THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD S43 
 
 Deity. The life with which he began, though 
 undoubtedly an evolution, like everything else 
 in the universe, from a preceding natural state, 
 must have been not the less an outcome of that 
 divine life which was never outside even of in- 
 organic matter; and when what hitherto had 
 showed itself only as force, shaped on earth its 
 first protoplasmic cell, — that out of which all 
 others have come, that which, according to 
 Weissmann, still survives immortal amid all the 
 deaths of its myriad descendants, in that cell, 
 rather than ages after, when it was born a fully 
 developed human babe, was revealed, so far 
 as origin is concerned, the Fatherhood of 
 God. 
 
 Again human fatherhood implies some re- 
 semblance between the child and the parent, 
 some qualities which are common to them both, 
 — a likeness between them which is accepted 
 everywhere as at least one evidence of their 
 relationship; and though at first the resem- 
 blance may be very incomplete, though there 
 is a wide diff'erence between the statesman 
 managing the aff'airs of a mighty nation, and 
 his little child at home "pleased with a rattle, 
 tickled with a straw," yet beneath this differ- 
 ence, as we know, they have the same human 
 nature, are made of the same substances, body 
 and soul, and have the same spiritual capacities 
 
U4> THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 for appreciating the beautiful, the true and the 
 good. 
 
 Evolution disclaims utterly the idea that 
 God is like man in bodily form, — in limbs and 
 features, shape and structure. But when inner 
 qualities are considered, those which are intel- 
 lectual, moral, emotional and spiritual, is the 
 difference otherwise than in degree.'' How do 
 we get our knowledge, so far as science is con- 
 cerned, of what God is? Plainly it is by the 
 study of the universe around us, — this that is 
 his manifestation and embodiment, this that has 
 proceeded out of his infinite and eternal 
 energy. But what is the universe thus open 
 for our study.'' Not its matter and force, suns 
 and stars, cliffs and clods alone ; but with them 
 its spiritual parts, its men and women, minds 
 and hearts, virtues and intelligences. And 
 taking these into the account, regarding them 
 all as his manifestations, imperfect, to be sure, 
 yet having some basis in reality, then evidently 
 there must be a likeness between the Being who 
 is thus manifested and the human beings who 
 are at least a part of the objects through 
 whom and to whom the manifestation comes. 
 Indeed, ie/hat is the science itself that reads the 
 universe but an evidence of such likeness ? The 
 only way in which we can understandingly read 
 anything, any book, any picture, any ex- 
 
THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD 24S 
 
 pression on a fellow creature's face, Is by virtue 
 of something which is common to ourselves and 
 to the one who wrote the book, made the 
 picture, wore the expression. So with the uni- 
 verse. Science finds it put together with won- 
 derful intelligence and wisdom, full of beautiful 
 pictures, and richly stamped with expressions, 
 in its human objects, of love, benevolence, sym- 
 pathy and moral order. What do these meg,n 
 but that there must be something in the power 
 that placed these qualities there which is akin 
 to what is in the beings who find them there, 
 something in the Father who writes meanings 
 in the world's great letter which resembles 
 what is in the child who is able to read the mean- 
 ings of the world's great letter.? And if along 
 with the diviner things we find in the universe, 
 there are mingled some which are brutish, some 
 which seem to have no resemblance to our 
 highest conception even of human fatherhood, 
 may it not be, as explained by evolution, 
 because the universe as yet, with all its age and 
 all its grandeur is only at its embryo stage, 
 only on its way through its brutish forms to 
 that maturity in which, like the grown man, it 
 shall be in all respects the image of its great 
 original.'' 
 
 But above progenitorship and resemblance, 
 human fatherhood means love for its offspring, 
 
M6 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 a love which shows itself in kindly intercourse 
 with them as social beings, in provision for their 
 wants, and in their protection from dangers 
 and foes, a love which does not depend for its 
 exercise on their greatness or worth or service, 
 but on their being his children, and which finds 
 its reward in the happiness, not of itself, but 
 of them. Does the father build a house, it is 
 not more for himself and his wife than for his 
 children. Does he go forth to toil hard all 
 day in the shop, the counting-room and the 
 field.'' It is that he may earn bread not for 
 his own mouth merely, but for his little ones 
 at home. Is a fortune won.'' Ah, he says, 
 now I shall have something to leave ray boy and 
 girl. Does danger threaten, sickness assail, 
 do foes attack.'' It is their cause he makes his 
 own, and help to them in some way that he seeks 
 to give. And does he want companionship and 
 social delights? There is no wisdom of phi- 
 losophers, or beauty of poets or graciousness 
 of kings that he finds so sweet as the cooing 
 of his little baby tossed in his arms, who can- 
 not speak a word. What is there in the God 
 of evolution and science which corresponds 
 with these qualities of paternity.'' 
 
 Well, no audible speech, no coming home at 
 night and taking his creatures bodily on his 
 knees, no rushing out visibly to rescue them 
 
THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD 24.7 
 
 from the earthquake and tornado, robber and 
 tyrant. But there are other ways in which a 
 love not unlike that of an earthly parent for 
 his children is really shown. What is this 
 whole earth but a mighty house he has built in 
 which for them to dwell? What are the coal, 
 and oil and metals and sunshine and air stored 
 up in it from cellar to ceiling, but his provision 
 for their wants? What are its myriad laws 
 and forces, winds and tides, heats and colds, 
 electricities and magnetisms but the hands with 
 which he is toiling day and night to promote 
 their welfare? What poetry and art and 
 science and civilization and religion but the 
 fortunes ever larger and larger which he is be- 
 stowing on each new set of his boys and girls? 
 
 To be sure, he makes them work with him to 
 obtain many of these blessings, and allows them 
 to fall into dangers, hardships and trials, and 
 to be overwhelmed with storms, earthquakes, 
 diseases, injustices and tyrannies without any 
 visible interferences to give them help. But 
 in the larger view such things are only the 
 rougher outside of what within are equally 
 blessings, are needed even more than the easy, 
 pleasant things, are to train up their recipients 
 in the highest degree as his children. Suppose 
 that he omitted them from his gifts, — did as 
 some people would have him do, allow his 
 
24.8 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 creatures to experience only the smooth, soft, 
 beautiful things of life, what would be the 
 result? You occasionally see some parents, 
 mothers especially, who have tried on their chil- 
 dren that very thing, — have done for them with 
 their own hands all the work of life, crammed 
 them with food, provided for them every kind 
 of! amusement, tolerated without punishment 
 their wrong doings, and sheltered them from all 
 hardship and harm. And what has been its 
 influence on their characters and their real 
 happiness? Why, there is no malignity of 
 devils which could have done them such injury, 
 no incarnations of hate which could have been 
 more successful in making them sometimes milk- 
 sops, sometimes knaves and villains, and always 
 the embodiments of downright selfishness and 
 conceit. 
 
 Fortunately the God of nature is no such 
 parent, is not a mother, as some would call him, 
 but a father, one who has the wise and far- 
 reaching love that when they are needed 
 supplies his creatures with hardships, puts them 
 to public school out in the universe, provides 
 them with the raw materials of happiness, but 
 lets them have the added pleasure of manu- 
 facturing the materials into actual things, 
 allows them now and then a round of fisticuffs 
 with the earthquake, tornado, pestilence and 
 
THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD 249 
 
 famine, and teaches them the value of liberty, 
 virtue and right by having them of themselves 
 knock down tyranny, vice and wrong. It is by 
 man's wrestling with things which are often re- 
 garded as the evidences of a lack in the world 
 of any paternal care, that he gets not only new 
 strength for himself, but at their core one of 
 a Father's strongest protecting arms, and out 
 of the nettle danger, plucks not only the flower 
 of safety but a flower which has in it the very 
 breath also of Infinite Love. 
 
 "By adversity are wrought 
 The greatest works of admiration^ 
 And all the fair examples of renown 
 Out of distress and misery are grown. 
 The gods in bounty work up storms about us 
 That give mankind occasion to exert 
 Their hidden strength, and bring in practice 
 Virtues which shun the day and lie concealed 
 In the smooth seasons and the calm of life." 
 
 Yet while recognizing the element of father- 
 hood even in the most terrible things of nature 
 to be obtained there by those who overcome 
 them, it would be wrong to suppose his pater- 
 nity is only in what is terrible and is only to be 
 obtained by his strong and victorious children. 
 One of the most touching incidents in Homer's 
 Iliad is where Hector, the Trojan leader, just 
 
250 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 before going out to battle with the Greeks, 
 comes home to take leave of his child, the 
 young Astyanax, and, finding the little one 
 frightened at his nodding plume, takes off his 
 helmet and lays it aside to let him see only the 
 father's loving face. Nature is full of scenes 
 where the eternal captain does the same, — ■ 
 leads his adult sons to battle with the warrior's 
 nodding plume, but when he comes to embrace 
 his little children, takes off his more terrible 
 accouterments, and appears to them as the 
 warm sunshine and the pleasant breeze, — 
 reveals to their weakness in all its beauty that 
 Father's smiling face which to others he hides 
 behind a frowning Providence. 
 
 There is one thing more implied in all true 
 fatherhood, which it will not do to leave out of 
 sight, love and care for its offspring, alike the 
 older and the younger, not only in the mass, 
 but also as individuals, not only as so much 
 childhood, but as so many children. When a 
 king loves his subjects, or a general his army, 
 or a philanthropist his race, it necessarily has 
 to be as a complex whole, with only the merest 
 fraction of them known to him by name, and 
 with thousands and millions he has never per- 
 sonally met, or taken any individual interest in. 
 But the peculiarity of a father's relation to his 
 children is that he knows them one by one, has 
 
THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD 251 
 
 a name for each, and makes each the object of 
 a distinct and individual affection. 
 
 At first it looks as if nature was the very 
 opposite of this, concerned herself with things 
 as a whole, but not with their individual 
 parts, — 
 
 "So careful of the type she seems 
 So careless of the single life." 
 
 But as under the guidance of science we ex- 
 amine her tendencies more minutely and higher 
 up, we find that it is preeminently the indi- 
 vidual she has in view and it is towards him that 
 all her progress is being made. The universe, 
 to start with, is a homogeneous mass, and the 
 first step of all evolution, and one it keeps 
 repeating wherever there is homogeneity after- 
 wards, is its differentiation into a multitude of 
 distinct parts, — into elements, worlds, species, 
 races, nations, classes and finally individual men 
 and women, and the giving to each of them its 
 own distinct life, form and functions, and its 
 own special food, protection and care. Na- 
 ture's providence is all "special," and special 
 beyond anything human fatherhood is ever 
 capable of. Gravity never forgets an atom of 
 dust any more than a Jupiter or a sun. The 
 same skill is used in painting the spots on a 
 butterfly's wings as in filling the sky with stars 
 
252 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 and the evening twilight with crimson and 
 gold. The humming-bird and the dove have 
 been provided with the means of coming down 
 the ages through the world's great struggle 
 for existence as safely as the elephant and the 
 lion. Limbs and senses and brain and soul are 
 given as carefully to the child which is born 
 in a hovel as to the one which is born on a 
 throne. When evolution passes on to its last 
 stage, that of integration into human society, 
 it is only to make its wholeness the means of 
 yet further perfecting its parts. And though 
 in time individuals die while the race lives on, 
 yet as the final outcome, everything in evolu- 
 tion points to the race as what, with a perish- 
 ing globe, is to perish, and to the individual 
 souls that age after age are springing from it 
 and apparently dying, as the products which, 
 if anything, are in other worlds to live forever, 
 the supreme objects, therefore, of the world's 
 paternal care. 
 
