But why do we so strenuously object to the application to ourselves of the theory of evolution?  One or two reasons are easily seen.  We have all of us a great deal of innate snobbery, we would rather have been born great than to have won greatness by the most heroic struggle.  But is man any less a man for having arisen from something lower, and being in a fair way to become something higher?  Certainly not, unless I am less a man for having once been a baby.  It is only when I am unusually cross and irritable that I object to being reminded of my infancy.  But a young child does not like to be reminded of it.  He is afraid that some one will take him for a baby still.  And the snob is always desperately afraid that some one will fail to notice what a high-born gentleman he is.

Now man can relapse into something lower than a brute; the only genuine brute is a degenerate man.  And we all recognize the strength of tendencies urging us downward.  Is not this the often unrecognized kern of our eagerness for some mark or stamp that shall prove to all that we are no apes, but men?  It is not the pure gold that needs the “guinea stamp.”  If we are men, and as we become men, we shall cease to fear the theory of evolution.  Now this is not the only, or perhaps the greatest, objection which men feel or speak against the theory.  But I must believe that it has more weight with us than we are willing to admit.

But some say that the theory of immediate creation and immutability of species is the more natural and has always been accepted, while the theory of evolution is new and very likely to be as short-lived as many another theory which has for a time fascinated men only to be forgotten or ridiculed.

But the idea of evolution is as old as Hindu philosophy.  The old Ionic natural philosophers were all evolutionists.  So Aristophanes, quoting from these or Hesiod concerning the origin of things, says:  “Chaos was and Night, and Erebus black, and wide Tartarus.  No earth, nor air nor sky was yet; when, in the vast bosom of Erebus (or chaotic darkness) winged Night brought forth first of all the egg, from which in after revolving periods sprang Eros (Love) the much desired, glittering with golden wings; and Eros again, in union with Chaos, produced the brood of the human race.”  Here the formative process is a birth, not a creation; it is evolution pure and simple.  “According to the ancient view,” says Professor Lewis, “the present world was a growth; it was born, it came from something antecedent, not merely as a cause but as its seed, embryo or principium.  Plato’s world was a ‘zoon,’ a living thing, a natural production.”