476 
DARWINISM 
CHAP. 
These three distinct stages of progress from the inorganic 
world of matter and motion up to man, point clearly to an 
unseen universe—to a world of spirit, to which the world of 
matter is altogether subordinate. To this spiritual world we 
may refer the marvellously complex forces which we know 
as gravitation, cohesion, chemical force, radiant force, and 
electricity, without which the material universe could not 
exist for a moment in its present form, and perhaps not at all, 
since without these forces, and perhaps others which may be 
termed atomic, it is doubtful whether matter itself could have 
any existence. And still more surely can we refer to it those 
jwogressive manifestations of Life in the vegetable, the 
animal, and man — which we may classify as unconscious, 
conscious, and intellectual life,—and which probably depend 
upon different degrees of spiritual influx. I have already 
shown that this involves no necessary infraction of the law of 
continuity in physical or mental evolution ; whence it follows 
that any difficulty we may find in discriminating the inorganic 
from the organic, the lower vegetable from the lower animal 
organisms, or the higher animals from the lowest types of 
man, has no bearing at all upon the question. This is to 
be decided by showing that a change in essential nature (due, 
probably, to causes of a higher order than those of the 
material universe) took place at the several stages of progress 
which I have indicated ; a change which may be none the less 
real because absolutely imperceptible at its point of origin, 
as is the change that takes place in the curve in which a body 
is moving when the application of some new force causes the 
curve to be slightly altered. 
Concluding Remarks. 
Those who admit my interpretation of the evidence now ad¬ 
duced—strictly scientific evidence in its appeal to facts which 
are clearly what ought not to lie on the materialistic theory— 
will be able to accept the spiritual nature of man, as not in 
any way inconsistent with the theory of evolution, but as de¬ 
pendent on those fundamental laws and causes which furnish 
the very materials for evolution to work with. They will 
also be relieved from the crushing mental burthen imposed 
upon those who — maintaining that we, in common with the 