 It is on these grounds and in these respects, 
 the respects of origin, likeness, love and indi- 
 vidual care, that I think we may safely regard 
 the God of nature and of evolution as a 
 Father. The word may not express all that 
 he is known to be in the light of science, or all 
 of the unknowable that he is made to be in the 
 darkness of metaphysics,— every father, even 
 
THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD 
 
 here on earth, having a vast number of other 
 relations and attributes besides the parental 
 ones, which go to make up what he is as mer- 
 chant, mechanic, citizen, friend, neighbor; but 
 it does set forth one part of what he is, one 
 that, whatever else about him remains to us un- 
 known and unknowable, we want preeminently 
 to be certain about. As a party of botanists 
 were exploring the hills of Scotland in the in- 
 terests of their science, they discovered one 
 morning a rare flower halfway down a steep 
 precipice, which they were very anxious to se- 
 cure. But the single rope they had with them 
 not being strong enough to bear the weight of 
 a full-grown man, it was proposed to tie it 
 around a little boy among them, the son of one 
 of their number, and let him down to where it 
 was. The boy looked over the brow of the cliff 
 at the fair flower nodding in the morning 
 breeze, and at the awful abyss and jagged 
 rocks far below it, and for a moment hesitated ; 
 then turning to the smiling parental face that 
 bent over him, he bravely answered, "Yes, I 
 will go, if my father will hold the rope." 
 Why.'' Not because there were not arms there 
 as strong as the father's arm; not because 
 there were not eyes there as keen as the father's 
 eye, not because there were not heads there as 
 cool and well-balanced as the father's head, 
 
254 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 but because the boy felt instinctively that there 
 was something in the father's heart, a love tie, 
 a love sight, a love skill mightier than muscle 
 or eye or brain, which would never, never let 
 him fall. So with the boy, man swung off by 
 the God of nature with evolution as the rope 
 over the abysses of earth and space and time to 
 pluck the flowers of knowledge, love, grace and 
 virtue, he can do it without fear because back 
 of all law and force, it is a Father's hand which 
 holds the rope. 
 
XIII 
 
 A SPIRIT WORLD AS THE NECESSARY 
 
 OUTCOME OF THIS WORLD'S 
 
 EVOLUTION 
 
 Having traced the bearings of evolution on 
 some of the great problems of religion that are 
 connected more especially with this present 
 world and this present life, we come naturally 
 to its relation with those which open out be- 
 yond earth and time into a spirit world and a 
 future life, or, to express it scholastically, to 
 the eschatology of evolution. 
 
 It is a subject whose significance is in some 
 
 respects less and in some greater in our day 
 
 than it ever was before. Less, because man 
 
 and society have now reached a stage in their 
 
 evolution at which life here to many persons 
 
 is so rich, rounded and complete that they have 
 
 little temptation to look beyond it for another 
 
 which shall fill out its deficiences. Greater, 
 
 because the very wealth and wonder of what 
 
 has been evolved and is yet further to be 
 
 evolved, make its final loss seem all the more 
 355 
 
256 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 terrible, and our interest in its final outcome 
 all the more absorbing. Inunortality and the 
 spirit world, connected with the idea of an 
 endless evolution alike to the universe and to 
 ourselves, mean more, infinitely more, than was 
 possible when their utmost reach was an ex- 
 istence and a heaven — 
 
 "Beyond the blooming and the fading, 
 Beyond the shining and the shading, 
 Beyond the hoping and the dreading," 
 
 mean so much more, that their very greatness 
 is what most stirs our doubt as to their pos- 
 sibility. Then there are those affections, 
 those yearnings to meet and know and love 
 again those we have met and known and loved 
 on earth, which are surely not less ardent, not 
 less characterized with eternity-hunger now 
 than in the past. And so, taking all together, 
 I believe that man is asking to-day, if not with 
 more faith and hope, yet with more eagerness 
 and desire than ever before, the old, old ques- 
 tion. If a man die shall he live again .>' 
 
 Four different sources have been recognized 
 in the past as the ones from which possibly to 
 get its answer, — one, a supernatural revela- 
 tion of it by Deity, witnessed to by miracles 
 and especially by the supreme miracle of 
 Christ's resurrection from the dead ; another 
 
A SPIRIT WORLD 257 
 
 the revelation of it by spirits once on earth, 
 who have returned from beyond its bourne to 
 tell their friends, yet here, of the world and 
 life which are there; a third, the soul's direct 
 perception of it through its own faculties, as 
 witnessed by the belief in it among all people; 
 and a fourth, the intimations and proofs of it 
 found in the arrangements and outlooks of this 
 present world. 
 
 But as regards the first of these answers 
 while there are multitudes of people who rest 
 in it joyfully as the all-sufficient ground of 
 their faith, there are other multitudes who 
 under the stress of modern criticism have had 
 their trust in its reliability greatly weakened. 
 As regards the second source, while to those 
 who have in themselves the spiritualistic fac- 
 ulty, its testimony is very precious and con- 
 vincing, its value to the world at large has 
 been utterly destroyed by the unspirituality of 
 its communications and the immensities of 
 fraud with which it has been connected ; and as 
 regards the other two sources, those of nature 
 and of human nature, their answers hitherto 
 have been so vague and logically far-fetched 
 that only a determined believer beforehand could 
 ever be convinced of their truth. So it is not 
 strange that with the advent on a stage of this 
 new source of knowledge, evolution, one that 
 
258 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 reaches back as nothing else has ever done 
 into the immeasurable past and has given us 
 so clearly the story of man's origin, there 
 should have been an eagerness to find out 
 whether it can reach forward with equal cer- 
 tainty into the immeasurable future, and solve 
 in a like manner the problem of man's destiny. 
 Its first answer, it must be confessed, is any- 
 thing but encouraging. Directing its in- 
 quiries to the origin in the human mind of that 
 belief in a spirit world and a spirit life which 
 is now so prevalent among aU people, instead 
 of finding it came from a direct perception of 
 its reality, it has been traced back by Spencer, 
 Frazer, Tylor, Lubbock and others to the 
 crudest and most superstitious material 
 sources,— dreams, shadows flitting over the 
 ground, breaths of air which could not be seen, 
 strange noises, and motions of objects without 
 any apparent mover, trivial things that we 
 now know well enough must have had a phys- 
 ical origin; and it has been shown by in- 
 numerable examples how these early material- 
 istic impressions have been developed step by 
 step under the aid of mythology, and of the 
 poetic imagination, "giving to airy nothings a 
 local habitation and a name," into our present 
 refined conceptions of a heavenly world. It is 
 a most depressing study. Very naturally the 
 
A SPIRIT WORLD 259 
 
 reader of its results is led to feel that what 
 started so evidently as a materialistic miscon- 
 ception at one end of the line, cannot have 
 grown into a reliable spiritual reality at its 
 other end, and that a world whose foundations 
 rest on a dream must be in its loftiest super- 
 structure no better than a dream also. We 
 have exactly the same starting point of super- 
 stition rising to-day in the mind even of civ- 
 ilized man. Let anyone be alone at midnight 
 in a strange house, or walk alone through a 
 graveyard at that dark and fearful hour 
 "when injured ghosts complain" and notice 
 how startling, in spite of all his sceptical" phi- 
 losophy, is every unusual sight and sound. 
 Read Mrs. Crowe's "Night Side of Nature" in 
 the night and prevent the hair, if you have got 
 any, from rising on the outside of your head, 
 whatever the flatness of your incredulity may 
 be on its inside. 
 
 Butler's Hudebras did not go astray in his 
 satire when he sang 
 
 "Night is the Sabbath of mankind." 
 
 And Coleridge's Ancient Mariner had only a 
 common experience in being 
 
 "Like one that on a lonesome road 
 Doth walk in fear and dread. 
 
260 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 And having once turned round, walks on 
 
 And turns no more his head, 
 Because he knows a frightful fiend 
 
 Doth close behind him tread." 
 
 With the appearance of the sunlight and the 
 society of our fellowmen, such sights and sounds 
 all sink back into their true place as mere phys- 
 ical phenomena, — are what no enlightened reli- 
 gion ever thinks of referring to now as any 
 foundation of its belief in a spirit world. And 
 why, it is asked, should the faith which has been 
 evolved out of precisely similar ones existing 
 among savages thousands of years ago, be re- 
 garded by us as of any higher authority? 
 
 To give a single illustration, — the night 
 before my father died he told me the story of a 
 man he knew of when a boy, a rough, dare- 
 devil sort of fellow, despising all belief in 
 God and spirits, who had occasion very late one 
 dark night to pass by the old graveyard in 
 Ipswich, at that time a very lonesome and neg- 
 lected spot. When directly opposite to it, 
 he heard a low, pathetic moan come from over 
 in its enclosure. Most people about that time 
 would have hastened their pace if not into a 
 run yet into a double-quick march. But he 
 said to himself, "Well, now is a good chance 
 for me to find out all by myself whether there 
 are really any such things as ghosts or not," 
 
A SPIRIT WORLD 261 
 
 so he clambered over the wall, and followed the 
 sound, breaking forth at intervals, till he came 
 to the door of a tomb. Most of us would 
 probably have ended our investigations as to 
 the reality of a spirit world right there, and 
 have hurried back to our own flesh and blood 
 world. But this sceptical old man resolved to 
 see the thing through, so tried to open the 
 tomb door and get in. But it was locked and 
 rusty, evidently had not been opened for 
 years. Nevertheless, with his rattling, more 
 distinct than ever came forth the pathetic 
 moan, not exactly human, but enough so to 
 suggest that it might come out of what was 
 once a human throat now somewhat dry with 
 death's dust. With that he climbed up on top 
 of the tomb, and there found that a part of 
 it had caved in, leaving a hole large 
 enough for his body to get through, and out 
 of which, beyond all question, came the moan, 
 reminding him of the hymn, "Hark from the 
 tombs a doleful sound." Afraid if he jumped 
 in directly, he would never be able to climb out, 
 he hunted around in the dark till he found a 
 stick large enough to lay across the hole, then 
 tied his handkerchief to it and let himself down 
 into a place a little darker and more forbid- 
 ding than even Grant Allen has ever pursued 
 his investigations in, and feeling carefully 
 
262 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 around among the coffins towards the corner 
 from which at intervals the moan still came, 
 what do you suppose he found? A little lamb 
 that while feeding above, had fallen down 
 through the opening and broken its leg. I am 
 glad to say he did not leave the poor creature 
 there, but clasping his legs about it pulled him- 
 self out and went whistling home more a scep- 
 tic than ever, and showing his Christian friends 
 the next morning the specimen ghost he had 
 resurrected from a tomb. 
 
 How many are the ghost stories and the 
 uncanny things the world in all ages has been 
 full of, that, traced to their source, would be 
 found to have a similar lamb-like origin.'' And 
 how natural it is to infer that the belief which 
 has been evolved from them is equally baseless : 
 but this is only a superficial inference. Para- 
 doxical as it is, the physical origin of such 
 sights and sounds is a vastly better evidence of 
 a real spiritual world behind them than their 
 unexplained source would be. For, unless there 
 had been in man beforehand some dim conscious- 
 ness of such a world, no mere physical ob- 
 ject, however strange, would ever have sug- 
 gested to him the idea of spirit. Such objects 
 are like the strange woods washed up on Euro- 
 pean shores in their relation to the discovery of 
 this new geographical world. They did not 
 
A SPIRIT WORLD 
 
 make of themselves the belief in its existence. 
 That belief as a possibility was already in the 
 mind of a Columbus, introduced there by finer 
 faculties than those of sight; and it was that 
 belief which gave the waifs to him their won- 
 derful new world significance. So with that 
 other world across wider seas whose indications 
 on these shores of time were, to begin with, so 
 fearfully crude; it was faith already in man's 
 soul which clothed them with a spirit meaning. 
 Like everything in evolution, it had to begin 
 with something that was crude and unlike its 
 full self, — a nebulous mist, a molten globe, a 
 protoplasmic cell. That non-physical world 
 we all have within us did the same, all its terms 
 having a physical origin, and all bearing still 
 some traces of their lowly birth, — as the under- 
 standing, that which stands under; right, a 
 straight line, wrong, a crooked one ; morality, 
 outward custom, and the like. And yet who 
 now on that account believes that what they 
 stand for intellectually and morally is any the 
 less distinct reality.'' 
 
