Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/748

728 are now seen to have brought on the downfall of feudalism, and the centralizing, civilizing monarchical period; the French Revolution, once thought a mere outburst of diabolic passion, but now seen to be a transition from the monarchical to the constitutional epoch—all show that even wide-spread deterioration and decline, even indeed the greatest political and moral catastrophes, so far from leading to a fall of mankind, tend in the long run to raise humanity to higher planes.

Thus, then, Anthropology and its handmaids Ethnology, Philology, and History, have wrought out, beyond a doubt, proofs of the upward evolution of humanity since the appearance of man upon our planet.

And these researches have not been confined to progress in man's material condition. Far more important evidences have been found of upward evolution in his family, social, moral, intellectual, and religious relations. The light thrown on this subject by such men as Lubbock, Tylor, Herbert Spencer, Buckle, Draper, Max Müller, and a multitude of others, despite mistakes, haltings, stumblings, and occasional following of delusive paths, is among the greatest glories of the century now ending. From all these investigators in their various fields, holding no brief for any system sacred or secular, but seeking truth as truth, comes the same general testimony of the evolution of higher out of lower. The process has been indeed slow and painful, but this does not prove that it may not become more rapid and less fruitful in sorrow as humanity goes on.

While, then, it is not denied that many instances of retrogression can be found, the consenting voice of unbiased investigators in all lands has declared more and more that the beginnings of our race must have been low and brutal, and that the tendency has been upward. To combat this conclusion by examples of decline and deterioration here and there, has become impossible: as well try to prove that, because in the Mississippi there are eddies in which the currents flow northward, there is no main stream flowing southward; or that, because trees decay and fall, there is no law of upward growth from germ to trunk, branches, foliage, and fruit.

A very striking evidence that the theological theory had become untenable was seen when its main supporter in the scientific field, Von Martins, in the full ripeness of his powers, publicly declared his conversion to the scientific view.

Yet, while the tendency of enlightened human thought in recent times is unmistakable, the struggle against the older view is