xix SELF-CONSCIOUS DEVELOPMENT 439 



dividual, based on a determinate interaction of structure 

 and environment, it may be questioned whether human 

 intelligence could do anything to affect it. But human 

 development is not fixed in this sense. Its proper aim, 

 and, we may say, its general course, are fixed by the 

 germinal possibilities of human nature, but wherever 

 intelligence can act, the limitations of ordinary organic 

 growth may be overstepped. An organic growth must, as 

 we have tried to show, always hold on its course, an 

 unfolding now of this structure, next of that, being the due 

 order never departed from. Intelligence, on the other hand, 

 may execute any sort of curve to get to its ultimate end. 

 It cannot, indeed, break any law of nature, but within the 

 limits of the laws of nature, it can alter the course by 

 which it reaches its goal at its pleasure. Since in the 

 intelligence which we presuppose in our "self-conscious 

 evolution," we have all the mastery of the forces of 

 nature, organic and inorganic, that the sciences give, with 

 the knowledge of man and his social life added thereto, 

 we should surely have not less but more of this intelligent 

 disposition of events than in the contrivance of any 

 ordinary human scheme. 



But if we conceive future evolution as essentially a 

 human purpose, we must be on our guard against an 

 opposite fallacy. From such a conception we should be 

 apt to infer in it something mechanical and also something 

 arbitrary. Man imposes his purposes as it were on things 

 without regard to their wants and requirements. Bars and 

 rivets and wheels of steel or brass do not spontaneously 

 come together to make a steam-engine, nor in a steam- 

 engine have they ever that organic relation which subsists 

 between cells of the animal body. They are simply 

 brought into shape by an agent acting upon them, an 

 agent which they do not set in motion. Human evolution, 

 on the contrary, is the work of man the product of the 

 being who evolves. Man does not stand outside his own 

 growth and plan it. He becomes aware of its possibilities 

 as he grows, and, if we are right, there comes a stage when 

 conception of the perfected growth seizes upon him, and 

 makes him intelligently work towards it. There is here 



