Time and Change

The long road I have in mind is the long road of evolution, -the road you and I have traveled inthe guise of humbler organisms, from the first unicellular life in the old Cambrian seas to thecomplex and highly specialized creature that rules supreme in the animal kingdom to-day. Surely along journey, stretching through immeasurable epochs of geologic time, and attended by vicissitudesof which we can form but feeble conceptions. The majority of readers, I fancy, are not yet ready to admit that they, or any of their forebears, have ever made such a journey. We have all long been taught that our race was started upon itscareer only a few thousand years ago, started, not amid the warrings of savage elemental nature, butin a pleasant garden with everything needed close at hand. This belief has faded a good deal in ourtime, especially among thoughtful persons; but in a modified form, as the special creation theory, itheld sway in the minds of the older naturalists like Agassiz and Dawson, long after Darwin hadlaunched his revolutionary doctrine of our animal origin, putting man in the same zoological schemeas the lower orders. We are slow to adjust our minds to the revelations of science, they have been so long adjusted toa revelation, so-called, of an entirely different character. It gives them a wrench more or less violentwhen we try to make them at home and at their ease amid these new and startling disclosures. Tomany good people evolution seems an ungodly doctrine, like setting up a remorseless logic in theplace of an omnipresent Creator. But there is no help for it. Science has fairly turned us out of ourcomfortable little anthropomorphic notion of things into the great out-of-doors of the universe. Wemust and will get used to the chill, yea, to the cosmic chill, if need be. Our religious instincts will beall the hardier for it. When we accepted Newton's discovery of the force called gravitation, we virtually surrenderedourselves to the enemy, and started upon a road, the road of natural causation, that traverses thewhole system of created things. We cannot turn back; we may lie down by the roadside and dreamour old dreams, but our children and their children will press on, and will be exhilarated by thejourney. It is at first sight an unpalatable truth that evolution confronts us with, and it requires couragecalmly to face it. But it is in perfect keeping with the whole career of physical science, which isforever directing our attention to common near-at-hand facts for the key to remote and mysteriousoccurrences. It seems to me that evolution adds greatly to the wonder of life, because it takes it out of therealm of the arbitrary, the exceptional, and links it to the sequence of natural causation. That manshould have been brought into existence by the fiat of an omnipotent power is less an occasion forwonder than that he should have worked his way up from the lower non-human form