The Universe is a creation of consciousness since we have known that its fundamental nature is a conscious process. The world did not come into existence suddenly as a finished product but it was created to acquire its present shape gradually by a process of evolution. Creation took the form of evolution because all creation, whether human or divine, takes this form.

 

If we trace back the evolutionary process step by step, we reach a stage when there was only matter and no organic life, and then a stage when there was only energy and no matter in the ordinary sense of the word and finally a stage when there was only consciousness and nothing else besides it. Matter consists of electrons and protons which are packets of waves of electric energy. All matter is thus reducible to energy and energy is destructible according to modern views of Physics. The process of creation was, therefore, started by consciousness and kept in a state of continuity by consciousness. Sir James Jeans came to the conclusion that the reality of the Universe is the thought of a Creator but it is evident that this thought must have its source in the Creator’s urge or desire for creation. This desire is realizing itself in the process of evolution exactly as the creative urge of an artist realizes itself in the form of a growing picture. This desire has appeared as a powerful current of consciousness or a stream of creative activity flowing in the direction of its choice. It is the cause of evolution which manifests itself in the animal stage of evolution in the form of the elan vital or the vital impetus of Bergson and in the human stage as the unconscious urge or the libido of Freud.

 

Why did consciousness create the Universe at all?

 

The answer to this question is that the creative activity of consciousness and the direction that it chose must be due to a natural and automatic self-expression on its part, to a spontaneous functioning of its qualities and attributes. It was in the nature of consciousness to create and to create in the form and manner in which it did. It does not mean that its nature does not permit the creation of other universes of different kinds as well. Rather we can assume very reasonably that other universes of the same kind as this or of different kinds may have been created by it in the past and may be created by it in the future. We should certainly suppose that an artist who is able to paint one beautiful picture has the talents to produce many other pictures of different kinds as well. Like the Pantheists we cannot identify the Universe with the creating consciousness. The picture is different from the artist, the speech is different from the speaker and the book is different from the writer, each of whom is able to produce many pictures, deliver many speeches and write many books. The Creator is apart from the Universe which is His creation and manifestation as the artist is apart from his picture which he creates and in which he manifests his creative genius.

 

In the case of the present Universe, according to what science has discovered so far, the first object of which we can have any knowledge with the help of our senses, that came into existence through the creative activity of consciousness, was energy in the form of a kind of light known as cosmic rays, which filled the space by its radiation. That there is nothing that can exceed the speed of light is perhaps an indication that all material objects have evolved out of energy. Energy formed itself into packets of waves of positive and negative charges known as electrons and protons which in their turn combined to form atoms of various complexity. The simplest atom is that of Hydrogen and consists of one electron and one proton. The atoms of other elements are of various degrees of organization and complexity. In the beginning the Universe was in a gaseous state and took the form of a huge revolving cloud or nebula. This mighty nebula split up, in the course of rotation, into a number of smaller nebulae. Each nebula broke up again into a group of stars or a stellar system. The stellar system which came into existence as a result of the splitting up of the galactic nebula contains the sun around which revolves our earth.

 

Thus, in the course of ages, matter was able to evolve into higher and higher states through the creative activity or the driving force of the desire of consciousness, till finally it developed all the physical laws which are known to us at present. The period of time during which this development has taken place, that is, the period from the beginning of time to the formation of earth is estimated at 200 x 10¹² years.

 

We have seen that, although life and matter appear to us to be different from each other, the reality of both is one—consciousness. Moreover, matter has an urge of behaviour, however fixed and stereotyped it may be, and behaviour is a characteristic of life. The German philosopher Liebniz believed that matter consists of conscious microscopic particles which he called monads. Particular evidence of a sort of consciousness characterizing matter is afforded by the atomic activity that takes place in the course of a chemical action when the atoms seem to behave as if they know what they should do, or in the course of the process of crystallization when molecules of each substance form themselves automatically into crystals of definite geometrical shapes.

