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A Little Child Shall Lead Them
This book will be mere foolishness to those who repeat the inhuman and animal cry that we have to take the world as we find it ? the motto of the impotent, the forgotten, the cowardly and selfish, or the merely vegetable, in all ages. The capital fact of man, as distinguished from the lower animals and from plants is that he does not have to take the world as he finds it, that he does not merely adapt himself to his environment, but that he himself is a creator of his world. If our ancestors had taken and left the world as they found it, we should be little more than erected monkeys to-day. For none who accept the hopeless dogma is this book written. They are welcome to take and leave the world as they find it; they are of no consequence to the world; and their existence is of interest only in so far as it is another instance of that amazing waste- fulness of Nature in her generations, with which this: bopk-.wl be: sp largely concerned.: ‘.Begih1jir’‘g, -.perhaps, some six million years ago, ..-the fact: w.hiQh.ve- call human life has persisted hith- JertoMncE shoivs- raw bigns of exhaustion, much less impending extinction, being indeed more abundant numerically and more dominant over other forms of life and over the inanimate world to-day than ever before. It is a continuous phenomenon. The life of every blood corpuscle or skin cell of every human being now alive is absolutely continuous with that of the living cells of the first human being ? if not, indeed, as most biologists appear to believe, the first life upon the earth. Yet this continuous life has been and apparently always must be lived in a tissue of amazing discontinuity ? amazing, at least, to those who can see th…