equel.

As the essay contains an epitome of my own original contributions to the
doctrine of evolution, I have added at the end a short list of
references to other works of mine, where the points here briefly
mentioned are more fully argued and illustrated. The views regarding the
progress of human society, and the elimination of warfare, are set forth
at greater length in a little book now in the press, and soon to appear,
entitled "American Political Ideas."

PETERSHAM, September 6, 1884.

CONTENTS.

I. Man's Place in Nature as affected by the Copernican Theory.
II. As affected by Darwinism.
III. On the Earth there will never be a Higher Creature than Man.
IV. The Origin of Infancy.
V. The Dawning of Consciousness.
VI. Lengthening of Infancy and Concomitant Increase of Brain-Surface.
VII. Change in the Direction of the Working of Natural Selection.
VIII. Growing Predominance of the Psychical Life.
IX. The Origins of Society and of Morality.
X. Improvableness of Man.
XI. Universal Warfare of Primeval Men.
XII. First checked by the Beginnings of Industrial Civilisation.
XIII. Methods of Political Development, and Elimination of Warfare.
XIV. End of the Working of Natural Selection upon Man. Throwing off
the Brute-Inheritance.
XV. The Message of Christianity.
XVI. The Question as to a Future Life.

THE DESTINY OF MAN.

I.

Man's Place in Nature, as affected by the Copernican Theory.

When we study the Divine Comedy of Dante--that wonderful book wherein
all the knowledge and speculation, all the sorrows and yearnings, of the
far-off Middle Ages are enshrined in the glory of imperishable verse--we
are brought face to face with a theory of the world and with ways of
reasoning about the facts of nature which seem strange to us to-day, but
from the influence of which we are not yet, and doubtless never shall
be, wholly freed. A cosmology grotesque enough in the light of later
knowledge, yet wrought out no less carefully than the physical theories
of Lucretius, is employed in the service of a theology cumbrous in its
obsolete details, but resting upon fundamental truths which mankind can
never safely lose sight of. In the view of Dante and of that phase of
human culture which found in him its clearest and sweetest voice, this
earth, the fair home of man, was placed in the centre of a universe
wherein all things were ordai