 

As blood runs through the veins of a living organism, so a current of life runs through all matter although it may appear to us to be dead. It is alive because it has properties on account of which it acts and behaves automatically. It responds to outside situations and stimuli as the animal or the human being does. Its activity, no doubt, follows definite laws which are studied by the physicist and the chemist. We cannot, however, take it to be dead but rather must take it to be alive for this reason. The activity of the animal and of man also proceeds in accordance with definite principles which are studied by the behaviourist and the psychologist. When a batsman hits a cricket ball, the ball bounds off to a distance. The batsman has responded to a situation or stimulus and the ball has done the same. If the ball had been utterly lifeless, the game of cricket would have been impossible. Response to situations and stimuli is a characteristic of life. It is because matter is alive, conscious and intelligent that it is intelligible to us and we are in a position to deal with it. Again, if growth may be considered to be a distinctive property of life, then matter is not without this property too since matter has grown out of its stage of material energy (which may be regarded as its seed) into its present condition. The present form of matter in all its varieties was implied in the original material energy no less than the tree with its branches, leaves, flowers and fruit is implied in the seed out of which it grows and no less than the various physical and psychological characteristics of an individual are implied in the genes and chromosomes out of which his development takes place. Matter is not dead. All that we can say is that the animal is at a higher stage of life than matter, just as man is at a higher stage of life than the animal.

 

Matter is life from another point of view as well. There could have been no organic life without matter and its laws. It is on account of the operation of the physical laws that the sun shines, the winds blow, the clouds rain, the rivers flow, the seasons change and the days and nights alternate. The laws of matter seem to have been designed, consciously or unconsciously, in order to make possible the appearance and the evolution of life on earth in the form and manner in which it did, because we find that exceptions to the general laws whenever they were of a vital importance have not been ignored. It is a general principle, for example, that all fluids contract when cooled but water expands when cooled below 4°C with the result that ice is lighter than water and floats on its surface. But for this apparently insignificant fact, which is a departure from a general rule, organic life on earth would have been impossible, as all the oceans and lakes on this planet would have frozen from top to bottom. Such examples can be multiplied. We find, therefore, that matter, along with the urge of behaviour that it has evolved, forms the only suitable environment in which life could have taken its birth, grown and evolved.

 

Favourable environment is so indispensable to the life of an organism, however small it may be, that Professor Haldane and a few other biologists maintain that an organism must be considered as a whole made up of the body and the environment which act and react on each other in perfect co-ordination. Environment is thus a part of life. When the first living cell came into existence, it found a favourable environment for its continued existence and evolution already prepared and finished. Although the amoeba was directly affected by only a part of its surroundings, yet this part was not isolated but existed within a big whole which was the Universe itself. Thus the whole of the Universe which confronted the amoeba, when it came into existence, was its environment and therefore a part of itself. The birth of the amoeba was due to the fact that matter throughout the Universe had taken the shape and evolved the properties that it had. The Universe evolved itself into what it did in order to prepare the way for the appearance of this tiny cell. The life process or the activity of consciousness which at last centered itself in this little animal was at work even before it came into existence and that was why it did come into existence at all. All activity of life in the past had no other purpose, conscious or unconscious, except to create this little animal. The evolution of life, therefore, dates from the very beginning of creation. The appearance of the amoeba was not the beginning of life. It was only the beginning of a new career of life of which the past was what we understand as matter.

 

We do not know whether there is life anywhere else in the Universe but, if there is, it must be fundamentally and with small variations similar to life on this planet. The reason is that life in the first definite stage of its evolution i.e., matter, is the same throughout the Universe.

 

Since the environment of organic life, i.e., matter, came into existence first and the organic life afterwards as a natural growth out of it, we conclude that what we call ‘environment’ is only life in an earlier stage of its development. Between “life” and matter the only difference is that of the stage of evolution of the same thing—life. The relation of matter to the organic life that came later on is the same as that of the stem of a tree to its branch; and we know that fundamentally the stem of a tree is not different from the branch that shoots out of it subsequently. The environment of life at a particular stage is in fact always the whole of the past of life at that stage. The most important part of the environment of life, at any stage, is that stage of its evolution which has just preceded this stage, because it is the most immediate determinant of the stage that comes next. The environment of life is the past of life and is indispensable to the future of life. Life creates its own environment and then outgrows it by acting and reacting upon it. The Universe is like a living organism outgrowing every stage of its own growth.

 

Because matter offers resistance to life, it is not for this reason a separate entity. Life that has grown always offers resistance to life that has yet to grow; the resistance that life offers to its own future growth is indispensable to its evolution and growth. Struggle with itself is life’s process of evolution. Life grows by breaking the resistance of its own present. It is always outgrowing itself. Like a tree it grows because every stage of its growth is superseded by a stage of fresh growth.

