But man can by art so alter his environment that it will elicit the noble in man, instead of the base.
Let us now sum up the difference between human and natural evolution, and arrive at some conclusion regarding the part man has played, and may still play, in his own advancement.
§ 4. Brief Restatement
Before the advent of man animal life prospered or degenerated according as the natural environment was favorable to progress or degeneration. The process of evolution was necessarily unconscious and undeliberate.
With the advent of man a new force appeared upon the face of the world, the power to modify the environment so as to make it serve human needs, and accord with human intention.
Before the advent of man, selection was exercised by Nature or the natural environment; since the advent of man it is man who has selected and not Nature; animals dangerous and useless to man have almost disappeared except in museums; and only those that are useful to him are allowed to survive.
Climate is no longer paramount; man by the use of tools, clothing, architecture, and other arts, contrives to-day to live in climates which were once fatal to him.
By increase of knowledge man has acquired a control of the forces of Nature, which makes him now a master where he was once a slave.
By increase of self-restraint—and self-restraint involves the subjection of natural instincts—man has developed qualities which permit of social existence unknown in any other race.
Without having lost the self-reliance that characterizes the solitary carnivora, he has, by resisting Nature—by such artificial institutions as that of marriage, and the education which results from family relations—developed all the social virtues. Ferocity has been tempered; lust has been reduced to subjection; in the place of the one we now see courage; in the place of the other chastity; craft is growing into wisdom; fear into reverence. He has substituted for the standard of Nature the standard of Morality, and the substitution of the standard of Morality for the standard of Nature has permitted men and women to live in the same community safe from the ferocity that drives the larger carnivora to solitude, and from the massacre and mutilation which characterize such natural communities as those of bees.