Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/775

Rh in the discovery by the world in general that it is true. Through enormous labors during the past thirty years the science of biology has covered the ground once supposed to be peculiarly the domain of mind, and the natural history of man, both body and mind, are so well known in their most general features that the biologists of every country are agreed that man is an evolved animal, that his lineage can be traced back into the geologic past and to an animal pedigree. In mind and body he has an ancestry reaching into time indefinitely remote, and those who hate to believe it are silenced by the evidence and no longer strive against it. Their only hope is to show reasonable grounds for the belief that Nature has in some way and at some time been supplemented, and that man has some arbitrary mental gifts that can not be deduced from his natural history. This acquired knowledge of the natural history of man has revolutionized every former conception of him, and has rendered worthless—absolutely worthless—almost everything that has been written. Not only physical science, but especially history, philosophy, psychology, ethics—all had to be rewritten, and all educational institutions founded upon these, as most all have been, have got to be metamorphosed to adapt them to the knowledge which has been acquired in this century and mostly within the last half of it. The case is precisely similar to the history of astronomy. After the Copernican theory was found to be the true theory, the overthrow of the Ptolemaic was complete. There could be no compromise between the two: if one was right the other was absolutely and irredeemably wrong, and there was nothing but complete surrender to the Copernican theory by every one who had any knowledge of the Ptolemaic system. It had to be complete and unconditional. The teachers of the Copernican theory may have been wrong in many of their statements concerning planetary matters, and some of the Ptolemaics may have been able to point out such errors, but such failures did not give any countenance to the Ptolemaic theory; they only showed that the details of the new science needed more careful investigation. The whole of astronomy had to be rewritten; the only things of any value that had been recorded were that an eclipse occurred on such a day at such a place, or a comet was seen, or an occultation, but the reasonings and deductions by the observers were of no account.

So in like manner, if evolution be true, it follows that all previous philosophizing upon history, philosophy, education, or science, is of no more account than the reasonings of the Ptolemaics. And one to-day will not be advancing himself in knowledge by perusing the volumes of the pre-evolution age. They can not help him, no matter how ably they are written. Nor does it follow that because objectors are able to point to errors in the