, p. 309.]
If we can be satisfied that ever higher functions have risen to
dominance in the successive stages of animal and human development,
if we can further be convinced that the sequence is irreversible, we
shall be convinced that future man will be more and more completely
controlled by the very highest powers or aims to which this sequence
points. Otherwise we must disbelieve the continuity of history. But
the germs of the future are always concealed in the history of the
present. Hence--pardon the reiteration--if we can once trace this
sequence of dominant functions, whose evolution has filled past
ages, we can safely foretell something at least of man's future
development.
The argument and method is therefore purely historical. Here and
there we will try to find why and how things had to be so. But all
such digressions are of small account compared with the fact that
things were or are thus and so. And a mistaken explanation will not
invalidate the facts of history.
The subject of our history is the development, not of a single human
race nor of the movements of a century, but the development of
animal life through ages. And even if our attempts to decipher a few
pages here and there in the volumes of this vast biological history
are not as successful as we could hope, we must not allow ourselves
to be discouraged from future efforts.
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