d deeper scale, there is one aspect of biological truth, as the
evolutionists have lately revealed it, which is of special interest. The
living thing is an organism of which the characteristic is the constant
effort to preserve its unity. This is in fact the definition of an
organism. It only dies or suffers diminution in order to reproduce
itself, and the new creature repeats by some sort of organic memory the
same preservative acts that its parents did. We recognize life by these
manifestations. A merely material, non-living thing, such as a crystal,
cannot thus make good its loss, nor can it assimilate unlike substance
and make it a part of itself. But these things are of the nature of
life. Now mankind, as a whole, has, if our argument is correct, this
characteristic of an organism: it is bound together by more than
mechanical or accidental links. It is _one_ by the nature of its being,
and the study of mankind, the highest branch of the science of life,
rests, or should rest, upon the basis of those common functions by which
humanity is held together and distinguished from the rest of the animate
world.

Just as in passing from the mechanical sciences to that of life, we
noticed that the general laws of the lower sphere still held good, but
that new factors not analysable into those of the former had to be
reckoned with, so in passing from the animate realm, as a whole, to man
its highest member, we find that, while animal, and subject to the
general laws of animality, he adds features which distinguish him as
another order and cannot be found elsewhere. His unity as an organism
has a progressive quality possessed by no other species. Step by step
his mind advances into the recesses of time and space, and makes the
farthest objects that his mind can reach a part of his being. His unity
of organization, of which the humblest animalcule is a simple type, goes
far beyond the preservation or even the improvement of his species: it
touches the infinite though it cannot contain it. To trace this widening
process is the true key to progress, the _idee-mere_ of history. For
while man's evolution has its practical side, like that of other
species,--the needs of nutrition, of reproduction, of adapting himself
to his environment,--with man this is the basis and not the end. The end
is, first the organization of himself as a world-being, conscious of his
unity, and then the illimitable conquest of truth and goodness as far as