4 evolution: the ages and tomorrow 



close to the letter and spirit of modem science. To Bruno, 



... all reality is one in substance, one in cause, one in origin; 

 . . . every particle of reality is composed inseparably of the physi- 

 cal and the psychical. The object of philosophy, therefore, is to 

 preserve unity in diversity, mind in matter, and matter in mind; 

 to find the synthesis in which opposites and contradictions meet and 

 merge; to rise to that highest knowledge of the universal unity 

 which is the intellectual equivalent of the love of God.* 



In our day the trend of evidence in the physical sciences 

 has led steadily toward a unification of our concepts of the 

 physical universe, and there seems little doubt now that all 

 may be revealed as the expression of one universal field. A 

 simplicity that would have been unbelievable to the nine- 

 teenth-century physicist is replacing the surface complexity 

 of nature. 



This infinite mechanism which we call the cosmos ap- 

 pears to be a self-operating complex of innumerable lesser 

 mechanisms, bound together and operationally controlled 

 by lawfully ordered principles. It is self-sufficient, not a 

 passive, inert machine operated by an outside agent. There 

 is no Prime Mover unmoved. The operator is an integral 

 part of the mechanism; or better, the mechanism itself is the 

 operator. This natural mechanism does not need an external 

 djinn to tell it how or when to produce a volcano or a 

 galactic system or a man. Its products may be material or- 

 ganized in various ways, or differing manifestations of en- 

 ergy, or matter transformed into energy, or energy into 

 matter— endlessly changing patterns and products in a won- 

 derfully intricate and imaginatively creative scheme. 



The universe has been and is evolving. My purpose in 

 this book is to place man, his mind, and his moral life in a 

 proper relationship with the other configurations of the 

 four-dimensional continuum. Only in this century has it 

 become possible to marshal scientific evidence for the con- 

 cept of the unity of mind and matter. We begin to see 



* Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy (New York: Simon & 

 Schuster, Inc., 1926) , p. 166. 



