ORGANIZING DRIVE OF EVOLUTION 5 



clearly that on the basis of over-all evolution, inorganic and 

 organic, no other concept seems acceptable. Certainly no 

 form of fundamental dualism has any place in this universe. 



Evolution is one of the great and rather completely dem- 

 onstrated principles of science. As a process, evolution has 

 not only formed the physical universe but has also gradu- 

 ally, imperceptibly, out of a vague and diffuse awareness, 

 brought into existence endless and varied organisms. Some 

 organisms eventually became better and better equipped to 

 know and to understand. It will be my object to show that 

 the mind of man is an expression of this process; or, differ- 

 ently phrased, that the innate psychical quality which is one 

 with the material universe finds a high-level expression in 

 man's mind. 



Man is a very recent arrival on the scene of an organic 

 evolution that stretches back on this earth to the unimagi- 

 nable remoteness of more than 2,000,000,000 years. The 

 newness of man and the speed with which he has finally 

 evolved is of deep significance if we are to understand him 

 and his problems. It is nearly meaningless to speak of mil- 

 lions of years of animal evolution and then to add that man, 

 as Homo sapiens, is only some several hundred thousand 

 years old. To set up a conceivable perspective, compare all 

 this vast stretch of time, some 2,000,000,000 years (the es- 

 timated age of the oldest rocks) to one calendar year— Jan- 

 uary 1 to midnight, December 31. On this scale, life begins 

 to appear vaguely in February in the form of microscopic 

 units not yet fully cellular. Even in early April there are 

 only unicellular organisms in the waters of the earth; and 

 not until late May do the first primitive backboneless ani- 

 mals, the invertebrates, appear. At the halfway mark on 

 July 1, there are still no multicellular plants and no back- 

 boned animals, the vertebrates, and the land is utterly barren 

 and waste. During the summer, land plants appear and 

 quickly spread into moist places. Invertebrates and finally 

 vertebrates crawl furtively out of the water to exploit the 