 

Matter is primitive life and the laws governing it are fixed tendencies developed by it just as instincts have been developed by the animal. They represent the affinities of matter acquired by a process of evolution, carried forward by the creative activity of consciousness. The search for affinities is a characteristic of all life. It is to be found in matter, in the animal and in man. Physical laws are victories won by consciousness in the course of its struggle to evolve itself. They are immutable, not because they were always so but because they do not need to change now. They kept changing and growing for a long time in the past and, when they had evolved themselves into a form most suitable for the higher developments of life, they became fixed and automatic, while change manifested itself at higher levels of life. Life changes only at its growing point. When life has finished its growth in any direction, it becomes set and fixed wherever it has reached.

 

Bergson has shown by a series of highly ingenious arguments that the evolution of life in various directions in the animal stage was due to an internal push or drive of consciousness by means of which consciousness wanted to realize all its potentialities. The efforts of the creature to the extent to which it was itself conscious brought this push or drive more and more into play so that consciousness was able to extend its foothold, to establish itself and express itself increasingly in the creature. Life that actually evolved did so in spite of resistance as well as on account of it. Whenever the creature was faced with resistance, it increased its efforts and thereby also the force of the internal push or drive, so that the obstacles were never able to check the drive of consciousness but rather consciousness was always able to realize its possibilities more and more on account of them. The direction which the development of the creature takes, even when it is due to its own efforts, is determined by the inherent possibilities or the potentialities of consciousness. When a creature is unable to develop in a direction consistent with the aspirations of consciousness, in other words, when it is unable to develop in the right direction, its progress comes to a stop; and, as it is no longer wanted by life, it becomes gradually extinct. Many species that came into existence disappeared from the face of the earth in this way. To the extent to which consciousness has not been able to express itself in matter at any stage of evolution it depends upon its own powers for carrying on the process of evolution and to the extent to which it has expressed itself in matter in the form of living organisms and is represented by conscious creatures on earth, it makes use of those creatures to serve its purpose of future evolution. To the extent the creature serves it, the creature prospers, improves, progresses, evolves, and draws into itself the hidden powers of consciousness. It must be the same vital impulse, the same current of consciousness which made possible the evolution of life during the animal stage, that was passing through matter in the material stage, changing it and carrying it forward till the birth of the amoeba became possible.

 

The appearance of the amoeba was a momentous event in the history of life because now life embarked on an entirely new career which constituted the second definitely marked stage of its evolution. At this point life broke the resistance of matter and its laws for the first time— laws which had no doubt helped its evolution to the stage that it had reached but which were nevertheless an obstacle to its future growth. The amoeba was able to make movements which “dead” matter could not, because matter was hindered by an obstacle — that of the physical laws. The drive of consciousness shattered this obstacle and the result was the birth of the amoeba, a small organism in which life now centred itself. This organism could move and act in opposition to the physical laws. It was, therefore, a wonder of creation when it first came into existence. Life was going to make this animal a passage in order to pass on to a fuller realization of itself. The amoeba, therefore, developed tendencies of behaviour which we call instincts, by means of which it was able to preserve its own life as well as to continue it in the offspring. It was only in this way that it could continue the efforts of life to realize its possibilities.

 

Life had yet much ground to cover. Although it had broken the resistance of matter it had not yet broken it completely and had succeeded only at one point. The subsequent achievements of life in the animal stage go to show that, when it reached the unicellular stage, heavy restrictions of matter were still clinging to it, restrictions which it was able to overcome only gradually. The effort involved in the expression and exercise of the two fundamental instincts of feeding and procreation enabled the tiny creature to enlarge its powers in the course of time on account of the impetus or drive of consciousness. This gradually brought into existence more and more developed forms of life capable of satisfying their fundamental instincts for the preservation of life and race much more efficiently and made possible an increasing differentiation of these fundamental instincts into a larger number of other tendencies which were inherent in the nature of consciousness.

 

It is an important point to remember that no tendency of life could come into existence in the form of an instinct which did not exist already in the nature of consciousness and which, therefore, life could not express. The evolution of species is not caused merely by the animal’s struggle for existence as Darwin and Lamarck have supposed. If this had been so, evolution would have proceeded in any direction and every direction indefinitely. But there are innumerable species that have ceased to evolve since long; they are discovered to have come down to us unaltered from a distant past. An animal, therefore, that is fit to survive is not always fit to evolve. We can never hope the race of horses to evolve into a race of men or supermen. The evolution of such species has come to a dead stop, no doubt, because their efforts to live do not favour the aspirations of consciousness any longer. The evolution of species is due more fundamentally to the push, the drive or the urge of consciousness to express more and more of its own possibilities. The efforts of the creature simply bring this drive more and more into play and when they are unable to favour this drive no evolution results from them. In such a case the species is left to continue in the form it has reached or else to perish gradually.

