EVOLUTION OF MAN

Taranaki Daily News, 17 July 1930, Page 16

EVOLUTION OF MAN

HIS PROGRESS LIMITED. A poetical narrative oi the evolutionary progress was given by Sir Rabindranath Tagore in opening a lecture at Oxford. He said life was introduced in “the tiniest little monocycle of a cell” with the gift of growth and the power of adaptation. Cells were bound together into a larger unity, their marvellous quality of inter-relationship maintaining a perfect' co-ordination of functions. This is the creative principle of unity, the divine mystery of existence, that baffles all analysis. Man turned the course of his evolution from an indefinite march of physical aggrandisement to a freedom of a more subtle perfection. The Spirit of Life in man surrendered some important parts of her sovereign rights to his mind, which minimised the passive processes of his evolution in favour of an active adjustment of self-determination. Since then the evolution of his limbs lias been carried on further outside his own body; for the telescope which he uses does not encumber his skull, and he is not compelled to carry an added mass of muscles and nerves in the shape of engines and electric wires. This has made possible his progress to become unlimited, and has enabled him to realise the boundless in hie power.

The most perfect outward expression of the divine principle of unity —that of the nearer inter-relationship revealed in the evolution of the multi-cellular life —has been attained by man, in his body. But what is most important of all is the fact that man has also attained his relationship outside his bodily (system. Man misses himself in isolation; his larger and truer self is found in his wide human' relationships. His multi-cellular body is born and it dies; his multi-personal humanity is immortal. In this ideal of human unity he realised the eternal in his life, and the boundless in his love. The unity itself becomes not a mere subjective idea, but a living truth. Whatever name may be given to it, and by whatever form symbolised, the consciousness of this unity is spiritual, and man’s effort to be true to it is his religion.