EVOLUTION. 11 



all tilings and processes. The world is not a meaningless 

 medley, but a cosmos which in its minutest parts is full 

 of significance and purport. And this truth has found a 

 religious expression in the God-idea. The world con- 

 sidered in its cosmic grandeur is divine, and when in the 

 process of evolution the soul develops as an image of the 

 world, the divinity of the cosmos is also mirrored in the 

 soul. The higher animal life rises, the more does it par- 

 take of the divine, and it reaches the highest climax in 

 man and finally in the ideal of a perfectly moral man in 

 the God-man. 



The test of progress must be sought in the growth of 

 soul. The more perfectly, the more completely, the more 

 truthfully the world is imaged in the soul-forms, so as 

 to enable mankind, (the individual man as well as the 

 race,) to react appropriately upon the proper occasions, 

 to be doing and achieving, to act wisely, aspiringly and 

 morally, the higher we have risen on the scale of evolution. 

 It is not the complexity of soul-forms which creates their 

 value, it is their correctness, their congruence with reality, 

 their truth. Evolution sometimes leads to a greater com- 

 plexity. In the realm of cognition it does so wherever 

 discrimination is needed. But sometimes again it will 

 lead to a greater simplicity. Complexity alone would 

 have a bewildering aspect, it must be combined with econ- 

 omy, and the economy of thought is important because it 

 simplifies our intelligence ; it enables us not only to see 

 more of truth at once but also to recognize the laws of 

 nature, the order of the cosmos, and its divinity. 



How much more complex is the Ptolemaic system 

 of the stellar universe than that of Copernicus and Kepler 

 and yet no one doubts that the latter on account of its 

 greater simplicity represents a more advanced stage than 

 the former, and ranges higher in the scale of progress. 



The test of progress, in one word, is the realization 

 of truth extensive as well as intensive, in the soul of man. 



