willingly than our ancestors part with the imperfect that a path to
the perfect may be opened.

Is not this, then, the great conception of change which we now need to
study as self-development? I believe not. One essential feature is
omitted. In the typical example which I have just reviewed, the growth
of an elm from its seed, we cannot say that the seed expands itself
with a view to becoming a tree. That would be to carry over into the
tree's existence notions borrowed from an alien sphere. Indeed, to
assert that there has been any genuine development from the seed up to
the finished tree is to use terms in an accommodated, metaphoric, and
hypothetical way. Development there certainly has been as estimated by
an outsider, an onlooker, but not as perceived by the tree itself. It
has not known where it was going. Out of the unknown earth the seed
pushes its way into the still less known air. But in doing so it is
devoid of purpose. Nor, if we endow it with consciousness, can we
suppose it would behold its end and seek it. The forces driving it
toward that end are not conscious forces; they are mechanic forces.
Through every stage it is pushed from behind, not drawn from before.
There is no causative goal set up, alluring the seed onward. In
speaking as if there were, we employ language which can have
significance only for rational beings. We may hold that there is a
rational plan of the universe which that seed is fulfilling. But if
so, the plan does not belong to the seed. It is imposed from without,
and the seed does its bidding unawares.



VII