PROGRESS 41 



man has no right to feel helpless or without support 

 in a cold and meaningless cosmos, to believe that he 

 must face and fight forces which are definitively 

 hostile. Although he must attack the problems of 

 existence in a new way, yet his face is set in the same 

 direction as the main tide of evolving life, and his 

 highest destiny, the end towards which he has so long 

 perceived that he must strive, is to 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 methods, 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 period, 

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

 of consciousness to become a fector of importance in 

 evolution has been one of the most notable single 

 items of progress. Darwin gave the death-blow to 

 teleology by showing that apparently purposive 

 structures could arise by means of a non-purposive 

 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 without the waste of 

 time and of living material needed by the indirect 

 method of natural selection ; and thus the substitution 



