PROGRESS, BIOLOGICAL AND OTHER 41 



extend to new possibilities the process with which, 

 for all these millions of years, nature has already 

 been busy, to introduce less and less wasteful meth- 

 ods, to accelerate by means of his consciousness what 

 in the past has been the work of blind unconscious 

 forces. "In la sua volontade e nostra pace." 



For this is one of the most remarkable facts of 

 evolution — that consciousness, until a very late pe- 

 riod, has played in it a negligible part. Indeed the 

 rise of consciousness to become a factor of impor- 

 tance in evolution has been one of the most notable 

 single items of progress. Darwin gave the death- 

 blow to teleology by showing that apparently pur- 

 posive structures could arise by means of a non-pur- 

 posive mechanism. "Purpose" is a term invented 

 to denote a particular operation of the human mind, 

 and should only be used where a psychological basis 

 may reasonably be postulated. On the other hand, 

 a result can be attained by conscious purpose with- 

 out the waste of time and of living material needed 

 by the indirect method of natural selection; and thus 

 the substitution of purposed for unpurposed progress 

 is itself a step in progress. 



As another corollary of our concept of progress, it 

 follows that we can and should consider, not only the 

 direction of any evolutionary process, but also its 

 rate. 



An evolutionary process, if it is to be considered 

 progressive, must have a component in one particu- 

 lar direction — a direction which we have already de- 



