MIND IS FUNCTION 201 



chicing the variation. In a forest there are a few 

 magnificent, lordly trees to the acre. The original 

 seedlings stood as many to the square yard. The differ- 

 ence is accounted for by the deadly struggle for exist- 

 ence. Those that have survived are the ones that had 

 the better correspondence with the environment, and 

 are the survival of the fittest. It is thus throughout 

 the realm of nature. 



So with the highest organism called man. His supe- 

 rior mentality has been evolved as part of, and simul- 

 taneously with, his superior physical organism. His 

 nervous organization, composing the avenues by which 

 molecular motion, producing that complicated and ob- 

 scure aggregation called the mind, is made possible, is 

 the material, or physical registration of all the previous 

 structure, producing the habits, the peculiar line of 

 action ; in other words, the function, of all his ancestry 

 back to the beginning of cell formation, from which 

 originally his life began. This mentality gives him an 

 immense advantage over other animals, in the struggle 

 for existence. 



When the variation, in nerve structure, occurred, 

 which differentiated man's ancestral line from that of 

 other animal forms, it probably occurred in the same 

 way essentially that the variation did in the blade of 

 grass above referred to. It was entirely material, and 

 natural in its cause. Its capacity for producing subse- 

 quent favorable variations, in the line of human evolu- 

 tion, was at that time established. Every successive 

 organism, of this ancestry, inherited the essential 

 structure, and function, of its predecessor. Occasion- 

 ally one would show a variation favorable to its. 

 struggle for existence, which also became inherited ; 

 and the added function of this variation became, also r 



