The theory of evolution, as a purely scientific theory, _i.e._ as an objective statement of what actually has taken place on the earth in the past, shows that the various species of animals which have survived were--so long as they did survive--the only species which could survive under the conditions which then prevailed; given the conditions, their survival was necessary and inevitable. There the scientific explanation of the matter ends: having shown the causes which produced the effect in question, science has explained everything that it undertook to explain. Had the conditions been different, the present state of the world, doubtless, would have been different; but being what they were they produced that which is, and there is an end of the matter--as far as it is a matter for scientific investigation. What we are to think of the survivors--whether we are to admire them; whether we are to consider their survival an advance and an improvement; whether anything has been gained by their survival, and, if so, from what point of view the gain is a gain--are questions which science excludes, because, however answered, they do not affect the scientific fact that these species did survive, and, under the conditions, alone could survive. But we all take it for granted and as self-evident that man is not only better adapted, under existing conditions, to survive and flourish at the cost and to the extinction of other species, but that he is better than the brute, that his survival is an advance, that his is a higher type, and that his existence realises a higher ideal than that of the brutes. We believe this not merely because we are men, and as such rate our own comforts, our own interests, our own skins as the most important things known to us, for there are things for which men sacrifice their own interests and for which they have laid down their lives. It is precisely because there are things more important than our own material and animal existence, and because they are or may be realised by man and not by the animals, by the ideal man and not by the brute man, that we consider him to be worth more than many sparrows--though they too have their value in His eyes--and man's existence to be of a higher type than theirs. Thus, then, when science--which, if it is truly scientific, makes no distinction of value, moral or spiritual, between man and the sparrow--has explained that a given species which did survive was the only species that could have survived under the conditions, there still remains the problem, for those to whom it is a problem, Why should the species which was bound to survive also happen to be a species of a higher type? Why have the survivors always happened to be both better adapted to survive and better adapted to further the ideal which the course of evolution reveals with increasing clearness?