COSMIC AND ORGANIC EVOLUTION, 681 



periods of ascendency and decline. But organic evolution ever con- 

 tinues. Progress in organization is the constant result. It is always, 

 on the whole, the less organized that gives way to the more organized. 

 If the rich and exuberant cryptogamic vegetation of the Carbonif- 

 erous epoch has dwindled away into the insignificant cryptogamic 

 vegetation of our time, it has been succeeded by a pha^nogamic vege- 

 tation of far higher organization and nobler qualities. If the great 

 saurian dynasty that ruled the Cretaceous age has surrendered its 

 sceptre and disappeared from the stage of terrestrial life, a far higher 

 mammalian dynasty, at whose head man now stands, has taken up 

 that sceptre and is moving on to still loftier heights of organic devel- 

 opment. 



We have thus arrived at the highest point from which the phe- 

 nomena of organic evolution can be surveyed. What do we see ? We 

 see that, in proportion as our point of view rises, the relative impor- 

 tance of the phenomena of dissolution to those of evolution dimin- 

 ishes. We see that the dissolution of the individual aggregate affects 

 but little the evolution of the race-aggregate, and not at all that of 

 the complete life-aggregate of the globe. We see that, amid all the 

 evanescent forms that surround us, the evolution of life is constant ; 

 that of organic being as such there is no dissolution. We thus find 

 the parallelism between cosmic and organic evolution, which at the 

 outset seemed so paradoxical, and afterward so imperfect, to be at 

 last complete. In the one as in the other, the only phenomena which 

 we know to be universal are those of evolution. In the one as in the 

 other, the opposite class of phenomena are wholly subordinate, spe- 

 cial, and local. In the one as in the other, the forces of attraction and 

 repulsion, of integration and disintegration, are in perpetual conflict. 

 Ill the one as in the other, the organization of matter is the result. 

 Just as tlie doctrine of the ultimate dissolution of the bodies of space 

 rests on a priori deductions alone, unsupported by empirical obser- 

 vation, so must the final disorganization of the life of our globe be 

 inferred from cosmological principles, which transcend tlie present 

 limits of astronomy and physics. So far as we are capable of pene- 

 trating the mysteries of space or of life, we find that evolution is the 

 law of the universe ; while the forces which oppose that law, though 

 powerful and ever active, are secondary and subordinate, and only 

 seem to revei-se it by the destruction of transient forms. In tlie gen- 

 esis of world-systems this counter-evolutionary force consists in the 

 inherent expansive power of diffused matter, or, what amounts to the 

 same thing, in the resistance whicli such matter offers to the forces of 

 condensation. In the phenomena of life this resistance comes chiefly 

 from the sun, whose thermal radiations tend to dissipate the elements 

 of the globe. 



We are thus brought into full view of the deepest truth that 

 underlies the redistribution of matter the profound antithesis be- 



