physical history of our planet shows us first an incandescent nebula
dispersed over vast infinitudes of space; later this condenses into a
central sun surrounded by a family of glowing planets hardly yet
consolidated from the plastic primordial matter; then succeed untold
millenniums of slow geological formation; an earth peopled by the lowest
forms of life, whether vegetable or animal; from which crude beginnings a
majestic, unceasing, unhurried, forward movement brings things stage by
stage to the condition in which we know them now. Looking at this steady
progression it is clear that, however we may conceive the nature of the
evolutionary principle, it unerringly provides for the continual advance of
the race. But it does this by creating such numbers of each kind that,
after allowing a wide margin for all possible accidents to individuals, the
race shall still continue:--
"So careful of the type it seems
So careless of the single life."
In short, we may say that the cosmic intelligence works by a Law of
Averages which allows a wide margin of accident and failure to the
individual.
But the progress towards higher intelligence is always in the direction of
narrowing down this margin of accident and taking the individual more and
more out of the law of averages, and substituting the law of individual
selection. In ordinary scientific language this is the survival of the
fittest. The reproduction of fish is on a scale that would choke the sea
with them if every individual survived; but the margin of destruction is
correspondingly enormous, and thus the law of averages simply keeps up the
normal proportion of the race. But at the other end of the scale,
reproduction is by no means thus enormously in excess of survival. True,
there is ample margin of accident and disease cutting off numbers of human
beings before they have gone through the average duration of life, but
still it is on a very different scale from the premature destruction of
hundreds of thousands as against the survival of one. It may, therefore, be
taken as an established fact that in proportion as intelligence advances
the individual ceases to be subject to a mere law of averages and has a
continually increasing power of controlling the conditions of his own
survival.
We see, therefore, that there is a marked distinction between the cosmic
intelligence and the individual intelligence, and that the factor which
differentiates the latter from the former is the presence of _individual_
volition. Now the business of Mental Science is to ascertain the relation
of this individual power of volition to the great cosmic law which provides
for the maintenance and advancement of the race; and the point to be
carefully noted is that the power of individual volition is itself the
outcome of the cosmic evolutionary principle at the point where it reaches
its highest level. The effort of Nature has always been upwards from the
time when only the lowest forms of life peopled the globe, and it has now
culminated in the production of a being with a mind capable of abstract
reasoning and a brain fitted to be the physical instrument of such a mind.
At this stage the all-creating Life-principle reproduces itself in a form
capable of recognizing the working of the evolutionary law, and the unity
and continuity of purpose running through the whole progression until now
indicates, beyond a doubt, that the place of such a being in the universal
scheme must be to introduce the operation of that factor which, up to this
point, has been, conspicuous by its absence--the factor, namely, of
intelligent individual volition. The evolution which has brought us up to
this standpoint has worked by a cosmic law of averages; it has been a
process in which the individual himself has not taken a conscious part. But
because he is what he is, and leads the van of the evolutionary procession,
if man is to evolve further, it can now only be by his own conscious
co-operation with the law which has brought him up to the standpoint where
he is able to realize that such a law exists. His evolution in the future
must be by conscious participation in the great work, and this can only be
effected by his own individual intelligence and effort. It is a process of
intelligent growth. No one else can grow for us: we must each grow for
ourselves; and this intelligent growth consists in our increasing
recognition of the universal law, which has brought us as far as we have
yet got, and of our own individual relation to that law, based upon the
fact that we ourselves are the most advanced product of it. It is a great
maxim that Nature obeys us precisely in proportion as we first obey Nature.
Let the electrician try to go counter to the principle that electricity
must always pass from a higher to a lower potential and he will effect
nothing; but let him submit in all things to this one fundamental law, and
he can make whatever particular
