Page:Philosophical Review Volume 19.djvu/131

117 which it pursues. At best, natural selection acts, as De Vries characterizes it, like a sieve through which the already existing forms which nature assumes are impartially sifted. It is evident that it is a sieve which distributes the chances of death, and in no sense can it determine the basis of life. Evolution merely shows the existence of a process whose operation starts at one point in a developing series and continues to another; and it is quite as incapable of explaining the nature of the origin as it is the significance of the goal. Professor Tyndall, for instance, places the first term of the evolutionary series at a distance far more remote than the beginnings of the plant or animal kingdom, discerning in the nebular star dust "the promise and the potency" of every form of life. And along the lines of this backward vision, it is necessary for every student of evolution today to reckon not only with the theory of organic but of inorganic evolution as well. Professor Tyndall, however, states most emphatically that "evolution does not, it does not profess, to solve the ultimate mystery of the universe. It leaves that mystery untouched. For granting the nebula and its potential life, the question, whence came they? would still remain to baffle and bewilder us. At bottom the hypothesis does nothing more than transport the conception of life's origin to an indefinitely distant past."

We must all concede what Darwin pointedly calls to our attention, as though in our pride we needed constantly to be reminded of it, that 'man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.' Although we may have come from a stock which we share in common with the ape, nevertheless we have come a long way; and although we have risen from the dust of the earth, and to that dust we return, yet the significant fact remains, that we have risen, and that for the brief space at least while thought holds sway over our lives we decline to be confused with this dust under our feet, or with the animal which follows to heel, or which mimics our bodily movements and gestures as he chatters to us from his cage.

Setting aside, therefore, this problem of origin which has been so widely debated in the course of the evolution discussion, there