Fifthly, there has been an increase in the possibility of bringing
past experience to bear on present problems. At the base is the power
of modifying normal reactions with repetition; then come some simple
degrees of memory; then associative memory, as in birds and mammals,
for whom most reactions are not given in the inherited constitution,
but must be learnt; then rational memory, in which the power of
generalization liberates life from blind dependence upon the local and
the accidental; and finally tradition, whereby the amount of experience
available to the developing race is not constituted merely by the
isolated and limited experiences of its members, but by their sum. More
and more of the past becomes directly operative in the present; further
and further into the future can the aim of the present extend.
Finally we can conclude with a high degree of certainty that the
psychical faculties--of knowing, feeling, and willing--have increased
in intensity, and also in their relative importance for the life of the
individual organism.
We have condensed our summary into these six general statements; if
we wish to reach a still more general form, the most general form
possible, we can redistil it thus: During the course of evolution in
time, there has been an increase in the control exerted by organisms
over their environment, and in their independence with regard to it;
there has been an increase in the harmony of the parts of organisms;
and there has been an increase in the psychical powers of organisms, an
increase of willing, of feeling, and of knowing.
This increase has not been universal; many organisms have remained
stationary or have even regressed; many have shown increase in
one particular but not in others. But the _upper level_ of these
properties of living matter has been continually raised, their average
has continually increased. It is to this increase, continuous during
evolutionary time, in the average and especially in the upper level of
these properties that, I venture to think, the term biological progress
can be properly applied.
Used thus it is no more an a priori or an undefined concept. It is a
name for a complicated set of actual phenomena, and if, with progress
thus defined, we were to speak of a law of progress in evolution, we
should be using the term law in a perfectly legitimate way, as denoting
a generalization based on observed facts, and not as pre-supposing any
vitalistic principle of perfectibility, any necessary and mysterious
tendency of organisms to advance independently of circumstances.
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