One of the weakest and most foolish of all the objections to the Darwinian theory is, that it does not explain variation,
and is therefore worthless. We might as well say that Newton's discovery of the laws of gravitation was worthless because its cause was not and has not yet been discovered; or that the undulatory theory of light and heat is worthless, because the origin of the ether, the thing that undulates, is not known. The beginnings of things can never be known; and, as Darwin well said, it is foolish to waste time in speculation about them. I think I have shown in my World of Life that infinite variability is a basic law of Nature, and have suggested its probable purpose. That purpose seems to have been the development of a life-world culminating in Man—a being capable of studying, and enjoying, and to some extent comprehending, the vast universe around him, from the microscopic life in almost every drop of water to the whirling nebulæ of the glittering star-depths extending to almost unimaginable distances around him.
Looking at him thus, man is as much above, and as different from, the beasts that perish as they are above and beyond the inanimate masses of meteoritic matter which, as we now know, occupy the apparently
vacant spaces of our solar system, and from which comets and stars are in all probability the aggregations due to the action of the various cosmic forces which everywhere seem capable of producing variety and order out of a more uniform but less orderly chaos.
But besides this lofty intellect, man is gifted with what we term a moral sense: an insistent perception of justice and injustice, of right and wrong, of order and beauty and truth, which as a whole constitute his moral and æsthetic nature, the origin and progress of which I have endeavoured to throw some light upon in the present volume. The long course of human history leads us to the conclusion that this higher nature of man arose at some far distant epoch, and though it has developed in various directions, does not seem yet to have elevated the whole race much above its earliest condition, at the time when, by the influx of some portion of the spirit of the Deity, man became "a living soul."
We will now consider some of the changes which this higher nature of man has produced in the action of the laws of variation and natural selection. These are
very important, and are so little understood that almost all popular writers on the subject of the future of mankind are led into stating as scientific conclusions what are wholly opposed to the actual teaching of evolution.