112 DOGMATISM AND EVOLUTION 



That is to say, it is impossible to advance by a synthesis of any 

 number of parts or aspects to the idea of an organic whole. It 

 is true that the idea of a universal organism may have for many 

 minds a certain figurative suggestiveness, standing for the fact, 

 that every apparent externality of relation constitutes a problem 

 that a why may always be asked. But the &quot;point of view of 

 the whole&quot; remains a pure abstraction. It adds nothing to the 

 law of gravitation if we write: &quot;Actuality is such that every mass 

 attracts every other mass, etc.&quot; 



For this reason, the famous Hegelian dictum, &quot;Everything 

 actual is reasonable,&quot; if intended as a criterion of reasonableness, 

 is not so much false as meaningless, because of utterly uncertain 

 application. The actual is the eternal or, at least, an essential 

 stage in the self-development of the eternal. But who, in looking 

 abroad upon human society, can distinguish between what is 

 essential for, from the point of view of the actual, a thousand 

 years are as a day and what is superficial and evanescent? 

 The dictum is appropriate only to one who pretends to extra 

 ordinary, if not superhuman, insight, and who magisterially an 

 nounces to the world his distinctions of true and false, reasonable 

 and unreasonable. Let it be admitted, that, as a postulate of 

 moral effort, the dictum is by no means meaningless. &quot;Nothing 

 that is unreasonable is actual,&quot; may well stand as the formulation 

 of the demand, that no evil be accepted as necessary, arid of the 

 faith, that in the battle of life the right may meet with defeat 

 but can never be conquered. 



It is because of his curiously abstract view of the nature of 

 the organism, that Hegel represents its evolution as the mere 

 self-explication of a concept the environment counting only as 

 a possible disturbing element. And because the process is a 

 self-contained one, it is reasonably described as determined by 

 its end. Thus the development of the chick is due to the fact 

 that the egg is implicitly a fowl; the fowl involved in the egg 

 produces itself. The same line of thought is accountable for the 



