Life Progressive. 423 



Man is in reality but on the threshold of civilization: Far 

 from showing any indication of having reached the end, the 

 tendency to improvement seems laterally to have proceeded 

 with augmented impetus and accelerated rapidity. There 

 is no reason to suppose that it must now cease. Man has not 

 attained the limits of intellectual development, nor exhausted 

 the infinite capabilities of nature. There are many things 

 not yet dreamt of in our philosophy which science must 

 reveal, many discoveries yet to be made which will confer 

 upon the human race advantages which as yet, perhaps, we 

 are not in a condition to grasp and appreciate. We seem, 

 when we compare our present knowledge with the great 

 ocean of truth that lies all undiscovered before us, like little 

 children playing on the sea-shore, and picking up a smoother 

 pebble and prettier shell than any they had met with before. 

 Thus, it is obvious, that our most sanguine hopes for the 

 future are justified by the entire experience of the past. It 

 is surely unreasonable to presume that a process which has 

 been going on for so many thousand years should have now 

 suddenly ceased ; and he must indeed be blind who thinks 

 that our civilization is unsusceptible of improvement, or that 

 we ourselves are in the highest state possible for man to 

 attain. Theory, as well as experience, forces the same con- 

 clusion upon us. That principle of Natural Selection, which in 

 animals affects the body and seems to have little influence on 

 the mind, in man affects the mind and has little influence on 

 the body. In the former it leads mainly to the preservation 

 of life, and in the latter to the improvement of the mind, and 

 consequently to the increase of happiness. It ensures, in 

 the words of Spencer, "a constant progress towards a 

 higher skill, intelligence, and self-regulation a better co- 

 ordination of actions a more complete life." Nearly all 

 the evils under which we suffer, it will be conceded, may be 

 attributed either to ignorance or sin. That ignorance will be 

 diminished by the progress of science is, of course, self-evi- 

 dent; and that the same will be the case with sin, seems 



