rottenness from inertia.  The first requirement is power, activity, and then this power can be directed to ever higher ends.  You cannot steer the vessel until she has sails or an engine; with no “way on” she will not mind the helm, she only drifts.  But the condition of the animal at this stage certainly looks very unpromising.  Can the will emancipate itself from appetite and control it?  Or is it to remain the slave of the body?

In time an emotion appears which marks the influence not directly of the body but of the individual consciousness.  This is fear; it is for the body, but not, like hunger, directly of it.  It arises in the mind.  It results from experience and memory.  The first animal which feared took a long step upward.  But when and where was the dawn of fear?  I touch a sea-anemone and it contracts.  Has it felt fear?  I think not.  The action certainly may be purely reflex.  Natural selection, not mind, deserves the credit of that action.  But I am sure that the cat fears the dog, or the dog the cat, as the case may be.  I have little or no doubt that the bird fears the cat.  I am inclined to believe that the insect fears the bird and the spider the wasp.  But does the highest worm fear?  I do not know.  I do not see how there can have been any fear until there was a nerve-centre highly enough developed to remember past experiences of danger and fair sense-organs to report the present risk.

Other emotions soon follow.  Anger appears early.  The order of appearance of these emotions or motives I shall not attempt to give to you.  Indeed this is to us of relatively slight importance.  The important point to notice is that a host of these have appeared in mammals and birds, and that each one of these is a new spur to the will.  And the will of a horse or dog, to say nothing of a pig, is by no means feeble.  And these are slowly emancipating the animal from the tyranny of appetite.  But how slow the progress is!  Has the emancipation yet become complete in man?  I need not answer.

The will has in part, at least, escaped from abject slavery to appetite; it sometimes rises superior to fear.  But it is evidently self-centred.  The animal may have forgotten the claims of his dead ancestors, he is certainly fully alive to his own interests.  Can he even partially rise superior to prudential considerations, as he has to some extent to the claims of appetite?  Is it possible to develop the unselfish out of the purely selfish?  And if so, how is this to be accomplished?  It is not accomplished in the animal; it is but very incompletely accomplished in man.  It will be accomplished one day.