The Whence and the Whither of Man eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 325 pages of information about The Whence and the Whither of Man.

The Whence and the Whither of Man eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 325 pages of information about The Whence and the Whither of Man.

And this is the reason that, when man awakened to himself and his own powers, he knew that there was and must be a God.  “Pass over the earth,” says Plutarch; “you may discover cities without walls, without literature, without monarchs, without palaces and wealth; where the theatre and the school are not known; but no man ever saw a city without temples and gods, where prayers and oaths and oracles and sacrifices were not used for obtaining pardon or averting evil.”  Given man and environment as they are, and a belief in God is a necessary result.  But you may ask, if we are to worship a personal God, why might not a conscious and religious hydra, with equal right, worship an infinite stomach, and the annelid a god of mere brute force?

There stands in Florence a magnificent statue by Michel Angelo.  A human figure is only partially hewn out of the stone.  He never finished it.  If you could have seen the master hewing the chips with hasty, impatient blows from the shapeless block, you would have been tempted to say that he was but a stonecutter, and but a hasty workman at that.  Even now we do not know exactly what form and expression he would have given to the still unfinished head.  But no one can examine it and hesitate to pronounce it a grand work of a master-mind.  In any manifestly incomplete work you must judge the purpose and character and powers of the workman or artist by its highest possibilities, just so far as you have any reason to believe that these possibilities will be realized.  You must look at the rudely outlined heroic human figure in the block of stone, not at the rough unfinished pedestal, if you would know Michel Angelo.  So in the hydra and the annelid you must look at the possibilities of the nervous system before you or he think that digestion and muscle are all.

Once more the highest powers dawn far down in the animal kingdom.  There are traces of mind in the amoeba, and of unselfishness in the lower mammals.  If there were a goal of human development higher and other than unselfishness, wisdom, and love, we should have seen traces of it before this.  But have we found the faintest sign of any such?  Moreover, remember that a function continues to develop about as long as it shows the capacity for development.  And during that period environment is a power making for its higher development.  But is there any limit to the possible development of the three mental activities mentioned above?  I can see none.  Then must we not expect that environment will always make for these?  And will environment ever manifest itself to man as the seat or instrument of a power possessing higher faculties other than these?  Man must worship a personal God of wisdom, unselfishness, and love, or cease to worship.  The latter alternative he never yet has been able to take, and society survive under its domination.  So I at least am compelled to read the finding of biological history.

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The Whence and the Whither of Man from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.