116 EVOLUTION AND MAN S PLACE IN NATURE 



a bearing on conditions of individual responsibility. In 

 not a few cases they involve demands upon intellectual 

 and moral control, of an unusually exacting kind. 



If next, we take action and experience originating 

 in individual mind itself, evidence as to transmission 

 becomes involved in more complexity, and is there 

 fore more difficult to trace. Here we begin with 

 rational power as a common possession, taking with 

 this, all emotion, sentiment, and aspiration depending 

 on it. We attribute rational powers to all the race ; 

 at the same time, variations, many and considerable, 

 appear. The analogy of adaptation to environment 

 passes to a secondary place, and even in some phases 

 disappears largely from view. Under sense of a new 

 demand upon language, we speak of mental culture, 

 recognising what education means, with its special 

 appeal to understanding and intelligent effort. As 

 interpreted in our own experience, we are conscious 

 of reflection, purpose, and sustained effort, all of which 

 are reckoned among powers common to men. When 

 inductions become wider, consequences in family and 

 in national history being included, laws of heredity 

 seem to find enlarged application. Human progress 

 is not severed from personal effort; and such effort 

 does not fail of securing gain more widely than per 

 sonal life. Always acting through physical life, as 

 we are bound to say, effects are such as must in 

 fluence the history of later generations. Even if it 

 be granted that there is warrant for the opinion 

 recently expressed, that no great advance is to be 

 expected in adaptation of human organism to its 

 environment, there is constant testimony to physical 

 and mental advance of the race. We witness fineness 



