A recent declaration by a number of eminent men, some of them on the highest round of the scientific ladder, that the evolutionary view of nature ennobles the thought of God is historically true at least; the event has occurred. In short, the atmospheric change was not toward the depression of a sultry day but toward the invigoration of a fresh, appetite-creating breeze. The sophistic that turned this into an alleged depletion of our moral vim is not far to seek. The reason why certain persons did not rejoice at the excuses that evolution provides for much of our faultiness is that they did not want us to be excused, but condemned. They wanted this, not because they were vicious, but because they held a theology that required them to think so. And because this authoritative theology had settled upon one way as the only one whereby man could be released from the sins that beset him, it could not rejoice to discover that there are other openers of prison doors. If many of the dogmatically faithful did not think their way into quite all this detail, they realized at least that to accept at the hands of evolution an ennobled view of man or of God would involve admitting inadequacy and lack of true authority in the dogmatic system. The dogmas never were complimentary to human nature, but--O droll self-delusion--when science offered us a real compliment, dogma insisted that it was an insult to our exalted dignity! V THE IRRATIONALITY OF MAN AS A LITERARY MOTIF “What a noble work is man!” is a characteristic sentiment of classical English literature. “What a work is man!” is the burden of the most distinctive literature of our day. The difference between the two exclamations is the difference between sunshine with clouds and clouds without sunshine. Our literature always has had rogues and villains galore, hypocrites and egotists, folly in good people and goodness in bad people. Human life and human nature have been pictured as spotted and mixed-up, and strife and confusion have not always been cleared up in the dénouement. But this was a mixture, a confusion, and a strife, of genuine opposites. That there are truly noble motives was not doubted; it was, indeed, the entanglements of nobility in a world that contains also stupidity, selfishness, sensuality, and cruelty that furnished the main dramatic situations, whether between individuals or within an individual’s own soul. The same objective material receives in our day a fundamentally different treatment. That we have fewer “happy endings” is not the main point, and it is not necessarily significant. What is significant is a shift of the main basis of dramatic contrasts and oppositions, and the insertion of a new set of tensions, together with the assumption, or the mood, that lies back of the change.