Thus we have two terms to start with in estimating the beginning of human development in knowledge and power: First, the primary capacities of the human mind itself; second, a material world, whose infinitely varied components are so arranged as to yield results to the energies of that mind. For example, the transition points of vaporization and liquefaction are so placed as to be within the reach of man’s agents; their weights are so fixed as to accord with the muscular or other forces which he is able to exert; and other living organizations are subject to his convenience and rule, and not, as in previous geological periods, entirely beyond his control. These two terms being given, it is maintained that the present situation of the most civilized men has been attained through the operation of a law of mutual action and reaction—a law whose results, seen at the present time, have depended on the acceleration or retardation of its rate of action; which rate has been regulated, according to the degree in which a third great term, viz., the law of moral or (what is the same thing) true religious development has been combined in the plan. What it is necessary to establish in order to prove the above hypothesis is— I. That in each of the particulars above enumerated the development of the human species is similar to that of the individual from infancy to maturity. II. That from a condition of subserviency to the laws of matter, man’s intelligence enables him, by an accumulation of power, to become in a sense independent of those laws, and to increase greatly the rate of intellectual and spiritual progress. III. That failure to accomplish a moral or spiritual development will again reduce him to a subserviency to the laws of matter. This brings us to the subject of moral development. And here I may be allowed to suggest that the weight of the evidence is opposed to the philosophy, “falsely so called,” of necessitarianism, which asserts that the first two terms alone were sufficient to work out man’s salvation in this world and the next; and, on the other hand, to that anti-philosophy which asserts that all things in the progress of the human race, social and civil, are regulated by immediate Divine interposition instead of through instrumentalities. Hence the subject divides itself at once into two great departments—viz., that of the development of mind or intelligence, and that of the development of morality. That these laws are distinct there can be no doubt, since in the individual man one of them may produce results without the aid of the other. Yet it can be shown that each is the most invaluable aid and stimulant to the other, and most favorable to the rapid advance of the mind in either direction. III. SPIRITUAL OR MORAL DEVELOPMENT.