40 INTRODUCTION. 



perilled the further evolution. To have revealed it 

 sooner had been premature. Love must come before 

 knowledge, for knowledge is the instrument of Love, 

 and useless till it arrives. But now that there is 

 Altruism enough in the world to begin the new era, 

 there must be wisdom enough to direct it. To make 

 Nature spell out her own career, to embody the key to 

 the development in the very development itself, so that 

 the key might be handed over along with the work, 

 was to make the transference of responsibility possible 

 and rational. In the seventeenth century, Descartes, 

 who with Leibnitz already foresaw the adumbration of 

 the evolutionary process, almost pointed this out ; 

 for speaking, in another connection, of the intellectual 

 value of a slow development of things he observes, 

 " their nature is much more easy to conceive when 

 they are seen originating by degrees in this way, than 

 when they are considered as entirely made." l 



The past of Nature is a working-model of how 

 worlds can be made. The probabilities are there is no 

 better way of making them. If Man does as well it 

 will be enough. In any case he can only begin where 

 Nature left off, and work with such tools as are put 

 into his hands. If the new partner had been intended 

 merely to experiment with world-making, no such 

 legacy of useful law had been ever given him. And if 

 he had been meant to begin de novo on a totally different 

 plan, it is unlikely either that that should not have 

 been hinted at, or that in his touching and beautiful 

 endeavor he should be embarrassed and thrown off 

 the track by the old plan. As a child set to complete 

 some fine embroidery is shown the stitches, the 

 1 Discourse on Method 



