one and the other with pointed illustrations from the quiver of history, in the hope of serving the time-honoured opinion which I hold, and which makes my theme. It is this: I conceive progress, by which I mean the increase of human well-being, to be the achievement of human faculty and the divine power. It seems to me to issue from the unfolding of the free energies of the human mind empowered and sustained by the creative and loving mind of God. Long lines of suggestive evidence, indeed I think the general course of history, may be adduced in favour of the human side of this proposition, which will form our main topic. Yet to many of us the human agency is unsatisfactory unless supplemented by some cooperative, or rather primordial, divine efficiency. The providence of God does not lend itself nowadays to demonstration. If real to us, it is so because we realize it religiously and have faith. This faith appears to be supported by broad inferences or inductions, which, however, are hard to make irrefutable.

Accordingly, with constant regard to the human part of our theme, I would refer first to the physical environment and animal antecedents of our race. The early manifestations of human faculties are next spoken of, all very briefly; and then we are arrested by the troublesome question of the mind's free power. From this we endeavour to extricate ourselves as historians, leaving the physicists to

whatever conclusions may be open to them. But thereupon, although no Samsons, we are caught in the toils of the equally impenetrable problem of the divine providence touching man. As to this, I can but give reasons for my own position, while at the same time pointing out the need to listen to the evidence of the chorus of human faculties, and admit the testimony of the whole man to our deliberation.

From these fundamental considerations we turn to the rôles of various peoples and great individuals in the drama of mankind's advance. Our search is for salient examples of the free action of the mind. No field is closed to us. Illustration may be sought in man's religious attitudes, or in the provinces of civil effort or intellectual creation. Political institutions and jurisprudence, art, philosophy, science, may be tapped at our discretion or indiscretion. It is better to look far and wide, since varied illustrations throw the broader light.

II

THE PLASTIC ENVIRONMENT

To-day all branches of science co-operate in the study of the character and behaviour of the physical world, and the stages through which it has reached its present state. Man is treated as part and parcel of this moving web. Science has drawn our gaze into novel vistas; it has expanded to the infinite

our thoughts of the labyrinthine universe of matter, energy, and life, whatever each of these may prove to be; and close to us on every hand it has disclosed the unfathomable complexity of the infinitesimal. Withal, it has disciplined our minds. It has disposed us to recognize the course of natural law throughout our world, and indeed throughout the whole sidereal universe, which likewise appears to have reached its present state through natural or physical law. Such law means order and regularity of sequence, continuity indeed, as, for example, in the successive stages through which plants and animals have attained the forms which prevail at present. Our mind harnesses and dovetails these regularities of sequence, while our mental needs force us to clothe and energize them with some conception of causation. We try to analyze the specifically acting causes, and assign its effect to each; or we may prefer to look to mutually enabling conditions, which appear to exercise efficiency or

coercion.

So the whole world seems to move onward under law, possibly under necessity. Its laws are deemed to be inherent in matter, and in the natures of living organisms and the relations among them. Like other organisms, man seems the product of natural law-physical, chemical, biological, economic, even psychological and spiritual.

How or when organic life began is absolute mystery. The hypotheses still limp that would

find its origin in some action of the inorganic elements. Yet the direct relationships are legion. Apparently some of the simplest and most abundant organisms, like the plankton or diatoms of the ocean, and to a large extent the world of plants, draw their nutriment directly from inorganic elements. The higher or more complex animal organisms require the inorganic air and water for their life and sustenance; while for their more palpable food they prey upon other organisms, vegetable or animal, and thus draw indirectly upon the elements of the inorganic world.

Science has conjured up an astounding vision of the history of our earth, with its gaseous, molten formations, its changes, its inscrutable engendering of life's beginnings, and the ever marvellous progression of organisms, from amoebae and trilobites, through uncounted ages, through fishes, reptiles, monstrous dinosaurs, still through countless ages, to cleverer, more highly organized birds and mammals. Somewhere, or everywhere, in this progression of life, instinct and thought were obscurely dawning. It was a long, slow dawn, perhaps, until toward the hither end of this infinite record appeared animals nearing the shape of man. The record of the slow evolution of this organic form amounts only to suggestive fragments here and there.

Dependent on their physical environment, all living organisms are held within its enabling forces and controlling conditions. Their dependent and

needful natures are fastened to their opportunities. The physical environment is the source from which these primarily animal needs must be satisfied. Very fundamentally, with consummated adaptability, the stability of the earth and the qualities of its inorganic elements-chief among them hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon, and their lifeensuring compounds, water and carbonic acidpermit the existence and make for the sustenance of life, make for its mobility and its complexity of development.1

Organism and environment: they seem distinct. Who would not distinguish the antelope from the grass it feeds on and the air it breathes? Or even those blades of grass from the soil and atmosphere which furnish the elements of their growth?

But it is not so clear. Our growing chemical and biological knowledge discloses the organism partaking of its environment and the environment interpenetrating the organism and becoming part of it becoming not merely elementary material of its sustenance and growth, but part and parcel of its living substance-of its life. The oxygen of the air when breathed into an animal may still remain detectable as oxygen; but, incorporated into the animal, its previous inorganic action seems transformed into a factor in the behaviour of a

1 See L. J. Henderson, The Fitness of the Environment (New York, 1913); ibid. The Order of Nature (Harvard Univ. Press, 1917).