170 A PHILOSOPHER WITH NATURE 



handful of inert material, to-day they have become 

 the physical basis of the supreme reasoning conscious- 

 ness of man and all that it implies. It is only by 

 the comparative study and analysis of animal 

 instinct and animal intelligence that we begin to 

 have some feeble idea of the cost of the process in 

 evolution, and of the unfathomable epochs of 

 development which separate such a result from the 

 first beginnings of life. No one who has grasped 

 in any real sense the significance of mind in the 

 evolution of life can hold the belief that the cycle 

 of the manifestations of it which we have begun to 

 witness will ever cease, or that it is destined to be 

 in any way bounded even by the life of the planet 

 on which we live. 