 

When a gramophone record is playing, the voice is produced by the vibrations of the diaphragm in the sound-box caused by the movements of the needle. The needle is being pushed up and down by the undulations in the groove of the record in which a particular voice singing a particular song exists in a potential form. Supposing, a scientist from the Mars has such limited powers of vision that, while he is able to see the sound-box and the needle, he is unable to see the disc and, therefore, the groove and the undulations in the groove over which the needle is moving. He will explain the final cause of the sound as being the movements of the needle. He will be unable to realize that it is only when the movements of the needle conform to a particular plan that they are able to produce the melody and that, if the movements were to depart from that plan, the melody would be discontinued at once. While he will be sure that the movements of the needle are causing the melody, he will be unable to say why they are causing it. His explanation will be correct, but it will not go far enough; it will be incomplete.

 

Equally incomplete, though equally correct, must be the explanation of that scientist who declares in the case of the evolution of species that it is the efforts of the creature that cause an increasing variation in its body-structure resulting in a new species. He does not explain why the creature’s efforts cause variations of form in certain cases and not in others. The fact is that just as the movements of the needle produce the melody when they are consistent with a particular scheme residing in the gramophone record, so the efforts of the creature cause a variation of its physical form only when they are consistent with the possibilities latent in the nature of consciousness. Just as the ultimate cause of the melody lies in the invisible potentialities of the disc which is shaking the needle for their expression, so the ultimate cause of evolution lies in the unseen potentialities of consciousness which is pushing the process forward for its own realization. Life is expressing only those tendencies in the instincts of the evolving species which exist already in its nature.

 

As the instincts developed, consciousness was able to express itself in matter more and more. Although the instincts multiplied and thereby gave a greater and greater expression to life, as life developed into higher and more organized forms, yet all of them arose in the service of the organism, that is, in the service of its two fundamental instincts of the preservation of life and race. As the instincts multiplied, they simply enabled the creature to have more and more complicated ways of maintaining its life and race. The development of instincts took place as much on account of the need and effort of the creature to live as on account of the need and effort of consciousness to express itself. Instincts are, therefore, the expression of the inherent tendencies and qualities of consciousness. Life, no doubt, complicated and organized itself and gained new powers by developing new instincts but every new instinct that it developed was only a fixed, inflexible tendency to which the creature had to respond out of a necessity, whenever a situation forming an adequate stimulus for that instinct was created.

 

The tendencies involved in the instincts were all present latently in consciousness from the very beginning but some of them developed more clearly and became more powerful in one direction than in another, owing to the circumstances the creature had to face and the consequent efforts that it had to put forth. That gave rise to a very rich variety of life. Although in this way life increased its powers, it was not able to use them as it pleased. In other words, life was unable to oppose its own instincts. Life was thus, owing to the instincts, under restrictions, akin to the restrictions of the physical laws, although the former permitted a far greater freedom to life than the physical laws did.

 

As life had not yet obtained its complete liberation from matter, its career was that of a hard struggle against the restrictions imposed by it. In its efforts to realize its latent possibilities it turned right and left and developed along various routes of evolution. As a result of its struggle innumerable new species were always coming into existence, sometimes suddenly and sometimes by a. prolonged, gradual process. Although it met resistance at every step, yet, on the whole, it succeeded in overcoming it and thus winning victory after victory it pushed forward on the road of self-expression. It is true that here and there a species was faced with a resistance that proved too great for it, so that the species succumbed to it and disappeared from the face of the earth. But the failure of life in one direction was always more than compensated by its success in other directions. Life never lost any of its achievements secured along one route of evolution which it did not take care to preserve along some other route, which means that life never met with a real failure. It continued to evolve slowly and hesitatingly but steadily and constantly.

 

The destination of life was far off, although it was approaching nearer and nearer to it every moment. Long before it reached anywhere close to it, its progress came to a dead stop along every route of evolution except one—that which was leading to man. On all these routes it developed certain tendencies of its nature more in one direction than in certain others. Although in this manner it dropped some of its achievements on the way, yet since it was keeping up its progress along one route at least, it was sure to realize them all soon in the course of its evolution along that route. We can imagine that when man will reach perfection, he will manifest in a harmonious combination the fundamentals of all those tendencies which life has developed in other species but not yet in man.

 

It was after a struggle of millions of years (the period of time between the appearance of the first organism and the appearance of man is estimated at 500 x 10⁶ years) that life succeeded in installing itself finally in the human form.

 

Much waste for the sake of a precious gain seems to be a characteristic of the process of evolution. Sometimes we misinterpret it as cruelty or purposelessness in nature but the fact is that in this case the end justifies the means. There would be no gain unless there is loss. Since the gain is valuable, it more than compensates for the loss. Creation takes the form of choosing, out of innumerable possibilities open to life to express itself, that possibility which happens to be the most potent for its future aspirations and the possibilities are ascertained by Nature to be potent or otherwise in the actual experiment of creation. Life expresses itself in innumerable forms and then favours one form that is most promising for the future, permitting all other forms to perish or to linger on without evolving. It does not follow a chalked out programme. That would be imitation and not creation. Its programme is made in action as it proceeds. Creation is free action. It is similar to what happens in our own case. Before choosing a line of action we think of several possibilities and reject all but one. But, while we may think and reject without acting, for consciousness thinking is acting and creating. Life is under no restrictions as we are. It is free to express and create all its possibilities out of which it chooses and preserves the one that is most promising of all. Life has to reject that part of its creation which lacks promise and fertility for the future and to support and continue that part through which it can keep up its progress. Freedom of action does not preclude the knowledge of future events on the part of consciousness. Consciousness is above time and for it future is as good as present. The fact that consciousness has not chalked out programme of creation and yet knows the details of future events looks like a logical contradiction. This fact, indeed, cannot be grasped by reason in the ordinary sense of the term; the self can realize it only directly and intuitively at a very high stage of self-consciousness, a stage which we shall study later on in this book.

 

Has life entered a new stage of evolution on reaching man or is the human stage a continuation of the animal stage? In other words, is the difference between a man and an animal a difference of degree or a difference of kind, a difference as radical as one finds e.g., between matter and animal? We believe that man is far superior to the animal. But in what does his superiority consist? The special achievement of life when it stepped into the animal stage was to develop an urge of instincts by means of which it was able to oppose the urge of matter, that is, the physical laws. It is this achievement that makes the animal so different from matter. What is it specially that life has achieved on entering the human stage? If we ascertain it, we ascertain what the object of life could be in organizing and complicating itself ever more and more and pushing itself ever forward through the animal stage in the course of millions of years, in spite of innumerable hardships and difficulties that it had to face. That object must include the object of creation itself; it must provide us with a clue to understanding the aim and the destination of life for the future.

 

Bergson rightly insists that the difference between a man and an animal is not one of degree but of kind. You cannot say that an animal is a lower kind of man or that man is a higher kind of animal. Consciousness which remains still imprisoned in the forms of life just below man gets its freedom all at once in the human form. There is only a very small difference of complexity and size between the brain of an ape and the brain of a man but the result of this small difference is very great. “In the animal” writes Bergson, “the motor mechanisms that the brain succeeds in setting up or, in the other words, the habits contracted voluntarily, have no other object nor effect than the accomplishment of the movements marked out in those habits, stored in these mechanisms. But, in man, the motor habit may have a second result out of proportion to the first; it can hold other motor habits in check and thereby in overcoming automatism set consciousness free.”

 

To use a simile of Bergson again, imagine a mechanism which requires the continuous attention of an operator to work it by turning a handle. If the operator finds one day that the handle can be moved automatically when it is tied with a chord to one of the wheels in the mechanism, what a difference it must create. The mechanism remains exactly the same in both cases but, while formerly it engaged the continuous attention of the operator, it is possible for the operator now to divert his attention from it to other things that he may like to do.

 

That in man consciousness has been liberated from the constraint of matter means no more than this that it has become free to look to itself, to know itself. It has achieved both freedom and self-knowledge. For consciousness knowledge is freedom and freedom is knowledge. Freedom and knowledge are two different names of one and the same thing. While the animal is only conscious, that is, it can know, feel and think, man is self-conscious. He can not only know, feel and think but he can also know that he knows, feels and thinks. This makes a huge difference. On account of this superiority enjoyed by man over the animal, man can oppose his instinctive desires, while an animal, cannot.

