Your last correspondent on the subject of my letters treats the question lightly. Perhaps he is young, enjoying the morning of life and thinking little of its close. On the mind of a student of history is deeply impressed the sadness of its page; the record of infinite misery and suffering as well as depravity, all apparently to no purpose if the end is to be a physical catastrophe. Comtism, while it bids us devote and sacrifice ourselves to the future of humanity, can apparently hold out nothing more.

I accept evolution, if it is the verdict of science as to the origin of physical species, the human species included; though it certainly seems strange that, the chances being so numerous as they are, no distinct ease of evolution should have taken place within our ken. But the theory apparently does not pretend to account for the development of man's higher nature. That there is a gap in the continuity of development or any supernatural intervention has never been suggested by me; but it does appear that there is an ascent such as constitutes an essential difference and calls for other than physical explanation.

In matter, said Tyndall, is the potentiality of all life. Matter is what we discern by our bodily senses. What assurance have we that the account of the universe and of our relations to it given us by our bodily senses is exhaustive, or that the moral conscience may not have another source?

Apart from anything more distinctly spiritual, where do we get the faculty of idealization? Is it traceable to physical sense?

Unless the moral conscience has a source higher than mere physical evolution, what is to deter a man in whom criminal propensities are strong from indulging them so long as he can do so with impunity? Eccelino had a lust of cruelty. Was he wrong in indulging it, so long as he had the power, which he might have had, with common prudence, to the end of his life?

I speak, as I have always said, from the ranks; and I am not presuming to criticise Darwin's theory as an explanation of the origin and nature of the physical man. But if the theory is to be carried farther, and we are to be told that man's higher attributes and his moral conscience have no source or authority other than physical evolution, we may fairly ask to see our way.

March 17th, 1907.