our knowledge, made discernible progress, whatever may have been their course before they swam into our historic ken. There have been times of retrogression even with progressive peoples. The socalled civilized world threatens to retrograde to-day. So we seem entitled to suppose that in the presumptive evolution of genus homo, the intelligence and social instincts of this animal may have played a larger rôle than with other animal forms. But of this intelligence hereafter.

Turning from the species to the individual, the opinion is that the determinants of individual growth lie inscrutably and implicitly in the egg and in the sperm, the germ-cells of the mature individual.1 As the mollusc or the starfish, so the adult ape, or the human individual, lies implicit in its germ cells. Upon their conjunction, to wit, upon the fertilization of the egg, the man or woman is started on a career of individual growth and action which never shall shake loose from the inherent or inherited qualities of the original germinating cells-the true birth cells. And behind those birth cells, what hundred-handed animality, what hosts of bestial ancestors-likewise in the egg. And all endowed with life and impulse!

The race is in the individual, and the individual may sum up the race and be enchained by it. Nay, the individual is still part of the ancestral cave, the

1 As to their infinite and living complexity, see Edmund B. Wilson, The Physical Basis of Life (The Yale Press, 1923).

many ancestral caves, from which the race has issued.1

But an individual is biologically a community. Its life, its physiology, is made up of the functioning, one might almost say, the lives, of organic parts. Among these there is co-ordination; they constitute a living order of mutual enablement and regulation, and even competition.

This association of organic parts, this individual, makes one of a larger society of organisms or individuals like himself. The functional co-ordination within him is the biological analogue to his membership in this larger order. His social instincts and sense of kind press to an outward manifestation reflecting his physiological constitution. In himself the individual is a symbol of the social state.

Accordingly, like the lives of the parts within him, the individual's life shows two closely related sides. Each part within, each cell, takes its sustenance from its cognate and homogeneous environment, while at the same time contributing to the co-ordinated life of the whole organism, in which it lives and moves and has its being, severed from which it quickly dies. So the life of the whole organism, that is, the individual, appears twofold. He gets his food as he may, even through violence

1 "In a living organism the past lives on in the present, and the stored adaptations of the race live on from generation to generation, waking up into response when the appropriate stimulus comes, just as conscious memory is awakened " (J. S. Haldane, o.c. p. 98).

to others; and will fight fiercely for the chance to propagate. But his instinct of kind and his, or rather her, passion of parenthood, draw this him or her toward their like, and lead them to co-operate with their kin in mutual aid and protection. Sometimes, indeed, the dependence of individuals upon the rest of the community may almost approach the dependence of a body-cell. Many species of ants and bees are so elaborately organized in mutual dependence and for mutual aid and supplementing of function, that they could not sustain themselves as solitaries; and the whole community, according to the equipment of its several divisions, is devoted to the care and protection of the young.1

Throughout the animal kingdom, including man, we may follow these varied aspects of the individual's apparently twofold life. But this life in reality is not dual, but one. It is a manifestation of that which can exist and live only as united in coordination. Every animal is a whole and entire organism. His or her life is not two but one throughout all its varied impulses, needs, and actions. He or she presses for food; sex is vibrant and seeks its satisfaction. Parenthood and its devotions are another manifestation of this life; and the broader communal instincts move toward

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1 Cf. W. M. Wheeler, Ants, their Structure, etc., and his Lowell Lectures on The Social Life of Insects," printed in the Scientific Monthly in June 1922 and following numbers. Also Prince Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, a Factor in Evolution (London, 1910).

its fulfilment. They also are in and of this individual life, germane to it, and make for its enrichment as well as for its protection.

The constituents of the human animal are infinite. Myriad are the factors entering his life, striking upon it, moulding it, limiting and conditioning, and again becoming very part of it. They appear as influences and compulsions from without, and as determining inheritances, impulses, not to say compulsions, from within.

Thought of in terms of evolution, fathomless depths of elemental potencies and animal impulse lie behind and within the animal nature of man. The instincts of the animal kingdom are our instincts and move our social life. We seem to have had no hand in their making, any more than in the making of the environment which enfolds, sustains, and enters into us.

Yet out of these driven and determined impulses, out of these animal instincts and perhaps animal thoughts, obscure, suggested, and confused, the qualities of the human mind apparently emerge, and the intellectual powers of judgement and selection.

IV

THE FREEDOM OF THE MIND

With this entrance on the contested province of free intelligence and will, acting with conscious

repulsion, preference, and selection, we touch the hem of distinctive human progress, and enter upon our proper theme. Until the entry of this factor of the free intelligence, whatever advance has taken place in life has been but as the growth or evolution of plant and animal organisms, which themselves possibly have contributed to their development through some dumb self-directing. But man's endeavours to advance his life are more conscious and articulate; their essence lies in the articulate consciousness of the attempt.

It is here, moreover, that we sense a seeming antinomy, as we enter on the true human history of mankind. We have been moving in the realm of natural law, apparently determined in its conditions and its sequences. But now we seem to touch a counter-principle of no-law, of choice, rejection, or denial. And as we advance from the obscurities of savagery, and its impelled existence, to the doings of more civilized, historic humanity, this counter-principle becomes more palpable and active.

The time-honoured question of human freedom has, in the past, been chained to the wheels of religious controversy. More recently it has become interwoven with the changing questions and solutions of many-sided scientific inquiry. It involves the constitution and significance of the universe, at least so far as concerns us men.

Conceptions of growth, of development, of evolution, of progress, dominate thought to-day.