But a greater problem confronts it; can it rise above self?  The animal often seems absolutely selfish.  Can the unselfish be developed out of the selfish?  This seems at first sight impossible.  And the first lessons are so easy, the first steps so short, that we do not notice them.  Reproduction comes to the aid of mind.  The young are born more and more immature.  They begin to receive the care of the parent.  The love of the parent for the young is at first short lived and feeble.  But it is the genuine article, and, like the mustard-seed planted in good soil, must grow.  It strengthens and deepens.  Soon it begins to widen also.  Social life, very rude and imperfect, appears.  And the members of this social group support, help, and defend one another.  And doing for one another and helping each other, however slightly and imperfectly, strengthens their affection for one another.  The animal is still selfish, so is man frequently, but it is in a fair way to become unselfish, and this is all we can reasonably expect of it.

For these are vast revolutions from reflex action to instinct, and from instinct to the reign of the individual will, and from appetite to selfishness on the ground of higher motives, and from immediate gratification to prudential considerations.  And the crowning change of all is from selfishness to love.  And each one of them takes time.  Remember that the Old Testament history is the record of how God taught one little people that there is but one God, Jehovah.  Think of the struggles, defeats, and captivities which the Israelites had to undergo before they learned this lesson, and even then only a fraction of the people ever learned it at all.  As the prophet foretold, so it came to pass.  Though Israel was as the sand by the sea-shore, but a remnant was saved.

But while we seek to do full justice to the animal, let us not underestimate the vast differences between it and man.  The true evolutionist takes no low view of man’s present actual attainments; in his possibilities he has a larger faith than that of the disbeliever in evolution.  In intelligence and thought, in will power and freedom of choice, in one word, in all that makes up character and personality, man is immeasurably superior to the animal.  These powers raise him to a new plane of being, give him an indefinitely higher and broader life, and his appearance marks a new era.  He alone is a moral, responsible being, to a certain extent the former of his own destiny and recorder of his doom, if he fails.  This gives to all his actions a peculiar stamp of a dignity only his.  What he is and is to be we must attempt to trace in another lecture.  But to one or two characteristic results of his progress we must call attention here.

The principal subject of man’s study is not so much the things which surround him as his relation to them and theirs to each other.  His environment has become really one, not so much one of tangible and visible objects as of invisible relations.  And these will demand endless investigation.  The more he studies them the more wonderful do they become.  The vein broadens and grows indefinitely richer the deeper he searches into it.  We find thus the purpose of the intellect; it is to study environment.