298 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION 



properties of their contents. Its life is ordered in such 

 a way, whatever the means of ordering it may be, that 

 on the whole the mouse avoids the cat, discovers the 

 nut, circumvents the nut-shell, gets to the meat it con- 

 tains, and rightly uses it in self-construction.. On the 

 whole, the mouse successfully avoids what is evil, and 

 gets what is good by rightly conforming its acts, or 

 behavior, to its own inner and outer world. To that 

 extent it is obedient to itself and to its outer world: 

 its science is true, its art constructive, and its morality 

 right or profitable, for they rest on the saving and cre- 

 ating basis of cooperative realities; otherwise the mouse 

 could not exist. So also with the cat, the ape, the fruit, 

 and the tiger. And also so with man. 



But this primordial science and art, ethics and 

 morality, of organic life was either so familiar, or so 

 fundamental to man's very existence that he did not, 

 or could not, recognize it as such till after the methods 

 and instruments of science had taken on newer and 

 less familiar shapes. 



When broader concepts were formed, and more 

 generalized rules of conduct formulated, this primor- 

 dial nature-science passed over into what we may more 

 properly call the common basis of man's science, re- 

 ligion, philosophy and art. 



Religion was the first of the great physico-psychic 

 systems to emerge from this common basis and to as- 

 sume a form peculiar to itself, partly because of the 

 growing remoteness of its subject matter from the in- 

 numerable practical problems of every day life; and 

 partly because imagination and fantasy, speculation 

 and theory, always outrun experience, and extend far 

 beyond the realms where the more immediate tests of 



