The Whence and the Whither of Man: A Brief History of His Origin and Development through Conformity to Environment; Being the Morse Lectures of 1895Tyler, John M. (John Mason)
Religion
The Whence and the Whither of Man: A Brief History of His Origin and Development through Conformity to Environment; Being the Morse Lectures of 1895
Tyler, John M. (John Mason)
Evolution
For these are vast revolutions from reflex action to instinct, and
from instinct to the reign of the individual will, and from appetite
to selfishness on the ground of higher motives, and from immediate
gratification to prudential considerations. And the crowning change
of all is from selfishness to love. And each one of them takes time.
Remember that the Old Testament history is the record of how God
taught one little people that there is but one God, Jehovah. Think
of the struggles, defeats, and captivities which the Israelites had
to undergo before they learned this lesson, and even then only a
fraction of the people ever learned it at all. As the prophet
foretold, so it came to pass. Though Israel was as the sand by the
sea-shore, but a remnant was saved.
But while we seek to do full justice to the animal, let us not
underestimate the vast differences between it and man. The true
evolutionist takes no low view of man's present actual attainments;
in his possibilities he has a larger faith than that of the
disbeliever in evolution. In intelligence and thought, in will power
and freedom of choice, in one word, in all that makes up character
and personality, man is immeasurably superior to the animal. These
powers raise him to a new plane of being, give him an indefinitely
higher and broader life, and his appearance marks a new era. He
alone is a moral, responsible being, to a certain extent the former
of his own destiny and recorder of his doom, if he fails. This gives
to all his actions a peculiar stamp of a dignity only his. What he
is and is to be we must attempt to trace in another lecture. But to
one or two characteristic results of his progress we must call
attention here.
The principal subject of man's study is not so much the things which
surround him as his relation to them and theirs to each other. His
environment has become really one, not so much one of tangible and
visible objects as of invisible relations. And these will demand
endless investigation. The more he studies them the more wonderful
do they become. The vein broadens and grows indefinitely richer the
deeper he searches into it. We find thus the purpose of the
intellect; it is to study environment.
And now a little about motives. The animal begins with appetite, and
some animals and men never get any farther. And yet how easily this
appetite for food is satiated! We all remember our experiences as
children around the Thanksgiving or Christmas table. What a
disappointment it was to us to find how soon our appetite had
forsaken us, and that we had lost the power of enjoying the
delicacies which we had most anticipated. And over-indulgence often
brought sad results and was followed by a period of penitential
fasting. And the appetites for sense gratification must always lead
to this result. They not only crave things which "perish with the
using;" temporarily at least, often permanently, the appetite itself
perishes with the gratification.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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