 And what is true with regard to those an- 
 cient things in which faith in a spirit world 
 began, is true with regard to what are called 
 our superstitions now. They are not really 
 superstitions, that is, things standing over 
 our faith, but substances, things standing 
 
264 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 under it, as the writer of Hebrews uses the 
 word, that is, the foundation of the higher 
 things hoped for. Instead of being despised, 
 they are to be honored, — are worth more than 
 all the books of theology ever written as proofs 
 of a spirit world. The subconscious man is 
 always the true, natural man, is always reli- 
 gious even when the one above him, the con- 
 scious man, is an atheist, is often more truly 
 religious than when the one above him is pro- 
 fessedly a Christian. We all of us have in this 
 under personality, not only a marvel of psychol- 
 ogy, but treasures of knowledge-material with 
 regard to the past, more wonderful than the 
 fossils geology digs out of the rocks, more 
 ancient than any written history, more pre- 
 cious religiously than any apostolic manu- 
 scripts found by pious seekers, buried in 
 Syrian cells. The beauty of them is they are 
 born anew with every child, are what time never 
 can crumble into dust. Some day evolution 
 will learn to read them as one of its richest 
 chapters. And among them it will find, not 
 least precious, the indications from the very 
 start, crude though it be, of a genuine spir- 
 itual faculty in our human nature: 
 
 "Like plants in mines which never saw the sun 
 But dream of him and guess where he may be. 
 And do their best to climb and get to him." 
 
A SPIRIT WORLD 265 
 
 But this faculty, how did it originate, how 
 is its existence a proof in any way of an actual 
 objective spirit world? These are questions 
 evolution must answer before we can be sure of 
 a realm beyond matter in which a future life is 
 possible. They are ones it does answer, and 
 its answer is, precisely in the same way that 
 man got his other faculties and is sure of an 
 objective material world. How did the primi- 
 tive animal from which man is descended get 
 its bodily eye? By the action on its general 
 nervous sensibility of that world of light it was 
 surrounded with. How its ear ? By the action 
 and in the same way of the atmospheric world 
 of sound. How his intellectual powers? By 
 the action of that truth, which is in all things, 
 on the bit of brain the action of his outer 
 senses had gradually stored up. It is all ob- 
 scure as yet, but about the tendency of the 
 environment to produce changes in the 
 environed that will bring them into relations 
 with each other, there can be no question. We 
 see it in the different colors the different seasons 
 make in the fur of animals at the North ; in the 
 modifications which have taken place in the 
 whale, once beyond question a land animal, to 
 fit it for the water; in the dependence of a 
 child on the talk of other children to develop 
 its own powers of speech, and in the need with 
 
266 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 us all of a civilized atmosphere in which to 
 grow up as civilized human beings. On the 
 other hand, how can there be any stronger 
 proof than the eye itself that there is around 
 it a world of light ; than the ear that there is in 
 contact with it an atmospheric world of sound, 
 and our intellectual faculties that the world in 
 which we live is an intelligible and truth-re- 
 lated world? 
 
 Why now does not the same proof hold good 
 with regard to the origin in man of spiritual 
 vision and the existence around him of a spirit 
 world? When all his other faculties had been 
 started, his spiritual environment acted on his 
 inner sensitiveness in the same way that his 
 light environment had on his original nerve 
 sensitiveness, and the result was at last an inner 
 vision for its own diviner radiance. Of course 
 it was at first very imperfect in its development 
 and efficiency. Like the bodily eye it would 
 not recognize itself as a distinct entity, but 
 only the physical objects that it seemed to be 
 reflected from. But a beginning had been 
 made, the origin of a new species in the king- 
 dom of mind, so that thenceforth it was only a 
 process of ordinary evolution for it to dis- 
 tinguish spirit itself from the strange physical 
 things which aroused it into action, and if we 
 can trust evolution's law of the environment 
 
A SPIRIT WORLD 267 
 
 anywhere, then surely man as a spiritual being 
 must have, not far away, but right around him, 
 a spirit world. 
 
 The discussion thus far may seem to be a look 
 backward instead of forward, an inquiry into 
 the beginning of things rather than into their 
 eschatology But before showing the possi- 
 bility of a life beyond this present world, the 
 first step must evidently be to show the possi- 
 bility of a world beyond this one into which 
 for the life which is here to evolve; and with 
 such a one shown, and shown also to have be- 
 gun its work on man already in time, it will be 
 seen that the presumption of his being des- 
 tined to enter it altogether at last, is not a 
 little increased. 
 
 Passing now from human nature to inquire 
 of physical nature through the same inter- 
 preter what its teaching is as to its having 
 anything at last to send on into the spirit 
 world, its answer at first is even more discour- 
 aging than was the opening result of its in- 
 quiries within. If the universe is full of 
 evolution, — forces which build up, it is full 
 also of dissolution, forces which tear down. 
 
 "Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good, 
 And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the 
 mud." 
 
268 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 The flower unfolds into beauty but to fade into 
 dust; the forest into verdure, but to drop into 
 death; the animal into strength but to age 
 into weakness. Mountains, rocks, continents 
 are only the flowers of a little longer day; 
 species, races, nations, only the animals of a 
 little larger growth. While minds grow god- 
 like with maturing years and have their 
 thoughts widened with the process of the suns, 
 yet as the years ripen more and the suns pro- 
 ceed farther, even minds sink earthward and 
 have their thoughts narrowed again. Write at 
 twenty-five the inspiring words, — 
 
 "Not in vain the distance beacons, forward let us 
 range," 
 
 and at eighty-five the despairing wail, — 
 
 "Gone the cry of forward, forward, lost within a 
 gath'ring gloom." 
 
 And with birth, growth and decay the history 
 of all the separate parts of the universe, how 
 direct appears the inference that it will finally 
 be the same with the universe as a whole, its life 
 wither as the rose, its humanity perish with the 
 animals from which it sprang, its ripened star 
 fruit 
 
A SPIRIT WORLD 269 
 
 "World by world drop mellowed off 
 The winkling stalk of time," 
 
 and its mighty trunk, dead at the core and dead 
 in its every nebulous branch, tumble back like 
 the tree into the chaos from which it came. 
 
 Direct, however, as such an inference seems, 
 it is really only nature's outside answer, only a 
 method of condemning superficiality in her stu- 
 dents such as she uses everywhere. Going 
 deeper down into her teachings, going, espe- 
 cially, with evolutionary principles as our 
 guide, it will be found that nature's old path- 
 way of death, hitherto so full of darkness, is 
 itself partly luminous with life's light, that out 
 of its very decay there shines a mild phos- 
 phorescent glow. And, faint though it may 
 be, as compared with what we could wish for, 
 yet with so many of the other lights paling on 
 which in the past humanity has relied, it surely 
 is well to open our eyes as widely as possible 
 to its revelations. 
 
 What, then, is death as interpreted by this 
 new philosophy? Not the antagonist of life, 
 not a destroyer who wholly undoes what growth 
 accomplishes; but only one of a larger life's 
 conditions, only a movement one way of a grow- 
 ing universe's mighty heart-beat. Two of the 
 
270 TPIE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 great principles of evolution, as you well know, 
 are the struggle for existence between different 
 agencies, and the survival of the fittest. Na- 
 ture has used these in the realm of animals and 
 plants between death and unbroken life; and 
 paradoxical as it sounds, it is literally true that 
 death has survived because in the struggle it 
 has been found the fittest to make animals and 
 plants live. It has come about in this way: 
 among the original protoplasmic cells in which 
 all life began, variation produced some that 
 continued their lives and produced their off- 
 spring by simply dividing themselves and never 
 dying; others that continued their lives by dif- 
 ferentiating themselves into two kinds without 
 dividing, one of which nourished the other and 
 after reproducing its offspring out of them, 
 itself died. Some of the first kind, dividing 
 and redividing as fast as they grew, have come 
 through all the geologic eons to this day, are 
 the ones, as Weismann has shown that thus 
 far have been immortal. But they have never 
 get beyond their original ceU life, — could not, 
 because simply repeating themselves by divi- 
 sion they had no extra cells to be used up in 
 ministering to higher vital functions, no chance 
 for variation in their offspring, and nothing in 
 themselves for improved environments to act 
 
A SPIRIT WORLD 271 
 
 upon. They are the amoebic forms which are 
 to be found any summer day in our ditches and 
 pools, — down there that we have to go to find 
 earth's genuine immortals, not to any French 
 academy, — are likewise the world's genuine 
 conservatives, and real unadulterated first 
 families. 
 
 On the other hand, the cells which began life 
 with dying are the ones that have forever pro- 
 gressed. Keeping their differentiations to- 
 gether they could organize and use a part of 
 their number up in other functions than those 
 of reproduction. When the parents died, a 
 vast amount of the old habits and conserva- 
 tisms that were fitted only for an old environ- 
 ment died out of the race with them. With a 
 new set of cells to be built up around the trans- 
 mitted ones in each generation, there was a 
 chance for variation and the new environment 
 to make improvements. The children to be as 
 good as their parents, had to be better. So 
 life has gone on, mounting with each set of 
 deaths into higher and higher and higher forms, 
 till it has culminated in man. Do you want to 
 see the contrast between the outcomes of the 
 struggle for existence between these two prin- 
 ciples, dying and continued living, look at a 
 scientist in his laboratory bending his eyes over 
 
272 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 his 80,000 power microscope and the wriggling 
 amoeba in its object glass, that he is using all 
 its powers to see. 
 
 It is a process which is still going on in the 
 man. He lives by dying. The reproductive 
 cells out of which he is bom remain immortal, 
 but all the somatic ones by which he grows 
 and acts, are with every moment having some 
 of their number used up and replaced by new 
 ones. That is what eating is — filling up the 
 ranks of the little killed cell-soldiers in life's 
 battle with fresh recruits. Love and life have 
 always been known to have a close connection 
 with each other. But how.? It is through dy- 
 ing, — the skeleton death the finest who joins 
 their hands and speaks their benediction. The 
 undying cells continue life by division, the dy- 
 ing ones by uniting. The sex relation among 
 animals came into existence side by side with 
 their mortality. Strange and wonderful still 
 is their connection. The thrill of reproduc- 
 tion is the thrill of death. If to love is to live, 
 to love is also equally to die. And in science 
 the real figure of what is called the last enemy 
 is not a skeleton but the blooming cheek and 
 rounded limbs of youth filled with that sex at- 
 traction which draws men and maidens to- 
 gether, — cupid's arrows that are death's real 
 darts. 
 
A SPIRIT WORLD 
 
 It is a law which holds eqiially good in so- 
 cial relations and with regard to humanity as 
 a whole. Individuals, institutions, races, reli- 
 gions are but larger cells. The conservatism 
 that would preserve them would keep society 
 forever in its protoplasmic state. It is by 
 their dying that the world increases in its finer 
 life. As Wendell Phillips used to say: "Na- 
 ture's method of reform is to kill off the old and 
 train up the young." Humanity's march is a 
 funeral march, — one-half of all the stepping 
 stones of progress gravestones, the brightest 
 vista of earth's future that which opens 
 through its tombs. We do well to cover our 
 dead with flowers, well to adorn our cemeteries 
 with lawns and groves and pleasant things, 
 for they symbolize as nothing else can, the 
 ever finer life which is to grow out of them. 
 Personal mortality written out scientifically 
 means social immortality ; the burial of the in- 
 dividual the resurrection of the race. It is 
 dead lips that speak the world's better proph- 
 ecies; the pyramids of Egypt that catch on 
 their peaks with each rising sun a fairer light 
 of man's new day than ever flashed on her 
 thrones. 
 
