282* DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



movement, but not its causes. We cannot even say that it 

 is continuous, for we see its movement broken by many 

 hesitations and backslidings of too great importance to be 

 overlooked or dismissed as casual irregularities. Indeed, 

 our whole conception of evolution as a process in which 

 mind is only one, though a growing, factor militates against 

 the acceptance of an automatic tendency to steady progress. 

 On the other hand, it would be absurd to dismiss the 

 evidence of past development in forecasting the future. 

 If development of a certain kind has occurred, it is certain 

 that the conditions which render it possible exist, and if the 

 development in question has proceeded on a very great 

 scale through long periods of time and over wide diversities 

 of environment, it is a necessary inference that, whatever 

 its conditions are, they are of great permanence and high 

 generality. Now, keeping closely to the empirical results 

 and without any hypothesis as to the nature of the perma- 

 nent evolutionary forces, what we are able to say as the 

 result of our descriptive account of mental evolution is 

 this that tracing the growth of mind from the germ 

 upwards, we find an extension, not indeed continuous, but 

 proceeding by successive stages of vast moment, of the 

 sphere of conscious control of racial life. This growth and, 

 therefore, the conditions rendering it possible, run through 

 the entire history of mind and its environment as we know 

 them from first to last. Thus as an empirical generalisation 

 we are justified in the hypothesis that these conditions are 

 permanent, or at least of very wide reach. 



But there is no need to leave the problem at this stage. 

 In point of fact, our descriptive account of the process of 

 development does yield a theory of the conditions, though 

 these have not yet been explicitly set out. Thus, to begin 

 with, we have found that, point by point, the control of 

 mind is limited by its scope. The individual organises his 

 life with a certain measure of freedom in so far as he is able 

 to utilise past experience and to bring within his mental 

 grasp that in his future which vitally concerns him. He 

 fails in so far as his grasp is too narrow or as his purposes 

 are not accurately adjusted to his real needs. Now in our 

 highest stage we assume a mind of scope so wide that these 



