RELIGION AND SCIENCE 241 



be incomplete; it is for those who come after to build 

 the upper stories. 



This cannot be helped. What we build, we must 

 build firmly; on what is yet to be built, science can- 

 not pronounce, except to say that she knows that it 

 will be congruous with what has gone before. 



What general principles, then, do we assume? \\\- 

 assume that the universe is composed throughout of 

 the same matter, whose essential unity, in spite of 

 the diversity of its so-called elements, the recent re- 

 searches of physicists are revealing to us; we assume 

 that matter behaves in the same way wherever it is 

 found, showing the same mode of sequence of change, 

 of cause and effect. We assume, on fairly good al- 

 though indirect evidence, that there has been an evo- 

 lution of the forms assumed by matter: that, in this 

 solar system of ours, for instance, matter was once 

 all in electronic form, that it then attained to the 

 atomic and the molecular; that later, colloidal or- 

 ganic matter of a special type made its appearance, 

 and later still, living matter arose. That the forms 

 of life, simple at first, attained progressively to 

 greater complexity; that mind, negligible in the lower 

 forms, became of greater and greater importance, 

 until it reached its present level in man.- 



Unity, uniformity, and development are the three 

 great principles that emerge. We know of no in- 

 stance where the properties of matter change, though 

 many where a new state of matter develops. The 



2 See Danysz, '21. 