 "My sister sunshine smiled on me. 
 And of my visage made a shade. 
 
274 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 Behold, she cried, the mystery 
 
 Of which thou art afraid. 
 For death is but a tenderness, 
 
 A shadow that unclouded love 
 Hath fashioned in its own excess 
 
 Of radiance from above." 
 
 But accepting this as the interpretation which 
 evolution gives of death in this world and for 
 the race here, what light, it may be asked, does 
 it throw on it with reference to another world 
 and the individual soul? To find it conducive 
 to a higher life and a blessing on so large a 
 scale is surely something even in this direction 
 — affords at any rate the presumption that 
 what is a beneficence and has an upward trend 
 for the whole, cannot be entirely the opposite 
 in its bearing on the parts. Look first and 
 see what it really does in its dealings with the 
 parts beginning with the humblest ones, even 
 here. 
 
 The leaves of the tree unfolding into beauty 
 with the breath of spring, do indeed, with au- 
 tumn's waning suns, fall withered to the 
 ground, and to the casual glance it seems as 
 if the tree which bore them, had returned, at 
 the year's close, to the exact condition it was 
 in at the year's beginning. But its condition 
 is not the same. Something out of each tiny 
 leaf has gone into the wood of the tree, a bal- 
 
A SPIRIT WORLD 275 
 
 ance over death, as it were, the leaf's little 
 soul, — which is stored up in it as the 
 stock with which to begin its next year's 
 growth. 
 
 The tree lives fifty, seventy, a hundred years, 
 and then that too dies. But death even then 
 does not put things all back where they were 
 at the start. The soil beneath it is made the 
 richer by its decaying wood, and its fruit has 
 gone from year to year as the food of beasts 
 and birds and as the seed of other trees, and 
 it is in them that something out of it still lives. 
 These in their turn perish, but their instincts, 
 habits, experience, life, — a subtle essence out 
 of all they have gathered up, is transmitted 
 to their offspring, helping to develop the spe- 
 cies, genus, order, to which they belong. Spe- 
 cies, genus, order in the long course of ages 
 die out, as in many a "scarped cliff and quar- 
 ried stone" we have the evidence ; but it is only 
 to have new ones with an inheritance of what 
 is best in the old ones born in their place — a 
 point where Darwin's theory as to the origin of 
 species supplies grandly what otherwise would 
 be a missing link. And by and by, as the result 
 of all these livings and dyings, man becomes a 
 possibility in nature, man at first, indeed, but 
 little above the brutes, but by a continuance of 
 the same process, the living and Hying of in- 
 
276 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 dividuals, tribes, nations, civilizations, religions, 
 each adding something to the stock, man at 
 last in the full splendor of his nineteenth cen- 
 tury estate. 
 
 All growth repeats thus the growth of a 
 single tree, is itself really the growth of a 
 larger tree, the mighty tree Yggdrasil, as our 
 Scandinavian ancestors called it; all Junes do 
 what Lowell has sung so poetically of a single 
 June, 
 
 "Every clod feels a stir of might, 
 
 An instinct within it which reaches and towers 
 And groping blindly above it for light, 
 Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers," 
 
 and then to a soul in man. And it is in man, 
 individual and social, that the accumulated 
 essence of all these climbings is stored up, in 
 his soul that all of them which is finest and 
 best, freed by their dyings from what was crude 
 and temporary still lives, an immortality, you 
 see, infinitely higher than that of the bare origi- 
 nal protoplasmic cells that death has never 
 touched. 
 
 But what is to be the final result of this 
 mighty process still going on, what the com- 
 pleted outcome of these myriad accumulations 
 of life over death that the world is getting 
 full of.? 
 
A SPIRIT WORLD 277 
 
 For awhile the answer, apparently sanctioned 
 by science, was the unfolding here on earth of 
 a perfect race, living in a perfect world, a real 
 Eden in the future that would more than equal 
 the storied one of the past, 
 
 "Every tiger madness muzzled, every serpent pas- 
 sion killed. 
 Every grim ravine a garden, every blazing desert 
 tilled," 
 
 and then the concentration of all nature's 
 forces ever after in its preservation. 
 
 It is a beautiful conception, the coming in- 
 deed here on earth of a kingdom of heaven, 
 an immortality not of ourselves as individuals, 
 but of our race, of all that is best in ourselves 
 and in all past races going on to live in others, 
 the immortality George Eliot has sung so 
 charmingly in her "Choir Invisible." 
 
 But it is an immortality that we now know, 
 as a matter of scientific forecast, can never be 
 realized. The earth will indeed reach In the 
 far future its stage not of perfection, but of 
 betterness. Its golden age when all that earth 
 can be, it will be. But it will not remain at 
 that stage forever, any more than the October 
 fruit will always remain on the tree, or the 
 June sun always in the summer sky. The law 
 of death will indeed be carried out then the 
 
278 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 same as it is now, — after ripeness decay, after 
 evolution dissolution. Humanity will become 
 an old man, society a withered flower, civiliza- 
 tion a fallen tree, the world a dilapidated 
 house. A time will come when its last child will 
 be born, its last love-word spoken, its last man, 
 sole heir of all its treasures, look over his king- 
 dom, a time when the earth itself shall be a 
 vast tomb without a breath of air to stir its 
 stillness or a falling raindrop to break its peace, 
 a time when this whole material universe, its 
 every sun expired, its every motion made, sink 
 back to that from which it came. And with 
 such a fate before it, evidently we must seek 
 some other answer than that of a continuance 
 here for all that evolution through the ages 
 has accumulated in human souls. What else 
 must it be, — the death of these also, the ab- 
 sorption of them back into Deity, or like a 
 flame the blowing of them out altogether.'' 
 
 It is an answer that in the light of evolution 
 has a meaning of horror to it such as it never 
 did before, one against which man's whole 
 moral nature, one of the choicest products of 
 evolution, instinctively revolts, one which 
 makes the universe a tragedy in comparison 
 with which all the tragedies ever enacted in it, 
 sink into insignificance. Think for a moment of 
 all the enormous cost at which even up to what 
 
A SPIRIT WORLD 279 
 
 it is now, it has been evolved, — of the myriad 
 brutes that toiled on its foundations before the 
 advent of man, and of the myriads since, that 
 have died to furnish it with food; of the sav- 
 age races that groped their way through the 
 chill and dark of long glacier ages and super- 
 stition's nights to civilization's dawn; of the 
 mothers who have travailed in pain to bring 
 forth its children; of the workmen who have 
 wrought in weary mines and fields and factories 
 to heap up its material treasures ; of the vast 
 armies that have fought and bled and died in 
 battle agonies to decide its questions ; of the 
 horrible sufferings that have come from its ac- 
 cidents ; of the thinkers and scholars who have 
 delved and soared, and line by line have sought 
 out its truths ; of the singers whose inspired 
 souls have poured out its treasures of poetry 
 and song, and of the martyr throngs who gen- 
 eration after generation have laid down their 
 property, their lives, their all, on its altars of 
 liberty, religion and reform ; — and what, with 
 such an ending, is the good, at last, of their 
 life-long toil, what the advantage, when the 
 summing up comes, of the martyr's devotion and 
 the patriot's zeal, what the difference weighed 
 in their final dust between virtue and vice, 
 saint and sinner, Jesus and Judas, a life among 
 the stars and a life among the clods ? 
 
280 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 "Spring, summer, autumn and winter, and all these 
 
 revolutions of the earth, 
 All new, old revolutions of empires, — change of 
 
 the tides, — what is all of it worth? 
 What the philosophies, all the sciences, poesy, 
 
 varying voices of prayer, 
 All that is noblest, all that is basest, all that is 
 
 filthy and all that is fair? 
 What is it all, if we all of us end but in being our 
 
 own corpse coffins at last. 
 Swallowed up in vastness, lost in silence, drowned 
 
 in the deeps of a meaningless past? 
 What but a murmur of gnats in the room, or a mo- 
 ment's anger of bees in a hive?" 
 
 Of course the difference between them is im- 
 mense as we go along; of course, taken day by 
 day and hour by hour, it is better to do right 
 than wrong, live nobly than live meanly; and 
 with all the world's sorrow and pain, it must 
 from the very start have had a preponderating 
 amount of happiness, otherwise it never would 
 have evolved at all. 
 
 But this alone does not satisfy — does not 
 really give any meaning to an evolution which 
 in the end evolves nothing. It takes something 
 more than happiness, more even than virtue's 
 happiness, to make life worth living, takes an 
 object ahead for the virtue to enable virtue to 
 be really happy, or, perhaps, even to exist at all. 
 
A SPIRIT WORLD 281 
 
 A poor tramp, asking of a man something to 
 eat and set by him to wheeling sand from one 
 side of the road to the other and back again, 
 over and over, to earn the food, after trying 
 it a few times rebelled at the task, and asked 
 for something, even though harder, that would 
 be of some use. "Why," asked his employer, 
 "what difference does it make whether you 
 wheel sand back and forth, or dig a well, so 
 long as I pay you for it the same wages?" He 
 could not explain the difference in words, but 
 he felt somehow in his miserable tramp soul 
 that there was a difference, and that a life spent 
 so would be more thoroughly a waste than to 
 stroll along the country roads, doing nothing, 
 or to lie down at once in the desert dust and 
 die. What now is a universe beginning and 
 ending in fire-mist but such a shoveling of its 
 atom sand from one side of eternity to the 
 other, all without final use ajid having its myriad 
 shovelers do it simply to get their meals.'' And 
 however excellent the meals may be as the work- 
 men go along, having even happiness for one of 
 their viands, who will not say with the tramp, 
 that rather than waste life so, it would have 
 been better to have had its potencies lie down 
 forever undeveloped in their original atom 
 heap ? 
 
 Directly opposite to this is the answer that 
 
282 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 evolution must necessarily give to the question 
 of what is to become of its gains, stored up 
 human souls, when this material universe shall 
 reach its end. To say that they are to end 
 and that out of what held them nothing is to 
 come, is to contradict its. own fundamental 
 teaching as displayed everywhere else, — is to 
 make nature after acting for countless years 
 along the line of evoking out of every other 
 death some higher forms either of life, or of 
 life's dwelling, when it comes to the highest and 
 finest thing of all, a universe, reverse its prac- 
 tice, give up its principle. If true to itself, 
 it must say, rather, that as out of the myriad 
 dying things of the past, — seeds, animals, na- 
 tions, races, civilizations, religions, there have 
 come, as a rule, ever other finer and better 
 things up to mind and soul, so when the en- 
 casements of mind and soul, including the world 
 itself, are destroyed, out of their dying, by the 
 same law, there will come something finer and 
 better still, into which their life, their growth, 
 their essence shall go. 
 
 What can this finer thing be? Nothing 
 made of matter, for in the final dissolution all 
 material forms must necessarily disappear. 
 What but the spiritual part of the world, the 
 human souls, in which the finer results of evolu- 
 tion are already stored up, leaving the material 
 
A SPIRIT WORLD 283 
 
 universe to be resolved back to its nebulous 
 mist and possibly to be used over and over 
 again, as the elements of our bodies now are, 
 for the evolutions of other and yet other ad- 
 ditions to the spirit world, or, as a field is, on 
 which in time's unnumbered larger years for 
 repeated crops of souls to be raised? 
 
