or
righteousness and unselfishness be purely material and mechanical?
Or must there be in or behind it something spiritual? Shall we best
call environment, in its highest manifestation, "it" or "him?"

The old argument of Socrates, as on the last day of his life he sits
discoursing with his friends, still holds good. He is discussing the
same old question, whether there is anything more than force,
material, mechanism in the world. He says that one might assign as
"the cause why I am sitting here that my body is composed of bones
and muscles; that the bones are solid and separate, and that the
muscles can be contracted and extended, and are all inclosed in the
flesh and skin; and that the bones, being jointed, can be drawn by
the muscles, and so I can move my legs as you see; and that this is
the reason why I am sitting here. But by the dog, these bones and
muscles would long ago have carried me to Megara or Booetia, moved
by my opinion of what was best, if I had not thought it more right
and honorable to submit to the sentence pronounced by the state than
to run away from it. To call such things causes is absurd. For there
is a great difference between the cause and that without which the
cause would not produce its effect."

If there is no intelligence or love of truth in the cause, how can
there be anything higher in the effect? And if Socrates had been
only bone and muscle, he ought to have run away.

Our problem stands somewhat as follows: We have given protoplasm, a
strange substance of marvellous capacities, which we call functions,
and possessing a power of developing into beings of ever higher
grades of organization. Environment proves to be a combination of
forces working for the higher development of functions in a certain
orderly sequence. And every lower function in the ascending line
demands the development of the next higher. Digestion demands
muscle, and muscle nerve, and nerve brain. We shall soon see that
mammalian structure had to culminate in the family, and the family
demands unselfishness and obedience. Environment therefore proves
from the beginning to have been unceasingly working for the highest
end; never, even temporarily, merely for the lower. For we have seen
that environment works most unsparingly against those who, having
taken certain of the steps in the ascending path, fail to continue
therein.

But in order to attain this highest end for which it has always been
working, an immens