and no more develop itself than it
could create itself. What is called the law of development is in the
germ; but that law or force can operate only in conjunction with
another force or other forces. All development, as all growth, is by
accretion or assimilation. The assimilating force is, if you will, in
the germ, but the matter assimilated comes and must come from abroad.
Every herdsman knows it, and knows that to rear his stock he must
supply them with appropriate food; every husbandman knows it, and knows
that to raise a crop of corn, he must plant the seed in a soil duly
prepared, and which will supply the gases needed for its germination,
growth, flowering, boiling, and ripening. In all created things, in
all things not complete in themselves, in all save God, in whom there
is no development possible, for He is, as say the schoolmen, most pure
act, in whom there is no unactualized possibility, the same law holds
good. Development is always the resultant of two factors, the one the
thing itself, the other some external force co-operating with it,
exciting it, and aiding it to act.

Hence the praemotio physica of the Thomists, and the praevenient and
adjuvant grace of the theologians, without which no one can begin the
Christian life, and which must needs be supernatural when the end is
supernatural. The principle of life in all orders is the same, and
human activity no more suffices for itself in one order than in another.

Here is the reason why the savage tribe never rises to a civilized
state without communion in some form with a people already civilized,
and why there is no moral or intellectual development and progress
without education and instruction, consequently without instructors and
educators. Hence the value of tradition; and hence, as the first man
could not instruct himself, Christian theologians, with a deeper
philosophy than is dreamed of by the sciolists of the age, maintain
that God himself was man's first teacher, or that he created Adam a
full-grown man, with all his faculties developed, complete, and in full
activity. Hence, too, the heathen mythologies, which always contain
some elements of truth, however they may distort, mutilate, or travesty
them, make the gods the first teachers of the human race, and ascribe
to their instruction even the most simple and ordinary arts of
every-day life. The gods teach men to plough, to plant, to reap, to
work in iron, to erect a shelter from the