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 upa 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 
