THE EVOLUTION OF SERVICE 409 



Creation then is the birth of new things through the union and 

 cooperation of preexisting things. Its product may be a new star; a 

 chemical compound; an inanimate machine; a living mechanism with 

 the properties of growth and renewal ; or any one of the many kinds of 

 cooperating groups, or associations, of men. We may not correctly use 

 the term " Creative Evolution," for there can be no creation without 

 evolution and no evolution without creation. The ceaseless flow of 

 creative processes is evolution, and evolution is serial creation. 



While nature's methods of creating are always the same, the quality 

 of her products is as unknowable, and the extent of her resources as 

 unpredictable, to-day as they were yesterday and as they will be to- 

 morrow. The first cooperative union of hydrogen and oxygen to pro- 

 duce water created a new substance, with new properties and qualities, 

 with new potentialities for world service, in no wise comparable with 

 those of its constituents. This familiar process, whereby a substance, 

 such as water, is produced by the cooperative union of things that 

 appear to us so utterly unlike it, is no more or less mysterious in its 

 power to create new things, new properties, new possibilities for further 

 creation, than the cooperative union of a much larger number of ele- 

 ments to form protoplasm, with its newly created properties called 

 "vitality." 



As the formal chemistry of cooperating elements creates new chem- 

 ical substances, with new properties and new powers for world service, 

 so the super-chemistry of cooperating lives creates new organisms whose 

 sum total of reactions may be expressed in unified bodily, or social 

 activities, or in terms of bodily or of social consciousness, with their 

 new powers for world service. These new properties, born of the co- 

 operative union of a group of cells to form a "living body," or of a. 

 group of men to form a " team," a college, a city, or a state, constitutes 

 the distinctive properties, or what is often called the " soul " or " spirit,"' 

 of that group; and just as the properties of water and the "vitality" of 

 protoplasm are new things, unlike anything else in the whole world, 

 so are the essential, distinctive properties of each class of cooperating 

 things unlike anything else in the whole world ; hence they can only be 

 measured, or compared, in terms of themselves. 



The only attribute common to each class, and to all classes of 

 nature's manifestations, is the inherent power, through the union and 

 cooperation of their respective constituents, to create new things with 

 new properties and with new powers for world service. The only com- 

 mon measure of their powers for service is the extent of the unions and 

 cooperations that created them, and the extent of the new unions and 

 cooperations they, in turn, create. 



Progress therefore in organic evolution, as in cosmic evolution, con- 

 sists in a measurable approach towards uniting the maximum number 



VOL. LXXXIV. — 28. 



