None of us is content with things as they
are. If we are, better were it for us to be nourishing the grass and
serving the things that will be in that way, if we cannot in any other.
What promise, then, have we that things as they will be are worth
working for? We live now in an age to which there has been revealed the
fact of organic evolution. From the fire-mist, from the mud, from the
merely brutal, there have been evolved--such is the worth of Nature's
womb--there have been evolved intelligence and love, sacrifice, ideals;
splendours which no splendour to come can utterly dim. These things are
in the power of Nature. This is what "dead matter" can mother. So much
the worse for our contemptible conceptions of matter, and That of which
matter is the manifestation. But if it be that from the slime, by
natural processes, there can grow a St. Francis, surely our dim notions
of the potencies of Nature must be exalted. The forces that have
erected us from the worm, are they necessarily exhausted or exhaustible?
Who will dare to set limits to the promise of Nature's womb? I mean, in
a word, that the history of evolution is a warrant for the idea that we
ourselves, even erected men and women, are but stages to what may be
higher. We look with contempt upon the apes, but time must have been
when "simian" would have been as proud an adjective as "human" is
to-day: and human may become superhuman.
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