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
By the ever-increasing acceleration of the development the gap
between man and the lower animal widens with wonderful rapidity. Of
course it is only in man, and higher man, that these last and
highest results of mammalian structure appear. But that, far removed
as they are, they are the results of mammalian and vertebrate
characteristics cannot, I think, be well denied. And this is only
one of innumerably possible illustrations of the fact that all our
most highly prized institutions are rooted far back in our ancestry,
often ineradicably in the very organs of our bodies. And thus
evolution, which many view only from its radical side--and it has a
radical side--is really the conservative bulwark of all that is
essentially worth possessing in the past.
But every factor in man's development tends toward intellectual and
spiritual development. Man's vast increase of brain; his finely
balanced body; his upright gait; setting his hands free from the
work of locomotion that they might become the skilful servants of
the mind; finally, articulate speech and social, and, above all,
family, life, all tended in this same direction.
And this makes the great difficulty in assigning man his
proper place in our systems of classification. Our zoölogical
classifications depend upon anatomical characteristics; and
anatomically man belongs among the order primates. But mental and
moral values cannot be expressed in terms of anatomy, any more than
we can speak of an idea of so many horse-power, and hence worth
three or four ancestral dollars. Hence, while from the zoölogical
standpoint man is a primate, and while he is very probably descended
from one of these, he has gradually risen above them mentally and
spiritually, so that he stands as far above them as they above the
lowest worm. And this leads us to the consideration of man, not
merely as a mammal, but as "Anthropos," Homo sapiens, although he
often degenerates into "Simia destructor."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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