 It is not an answer that gives us all the par- 
 ticulars that we may wish to know, is not one 
 that is without some very decided limitations in 
 its scope. But it does give us the central 
 truth that we want assurance of and it carries 
 with it, if not directly, yet by implication a war- 
 rant for not a few of our great hopes. It 
 will be a better state than our present one, for 
 that is what in the past all evolution has meant. 
 Yet not a new and strange one, for its begin- 
 nings are what we have become familiar with 
 here on earth. Its immortality will be indi- 
 vidual and personal, for it is in individuals and 
 persons, as the highest outcome of evolution, 
 that what it is constituted of is stored up here ; 
 and with no new beings born out of them, as 
 they are in the continuation of life and its 
 qualities in the natural world; with the new 
 birth, as we know it already, the birth of new 
 spiritual faculties in the individual soul, — the 
 only conceivable way of an evolution from 
 earth into the spirit world is through this 
 
284 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 world's conscious spiritual beings. And as 
 what is possible for one soul quickened with 
 spiritual life, must be possible for all souls in 
 a like manner quickened, and as we have the 
 eridence on earth that evolution does not wait 
 for the perfecting of the old before starting 
 the new, physical life appearing long before 
 the completion of the physical earth, — the child 
 before the parents' maturity, and the fruit of 
 the tree while the tree itself is yet growing, 
 so it is a legitimate inference that the evolution 
 of spiritual beings into the spirit world should 
 not wait till the far-off ripening of humanity's 
 stock on earth, but should begin with its first 
 dying child. 
 
 All honor, then, to the philosophy which gives 
 the world this ray of new light, imperfect 
 though it is, on that old, old way, so dim and 
 to many so dark, which all earth's children 
 sooner or later have to travel. It derives it, 
 as you see, not from a miracle, or from the in- 
 terference in any way with the common laws of 
 nature, and not by bringing in any new force 
 or principle, but from nature's ordinary work- 
 ing and by supposing it to go right along, 
 using the forces and principles it has been act- 
 ing on from the starting of its first atom feet, 
 — ^justifies the poet's words. 
 
A SPIRIT WORLD 285 
 
 "Gone forever! Ever? No — for since our dying 
 race began 
 Ever and forever was the leading light of man." 
 
 It takes the material world at its darkest place, 
 its myriad dissolutions, and out of its very 
 deaths wrings the lessons of life, — grapples the 
 most terrible weapon of doubt and turns it into 
 a beam of faith. It has a ray of light, also, not 
 for humanity alone, but for all other animal 
 creatures walking with it the same dark way, 
 gives a meaning to their lives, their toils, their 
 deaths such as nothing else ever has, makes the 
 spirit world the outcome, not of human growth 
 alone, but of the whole earth, something to 
 which the lowest monad as well as the loftiest 
 man has contributed a part. For as the best of 
 everything which has ever lived has remained 
 over and helped to make human beings and hu- 
 man conditions and is represented in their lives 
 now, so it will have helped to make all that 
 human beings will ever be, however high they 
 mount, and will be represented in them through 
 all years and all worlds. It gives animals, if 
 not individual immortality, yet the immortality 
 which comes from "the sweet presence of a good 
 diffused and in diffusion ever more intense"; 
 is the scientific endorsement of Tennyson's 
 
286 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 hopeful trust, that "not a worm is cloven in 
 vain ;" is a side truth from Darwin's maligned 
 "Origin of Species" which lights up religiously 
 what realms of nature's economy as to brute 
 suffering hitherto so awfully dark; and under 
 it Emerson's mystic words as to nature's inner 
 meaning become how literally true. 
 
 "Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know 
 What rainbows teach and sunsets show, 
 Verdict which accumulates 
 From lengthened scroll of human fates, 
 Voice of earth to earth returned, 
 Prayer of saints that inly burned, — 
 Saying what is excellent 
 As God Uves is permanent?" 
 
XIV 
 
 THE WARRANT FOR PRAYER UNDER 
 EVOLUTION 
 
 The problem of prayer, and especially of its 
 petitioning element, is unquestionably one of 
 the most difficult to the modern thinking mind 
 of any in the whole range of theology. There 
 are many persons, not sceptics or sinners, but 
 cordial believers and doers of religion in its 
 other parts, who feel that its praying for di- 
 vine favors is the mere tradition of a darker 
 age, inconsistent with the larger views of Deity 
 and of the divine economy that men have come 
 to in our time, and is what reverence itself 
 demands should be eliminated alike from pri- 
 vate and public worship. Said a respected 
 parishioner to me awhile ago, "I do not see how 
 you as a believer in science and evolution can 
 ask things of God whose giving would be a di- 
 rect violation of their most fundamental prin- 
 ciples ; and for one instead of such prayers I 
 wish you would offer for our meditations simply 
 
 some noble thoughts or lofty aspiration." Its 
 
 287 
 
288 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 practice has actually been given up by many 
 liberal thinkers; and there are others, not yet 
 prepared to drop entirely out of their worship 
 what custom has so long endeared, who would 
 compromise the matter by asking simply for 
 spiritual blessings, or by expecting answers to 
 their petitions only in their reflex influence on 
 themselves, or by making their prayers consist 
 wholly of thanksgiving and praise. 
 
 But the asking element, though not by any 
 means the whole of prayer, is historically its 
 root and starting point. Whatever else it may 
 unfold into, there are times In every person's 
 life when it becomes the central and all-ab- 
 sorbing thing; emergencies when the soul feels 
 it must have not only communion with God, but 
 the direct help, also, of his everlasting arm ; and 
 even to have it exert a beneficial influence on the 
 petitioner himself there must be in it the sin- 
 cerity which can come only from a belief in its 
 outward efficacy. 
 
 It is a matter with regard to which science 
 has indeed hitherto spoken with a most 
 discouraging voice ; but science and es- 
 pecially science in its new garb of evolution, 
 has here, the same as in many other places, two 
 voices that are in some respects directly the op- 
 posites of each other. It is the most radical 
 and destructive, and also the most conservative 
 
THE WARRANT OF PRAYER 289 
 
 and protective, of all forms of thought, — tears 
 off ruthlessly the outside of ancient things, but 
 often keeps its grip on their core when every- 
 thing else, even the most backward-looking 
 philosophy, has given them up, scatters the 
 petals of religion on the ground, as nature is 
 now doing those of the apple tree, but only to 
 unfold beyond them as the apple tree will, the 
 more precious fruit. It seems to me it does so 
 with prayer; and in discussing the subject I 
 want first to set forth the difficulties it puts in 
 the way of its being answered, and then 
 the finer voice with which it tells us, as a part 
 of itself, that it has in a large way always been 
 answered. 
 
 Foremost of its difficulties is the modern 
 view of what the universe really is and of how 
 its affairs are carried on. The view under 
 which prayer originated was that of the world 
 as a comparatively small abode consisting of 
 various independent realms, each presided over 
 by its own special deity who conducted its af- 
 fairs, like a human absolute sovereign, by the 
 direct edicts of his will ; and under such a view 
 of it there was of course no inconsistency 
 in a person's asking his god to do for him one 
 thing rather than another, and to favor his 
 own subjects rather than those of a foreign 
 deity. But under our modern scientific view 
 
290 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 the universe consists of a myriad worlds cor- 
 related with each other in a vast system whose 
 Deity is one all-pervading spirit conducting 
 its affairs by laws and forces which are inher- 
 ent in the thing itself; and to ask to have any 
 event in it made different from what it would 
 naturally be, is apparently to ask to have a 
 new force introduced into it and to have all 
 subsequent events in it made different from 
 their natural course, that is, means an alteration 
 in the very constitution of the universe. 
 
 Then, assuming the possibility of such an- 
 swering so far as Deity is concerned, the dif- 
 ficulties are equally great in the way of its 
 being of any real benefit to man. In the mad- 
 dening maze of things who, as a finite being, can 
 know what to pray for as his real good? How 
 true are the words that 
 
 "We, ignorant of ourselves, 
 Beg often for our harms"; 
 
 and if, to prevent our being cursed by the 
 granting of our requests, we add at the end 
 of them as we ought, "Thy will and not mine 
 be done," why should we not rest in its being 
 done at the start.? Why be to aU the trouble 
 of asking our own will to be done only to wind 
 up with asking it not to he? 
 
 But man is not one alone. The world is fuU 
 
THE WARRANT OF PRAYER 291 
 
 of diverse and clashing interests, some persons 
 praying for one thing and some for another, 
 and how can all be granted their requests, how 
 any of them without an unfatherly partiality? 
 If the prayer be that he will answer the most 
 deserving, what does it imply but the idea that 
 if he was left to himself he would not do so? 
 Or if Dr. Bushnell's notion be accepted that 
 he goes by the will of the majority, what 
 becomes of the doctrine that prayer is 
 the special resource of the weak and soli- 
 tary? 
 
 Men, in planning their business, need a rea- 
 sonable assurance as to the regularity and uni- 
 formity of nature's laws and forces ; but if this 
 regularity and uniformity are liable to be in- 
 terfered with in some emergency by the grant- 
 ing of prayers, so they cannot be depended 
 upon, how great to the rest of God's children 
 would be the harm. Suppose, for instance, 
 that after the weather office at Washington had 
 made up its indications for the day and tele- 
 graphed them all over the country, some humble 
 Christian in Connecticut who wanted rain, or 
 some pious farmer in Massachusetts desiring 
 sunshine, should be able to get his wish granted 
 by kneeling down to "move the arm which moves 
 the world," what would the indications be worth, 
 — what help to the merchant who was planning 
 
292 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 to send his ship to sea, or even to the Sunday- 
 school children who were in doubt about start- 
 ing out on their picnic? 
 
 Then as regards the influence of such peti- 
 tions on the prayer-maker himself, — if always 
 answered, would not the answering as the easiest 
 way of getting things done, almost inevitably 
 slacken his own exertions and in the end make 
 him a mere parasite on Deity; and if answered 
 only occasionally, would not the omissions 
 sooner or later catch him at a time when his ex- 
 pectation of an answer had led him to neglect 
 the precaution he otherwise would have used, 
 so result in a loss that would offset all his g^ins ? 
 A few years ago, while a party of children were 
 playing on the banks of a Western river, one of 
 them fell into its waters and had just lost con- 
 sciousness, when he was seized and dragged a- 
 shore by a noble dog which came bounding along 
 — life was not yet extinct and, if his playmates 
 had been only ordinary unsanctified little boys 
 and girls, they would at once have obeyed the 
 prompting of their natural hearts to rush off 
 to the nearest residence for human help. But 
 they were all nice Sunday-school children taught 
 to look to God for help in emergencies, so they 
 at once knelt around him in prayer to God for 
 his restoration, sentimentally a beautiful sight, 
 but scientifically the worst thing possible, for 
 
THE WARRANT OF PRAYER 293 
 
 when at last older people came, it was too late 
 to use natural means, and the prayer's answer 
 was a dead child. A similar thing has hap- 
 pened again and again to adult devotees. It 
 was experienced in Montreal, a few years ago, 
 on a terrible scale when its more ignoranjt 
 Roman Catholic population insisted on trusting 
 to the intercession of their priests to save them 
 from the smallpox, rather than to the skill of 
 physicians ; and everywhere the disposition to 
 rely on it is one of the greatest obstacles sani- 
 tary science finds in its way. 
 
 It needs to be said, also, that the difficulties 
 in the way of prayer are not confined to peti- 
 tions for material blessings, but are equally 
 strong against those for spiritual good. The 
 unseen world, so far as we know anything about 
 it, is not a separate system of the universe but 
 is under the same reign of law and order, cause 
 and effect, as its visible counterpart. To the 
 larger view it is just as much an interference 
 with the established divine economy to pray 
 for a descent of the spirit as to pray for a 
 descent of rain, just as demoralizing to a man 
 for him to depend on the gift of a revival to 
 get him out of sin as on the gift of health to 
 get him out of disease, or of a miracle to 
 get him out of drowning; and taking these dif- 
 ficulties all together, it is no wonder that 
 
294 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 thoughtful men hg,ve been staggered as to the 
 value of supplicatory prayer. 
 
