296 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION 



Apparently man's earliest and most fundamental 

 concept was that of profit, or progress, or growth; the 

 vague notion that all things had some kind of a begin- 

 ning, and moved toward some end, for some purpose. 

 The dawning consciousness of progress was doubtless 

 due to its insistent influence on the whole gamut of or- 

 ganic life. It was but another expression of the com- 

 pulsory adaptation of life to universal progress; for 

 life could preserve its own constructive relations to the 

 outer world only so far as its own acts fitted coopera- 

 tively into these larger movements of the outer world. 

 Hence this idea of progress has been the chief motive- 

 thought of man, persistently expressed in a more or 

 less crude way, in his science, in his religion, and in 

 his conduct, at every stage of his mental evolution. 



Man's earliest questioning, the underlying motive 

 of all his seeking, has ever been to discover: How the 

 familiar things of the world begin, where they come 

 from, how they "carry on," and how man may keep on 

 the right side of things as they are. Or to put these 

 questions in a more modern form: What creates, what 

 preserves, and what destroys the products of nature 

 and how man may profit thereby? Or still more com- 

 prehensively: How does nature act and how must 

 man act in order to live and to grow? 



The asking of these questions and the attempts to 

 answer them marked man's dawning recognition of 

 Tightness and his obligation to obedience ; the germina- 

 tion of his ethics and morality, as a counter expression 

 of the ethics and morality of nature action. Out of 

 these very practical, every day problems, with no sys- 

 tem of formulating questions and answers; no dis- 

 tinction between fantasy and reality, and no separa- 



