The origin of man / by Carveth Read.

  • Read, Carveth, 1848-1931.
Date:
1925
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The origin of man / by Carveth Read. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    adopting the life of a hunter, and has drawn some of the consequences. It is comforting to have a close ally in such a risky undertaking. Mr Morris is (I suppose) an American; and to give our ideas prestige it is a pity he should not have been more of a foreigner. Still, as the hypothesis must now be con¬ sidered his property in virtue of prior publication, I am relieved of the obligation to be modest in speaking of it, and might even (if occasion offered) venture the length of saying how well I think of it. Though some readers have found my argument plausible, few have been satisfied with it, and many regard it as vain and fanciful. The fact is that most students of animate nature are busy with experimental Biology, and admirable results they have obtained. It is the fashion to neglect general reasoning (though like ours proceeding upon acknowledged facts) that does not lead to direct experiment; and in this case experi¬ ments cannot be made. One reviewer thinks it enough to say— “Die Zeit, in welcher man fur solcher Hypothesen in der Wissenschaft Interesse hatte oder sogar sich begeistern konnte, ist wohl endgultig voriiber.” In short, it is out of fashion, and there is as much a fashion in philosophemes as in furbelows. A well-disciplined pack follows only one quarry at a time. So irresistible is the fashion that we are told that “a generation has arisen that knows not Darwin.” The unhappy generation must have been badly taught. No wonder they will not listen to Mr Morris. The arrival of Man in the world is the most wonderful event since the formation of protoplasm; yet in minds that cannot explain it in their own way it excites no curiosity. Content with the evidence of their close relationship to the apes, they are indifferent to the causes that have made them a little lower than the angels. I must venture to say that Man is not explained by showing his relationship to the apes. That is a classification on the ground of resemblance, and the resemblance is sufficiently explained by the hypothesis of heredity. But Man is constituted not by his resemblance to the apes but by his differences from them, and the differences cannot be explained by heredity. To indi-