RELIGION AND SCIENCE 241 



be incomplete; it is for those who come after to build 

 the upper stories. 



This cannot be helped. What we build, we must 

 build firmly; on what is yet to be built, science can- 

 not pronounce, except to say that she knows that it 

 will be congruous with what has gone before. 



What general principles, then, do we assume? We 

 assume that the universe is composed throughout of 

 the same matter, whose essential unity, in spite of 

 the diversity of its so-called elements, the recent re- 

 searches of physicists are revealing to us; we assume 

 that matter behaves in the same way wherever it is 

 found, showing the same mode of sequence of change, 

 of cause and effect. We assume, on fairly good al- 

 though indirect evidence, that there has been an evo- 

 lution of the forms assumed by matter; that, in this 

 solar system of ours, for instance, matter was once 

 all in electronic form, that it then attained to the 

 atomic and the molecular; that later, colloidal or- 

 ganic matter of a special type made its appearance, 

 and later still, living matter arose. That the forms 

 of life, simple at first, attained progressively to 

 greater complexity; that mind, negligible in the lower 

 forms, became of greater and greater importance, 

 until it reached its present level in man.^ 



Unity, uniformity, and development are the three 

 great principles that emerge. We know of no in- 

 stance where the properties of matter change, though 

 many where a new state of matter develops. The 



2 See Danysz, 71, 



