But doubtless the reader is already weary of illustrations; and our promise has been amply fulfilled.  We believe we have shown beyond question, that that which the German physiologists have found to be the law of organic development, is the law of all development.  The advance from the simple to the complex, through a process of successive differentiations, is seen alike in the earliest changes of the Universe to which we can reason our way back; and in the earliest changes which we can inductively establish; it is seen in the geologic and climatic evolution of the Earth, and of every single organism on its surface; it is seen in the evolution of Humanity, whether contemplated in the civilised individual, or in the aggregation of races; it is seen in the evolution of Society in respect alike of its political, its religious, and its economical organisation; and it is seen in the evolution of all those endless concrete and abstract products of human activity which constitute the environment of our daily life.  From the remotest past which Science can fathom, up to the novelties of yesterday, that in which Progress essentially consists, is the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous.

* * * * *

And now, from this uniformity of procedure, may we not infer some fundamental necessity whence it results?  May we not rationally seek for some all-pervading principle which determines this all-pervading process of things?  Does not the universality of the law imply a universal cause?

That we can fathom such cause, noumenally considered, is not to be supposed.  To do this would be to solve that ultimate mystery which must ever transcend human intelligence.  But it still may be possible for us to reduce the law of all Progress, above established, from the condition of an empirical generalisation, to the condition of a rational generalisation.  Just as it was possible to interpret Kepler’s laws as necessary consequences of the law of gravitation; so it may be possible to interpret this law of Progress, in its multiform manifestations, as the necessary consequence of some similarly universal principle.  As gravitation was assignable as the cause of each of the groups of phenomena which Kepler formulated; so may some equally simple attribute of things be assignable as the cause of each of the groups of phenomena formulated in the foregoing pages.  We may be able to affiliate all these varied and complex evolutions of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous, upon certain simple facts of immediate experience, which, in virtue of endless repetition, we regard as necessary.