214 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY 



mentally. It is merely logical relationships that we 

 establish, and the chronological succession of forms 

 of life, higher forms succeeding lower ones, does not 

 itself do more than suggest an evolutionary process. 

 All that we have said is compatible with a belief in a 

 process of special creation. But if we cling to such a 

 belief, if we suppose that the organisms inhabiting 

 the earth, now and in the past, are the manifestations 

 of a Creative Thought, we must still accept the notion 

 of logical and chronological relationships between all 

 these forms of life. If we permit ourselves to speculate 

 on the working of the Creative Thought, we seem to 

 recognise that the ideas of the different species must 

 have generated each other, and that the genesis of 

 living things must have occurred in some such order 

 as is indicated by a scientific hypothesis of transform- 

 ism. An evolutionary process must have occurred 

 somewhere, but the kinships so established between 

 organisms would be logical and not material ones. 



Science must not, of course, describe the mode of 

 origin of species in this way. So long as it investigates 

 living things by the same methods which it uses in 

 the investigation of inorganic things, it must hold that 

 the concepts of physical science are also adequate 

 for the description of organic nature. It must assume 

 that matter and energy and natural law are given ; 

 and that, even in the conditions of our world, life must 

 have originated from lifeless matter ; must have 

 shaped itself, and undergone the transformations that 

 are suggested by the results of biology. It must 

 assume, in spite of the formidable difficulties that the 

 assumption encounters, that cosmic physical processes 

 are reversible and cyclical ; and that worlds and solar 

 systems are born, evolve, and decay again. Every 

 stage in such a cosmic process, as well as every stage 