 What has science to say on the other side? 
 It begins with saying simply this, — that man 
 is a being not of reason and understanding 
 alone, but of instinct and impulse also, and that 
 prayer, its asking element especially, is one of 
 the great primal instincts of our human nature, 
 one of those things like eating and drinking, 
 laughing and crying, loving and living, to which 
 lie is moved, not by any knowledge of their use 
 coming from without, but by an impulse to it 
 coming from within. Men in all ages, all lands, 
 all religions, have prayed. It is not an artificial 
 act imposed on the world by bibles, churches and 
 priests, but a prompting of the soul out of which 
 bibles, churches and priests arose ; and though 
 with the progress of civilization and the smooth 
 play of our ordinary life it may seem to be lost, 
 yet in all times of danger and distress, when the 
 depths of our being are thrown open and that 
 deeper subconscious self, which in all of us lies 
 beneath the surface conscious one, asserts itself, 
 it reappears as strong as ever, and man in spite 
 of learning, logic, atheism, sin, breaks forth 
 into prayer. 
 
 What does this mean? Until recently it was 
 supposed to have no meaning at all, or, at any 
 rate, as against the deductions of reason and 
 
THE WARRANT OF PRAYER 295 
 
 the understanding, to be only as a feather 
 against the universe, or as the mind of a brute 
 against the mind of a man. But within the 
 last few years science, under the guidance of 
 evolution, has been studying the instincts alike 
 in brutes and in man, and it finds them full of 
 profoundest meaning, finds truths in them 
 equaling all that logic and learning in their 
 farthest bounds have ever reached. Man's con- 
 scious faculties, his memory, judgment, reason, 
 imagination, the ones that of old were thought 
 to be so godlike and whose deliverances received 
 such exclusive attention, are now beginning to 
 appear as only the outside of the mind, only as 
 the sunlit peaks of a mountain, as compared 
 with the immensit_y of the earth out of which 
 they spring and the grandeur of the heavens 
 to which they point. Who has not stood under 
 the glittering skies some clear summer night, 
 and set his eyes wandering and his thoughts 
 leaping and his soul wondering, first among the 
 starry orbs within his sight, then beyond our 
 own galaxy, beyond the farthest nebula, beyond 
 anything the telescope's keen vision or the 
 camera's patient retina has ever reached, into 
 that vastness of space where the flight even of 
 thought grows weary, and not been thrilled 
 with the mystery which in spite of science, 
 — rather all the more through science, there still 
 
296 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 is in our physical universe? But under these 
 later investigations we are finding that it is yet 
 more thrilling, more suggestive, more an appeal 
 to wonder and worship to stand on the shore of 
 our own souls and look off beyond sense, beyond 
 reason, beyond memory, beyond any faculty of 
 the mind we are conscious of, into that vast 
 spiritual realm that is a part even of the 
 humblest human being. 
 
 The instincts belonging to this realm of the 
 unconscious self are now known to be inherited 
 habits, — faculties as old as our race, some of 
 them as old as life itself. They began as con- 
 scious acts needed for food, defense and the 
 keeping of their possessor physically alive. 
 They were done over and over till the prompt- 
 ing to them became fixed in the individual doer, 
 and as such was transmitted to its offspring. 
 Those that kept them up survived as being the 
 fittest ; those that failed to keep them up 
 perished in the struggle for existence with no 
 ofi'spring, as being the unfit, and so generation 
 after generation they have come down to our 
 day as the inborn means by which every crea- 
 ture is enabled to live. The wild goose takes 
 its flight north or south with each changing 
 season because it is the descendant of geese 
 which among the many that tried other direc- 
 tions and so were lost, found these to be the 
 
THE WARRANT OF PRAYER 29T 
 
 ones by which to get their requisite food and 
 surroundings, and did it year after year, and 
 flock after flock, till it became a habit fixed in 
 their blood. The newborn babe when liungry 
 or hurt or in danger, cries out for its mother 
 to feed it and save it, because it- is the descend- 
 ant of babes who, ages ago, out in their wilder- 
 ness home, found such crying to be the surest 
 way of attracting the mother's attention, the 
 ones who did not so cry being the ones who 
 oftenest perished. Why does the man who 
 falls into the water, or into danger of any 
 kind, instinctively cry out for human help, 
 even when no human help is in sight.'' It 
 is because men in past ages, placed in like 
 circumstances, have found that the cry as 
 a whole, though amid many disappointments, 
 has been of some avail in bringing them 
 assistance. So with their cries to God, even 
 when no God is seen or believed in. They 
 are the voices of the race ; and they are uttered 
 — there is and can be no other explanation 
 — ^because the race amid a myriad disappoint- 
 ments has found that somehow they had a 
 saving power, and because those parts of the 
 race which uttered them the most, are the ones 
 that amid a myriad dangers have, pulled 
 through. 
 
 The praying which has thus conie down to us 
 
298 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 as an instinct of the race, is of course based on 
 the old idea of its gaining an outside super- 
 natural help, and as such it has to be held, as I 
 have shown, in direct opposition alike to the 
 science and religion of our day. But now ad- 
 mitting this, the question further arises, is this 
 idea absolutely essential to prayer, or is it 
 possible to drop it so as to harmonize the two 
 things and to still retain its real life? What is 
 the essential thing about prayer to God? Not 
 surely the formal asking of him for a blessing ; 
 not the idea of its coming from without nature ; 
 not the idea that it must be entirely a gift. It 
 is simply a desire for it directed towards him, 
 wherever he is, and to have it come through 
 him by whatever means. As the familiar hymn 
 expresses it, — 
 
 "Prayer is the soul's sincere desire 
 Uttered or unexpressed, 
 The motion of a hidden fire 
 That trembles in the breast." 
 
 And as Coleridge has said, — 
 
 "Ere on my bed my limbs I lay 
 It hath not been my use to pray 
 With moving lips or bended knees, 
 But silently by slow degrees, 
 My spirit I to love compose 
 In humble trust my eyelids close 
 
THE WARRANT OF PRAYER 299 
 
 With reverential resignation, 
 No wish concernedj no thought expressed, 
 
 Only a sense of supplication, 
 A sense o'er all my soul impressed 
 That I am weak, yet not unblessed. 
 Since in me, round me, everywhere 
 Eternal strength and wisdom are." 
 
 And this desire, this inward sense of supplica- 
 tion, is what underneath all its supernaturalism 
 has existed in all ages and all lands as the real 
 heart of prayer, this with all its supernat- 
 uralism stripped off that may still remain as 
 strong a light as ever. 
 
 The element, however, thus found in it is not 
 only reconcilable with reason and science, but 
 is demanded by them everywhere as one of the 
 most vital elements of all success. Desire, ambi- 
 tion, the earnest craving for a thing "uttered 
 or unexpressed," this is the primal source of all 
 getting, this the thing in the farmer, the 
 mechanic, the artist, the scholar, the Christian, 
 without which labor, acquaintance with the laws 
 and forces of nature, preaching, the faculty of 
 reason, and belief in right, truth and God, are 
 of but little use. A man may be equipped with 
 everything else, a good body, keen senses, a 
 brilliant mind, and a noble soul ; but, if he has 
 no desires for anything, no inward heart of 
 prayer for it, nothing will ever be attained. 
 
300 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 It is desire, not in the language of prayer- 
 meetings alone, but of all science, which "moves 
 the arm which moves the world." The whole 
 universe is divided between this element of 
 prayer on the one side, and its answer on the 
 other. Every planet and every atom asks for 
 companionship ; every blade of grass for the 
 sunshine, every flower for the dew, every insect 
 for its food, every animal for growth and hap- 
 piness, every faculty of our being for the means 
 of life; and when man voices his asking in the 
 words of prayer, instead of its being unwar- 
 ranted by anything which science can find in 
 nature, it is only his part of a grand litany in 
 which every living thing from animalcule to 
 angel, joins, and whose answer God is giving in 
 every thread of gravity, every drop of dew, 
 every ray of sunshine, every throb of love, 
 every word of truth, every resurrection of 
 springtime and every raising him to himself. 
 
 But still, it may be said, admitting all this, 
 admitting that the essence of prayer is desire 
 and as such is rational, why not call it desire? 
 Why not cherish and nourish it like all other 
 desires, with its own appropriate food.? Why 
 not direct it like all other desires, to its own 
 special objects, — the desire for food to food, 
 the desire of truth to truth, the desire for good- 
 ness to what is good.'' Why call it a prayer 
 
THE WARRANT OF PRAYER 301 
 
 and direct it to a God? The question is 
 a fair one, is the last link in the chain of a 
 prayer's logic, often, however, left unforged; 
 and is capable, I believe, of a full scientific 
 answer. 
 
 How is it that our desires are nourished, 
 strengthened and directed to their appropriate 
 objects? One way is by their use, by the culti- 
 vation of those special faculties which lead to 
 them, and by the food for them which exists 
 naturally in those objects themselves. For 
 instance, if a man wants more truth, he turns 
 his desires for it in that direction, cultivates 
 his intellectual faculties, and uses each item of 
 truth which is attained, as the food with which 
 to nourish his desire for more. But this is only 
 a part of the process. Another thing needed 
 is quickening, inspiration, enlightenment, and 
 the enlarging, refining and uplifting of the 
 whole soul. We know how it is with the mind, 
 know how much brighter, quicker, more eager 
 for truth, and more capable of its discernment 
 it is at one time than at others. Why ? Not be- 
 cause the mind itself is changed either as to its 
 desires or faculties; but because it is inspired, 
 touched somehow by an influence from the out- 
 side which is breathed into itself. So with all 
 our faculties, even down to our muscles and 
 nerves ; their strength and capacity depend not 
 
302 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 on themselves alone, but on something which 
 operates upon them from without, almost as 
 much as the organ's music does on the bellows' 
 breath. What is the source of this quickening? 
 What but that great Divine Spirit which is all 
 around us, in matter, in nature, in food, in love, 
 in truth, in everything, that wonderful some- 
 thing whose existence no science can deny, which 
 is recognized by Spencer and Darwin as much 
 as Jesus and Paul, and in which philosophy and 
 religion alike say we live and move and have our 
 being, that breath which makes the great organ 
 of the universe alive with music, and that 
 radiance which is 
 
 "The master light of all our seeing 
 The fountain light of all our day." 
 
 And how are we to draw it from this great foun- 
 tain and make it available for our individual 
 enlightenment and inspiration? How conscious- 
 ly, but through prayer? We know how it is with 
 the illuminating gas of our cities. Out from its 
 great reservoir there is a network of pipes going 
 to every house, some larger and same smaller, 
 some clear and some choked with dust, and 
 ample pressure to send it into every cellar and 
 attic as well as every parlor. But this alone is 
 not enough. To have it illumine, the stop-cock 
 at the end of the pipe must be turned and the 
 
THE WARRANT OF PRAYER 303 
 
 match applied. And all this is voluntary. 
 The citizen can live without it, grope around 
 with a taper, or by the aid of his other senses 
 do some things in the dark. But when the stop 
 is turned and the match applied, what an in- 
 spiration it is ! How much better he can see 
 to work, to eat, to read, to play, to do every- 
 thing! And to use it thus who will say it is a 
 mere superstition.'' Who that we might as well 
 direct our desire for light at once to the light, 
 rather than use the network of gas pipes? 
 Who say that the whole thing is not a grand 
 outcome of true science.? So with prayer. 
 There is a spiritual network of communion 
 between our souls and the great illuminating 
 Light of the universe, something which runs to 
 every race and every man ; and prayer is the 
 stop-cock with which to turn it on. We can 
 live without it, can gratify many of our desires 
 by directing them right to food, love, truth and 
 goodness themselves, can grope around with our 
 ordinary senses and do some work. But to 
 turn on the divine light, to have our whole 
 being filled with its radiance, — who cannot see 
 how philosophical it is that it should help us 
 the better to eat, read, work, play, do every- 
 thing.? Who not see that desire expressed in 
 this way may be certainly not less effective than 
 that which goes for them directly, in securing 
 
304 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 us food, truth, love and goodness, all, too, in 
 perfect harmony with the laws alike of material 
 and human nature? 
 
