xx INTRODUCTION 



this was the true empirical account of Evolution, our inter- 

 pretation of that process would be fundamentally changed. 

 The factor of consciousness, as the late Professor Ritchie 

 was already insisting, would influence the course of de- 

 velopment. If my view was right it would turn out even 

 to be the central point in development. To the fully 

 conscious mind in man everything would lead up, and from 

 it, once formed, all future movement would be derived. 

 This was indeed to assume that along with knowledge there 

 would go control, but in the first place it could, I thought, 

 be shown that control extends in a kind of geometrical 

 ratio with each new turn in the development of conscious- 

 ness, and in the second place, as the full meaning of the 

 self-conscious mind worked itself out it was seen to imply 

 a grip on those underlying conditions of life which, as long 

 as they remain obscure, thwart human effort and distract 

 man from that social collaboration which is necessary to the 

 greatest efforts. 



By emphasizing consciousness and its control moreover, 

 several difficulties as to the relations of evolution and pro- 

 gress could be met. To begin with, it was possible to 

 conceive of evolution in general as a blind and even brutal 

 process, dependent on the anarchical struggle for existence, 

 but to maintain that in the course of this struggle there had 

 arisen among other species one which owed its survival to 

 a mind. How this had happened was not for the moment 

 the point. It had happened, and there was a being with a 

 mind, looking before and after, and also looking around 

 him upon his fellows and on the whole, working with as 

 well as against them. Something of this mind moreover 

 existed in lower species, and it was important to notice that 

 even there, in proportion as mind began to exert itself, it 

 tended to supersede the struggle for existence. It was 

 possible to display one particular line of evolution, for 



