Histology

The only hope is education, yet the limitations placed on this solution are severe. The author feels that the rightful function of education is to fit the young "to participate in their culture and to preserve it"; social change must come from the adult community, not the schools. In addition, each culture is "to have considerable respect for the past and its achievements, to rely on scrutiny and selection at least as fully as on experiment... Under such restrictions education can never transcend the tight boundaries of individual cultural groups in anything but science, which we previously found inadequate to establish universal moral judgments. It would appear then that Dr. Sears is left with the theory of evolution as his sole universal principle. He answers the neo-Darwinian school by citing mutual aid as evidence against competition and struggle. However, mutual aid is but an empirical fact which would seem to satisfy antithetic hypotheses. Thomas Hobbes' idea of man under natural law is not contradicted by the fact of mutual aid. Nietzsche is summarily dismissed, maybe rightly so, but his belief in the struggle against nature and the will for power cannot be ignored when considering the philosophic significance of the theory of evolution. Possibly much of the confusion arises from the oversimplification which brevity necessitates. Dr. Lecomte du Noiuy has observed that the "scale of observation" colors any conclusions obtained. Dr. Sears passes from the philosophic implications of the theory of evolution to the effect of the theory on democratic schools, etc., with but brief regard of the different conditions inherent in such diverse situations. Had his perspective been as constant as, for example, the view of the universe taken by George Stewart in Man, An Autobiography, the argument would have been more lucid. Nonetheless, Dr. Sears surveys a very difficult subject in a brief and provocative manner, and points up many relevant and interesting facts concerning Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution.