12 THE RISE OF MAN. 



The more truth the human soul contains and the more it 

 utilizes the truth in life, the more powerful it will be, and 

 the more moral. In this way the soul partakes of the 

 divinity of its creator, call it nature or God ; it will come 

 more and more in harmony with the cosmos, it will more 

 and more conform to its laws, it will be more religious, 

 the holier, the greater, the diviner, the higher it develops 

 and the further it progresses. 



The characteristic feature of evolution is not, as Mr. 

 Herbert Spencer has it, a change from homogeneity to 

 heterogeneity, but the gradual approach of an acquisition 

 of truth. Those creatures who have a clearer, and broader, 

 and a more correct conception of the world-order that per- 

 vades all things, and whose attitude in life is correspond- 

 ingly adjusted, range higher than those whose souls are 

 only dimly lit up by reason or obscured by error and pas- 

 sion. Not complexity is the test of progress, but ration- 

 ality. And our conception of truth ought to be, not a 

 mere theoretical insight into certain laws, but truth 

 practically applied ; truth respected, cherished, and fol- 

 lowed ; truth loved, and truth lived out. Truth in this 

 sense, i. e., truth that has become part of our souls, is 

 not mere rational knowledge, but justice, and goodness, 

 and lovingkindness. 



Truth, and reason, and goodness are not made of the 

 dust. Reason is a perception of the relational facts, and 

 it supports the ideals of life. Truth and goodness apper- 

 tain to the immaterial, the purely formal, the spiritual. 

 None of these qualities can be said to be qualities of matter ; 

 they do not reside, in whatever latent form it may be, in 

 atoms or molecules. They develop by experience ; they 

 are added unto the budding life ; they are the product of 

 an epigenesis, which originates under the guiding influ- 

 ence of the cosmic order with all that it implies, and if 

 there is any sense in the expression " divine," that cer- 

 tainly, and that alone, is worthy of the name. 