 Or take another analogy, that of air. It is 
 not muscle or nerve or brain or bone or soul or 
 any part of man himself. It cannot be used 
 directly to run with, or read with, or see with, 
 or work with, or love with; and though it is all 
 around us, a person ignorant of its real prop- 
 erties, who wished for help in his pursuits, 
 might well sneer at its value. But we all of us 
 know practically that it is to us the very breath 
 of life; that muscle, nerve, bone, brain, every- 
 thing depend on it for their efficiency; that, if 
 a man desires to run, read, see, work, love or do 
 anything, he must first of all desire air; and 
 that though the lowest animals, the amoeba, 
 rhizopod and sponge, and even the embryo 
 chUd, may exist without any lungs for it, yet 
 that they are developed and increase just as we 
 go up the scale of being, and that they reach 
 their fuU evolution only in perfect man. So 
 with prayer. It is indeed "the Christian's vital 
 breath" ; is the process by which the soul takes 
 in the spiritual atmosphere that is all around it. 
 The inspiration it gives is felt in our study, 
 work, amusement, everything we do, giving an 
 answer to our desires for them so, as no direct 
 reaching out of our faculties to them could. 
 
THE WARRANT OF PRAYER 305 
 
 And though a man may get along without it to 
 some extent, it is only as the rhizopod and 
 sponge, without breathing, and, as we mount 
 up into science and civilization, we shall evolve 
 not out of it, but like the physical man, into its 
 larger, deeper, fuller use. 
 
 And now, friends, have I not given you a 
 good, honest, rational and scientific justification 
 of prayer, recognized all its difficulties and in- 
 congruities, but met them with laws and facts 
 on the other side that are equally solid and in- 
 surmountable, shown that the only thing needed 
 to make it harmonize with the evolution of the 
 outward world is the parallel evolutions of its 
 own intrinsic meaning, and found a place for 
 it alike in our deepest instincts and our loftiest 
 and broadest philosophy? It is thus, as I 
 understand, which is in the true line of evo- 
 lution, not to root up and tear out and throw 
 away the old growths of the world anywhere, 
 but to throw off their old husks, unfold them 
 into richer and diviner meanings, and reap from 
 them new blossoms and new fruit. And, meet- 
 ing together from Sunday to Sunday, as pro- 
 gressives, liberals and evolutionists, instead of 
 relaxing or giving up prayer, shall we not on 
 this very ground, lift up our common wants all 
 the more to him who is the God alike of science 
 and Scripture, and who, as one result of this 
 
S06 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 very evolution, has enabled us to proclaim "Thy 
 servant, Lord, hath found it in his heart to 
 pray." 
 
 "For what are men better than sheep or goats 
 That nourish a blind hfe within the brain, 
 If having hands they hft them not in prayer 
 Both for themselves and those who call them 
 
 friends. 
 For so the whole round earth is every way 
 Bound by gold chains about the feet of God." 
 
 And the instinct in the human soul which 
 prompts it with life's changing seasons to take 
 its flight in the direction of the spirit world, 
 and in God's child, when hungry or hurt or in 
 danger, to cry out to him for help, must have 
 had a similar origin. Men pray because they 
 are the descendants of ancestors who somehow 
 found praying a help to them in keeping alive, 
 they being the ones naturally who would have 
 children to transmit it to, so that at last it 
 became fixed in their race, while the ones who 
 did not use this means of help would be the ones 
 naturally to die out and to leave no descendants. 
 There is no other way of accounting for its 
 origin, and this does account for it perfectly. 
 It is what the doctrine of natural selection and 
 survival of the fittest means, the survival not 
 only of species, but of habits, forms, faculties, 
 
THE WARRANT OF PRAYER SOT 
 
 morals, tastes, religions, everything in him which 
 has been of use for safety and sustenance. Its 
 survival is the best possible proof that it has 
 been of such use. And to apply it to prayer 
 is not forcing its meaning, not making an ar- 
 gument of it which is unnatural and far-fetched, 
 but is simply coordinating it with its use in 
 relation to all the rest of our nature and all 
 through the organic world. 
 
 What though its help in continuing life, as 
 compared with that of the strong muscle and 
 the active brain, may have been small. Nature 
 is full of instances, as Darwin has pointed out, 
 where other things as slight as this, an extra 
 feather in the wing, or finer color in the feather, 
 a sweeter tone in the voice, an upward look in 
 the eye — have proved the very additions needed 
 to enable their possessors to come off as victors 
 over their competitors in the struggle for exist- 
 ence, — shows us the lily and the dove as 
 survivors of the paleoron and the pterodactyle, 
 shows us even in human history, Greek swords 
 edged with patriot love, and Cromwellian 
 soldiers weaponed with a psalm, as more than a 
 match for Persian hosts and royal guns ; and 
 it well may have been that the white wing of 
 prayer, the gentle tone of entreaty, the upward 
 look of supplication, devotion's lily and re- 
 
308 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 ligion's dove, have proved of like help in secur- 
 ing a like survival in the case of man. 
 
 It is this, as it seems to me, that is the deeper, 
 sweeter, more trustworthy voice of science with 
 regard to prayer. It does not directly refute 
 the objections that are urged against it by its 
 other voice, does not present special instances 
 here and there of its being answered, but it 
 goes back of them all and shows the whole 
 human race as a proof of its value, shows not 
 by a long chain of reasoning but by a logic 
 which has only one link, the shortest, perhaps, 
 in all the realm of dialectics, that the best proof 
 of its being answered is its being asked. Talk 
 of giving it up now as passed, and as having 
 no standing place in science ! Why science has 
 only just reached out to the realm where its 
 roots really are, has just become large enough 
 itself to afford it room. It finds its seat to be 
 in the oldest part of our nature, in that which 
 goes down through all the strata of conscious 
 life to its primal fires, not likely, therefore, to 
 be blown away by any surface storms. With 
 Emerson it says, — 
 
 "The litanies of nations came 
 Like the volcano's tongue of flame 
 Up from the burning core below, — 
 The canticles of love and woe." 
 
THE WARRANT OF PRAYER 309 
 
 And whatever may be the difficulties of the mind 
 and the understanding as to its answers, it 
 would have us keep up its practice for the very 
 reason given in the old Scripture words that I 
 have taken as a text, because "Thy servant 
 Lord hath found in his heart to pray." 
 
XV 
 
 THE NEW MEANING AND POSITION OF 
 WORK UNDER EVOLUTION 
 
 Doubts about prayer are strongly felt in our 
 day, but the problem of work, so often set up as 
 the easy alternative of prayer, is one which to 
 a vast number of people in our time is infinitely 
 greater and more perplexing, and more in need 
 of light. . The difficulties connected with prayer 
 are in regard to its relations with the material 
 order of the universe, how to adjust it to the 
 reign of law, to the idea of God as a perfect 
 Creator, and to the growth and use of man's 
 scientific and rational powers, and are largely 
 theoretical. The difficulties connected with 
 work are in regard to its relations with the 
 world's moral economy, how to adjust to the 
 reign of love, to the idea of God as a con- 
 siderate Father, and to the growth and use of 
 man's moral and spiritual faculties, and are in- 
 tensely practical. Whether or not to pray is 
 a matter of free choice, is what comes up for 
 
 decision only now and then in some quiet hour 
 310 
 
WORK UNDER EVOLUTION 311 
 
 of meditation or some rare emergency of peril, 
 and is often only a question of pleasant 
 curiosity. Whether or not to work is a matter 
 where the choice is necessity ; is what has to be 
 answered afresh every day and every hour, and 
 is a question of life or death. A person may be 
 an infidel with regard to prayer, may never 
 bend the knee at home for its blessings, or join 
 with others at church in asking for its objects, 
 and his penalty is only the loss of some spiritual 
 good now, or the threat of some physical woe 
 in the far-off future ; but let him be an un- 
 believer with regard to work, refuse to bend his 
 back to it in solitude, or ask for it with others 
 in society, and instantly its penalty comes in 
 hunger, suffering and death. And where there 
 is one man or woman who is wrestling with the 
 knotty points of prayer as a means of obtain- 
 ing good, there are millions who are being 
 crushed in their struggle with work as a means 
 of getting from God the things they need. It 
 is no wonder that a friend said to me: "What 
 the most of us in the Christian Church and every 
 other want to drop is not our prayers, but our 
 work ; wha.t we want justified by religion, not so 
 much our litanies as our labors." Is there any 
 light which modern science can bring to bear 
 on this problem, any new philosophy which 
 better than the old ones can help us to solve its 
 
312 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 meaning and to bear its burdens? It is a 
 question whose religious significance no one can 
 deny. And so, what I did last Sunday for 
 prayer I want now to do for work, discuss it in 
 the light of reason and from the standpoint of 
 evolution. 
 
 We all know the explanation which the old 
 Hebrew Scriptures and the theologies based 
 upon them, give of work. It is the penalty of 
 sin, is the result of the curse pronounced on our 
 first parents because they had eaten of the tree 
 of knowledge in the Garden of Eden. It is an 
 idea which theoretically has been given up. 
 Labor is proclaimed to be a blessing rather than 
 a curse. The world is fuU of sentimental 
 orations on its dignity and divinity. The 
 garlands of poetry have been wreathed around 
 it; and it has been advocated as the true form 
 of prayer, "Orare est laborare." Yet by 
 myriads of God's creatures it is still practically 
 regarded as a curse. Its associations are those 
 of drudgery, dirt and disagreeableness. It 
 takes them away from the playground, the 
 restful couch and the atmosphere of freedom, 
 and gives them the rough field, the dark factory, 
 the narrow counting-room and the tumultuous 
 sea. Hard task-masters, soulless corporations 
 and the loud voice of arbitrary command are 
 its embodiments; and it leaves them with 
 
WORK UNDER EVOLUTION 313 
 
 aching muscles, sensibilities dulled to poetry, 
 beauty, truth and all the high things of the 
 world, and with a pittance of mercenary coin. 
 Is it any wonder that they fail to see in it a 
 blessing; any wonder that the reasons against 
 it from the moral standpoint seem to them even 
 stronger than those against prayer from the 
 standpoint of nature ? A lady of my acquaint- 
 ance who had been very much impressed with 
 the fact that her horse was a great deal more 
 eager and spirited in getting back to his stable 
 than in going from it, and who thought that 
 after standing still all night and perhaps for 
 days he ought to be glad of the chance to ex- 
 ercise himself in a little carriage-pulling, asked 
 the hostler one day whether they all of them had 
 this reluctance to labor, or whether it was a 
 peculiarity of her beast. "Well," said he, with 
 the Yankee art of putting things in the aptest 
 way, "they don't none of them go out laughing 
 when they are hitched up." So with us human 
 beasts of burden; it matters not how senti- 
 mentally we may talk about work, and how 
 delightful it ought to be to engage in it, when 
 the harness is actually put on, we don't any of 
 us go out "laughing" to its wagon-pulling. 
 And yet with one part of our nature regarding 
 it as a curse and set so strongly against it, it 
 is to be recognized here the same as with regard 
 
