The positive lesson that the surest mode of self-defence
is the elevation of these submerged classes, we are just beginning
to learn and apply.
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.
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