CHAPTER II 

 ORGANIC EVOLUTION 



THE making of worlds implies the transforming 

 of material from one shape to another, and even 

 when there has been an evolution of diverse elements 

 from homogeneous primordial units and of one 

 chemical element from another, it has been the same 

 material throughout. There has been no succession of 

 generations as in Animate Nature, and no picking 

 and choosing of survivors or elimination of the 

 doomed. Thus there is much to be said for using some 

 word like "genesis" for the inorganic world, keeping 

 evolution for the racial change of organisms, usually 

 from simpler to more differentiated and integrated 

 types. The term "development" should be kept for 

 the becoming of the individual, while "history" re- 

 mains the best word for organic and social changes in 

 the kingdom of man. 



Speaking of words, we may notice here that in our 

 use of the convenient phrase "Animate Nature" to 

 include all plants and animals and their interrela- 

 tions, we are not to be held as implying that there is 

 no "anima" in the domain of the non-living. For it 

 is part of our personal metaphysics that there is 

 throughout the inorganic or non-living world a meta- 

 kinetic aspect, the analogue of the "mind," which 

 struggles for expression in plants and in the lower 

 animals, and finds a considerable degree of freedom 

 in the higher reaches of life, notably among birds 



