Modern science insists upon the doctrine of evolution; so do human reason and the “secret doctrine,” and the idea is corroborated by the ancient legends and myths, and even by the Bible itself when it is read between the lines. We see a flower slowly developing from a bud, and the bud from its seed. But whence the latter, with all its predetermined programme of physical transformation, and its invisible, therefore _spiritual_ forces which gradually develop its form, color, and odor? The word _evolution_ speaks for itself. The germ of the present human race must have preëxisted in the parent {153} of this race, as the seed, in which lies hidden the flower of next summer, was developed in the capsule of its parent-flower; the parent may be but _slightly_ different, but it still differs from its future progeny. The antediluvian ancestors of the present elephant and lizard were, perhaps, the mammoth and the plesiosaurus; why should not the progenitors of our human race have been the “giants” of the _Vedas_, the _Völuspa_, and the Book of _Genesis_? While it is positively absurd to believe the “transformation of species” to have taken place according to some of the more materialistic views of the evolutionists, it is but natural to think that each genus, beginning with the mollusks and ending with monkey-man, has modified from its own primordial and distinctive form. Supposing that we concede that “animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors;”[273] and that even _à la rigueur_ “all the organic beings which have ever lived on _this earth_ have descended from some one primordial form;”[274] still no one but a stone-blind materialist, one utterly devoid of intuitiveness, can seriously expect to see “in the distant future ... psychology based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation.”[275] Physical man, as a product of evolution, may be left in the hands of the man of exact science. None but he can throw light upon the _physical_ origin of the race. But, we must positively deny the materialist the same privilege as to the question of man’s psychical and spiritual evolution, for he and his highest faculties _cannot_ be proved on any conclusive evidence to be “as much products of evolution as the humblest plant or the lowest worm.”[276]