Then you need a moment’s inspiration, and for someone to think out a better way of exposing lies; and for a time it works, and then you sink back to uniformity as lying improves yet again. The seemingly mechanical ritual of life only provides the background; and its function is to stimulate the native genius of men and women to rise above it, and give an example to their fellow men and women that they too can rise above the prevailing dreary mediocrity.
So to begin with, Evolution may have been 99% mechanical; but we have left that period behind, just as we have left bows and arrows behind in War. There was nothing wrong with bows and arrows; they were deadly against the Scots at Falkirk and Halidon Hill; and curtailed Scottish military prowess, until the introduction of firearms, the genius of Gustavus Adophus and the men whom he inspired, and the reckless courage of the Highland clan, revived it. The Scottish victory at Bannockburn, whose date lies between those of the other two battles, was an exception, although it secured the independence of Scotland. It was largely due to the folly of the English in falling into the ambush Robert the Bruce laid for them; by crossing the river with their armour into the bog in which Bruce had dug concealed pits, and by Bruce’s appreciation that he must get rid of the English archers. This he did with his light horse, when the archers were foolishly left unprotected. The real conflict was between the Scottish pikemen and the English armour floundering about in the bog, with no room to deploy or manoeuvre. It must have been a grim one-sided encounter, and slaughter, as the armour was driven into an ever smaller space. Does anyone seriously suggest it was all decided by the genes of the men involved? But we have moved on from bows and arrows. We have moved on in the evolutionary world too. It is a seemingly endless cycle now, of imagination having to find a way through the ever increasing complexity of life; and of course creating more problems as it goes. It is a spiritual world of seemingly endless richness.
Anything less like an opium of the people is hard to imagine. When viewing the history of man’s evolution through the eyes of individual man manifestly fails to make sense of what has happened, it is only common sense to look for another interpretation. In particular, when evolution by cumulative genetic selection fails to make sense of human emotions, and the interpenetration of the sympathy we all believe we have for one another, it is only sensible to think that other factors have come into play. Indeed remembering the idea of Occam’s Razor, that you do not multiply imponderables, we can ask what hypothesis reduces the problem to its simplest conception?