What corollaries and conclusions may be drawn from the establishment of the fact of biological progress? In the first place, it permits us to treat human progress as a special case of a more general process. Biologically speaking, the human species is young--not perhaps still in infancy, but certainly not yet attained to any stable maturity. The conception, common enough in much traditional thought, that man as a species is old, far removed from all pristine vigour and power, is demonstrably untrue. The genus Homo has not yet adapted itself to the new conditions and the new possibilities arising out of the acquisition of reason and tradition. Its history so far is a record of experiment after experiment. From a period so short and so empirical it is impossible to deduce any general law of progress. In certain respects, as we shall see more in detail later, there has been advance; in others, the species has been stationary. But whether humanity in this or that particular has progressed is for the moment comparatively immaterial. Humanity is part of life, a product of life’s movement; and in life as a whole there is progress.[9] What is more, there was progress before man ever appeared on the earth, and its reality would have been in no way impaired even if he had never come into being. His rise only continued, modified, and accelerated a process that had been in operation since the dawn of life. Here we find, in the intellectual sphere at least, that assurance which men have been seeking from the first. We see revealed, in the fact of evolutionary progress, that the forces of nature conspire together to produce results which have value in our eyes, that man has no right to feel helpless or without support in a cold and meaningless cosmos, to believe that he must face and fight forces which are definitively hostile. Although he must attack the problems of existence in a new way, yet his face is set in the same direction as the main tide of evolving life, and his highest destiny, the end towards which he has so long perceived that he must strive, is to extend to new possibilities the process with which, for all these millions of years, nature has already been busy, to introduce less and less wasteful methods, to accelerate by means of his consciousness what in the past has been the work of blind unconscious forces. “In la sua volontade è nostra pace.”