Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 44.djvu/338

326 aside the notion that the escape from pain and sorrow is the proper object of life."

I will now pass to the second of the two processes of evolution which his recent writings seem to indicate as having taken place in the mind of Prof. Huxley.

He and I worked simultaneously and harmoniously to show how much less the human body differs from that of an ape, than does that of an ape from any other animal.

In his work on Man's Place in Nature (1863), he diverged from Cuvier and followed Linnæus by including man in one order—Primates—with the apes and lemurs. In the first scientific paper I ever published, I went yet further and reduced man (anatomically considered) to the rank of a section of a suborder of the Primates, for which section I first proposed the term "Anthropoidea."

But while the professor took the position of an entire sympathizer with and supporter of Mr. Darwin's views as to man's origin, I have ever maintained that, in spite of the closeness of bodily resemblance, the psychical gulf between him and them constitutes a profound difference not merely of degree, but an absolute distinction of kind—one involving a difference as to origin.

The position I at once assumed, which I have unfalteringly upheld, and now maintain more confidently than ever, is that no mere process of evolutionary natural selection, no cosmic process, could ever have produced from irrational Nature a being "looking before and after"—a being who could say either "this must be absolute truth," or "such is my duty and I will, or will not, do it." It was with great satisfaction, therefore, that I perused some of the passages on this subject in the recent Romanes lecture.

Therein, after having affirmed that the mere animal man had attained his position by the cosmic process—a view I had supported in. 1871 the lecturer makes the following statement:

The practice of that which is ethically best—what we call goodness or virtue—involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless selfassertion it demands self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect but shall help his fellows; its influence is directed, not so much to the survival of the fittest, as to the fitting as many as possible to survive. It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence.