CREATION BY EVOLUTION 



and difficult question. We cannot discuss it here; but it is 

 pretty easy to see that if some of the lower animals give no 

 evidence of guidance of action and a great many of the 

 higher animals give abundant evidence of such guidance, 

 there must be some stage of evolutionary advance at which 

 an important feature of mind, hitherto absent, is no longer 

 absent but very much in evidence. 



What, then, is the kind of evidence? And what does 

 guidance imply? It is guidance of behaviour and of con- 

 duct. And it seems that there are two evolutionary stages 

 of guidance: (l) the higher, reflective or thoughtful guid- 

 ance, which comes in us at the age of 21/^ or 3 years and 

 then progressively increases from about that age onward; 

 and (2) the lower, unreflective guidance, of which we find 

 evidence in the infant and in many of the lower animals. 

 It is difficult to see how there could be guidance, even at 

 the earlier stage, if there were no reference to an objective 

 world, for it is with reference to that world that behaviour 

 is subject to guidance. But it is, I think, easy to see that 

 reference only to what is going on noiu would not afford 

 what seems to be essential to guidance. It seems essential 

 that there should be prospective guidance, anticipating, if 

 only by a little, that which will come in the course of some 

 established routine. How else can what 77iay come be 

 hastened or avoided by acting in this way or that? Does not 

 all guidance imply some measure of reference to future 

 events rendered present in expectancy, however shortsighted? 



I take it that all may ^gree that under mental evolution 

 we have to ascertain the manner in which conscious guidance 

 advances from lower to higher stages, no less than the man- 

 ner in which enjoyment, with reference to surrounding 

 objects and eventually persons, likewise advances from lower 

 to higher status. But just how guidance arises, and what 



[350] 



