SUMMARY OF RESULTS
It may be well, in conclusion, to sum up the general truths we have arrived at in relation to the place of man in the great and long-continued drama of the earth's geological history.
1. We have found no link of derivation connecting man with the lower animals which preceded him. He appears before us as a new departure in creation, without any direct relation to the instinctive life of the lower animals. The earliest men are no less men than their descendants, and up to the extent of their means, inventors, innovators, and introducers of new modes of life, just as much as they. We have not even been able as yet to trace man back to the harmless golden age. As we find him in the caves and gravels he is already a fallen man, out of harmony with his environment and the foe of his fellow creatures, contriving against them instruments of destruction more fatal than those furnished by nature to the carnivorous wild beasts. Yet we would fain believe in an Edenic age of innocence; and physiological probability, as well as the old story in Genesis, demands that we should suppose a primitive condition in which man, careless and happy, should subsist on the spontaneous bounty of nature in some favoured 'garden of the Lord.'
Scheme of possible Correlation of the Geological and Historical Records as to Early Man, as the Facts appear in the present Stage of Investigation, May 1894.
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2. If we inquire as to the nature of the interval which separates man from the lower animals, we find that it exists with reference both to his rational and physical nature. With respect to the first we may affirm in man the existence of a lower (psychical) intelligence, similar to that of the inferior animals, and of a spiritual nature allying him with higher intelligences, and with God Himself. Rightly considered, this places the doctrine of creation in a very firm position. Those who deny it must adopt one of two alternatives. Either they must refuse to admit the evidence in man of any nature higher than that of brutes—a conclusion which common sense, as well as mental science, must always refuse to admit—or they must attempt to bridge over the 'chasm,' as it has been called, which separates the instinctive nature of the animal from the rational and moral nature of man—an effort confessedly futile.