Chapter 1625
[←1616]
We cannot follow Mr. Laing here. When avowed Darwinists like Huxley point to “the great gulf which intervenes between the lowest ape and the highest man in intellectual power,” the “enormous gulf ... between them,” the “immeasurable and practically infinite divergence of the human from the simian stirps” (Man’s Place in Nature, p. 102 and note); when even the physical basis of mind—the brain—so vastly exceeds in size that of the highest existing apes; when men like Wallace are forced to invoke the agency of extra-terrestrial intelligences in order to explain the rise of such a creature as the pithecanthropus alalus, or speechless savage of Hæckel, to the level of the large-brained and moral man of to-day—when all this is the case, it is idle to dismiss evolutionist puzzles so lightly. If the structural evidence is so unconvincing and, taken as a whole, so hostile to Darwinism, the difficulties as to the “how” of the evolution of the human mind by natural selection are tenfold greater.