life, improvements in locomotion, and the communication
of intelligence. Science, capital, and machinery conjoined are producing
industrial miracles. Colossal projects are undertaken and executed, and
the whole globe is literally made the theatre of action of every
individual.

Nations, like individuals, are born, pass through a predestined growth,
and die. One comes to its end at an early period and in an untimely way;
another, not until it has gained maturity. One is cut off by feebleness
in its infancy, another is destroyed by civil disease, another commits
political suicide, another lingers in old age. But for every one there
is an orderly way of progress to its final term, whatever that term may
be.

[Sidenote: The object of development is intellect.] Now, when we look at
the successive phases of individual life, what is it that we find to be
their chief characteristic? Intellectual advancement. And we consider
that maturity is reached when intellect is at its maximum. The earlier
stages are preparatory; they are wholly subordinate to this.

[Sidenote: It is the same in individual life,] If the anatomist be asked
how the human form advances to its highest perfection, he at once
disregards all the inferior organs of which it is composed, and answers
that it is through provisions in its nervous structure for intellectual
improvement; that in succession it passes through stages analogous to
those observed in other animals in the ascending scale, but in the end
it leaves them far behind, reaching a point to which they never attain.
The rise in organic development measures intellectual dignity.

[Sidenote: and in the animal series,] In like manner, the physiologist
considering the vast series of animals now inhabiting the earth with us,
ranks them in the order of their intelligence. He shows that their
nervous mechanism unfolds itself upon the same plan as that of man, and
that, as its advancement in this uniform and predetermined direction is
greater, so is the position attained to higher.

[Sidenote: and in the general life of the globe.] The geologist declares
that these conclusions hold good in the history of the earth, and that
there has been an orderly improvement in intellectual power of the
beings that have inhabited it successively. It is manifested by their
nervous systems. He affirms that the cycle of transformation through
which every man must pass is a miniature representation of the progress
of life o