330 HOLISM AND EVOLUTION chap. 



whole, becomes an impotent spectator of this melancholy 

 scene, wrapped up in the illusions of his own self-con- 

 sciousness. Such a view of the universe seems to me hope- 

 lessly one-sided and distorted, and comes into direct conflict 

 with large and important bodies of facts of experience which 

 cannot be denied or reasoned away. To me the rock on 

 which Naturalism must split is the fact of creative Evolution. 

 In the first chapter I pointed out that the old materialistic 

 Naturalism is inconsistent with a clear and frank recognition 

 of the great fact of Evolution, and in the body of this work 

 I have tried to drive the point further home. 



Creativeness is the key-word and the key-position, not 

 only as far as Naturalism is concerned, but also as regards 

 those other world-conceptions which are most hostile to 

 Naturalism, such as the various modern forms of Spiritual 

 Idealism. Naturalism imposes the past on the present and 

 the future; Idealism, again, imposes the present and the 

 future on the past. Both implicitly deny that creative 

 Evolution which shows the universe historically as a gradual 

 transformation, as a real creative process moving from the 

 real structures of the past to the real structures of the 

 future; and therefore as a system which in its historical 

 development embraces and gives justification to both con- 

 trasted points of view. To view the ideal or spiritual 

 element in the universe as the dominant factor is to ignore 

 the fact that the universe was before ever the ideal or 

 spiritual had appeared on the horizon; that the ideal or 

 spiritual is a new and indeed recent creation in the order of 

 the universe, that it was not implicit in the beginnings and 

 has not been reached by a process of unfolding; but that 

 from a real pre-existing order of things it has been creatively 

 evolved as a new factor; and that its importance to-day 

 should not be retrospectively antedated to a time when the 

 world existed without it. Where was the Spirit when 

 the warm Silurian seas covered the face of the earth, and the 

 lower types of fishes and marine creatures still formed the 

 crest of the evolutionary wave? Or going still further 

 back, where was the Spirit when in the Pre-Cambrian 



