MAN ADVANCING TO NEW HEIGHTS

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6918, 25 May 1929, Page 2 (Supplement)

MAN ADVANCING TO NEW HEIGHTS

PHILADELPHIA, April 27. No apprehension is held for the future of mankind, but on the contrary, the advancing years and centuries will form a background of roseate hue, in •which he will rise with more dominion and power, according to Dr Ales Hrdlicka, curator of the division of physical anthropology of the United States National museum at Washington, m sneaking at the annual meeting ot the American Philosophical society here on “Tho Future of Man in the Light pf His Past and Present.” * While Dr Hrdlicka envisaged some very trying years of evolution timing the next few hundred thousand years, ho predicted that the human animal would surmount them through enlarged capacity for understanding and recreased spiritual development. xLQ will advance in the control of nature, Iho said, “which will aid him greatly in shaping his own destinies.” The new knowledge that man is gaining helps him to understand the many impefeetions vriM which he is still burdened, and the material evidences of his evolution satisfy him that he has not become degraded from any higi former estate, but that for the last half-million or so of years he has, re general, always been progressing. Ihe most capable and reliable researches show that man is still evovreg, especially mentally, “and there is no perceptible limit to his future possibilities, especially in the mental direction.^ “But man’s future evolution, he continued, “will, it is already seen differ in important respects from that ot tho past and even the present. He has found a wonderful past, is passing through a surging present and glimpses an inspiring future. In the past it has been largely a matter of environment and condition. In the past man, himself, aided not, or at least not consciously. But as knowledge with consequent understanding and mastery of nature by man are steadily advancing, there gradually dawns a great new privilege and duty, namely, rationally to assist in his own further organic and spiritual progress.” True enlightenment of the masses, tho speaker said, will materially aid sounder progress in human evolution, enlightenment in all that is favouiable, as well as that which is unfavourable toward evolutionary progress.