V GENERAL CONCEPT OF HOLISM 89 



no fresh addition to the original current. All real novelty 

 and initiative, all real freedom of choice and development 

 disappear from the universe. The process of the world 

 becomes at most an explication, an unfolding of what was 

 implicitly given, and not a creative evolution of new forms. 

 This view-point has been dominant in Western science and 

 philosophy from its early beginnings until quite recently. In 

 physical science it fits in naturally with the orthodox laws 

 of conservation, which preclude either the creation or the de- 

 struction of energy, mass or momentum. And in proportion 

 as mechanistic ideas have prevailed in science and philoso- 

 phy, all change has come to mean merely mechanical re- 

 arrangements without any substantial addition to or subtrac- 

 tion from the sum total of reality. Those thinkers, again, who 

 (like Leibniz) did not subscribe to the mechanistic formula 

 were led by their theological standpoints to look upon reality 

 as completed in the past, and to leave to the future the merely 

 subordinate role of unfolding, evolving, explicating what was 

 virtually contained in that past. This, therefore, is the very 

 limited sense in which the term development or evolution as 

 used by them must be understood. Where they believed in a 

 d5mamic progressive universe, they meant merely a universe 

 which was progressively unfolding what was implicitly 

 contained in the past. The view-point of Evolution as 

 creative, of a real progressive creation still going forward 

 in the universe instead of having been completed in the past, 

 of the sum of reality not as constant but as progressively 

 increasing in the course of evolution, is a new departure of 

 the nineteenth century, and it is perhaps one of the most 

 significant departures in the whole range of human thought. 

 Not only has the old static view of reahty with its fixed 

 elements and species disappeared, the new dynamic view of 

 Evolution does not merely negate the old static view, it has 

 gone much further. Evolution is not merely a process of 

 change, of regrouping of the old into new forms; it is 

 creative, its new forms are not merely fashioned out of the 

 old materials; it creates both new materials and new forms 

 from the synthesis of the new with the old materials. The 



