s
career as the servant of digestion, recognizing and aiding to attain
food. Action is at first mainly reflex. But conscious perception
plays an ever more important part. The animal is at first guided by
natural selection through the survival of the most suitable reflex
actions, then by inherited tendencies, finally by its own conscious
intelligence and will. The first motives are the appetites, but
these are succeeded by ever higher motives as the perceptions become
clearer and more subtile relations in environment are taken into
account. Governed first purely by appetites, the will is ever more
influenced by prudential considerations, and finally shows
well-developed "natural affections." It has set its face toward
unselfishness.

Digestion and muscle, as well as mind, have persisted in man. He is
not, cannot be, disembodied spirit. And in his mental life reflex
action and instinct, appetite and prudence, are still of great
importance. But the higher and supreme development of these powers
could never have resulted in man. They might alone have produced a
superior animal, never man. His mammalian structure found its
logical and natural goal in family and social life. And even the
lowest goal of family life is incompatible with pure selfishness,
and as family life advanced to an ever higher grade it became the
school of unselfishness and love. And social life had a similar
effect.

Moreover, man as a social being early began to learn that he could
claim something from his fellows, and that he owed something to
them. If he refused to help others, they would refuse to help him.
This was his first, very rude lesson in rights and duties. Love,
duty, and right have ever since been the watchwords of his
development and progress. We have not yet considered, and must for
the present disregard, the value and efficiency of religion in
aiding his advance. At present we emphasize only the historical
fact that man has not become what he is by a higher development of
the body, nor by giving free rein to appetite, nor yet by making the
dictates of selfish prudence supreme. And if there is any such thing
as continuity in history, such modes and aims of life, if now
followed, would surely only brutalize him and plunge him headlong in
degeneration. He must live for right, truth, love, and duty. In just
so far as he makes any other aim in life supreme, or allows it to
even rival these, he is sinking into brutality. This is the clear,