the sun was made to give him light, etc.  When Copernicus overthrew that view, the effect upon theology was certainly tremendous.  I do not believe that justice has ever been done to the shock that it gave to man when he was made to realize that he occupied a kind of miserable little clod of dirt in the universe, and that there were so many other worlds greater than this.  It was one of the first great shocks involved in the change from ancient to modern scientific views, and I do not doubt it was responsible for a great deal of the pessimistic philosophizing that came in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Now, it flashed upon me a dozen years or so ago—­after thinking about this manner in which man originated—­that man occupies certainly just as exceptional a position as before, if he is the terminal in a long series of evolutionary events.  If at the end of the long history of evolution comes man, if this whole secular process has been going on to produce this supreme object, it does not much matter what kind of a cosmical body he lives on.  He is put back into the old position of theological importance, and in a much more intelligent way than in the old days when he was supposed to occupy the centre of the universe.  We are enabled to say that while there is no doubt of the evolutionary process going on throughout countless ages which we know nothing about, yet in the one case where it is brought home to us we spell out an intelligible story, and we do find things working along up to man as a terminal fact in the whole process.  This is indeed a consistent conclusion from Wallace’s suggestion that natural selection, in working toward the genesis of man, began to follow a new path and make psychical changes instead of physical changes.  Obviously, here you are started upon a new chapter in the history of the universe.  It is no longer going to be necessary to shape new limbs, and to thicken the skin and make new growths of hair, when man has learned how to build a fire, when he can take some other animal’s hide and make it into clothes.  You have got to a new state of things.

After I had put together all these additional circumstances with regard to the origination of human society and the development of altruism, I began to see a little further into the matter.  It then began to appear that not only is man the terminal factor in a long process of evolution, but in the origination of man there began the development of the higher psychical attributes, and those attributes are coming to play a greater and greater part in the development of the human race.  Just take this mere matter of “altruism,” as we call it.  It is not a pretty word, but must serve for want of a better.  In the development of altruism from the low point, where there was scarcely enough to hold the clan together, up to the point reached at the present day, there has been a notable progress, but there is still room for an enormous amount