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The view which glorifies the dignity and value of human nature and points its aspirations forward is challenged in our time by an important school of thinkers. Science, whose moral characteristics have often been reproached as pride and self-concept, preaches aloud from professorial chairs the lesson of humility, and, echoing the precept "Know thyself," bids man lay aside as a false illusion the fond imagination that he has a place in creation superior to the brute. Man is represented as an improved animal or vegetable, differentiated in the long course of ages from earlier forms of life by a more perfect organisation and a more complete adaptation to his surroundings, but not superior in essence or endowed with higher hopes than the rudimentary organised beings who have preceded him in the gradual development of the universe. The accurate observations of physiology and biology have traced out numerous marks of likeness of organs between man and these earlier organisms, which we have been accustomed to call lower. Rudimentary inchoate forms of the mechanism of the human body have been noticed in the irrational beings, and man is pronounced to differ from the despised ape not more than the cultivated European of our day from the barbarous native of the Admiralty Islands. On observed facts a theory is based, claiming to be covered by the facts in accordance with the strictest methods of induction, that there has been going on through countless ages of the universe a development from one primordial seed of insect, and animal, and man, through endless varieties of sub-species, each slightly deviating from and improving upon its predecessor in the series, until man, the latest result of evolution, appeared upon the earth. The old theory of final causes and foreseen adaptations of organs to their purposes we are told must be abandoned, and a doctrine of types of form must be substituted for a wise and benevolent will underlying the material universe. We may fear lest imagination should carry us into inferences which the organs of experience cannot verify. We may listen respectfully to all the analogies and homologies revealed to us by the biologist, and yet pause in the immediate acceptance of a provisional hypothesis of one uninterrupted evolution exclusive of any specific acts of creation, when the geologist tells us that he can discover few (if any) traces of these thousands upon thousands of varieties and sub-species which the hypothesis postulates, and we may feel a natural difficulty in understanding how the present phenomena of life have been produced by the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence, when we observe that the alleged earlier and lower types still exist side by side with the later and higher. If man, to use the poet's metaphor, is in his moral progress still working out the tiger and the ape, the tiger and the ape still hold their place in the animal world, and are not extinct species. Man has not survived, but is contemporary with them. A layman also may be at liberty to note that natural science does not speak with unanimous voice either on the facts or the speculative theories of the origin of man. Great names are ranged on either side of the controversy. Biology cannot claim a monopoly and exclusive privilege in the discussion of the great problems of anthropology, psychology, and theology; history and philosophy are entitled to be heard. They maintain that there are moral and spiritual facts in man's nature over and beyond those physical facts which fall within the range of natural science, and these cannot be overlooked, but must be idly taken into account if we would attempt an adequate answer to the question, What is man?

(W. Ince, M. A.)

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KJV: When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;

WEB: When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have ordained;