 

We conclude, therefore, that the goal of consciousness in undergoing a process of evolution was to become self-conscious, that is, to obtain freedom and self-knowledge. Reaching man, life, on  account of its newly acquired gift of self-consciousness, was enabled to break the resistance of the instincts.

 

Is the forward movement of life to continue or has it come to a stop having reached its goal in man?

 

The process of evolution must continue as long as the world lasts. The vital impulse has reached many goals in the past. It reached a new goal every day, every hour, and every minute of its life. Each goal that it reached brought within sight another goal which it again set out to achieve. It did not stop because it could not stop; such is the nature of life. Its present goal too is a stepping stone to innumerable other goals which lie ahead.

 

Life must continue to unroll and unfold itself for ever. It can never come to a stop. The secret of consciousness is that it must change and change always. The very fact that we live and that the world continues, changing violently all around us, is an indication that the expression of consciousness has not yet reached its perfection and that consciousness has yet to display much of its latent splendour.

 

As soon as this Universe has reached its perfection, it must vanish and then another Universe may come into existence. To create is an eternal characteristic of consciousness and, having finished one Universe, the Creator, we assume, may begin another, as an artist who has completed one picture may start another.

 

The aim of consciousness is to obtain freedom and self-knowledge for itself and it has not yet attained to the maximum of that freedom and that self-knowledge which it is possible for it to attain. It has yet to know a lot of itself. When the first amoeba came into existence, it was a wonder of creation. It could move, however little, automatically, against the resistance of the physical laws, unlike all other objects. It could feed itself, grow and procreate. But, in spite of its wonderful powers, it represented but a very small fraction of that power, latent in consciousness, which it was able to display later on in monkeys and anthropoids even in the course of its evolution during the animal stage. Similarly, although man is a wonder of creation as compared with the animal, he is but an animal as compared with the morally and spiritually evolved superman of the future. Consciousness has expressed but a small fraction of itself in man as yet; life has innumerable potentialities waiting to be revealed.

 

To say that man is a self-conscious animal means only that in him matter cannot and does not obstruct the growth of self-consciousness, such is the evolved construction of his brain, but self-consciousness is yet to grow in him to tremendous dimensions.

 

If the forward movement of life is to continue indefinitely what is going to be its future?

 

The following three facts about the future evolution of life are evident:-

 

Firstly, that consciousness will press forward in future through man and man alone. Its movement has already come to an end along all other lines of evolution. At present the most highly developed form of life is man. Man is, therefore, the only thoroughfare along which life can continue its progress indefinitely.

 

Secondly, the future evolution of consciousness will consist in its ever getting greater and greater freedom and self-knowledge. What it will achieve for the future must be of the same nature as that which it has achieved in the past. In order that the impulse of life may be consistent with itself, its future must be in line with its past, that is, it must preserve its past achievements and go on adding to them in future. What it has achieved so far is self-knowledge and what it will achieve in future must be only in the nature of further additions to self-knowledge.

 

Thirdly, no new species are necessary for the future evolution of life. What is known as the evolution of species is really the evolution of consciousness, the evolving species with an ever increasing complication of their brain, the organ of consciousness, serving merely as an instrument of this evolution. And the evolution of consciousness in its turn means the evolution of the knowledge of consciousness about itself. Now that the material instrument of consciousness, that is, the physical body and its brain, no longer obstruct consciousness and allow it the freedom to know itself, consciousness can add to this freedom as much as it likes. No doubt the restrictions of matter, that is, the physical body and its fixed tendencies, the instincts, will still weigh on the progress of consciousness, but they cannot stop it. Consciousness having once regained some control over itself will know how to make further additions to it.

 

Just as in the life of a human individual the brain develops from childhood onwards up to a certain limit beyond which it is not the brain but the individual’s knowledge that develops, similarly, in the history of life the appearance of new species with a greater and greater development and organization of the brain goes on up to a certain limit — which is the human form of life —and beyond this limit it is not the species or the brain that we can expect to evolve but the human self-consciousness. That man has become self-conscious is an indication that the physical instrument of consciousness, the brain, has reached its perfection in him. The future evolution of man will, therefore, consist in the development of his self-knowledge and not in a still greater development and complication of his brain, or his physical body, as a consequence of the formation of new species.