But our history of animal and human progress shows us successive stages, each a little higher than the preceding, and surviving, for a time at least, because more completely conformed to environment. If this be true, and it must be true unless our theory of evolution be false, higher forms are more completely conformed to their environment than lower; and man has attained the most complete conformity of all. Our biological history is therefore a record of the results of successive efforts, each attaining a little more complete conformity than the preceding. From such a history we ought to be able to draw certain valid deductions concerning the general character and laws of our environment, to discover the direction in which its forces are urging us, and how man can more completely conform to it. If man is a product of evolution, his mental and moral, just as really as his physical, development must be the result of such a conformity. The study of environment from this standpoint should throw some light on the validity of our moral and religious creeds and theories. It would seem, therefore, not only justifiable, but imperative to attempt such a study. Our argument is not directly concerned with modern theories of heredity, or variation, or with the "omnipotence" or secondary importance of natural selection. And yet Nägeli, and especially Weismann, have had so marked an influence on modern thought that we cannot afford to neglect their theories. We will briefly notice these in the closing chapter. CHAPTER I THE PROBLEM: THE MODE OF ITS SOLUTION The story of a human life can be told in very few words. A youth of golden dreams and visions; a few years of struggle or of neglected opportunities; then retrospect and the end. "We come like water, and like wind we go." But how few of the visions are realized. Faust sums up the whole of life in the twice-repeated word _versagen_, renounce, and history tells a similar story. Terah died in Haran; Abraham obtained but a grave in the land promised him and his children; Jacob, cheated in marriage, bitterly disappointed in his children, died in exile, leaving his descendants to become slaves in the land of Egypt; and Moses, their heroic deliverer, died in the mountains of Moab in sight of the land which he was forbidden to enter. You may answer that it is no injury that the promise is too large, the vision too grand, to be fulfilled in the span of a single life, but must become the heritage of a race. But what has been the history of Abraham's descendants? A death-grapple for existence, captivity, and dispersion. Their national existence has long been lost.