His advance, if there is
any continuity in history, depends upon his making these the ruling
motives and aims of his life. He must continually grow in
righteousness and unselfishness, if he is not to degenerate and give
place to some other product of evolution. Moreover, as these moral
faculties are capable of indefinite, if not infinite, development,
they must dominate his life through a future of indefinite duration.
For the length of the period of dominance of a function has always
been proportional to the capacity of that function for future
development. These can never, so far as we can see, be superseded,
for no rival to them can be discovered. We have found in them the
culmination of the sequence of functions.
We have attempted to show in this lecture that reversal of this
grand sequence has always led to degeneration, or, in higher forms,
far more frequently, to extinction. As we ascend, natural selection
works more, rather than less, unsparingly. And as advance depends
upon conformity to environment, and as the highest forms must be
regarded as therefore most completely conformed, we gain our most
adequate knowledge of environment when we study it as working
especially for these. For these have been from the very beginning
its far-off, chief aim and goal. Viewed from this standpoint,
environment proves to be a host of interacting forces uniting in a
resultant "power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness," and
unselfishness.
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