THE OVERCOMING OF APPEARANCES 35 



rather, starting thus in either direction, and covering in its 

 stupendous flight the ineluctably vast, the inconceivably small, 

 it gains at least a common goal. Here pausing, it endeavours 

 to bind the retrospect in a single principle, to link macrocosm 

 and microcosm in a single enveloping conception. Rising from 

 the analogy of the growing tree or the unfolding petals of a 

 flower to see a kindred process in the whole spectacle of nature, 

 it sums the course of universal development in a word 

 Evolution. 



It is to be noted that we have here an analogy, a description, 

 and not an explanation. It is expressly unconcerned with any 

 thoughts of Cause. It was simply that with his ever-widening 

 vistas of space and time man had found the more primitive 

 simile of the potter and the clay had ceased to be adequate. 

 Advancing knowledge had revealed a world awhirl a whirling 

 earth, a whirling sun, whirling planets, whirling atoms, and 

 whirling stars. If the idea of an intervening artificer was to 

 be retained, it would needfully have been under the altered 

 guise of a maker and spinner of tops ; and the notion seemed a 

 little bizarre. So from the symbol of the architect the mind 

 of man broadened to conceive the whole of nature as an 

 organism, subject to universal laws of growth and decay. For 

 the old anthropomorphising theognosy it substituted a process, 

 an unfolding, a becoming. 



The idea of evolution, not less than the picturesque demons 

 and deities of the antique world, was essentially a poetical 

 conception the effort of the mind toward a world-image. It 

 seems to be a little lost to view that all world-pictures, all 

 cosmogonies, are that, and no more than that. Herbert Spencer 

 and Darwin, no less than the Pentateuchian theorisers and all 

 their forerunners, were essentially poets, only dowered with a 

 more highly developed imagination and a loftier range of thought 

 than usually accompanies the merely rhyming brain. 



And again, the idea of evolution was a stage, a step higher, 

 in the unfolding of the world mind. Advancing knowledge is 

 building yet a higher stage, approaching a yet wider view. It 

 was more especially with the phenomena of life, the unfolding 

 of new species, new races, new institutions, that the idea of 

 evolution was concerned ; and as the processes of life, growth, 

 birth, and death are brought more and more within the domain 

 of chemistry and physics, the evolutionary imagery must give 



