GROWTH OF IDEAS 261 



once more, after a safe voyage. The notes he made 

 during his journey yielded another charming work, 

 Letters from the East Indies and Malaysia (1901). 

 His spirit of enterprise is inexhaustible, and still 

 continues. 



Within this frame of his career we have now 

 to study a growth of ideas and a continuance of 

 research that tell of vigour, consistency, and 

 success in every line. It unfolds logically like a 

 great work of art. 



The General Morphology stands at the parting 

 of two ways. It afforded a programme of an 

 infinite amount of fresh technical research the 

 elaboration of his studies in detail, of promor- 

 phology, of his theory of individuality, and of the 

 phylogenetic system of living things ; and the 

 strengthening of the laws of evolution, especially 

 the great biogenetic law. On the other hand, there 

 was the purely philosophic work to be done : the 

 gathering together of the general threads that 

 ran through his work, and the building of a new 

 philosophy of life, based on a new story of creation, 

 from the atom to the moneron, from the moneron 

 to man, and the whole to be comprised and 

 contained in God. In a word, he might proceed 

 in either of two ways from the Morphology : he 

 might construct academic zoology afresh, or he 

 might write a work on the new God. 



When he came home from Lanzarote, the two 

 ways seemed to coincide in front of him ; his work 

 had, indeed, opened them out as one. But external 



