It is much easier to say what the life-impulse is not than what it is. I cannot, for my own part, conceive it as personal or conscious, in the sense in which I feel myself a conscious person. If we ask, Has it or has it not the quality of intelligence? we shall find both the affirmative and the negative answers equally hard to square with the facts. Our own intelligences working in a mysterious relation to a bodily organism are perhaps fundamentally incapable of forming a clear idea of the nature of the cosmic intelligence which is revealed to us in the outside world, “like the dim view of a country seen in the twilight, with forms half extricated from the darkness, with broken lines, and isolated masses.”[100] But those who find it difficult to believe that anything having the nature of intelligence is at work in the physical world might reflect on the striking analogy which that world offers to a certain sphere where it is quite certain that the human spirit, including its intelligence as well as its appetites and instincts, is the governing power. Social institutions are a product of the human spirit. Yet the development of these institutions is extraordinarily like that of the functions and structures of an animal or vegetable organism. The value of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s philosophic system may be disputed on many points, but his elaborate analysis of the phenomena of social life and his exposition of the minute analogies they exhibit to the processes of evolution in nature must always remain a landmark indicating the conquest of a great territory of human thought.[101] Here, as in nature, we find a principle of movement and progress conflicting with a principle of inertia. We find all grades of development existing at the same time. We see the gradual progression, by means of all kinds of by-ways, to a goal which one might have expected intelligence to attain simply and directly. We see parallels in human societies to arteries, nerves, to co-ordinating and ruling brain-centres, to the specialization of different members or organs for different tasks; and we see all these things growing up slowly, from point to point, in obedience to immediate and pressing requirements. We find, both in nature and in society, survivals of past structures, whose use is gone, carried forward into new stages of development. A particularly interesting analogy is that of structures which develop to meet one kind of requirement, and, on the cessation of that, persist into a further stage and are then modified to meet quite other requirements. Thus the swim-bladder of the fish became, it is supposed, the lung of the terrestrial animal. We may compare this with the development of municipal institutions. Originally intended to enable bodies of craftsmen and merchants to make head against the aggressions of a feudal aristocracy they have survived the fall of feudalism, and have become more important than ever as independent agencies for carrying on