Page:Darwinism by Alfred Wallace 1889.djvu/487

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XV
DARWINISM APPLIED TO MAN
463

here, and a reference to it has been introduced only to complete the sketch of Mr. Darwin's view of the continuity and gradual development of all human faculties from the lower animals up to savages, and from savage up to civilised man. The point to which I wish specially to call attention is, that to prove continuity and the progressive development of the intellectual and moral faculties from animals to man, is not the same as proving that these faculties have been developed by natural selection; and this last is what Mr. Darwin has hardly attempted, although to support his theory it was absolutely essential to prove it. Because man's physical structure has been developed from an animal form by natural selection, it does not necessarily follow that his mental nature, even though developed pari passu with it, has been developed by the same causes only.

To illustrate by a physical analogy. Upheaval and depression of land, combined with sub-aerial denudation by wind and frost, rain and rivers, and marine denudation on coastlines, were long thought to account for all the modelling of the earth's surface not directly due to volcanic action; and in the early editions of Lyell's Principles of Geology these are the sole causes appealed to. But when the action of glaciers was studied and the recent occurrence of a glacial epoch demonstrated as a fact, many phenomena—such as moraines and other gravel deposits, boulder clay, erratic boulders, grooved and rounded rocks, and Alpine lake basins—were seen to be due to this altogether distinct cause. There was no breach of continuity, no sudden catastrophe; the cold period came on and passed away in the most gradual manner, and its effects often passed insensibly into those produced by denudation or upheaval; yet none the less a new agency appeared at a definite time, and new effects were produced which, though continuous with preceding effects, were not due to the same causes. It is not, therefore, to be assumed, without proof or against independent evidence, that the later stages of an apparently continuous development are necessarily due to the same causes only as the earlier stages. Applying this argument to the case of man's intellectual and moral nature, I propose to show that certain definite portions of it could not have been developed by variation and natural selection alone, and that, therefore, some other influence, law, or agency is