Page:Nature and Man.djvu/25

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22
The Romanes Lecture 1905

Man is Nature's rebel. Where Nature says 'Die!' Man says 'I will live.' According to the law previously in universal operation, Man should have been limited in geographical area, killed by extremes of cold or of heat, subject to starvation if one kind of diet were unobtainable, and unable to increase and multiply, just as are his animal relatives, without losing his specific structure and acquiring new physical characters according to the requirements of the new conditions into which he strayed, without in fact becoming a new morphological 'species.' But man's wits and his will have enabled him to cross rivers and oceans by rafts and boats, to clothe himself against cold, to shelter himself from heat and rain, to prepare an endless variety of food by fire, and to 'increase and multiply' as no other animal without change of form, without submitting to the terrible axe of selection wielded by ruthless Nature over all other living things on this globe. And as he has more and more obtained this control over his surroundings, he has expanded that unconscious protective attitude towards his immature offspring which natural selection had already favoured and established in the animal race, into a conscious and larger love for his tribe, his race, his nationality, and his kind. He has developed speech, the power of communicating, and above all of recording and handing on from generation to generation, his thought and knowledge. He has formed communities, built cities, and set up empires. At every step of his progress man has receded further and further from the ancient rule exercised by Nature. He has advanced so far and become so unfitted to the earlier rule, that to suppose that Man can 'return to Nature' is as unreasonable as to