Nature of Evolutionary Progress 47 



poses, opinions, and knowledge decide our conduct. 

 Ideas and ideals are efficient agents in determining 

 what happens. The laws of action, the laws of motion, 

 we conclude, are different when specified mental 

 states are present, as compared with the methods of 

 action when those mental states are not present or 

 when other mental states are present. This is one of 

 the fundamental principles for our biological outlook 

 on the world. It affects all our further conclusions. 



One conclusion follows at once, a conclusion that is 

 of the greatest import for our outlook on the world. 

 Since sensations, emotions, ideas, and other mental 

 states have come into existence in the passage of time, 

 thereupon altering the movements that occur, it fol- 

 lows that the laws of movement are not given complete 

 in the early epochs, but that new laws are exemplified 

 as time passes and new conditions arise. As new com- 

 binations of the elementary constituents are formed, 

 new methods of action come into operation. 



What occurs now was therefore not predictable 

 before life came into the world. My behavior, your 

 behavior, the course of human history — these things 

 were not in principle to be computed from the move- 

 ments and distribution of the elementary particles in 

 the early ages. What is to come in the future is not 

 predictable from what is now present, for we do not 

 know what will be the rules of action, the laws of 

 motion, when other mental states shall have come into 

 being, when there are other sensations, purposes, 

 ideas. The universe produces new things; produces 

 sensations, emotions, ideas, where none existed; pro- 