314 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 to prayer, that there is another part of us which 
 instinctively regards it as a blessing, and which 
 in all ages, the same as with prayer, has drawn 
 us towards it. Man is naturally a working 
 animal. Mingled with the strong leash of 
 necessity which is ever driving him unwilling to 
 his toil, is the gentler cord of love for it, which 
 is ever leading him gladly to its burdens. One 
 of the chief things which distinguishes him from 
 the brutes is the fact that over and above 
 getting enough to satisfy his wants at their 
 present standpoint, he has a little bit of some- 
 thing in his nature which prompts him to put 
 forth an extra blow or two, for other wants not 
 yet wholly developed. It is on this residuum 
 of the attractive over the repulsive in work 
 stored up within, that is built all our wealth, all 
 our civilization, all our progress, this that is 
 the source of that much abused thing, capital. 
 If labor was wholly or preponderatingly a 
 curse, if it did not have a balance of blessing on 
 its side, it would be impossible to account for 
 the habit of it in our race, any more than for 
 that of prayer, or indeed for the race itself. 
 The working members of the human family have 
 survived and have transmitted their instinct for 
 it to their descendants, over the non-working 
 ones, on precisely the same principle as that on 
 which the praying members have survived and 
 
WORK UNDER EVOLUTION 315 
 
 transmitted theirs, the principle that it is the 
 fittest, that is, that it gave them an advantage 
 in the struggle for life over those who worked 
 less, or not at all. And the burdens, the 
 drudgeries and the injustices of labor, the 
 things connected with it which apparently 
 drag men down, blunt their sensibilities to 
 higher things and rank them with the brutes, 
 are an argument against its blessedness only in 
 the same way, and to the same extent, that 
 the superstitions and falsities connected with 
 prayer are an argument against that, — to the 
 extent of its outside drapery and to that alone. 
 
 Admitting now in this general way that labor 
 cannot be a penalty and a curse, any more than 
 prayer, or any other instinct can a folly and 
 superstition, we want next to get at its positive 
 side, to learn its place and meaning and what it 
 is for in the economy of nature, and to ask how 
 it can be freed from its darker features. 
 
 Its object, as commonly understood, is to get 
 its doer the means of life, — food, clothing and 
 shelter first, and then after these, amusement, 
 beauty, truth, religion, all those which go to 
 supply his higher nature. Man, and not man 
 alone, but all other creatures, animal and vege- 
 table, are beings endowed with wants, beings 
 that, unlike inanimate things, cannot exist by 
 virtue of what is in themselves alone, but are 
 
316 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 obliged to reach out for other things on which 
 to live, the lowest for bare soil, air and light, 
 and each above these in larger and larger circles, 
 and for finer and finer things, till we come to man 
 reaching out for his through all worlds and up 
 to all heights. It is around these wants, these 
 appetites, aspirations and desires, and with ref- 
 erence to their supply, that all the rest of our 
 organization, our limbs, senses, instincts, intel- 
 lectual faculties and spiritual powers, are built 
 up ; these which explain why the flower has its 
 petals, the tree its roots, the insect its feet, the 
 bird its wings, the tiger his claws and man 
 his hands, his eyes, his reason and his soul. 
 They are not shaped by chance or with refer- 
 ence to some preconceived ideal, but only as 
 the best practical apparatus to supply wants; 
 and it is their use for this purpose which 
 constitutes work, — this which gives us phil- 
 osophically its meaning and place in the order 
 of nature. Instead of its being an after- 
 thought of the Creator, a penalty of sin sug- 
 gested to him by man's disobedience, it is a 
 primitive and fundamental principle of the 
 animate world, entering into its very plan. To 
 live is to labor; to have faculties and powers, 
 to work. And instead of its being an ugly, 
 clumsy thing, the doing ourselves because 
 nature had no skill to do for us, there is nothing 
 
WORK UNDER EVOLUTION 317 
 
 in all its round which is more ingenious and 
 beautiful than the machinery of which it is a 
 part. On the one side are wants, on the other 
 the things wanted. The only way in which 
 there can be life is by having the one get the 
 other. The only way in which this getting be 
 done, by the creation and use of various facul- 
 ties and powers ; and the getting itself, — this is 
 work. Wants are the engine that moves the 
 world; its movement is labor, and its result, 
 reaching the means of life. 
 
 But this is only the near, immediate object 
 of labor. The question now comes, What is the 
 object of this object? What the result that 
 is sought for by our having and using the means 
 of life.'' To gratify wants alone, and these so 
 largely the wants of food and drink, even with 
 living as their outcome, would be a very meager 
 reason, if this were the whole, for all the hard- 
 ship, pain, weariness and wear that work every- 
 where involves. The things labored for, the 
 meat and drink, the clothing, the houses, the 
 books, the nationalities, the civilizations and 
 even the religions, that are reached with such 
 toils, groans and tears, perish in the using, die 
 in making live; and the animals, the men and 
 the races which use them, in a little while longer 
 they perish, too; and then the whole thing, all 
 the round of labor has to be gone through with 
 
318 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 again to supply a new set of creatures destined 
 in their turn likewise to perish. It seems out- 
 wardly a realization of the old classic stories 
 of Sisyphus rolling forever the stone up the 
 hill, only to have it roll down again, and Tan- 
 talus forever pouring water into sieves that im- 
 mediately let it out again. And it is this ap- 
 parent uselessness of labor that is the hardest 
 of all its burdens, this which makes the ques- 
 tion of whether it has any ulterior object be- 
 yond that of mere present living, one of tre- 
 mendous practical importance. 
 
 It is a question to which evolution gives a 
 complete and triumphant answer. It shows 
 first, that the object of labor beyond the build- 
 ing up of the individual, is the building up of 
 the race. The thing labored for does indeed 
 perish in its use, but in perishing it feeds the 
 laborer, gives him more strength and larger 
 wants, which in their turn labor for other 
 things ; and thus the process goes on back and 
 forth, the labor itself aiding in the growth till 
 the individual reaches his completeness ; and 
 then, though he dies, there is a subtle essence 
 out of his growth which goes into his stock 
 like that of the leaves into a tree, making that 
 the larger and richer, and his offspring the 
 more capable ; and so on from generation to 
 generation and from age to age. We have 
 
WORK UNDER EVOLUTION S19 
 
 in our blood to-day the labors of the first man, 
 yea, and of the first animal, that ever toiled; 
 our strength, our capacity for labor, our hu- 
 manity, is a fruit to which all the myriads be- 
 fore us who have ever delved with muscle, mind 
 and soul have contributed each a part; and 
 when the perfect man stands on earth, it will 
 be on the shoulders, through all the ages, of all 
 the earth's toil. 
 
 Nor is this all. The growing man must have 
 a growing environment, must have this evolved 
 side by side with himself. It is a work which 
 nature does in part, her forces and her laws 
 which toil on its outward structure, giving us, 
 age after age, richer soils, fairer skies and 
 more harmonious elements. But, beyond these, 
 society, government, letters, science, and re- 
 ligion, all that goes to make civilization is 
 needed ; and it is this finer environment that 
 man's work helps to build up. Its immediate 
 products, houses, temples, furniture, books, 
 paintings, statues, and the special forms of 
 government, science and religion do indeed per- 
 ish with their use, equally with our food and 
 drink; but out of them a subtle essence like 
 that from our food, remains and goes to nour- 
 ish the great structure of society and of the 
 universe. The stone of Sisyphus never rolls 
 back quite to the foot of the hill; the waters 
 
320 THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 of Tantalus never leak wholly out of the sieve. 
 The civilization of to-day is the result of its 
 long rolling and pouring: and when it is com- 
 plete, when a perfect world shall be the en- 
 vironment of a perfect humanity, in it will be 
 the labor, eternal as itself, of every man who 
 has ever dug a sod, driven a nail or thought a 
 truth. 
 
 And is evolution here the end of labor? 
 With a perfect humanity and a perfect world 
 accomplished by it, is it then to come to a 
 stand, then to see this mightier structure per- 
 ish? No; the same principle which demands 
 an object for labor beyond the life of the in- 
 dividual, demands an object for it beyond the 
 life of nature and the race. What can this be 
 but the growth out of them of a spirit world, 
 of spiritual beings and of endless progress? 
 The labors of time, not the immaterial ones 
 alone, but the humblest ones of the muscle and 
 the limb, are to reach over into eternity. Min- 
 gled with their stains of filth and dirt are the 
 glitter of spiritual splendors; and rooted in 
 the noisy factory and the darksome mine they 
 are to blossom and fruit in the music of angel 
 choirs and the light of the everlasting day. 
 
 Who now will say that under evolution, work 
 as well as prayer does not have a meaning and 
 position such as even under poetry and religion 
 
WORK UNDER EVOLUTION 321 
 
 it never did before? The old theology made 
 the world a prison in which work was inflicted 
 as a punishment. Political economy makes it 
 a factory where it is paid for on the wage sys- 
 tem of so much meat and drink. But under 
 this new philosophy it becomes a great co- 
 operative establishment where every man, 
 woman and child is a part owner and has his 
 proportionate share of the proceeds. And 
 who does not know the new zest which is given 
 to toil when the toiler feels that its object is 
 his own? Where is the carpenter who does not 
 enjoy building a house when he himself is to 
 have it and live in it, as he never does when his 
 toil on it is to be paid for in money ; where the 
 sailor who does not work with tenfold zeal and 
 fidelity in rigging the ship that he has a share 
 in, and which is to bear himself and his dear 
 ones over the seas? And this great house of 
 humanity, to feel that it is to be ours to live in 
 through all ages ; and this great world-ship, to 
 know that it is ours to sail in over all the seas 
 of time and into celestial ports, — is there any- 
 thing which can so make us forget the bruises 
 and stains and drudgery of their building, and 
 fill us with enthusiasm and fidelity to make it 
 good? 
 
 It is a principle which at last is to solve the 
 problem of work in aU its minor fields. The 
 
THE ROMANCE OF EVOLUTION 
 
 wage system, the idea of the work by one man 
 and of its ownership by another, is false to the 
 order of nature and false to all sound phi- 
 losophy. Cooperation, every man working on 
 his own material and sharing directly in the 
 proceeds of his work, that is the position of 
 labor under evolution; and that is the position 
 to which sooner or later it is bound everywhere 
 to come; that the one in which how many of 
 its difficulties, so perplexing to-day, will of 
 themselves disappear. 
 
 And finally, notice how harmoniously this 
 view of work blends with that of prayer. 
 The root of all labor is in want, desire, the 
 same thing that is the root of all prayer; the 
 answer of all prayer is to be found through 
 labor and found in him who is the animating 
 presence of all nature and all life. The larger 
 the desire is, that is, the more earnest the 
 prayer ; and the closer we come into communion 
 with him and into conformity with his laws, 
 which is science, the larger and the more cer- 
 tain will be the result of labor, — that is the an- 
 swer to prayer. And as the two have come 
 down together so far from the mighty past 
 and are twin instincts now in our human na- 
 ture, who shall say it is not the teaching of the 
 latest philosophy as well as of the oldest re- 
 ligion that they should be used together. 
 
WORK UNDER EVOLUTION 323 
 
 prayer and work, as the twin forces, equally 
 needed and equally divine, with which to win 
 the good we need to-day and reach the heaven 
 of our vast to-morrow? 
 
 "The doom which to the guilty pair 
 Without the walls of Eden came, 
 Transforming sinless ease to care 
 And rugged toil, no more shall bear 
 The burden of old crime, or mark of primal shame: 
 
 A blessing now, a curse no more, 
 Since he whose name we breathe with awe 
 The coarse mechanic vesture wore, — 
 A poor man toiling with the poor. 
 In labor, as in prayer, fulfilling the same law."