58 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



provement in the lives of the individuals composing 

 them, then, like Denmark, they have moved rapidly 

 along a path of real progress. Once an efficient 

 federation of communities has come into being, 

 Progress can knock at the door with some chance 

 of being admitted. In general, it is enough for our 

 present purpose to have shown that some modicum 

 of progress has occurred within the species Man; 

 and that some of the characteristics which most 

 saliently mark him off from other organisms — his 

 powers of generalization and his self-consciousness 

 — are in themselves germs, potentialities of great 

 progress in the future, because through them blind 

 biological progress can become economical, foresee- 

 ing, and conscious of herself. 



There remains for me only one task — to investi- 

 gate more closely the relation of that fact of evolu- 

 tionary direction which we have called biological 

 progress, to our ideas of value. What we have 

 found is that there exists a certain general direction 

 of movement in the evolution of living things; to- 

 wards the increase of certain of their properties. 

 But when we make a further analysis, we fmd that 

 movement in this direction is movement towards a 

 realization of the things judged by the human mind 

 to have value. It is movement towards an increase 

 of power, of knowledge, of purpose, of emotion, of 

 harmony, of independence. Increases in these facul- 

 ties combine, once a certain stage in mental develop- 



