way guaranteed by tendencies that are beyond the
hit-and-miss method of natural selection.

When we look back over the course of organic evolution, we see the
unfolding of a great drama, or tragedy, in which, for millions upon
millions of years the sole actors are low and all but brainless forms
of life, devouring and devoured, in the old seas. We see, during other
millions upon millions of years, a savage carnival of huge bestial forms
upon the land, amphibian monsters and dragons of the land and air,
devouring and being devoured, a riot of blood and carnage. We see the
shifting of land and sea, the folding and crumpling of the earth's
crust, the rise of mountains, the engulfing of forests, a vast
destruction of life, immense numbers of animal forms becoming extinct
through inability to adapt themselves to new conditions, or from other
causes. We see creatures, half beast, half bird, or half dragon, half
fish; we see the evolutionary process thwarted or delayed apparently by
the hardening or fixing of its own forms. We see it groping its way like
a blind man, and experimenting with this device and with that, fumbling,
awkward, ineffectual, trying magnitude of body and physical strength
first, and then shifting the emphasis to size of brain and delicacy and
complexity of nerve-organization, pushing on but gropingly, learning
only by experience, regardless of pain and waste and suffering; whole
races of sentient beings swept away by some terrestrial cataclysm, as at
the end of Palaeozoic and Mesozoic times; prodigal, inhuman, riotous,
arming some vegetable growths with spurs and thorns that tear and stab,
some insects with stings, some serpents with deadly fangs, the
production of pain as much a part of the scheme of things as the
production of pleasure; the creative impulse feeling its way through the
mollusk to the fish, and through the fish to the amphibian and the
reptile, through the reptile to the mammal, and through the mammal to
the anthropoid apes, and through the apes to man, then through the rude
and savage races of man, the long-jawed, small-brained, Pliocene man,
hairy and savage, to the cave-dwellers and stone-implement man of
Pleistocene times, and so on to our rude ancestors whom we see dimly at
the dawn of history, and thus rapidly upward to the European man of our
own era. What a record! What savagery, what thwartings and delays, what
carnage and suffering, what an absence of all that we mean by
intell