172 HEREDITY AND SOCIETY 



that the average man has improved since the days of 

 his palaeolithic forebears. 



As the result of our inquiry, therefore, we conclude 

 from direct observation that, if the process of creative 

 evolution be intelligible at all (and such an intelligibility 

 is a necessary assumption underlying any inquiry), it 

 has been tending for some tens or hundreds of 

 thousands of years towards the production of the 

 largest numbers of mankind of the highest physical 

 and mental types. 



Now such a tendency may exist without any further 

 significance. It may represent a necessity in the nature 

 of things as they are, with no further meaning or aim 

 behind it. In the structure of matter and in the forms 

 of energy with which the Universe is replete we find 

 inherent this tendency towards evolution along different 

 lines, one of which culminates in man. And it may be 

 possible that we can carry our investigation no further 

 back ; that we have arrived at what, for our minds, 

 must be an ultimate explanation. 



But ultimate explanations are not recognized by 

 science. No sooner do we succeed in reducing our 

 conceptions of one train of phenomena to simpler terms 

 succeed, let us say, in connecting those phenomena 

 with others which we can represent to our minds in 

 terms of the relations of such physical concepts as 

 length, mass and time than we strive to go further, 

 and attempt to analyse these fundamental physical con- 

 cepts into others mass into electric charge, electric 

 charge into a strain knot in the aether. 



But let us suppose the process of evolution ex- 

 plained in terms of mass, length and time and their 



