When our minds have expanded sufficiently to take in and accept the
theory of evolution, with what different feelings we look upon the
visible universe from those with which our fathers looked upon it!
Evolution makes the universe alive. In its light we see that
mysterious potency of matter itself, that something in the clod
under foot that justifies Emerson's audacious line of the "worm
striving to be man." We are no longer the adopted children of the
earth, but her own real offspring. Evolution puts astronomy and
geology in our blood and authenticates us and gives us the backing
of the whole solar system. This is the redemption of the earth: it
is the spiritualization of matter.
In imagination stand off in vacant space and see the earth rolling
by you, a huge bubble with all its continents and seas and changing
seasons and countless forms of life upon it, and remember that you
are looking upon a great cosmic organism, pulsing with the vital
currents of the universe, and that what it holds of living forms
were not arbitrarily imposed upon it from without, but vitally
evolved from within and that man himself is one of its products as
literally as are the trees that stand rooted to the soil. Revert to
the time when life was not, when the globe was a half-incandescent
ball, or when it was a seething, weltering waste of heated water,
before the land had yet emerged from the waves, and yet you and I
were there in the latent potencies of the chemically and dynamically
warring elements. We were there, the same as the heat and flame are
in the coal and wood and as the explosive force of powder is in the
grains. The creative cosmic chemistry in due time brought us forth,
and started us on the long road that led from the amoeba up to man.
There have been no days of creation. Creation has been a continuous
process, and the creator has been this principle of evolution
inherent in all matter.
Man himself was born of this principle. His genealogy finally runs
back to the clod under his feet. One has no trouble in accepting the
old Biblical account of his origin from the dust of the earth when
one views that dust in the light of modern science.
Man is undoubtedly of animal origin. He is embraced in the same
zoological scheme as are all other creatures, and did not start as
man any more than you and I started with our present stature, or
than the earth sprang from chaos as we now behold it.
His complete physical evolution must have been achieved thousands of
centuries ago, but his full mental and spiritual evolution is not
yet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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