PROGRESS 27 



of the parents is in part made available to the offspring. 

 But never until the origin of speech was it possible for 

 a whole series of generations to be linked together by 

 experience, never could experience be cumulative, 

 never could one mind know what another mind, 

 remote in time, had been thinking or feeling. Bio- 

 logically, evolution since the time of origin of this new 

 process has consisted essentially in the enlargement and 

 specialization of aggregations of minds, and the im- 

 provement of the tradition which constitutes the 

 mode of inheritance for these aggregations — that tradi- 

 tion which, like Hugo's ' Nef magique et supreme ' 

 of human destiny, will eventually have 'fait entrer 

 dans rhomme tant d'azur Qu'elle a supprime les 

 patries ! ' 



It will, I hope, have been clear, even from the few 

 examples which I have given, that there has been a 

 main direction in evolution. At the close of the paper I 

 shall try to point out that since motion in this direction 

 has led to the production of an increasing intensity 

 of qualities which we are unanimous in calling valuable, 

 since in other words the application of our scale of 

 values tends in the same direction as has the march 

 of evolutionary history, that therefore we are justified 

 in calling this direction progressive, and indeed logic- 

 ally compelled to give to motion in this direction a 

 name which, like progress, implies the idea of value. 



I shall therefore, from now on, use the term biological 

 progress to denote movement in the direction which 



