ON MAN AND HIS DEVELOPMENT. 63 



the persistent labour and energy, the unwearied ant-like 

 industry of a thousand generations a result which 

 natural selection has aided to produce, and which in- 

 heritance has handed on. Far from having fallen or 

 retrograded, man has advanced very far indeed; his 

 nature has been widened and deepened on all sides, and 

 a yet further and more glorious development of his 

 nature will take place. What he has done is but a 

 promise of what he will do. What he is, is but as the 

 statue in the rough compared to the finished man of the 

 far future. 



But human nature, though widened and deepened 

 with the process of the suns, is not in any sense of the 

 word infinite, as certain metaphysicians would have us 

 believe. Man's mental, like his bodily constitution, is 

 on all sides bounded and limited. Thought, emotion, 

 volition, are all finite and conditioned ; are subject to 

 laws of regular and ascertained sequence ; fall into the 

 universal chain of cause and effect, as psychology and 

 physiology teach. What, indeed, may be the ultimate or 

 First Cause of the mental as of other phenomena, Science 

 is unable to say a First Cause, even if comprehensible, 

 not being within the scope of her inquiries, and her only 

 notion of causation being constantly recurring sequence 

 but so far as Science traces or follows the phenomena, 

 so far as they are accessible to her most improved 

 methods of search, they are in the last resort caused by 

 states of the bodily organism, in particular by molecular 

 changes in the brain and nervous system.* These are 

 the invariable antecedents, the cause or conditions of 

 consciousness in Hume's and Mill's sense of the word 

 " cause." Without these no thought or consciousness is 



* Huxley's Life of Hume, p. 79 (" English Men of Letters " series) ; 

 also Bain's Mind and Body, pp. 11, 140. 



