[Footnote 1:  See chart, p. 310.]

We have followed hastily the development of mind.  The mind began its career as the servant of digestion, recognizing and aiding to attain food.  Action is at first mainly reflex.  But conscious perception plays an ever more important part.  The animal is at first guided by natural selection through the survival of the most suitable reflex actions, then by inherited tendencies, finally by its own conscious intelligence and will.  The first motives are the appetites, but these are succeeded by ever higher motives as the perceptions become clearer and more subtile relations in environment are taken into account.  Governed first purely by appetites, the will is ever more influenced by prudential considerations, and finally shows well-developed “natural affections.”  It has set its face toward unselfishness.

Digestion and muscle, as well as mind, have persisted in man.  He is not, cannot be, disembodied spirit.  And in his mental life reflex action and instinct, appetite and prudence, are still of great importance.  But the higher and supreme development of these powers could never have resulted in man.  They might alone have produced a superior animal, never man.  His mammalian structure found its logical and natural goal in family and social life.  And even the lowest goal of family life is incompatible with pure selfishness, and as family life advanced to an ever higher grade it became the school of unselfishness and love.  And social life had a similar effect.

Moreover, man as a social being early began to learn that he could claim something from his fellows, and that he owed something to them.  If he refused to help others, they would refuse to help him.  This was his first, very rude lesson in rights and duties.  Love, duty, and right have ever since been the watchwords of his development and progress.  We have not yet considered, and must for the present disregard, the value and efficiency of religion in aiding his advance.  At present we emphasize only the historical fact that man has not become what he is by a higher development of the body, nor by giving free rein to appetite, nor yet by making the dictates of selfish prudence supreme.  And if there is any such thing as continuity in history, such modes and aims of life, if now followed, would surely only brutalize him and plunge him headlong in degeneration.  He must live for right, truth, love, and duty.  In just so far as he makes any other aim in life supreme, or allows it to even rival these, he is sinking into brutality.  This is the clear, unmistakable verdict of history, and we shall do well to heed it.