For myself, I understand by progress _the
emergence of mind, and its increasing dominance over matter_. Such
categories are, no doubt, unphilosophical in the ultimate sense, but
they are proximately convenient and significant. Now, if progress be
thus defined, we can see for ourselves that life has truly advanced, not
merely in terms of anatomical or physiological--_i. e._ mechanical or
chemical--complexity, but in terms of mind. The facts of nutrition teach
us that the first life upon the earth was vegetable; and though the
vegetable world displays great complexity, and that which, on some
definitions, would be called progress, yet we cannot say that there is
any more mind, any greater differentiation or development of sentience,
in the oak than in the alga. When we turn, however, to the animal
world--which is parasitic, indeed, upon the vegetable world--we find
that in what we may call the main line of ascent there has been, along
with increasing anatomical complexity, the far greater emergence of
mind. In its earliest manifestations, sentience, consciousness, the
psychical in general, and the capacity for it, must be regarded merely
as phenomena of the physical organism; the capacity to feel, as no more
than a property of the living body; and such mind as there is exists for
the body. But, as we may see it, there has been a gradual but infinitely
real turning of the tables, so that, even in a dog, as the lover of that
dog would grant, the loss of limbs and tail, or, indeed, of any portion
of the body not necessary to life, does not mean the loss of the
essential dog--not the loss of that which the lover of the dog loves.
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